Classroots.org

number 4 by Leo Reynolds

What’s the difference between strategic thinking and strategic planning in the classroom?

I frequently find myself designing instruction according to the principles of strategic planning. I have in my mind a predictable future – a particular product or a pacing guide. The formulation and implementation of learning are clearly defined: before, during, and after; direct instruction, guided practice, independent practice, and assessment. I manage the plan and pass it out to students. I assert control through frequent feedback and pacing decisions about which parts of the lesson to implement when. I let students know what I expect through pre-assessments, criteria, feedback, and grades.

For me, planning a lesson is an analytic pursuit, like solving a logic puzzle. I want to believe that the product will come together through the right combination of pieces. My focus is on the plan, on connecting content, process, and students to promote learning toward a discrete objective.  While I sometimes plan lessons that allow me to lead-manage during class, I behave like a boss-manager when planning instruction, as I’ve been trained to do.  For me, lesson planning is strategic planning.

However, when class begins strategic thinking takes over. In practice, as classroom relationships play out, it’s true that students will learn, but what they’ll learn when is uncertain.  During class, the sequential, discrete lessons in a unit give way to an expanding cloud of interactions between class members that creates a give-and-take of information about more than the lesson at hand. Boundaries are pushed. Moods are gauged. Questions are raised. Students’ participation in the strategically planned lesson – even their resistance to it – is a clear sign of their desire to be active and engaged learners, of their desire to be treated as collaborators and not subordinates. They want to take advantage of the learning opportunities that occur to them tangentially as the teacher invites, coaxes, coerces, and sometimes engages them with the teacher-intended work. Competing visions of what should to be learned create a chaos of intents the teacher can acknowledge – with or without acting on it – or ignore. Students’ roles directly impact who learns what when whether those roles are leveraged well or managed poorly by the teacher. Change courses throughout the class as the teacher and students choose their reactions to the intended lesson. The teacher and students adopt a series of micro-strategies to move forward each class member wants to happen.

During a lesson everyone thinks strategically in response to the strategic plan drafted by the teacher.

However, in the middle of a tanking lesson – or even in the middle of a “good” lesson that a few kids resist – I resist strategic thinking. Or, rather, I use strategic thinking to resist changing what I expect. I don’t ask myself to look at students’ behaviors and desires as new avenues into the intended learning. Instead, I ask myself questions like these: how can I get kids back on track? How can I redirect students from Photo Booth back to the class blog? How can I make sure we finish by Wednesday?

At times like these my failing lesson feels like a form of control – a comfort, a terror, a battlefield, and a prize. It becomes an abstract anchor in a sea of real human interactions. It becomes not-learning set in opposition to what learning really is – the acquisition of new knowledge and skills, rather than the delivery of them.

But even when the lesson becomes an obstacle to learning, I’m not sure what to do without it.

In the age of testing, can you create a public school classroom of learning without delivering specific content? Is it ever desirable to do so? What is teaching anyway anymore? Are we delivery people or models? Do we give students what they should study, or do we ask them to study us? Do we insist on a role apart from students’? Are we willing to become co-learners and to design classrooms that reflect a single intent: to learn alongside students?

But here again I’m caught in strategic planning, trying to imagine a definite role for myself – a way to maintain my expectations of what I should do each day in the classroom. That’s such an attractive notion. It’s captivating; it’s the history of public schooling – the history of how can teachers remain the focus of attention?

So here’s to change.  Here’s to strategic thinking: to learning instead of teaching; to discovering instead of delivering; to intending instead of expecting.  And here are four intents for the general shape of the future:

Intent 1 – Make all learners great

Today I read this article about what makes a great teacher. I wasn’t taken with either the implicit measure of greatness used (standardized testing) or the students’ use of memorized math facts to calculate decontextualized figures. I can see how the students’ skills would help them on a standardized test and how their results would make their teacher seem great compared to teachers whose students did poorly on the tests, but the product of the students’ work isn’t great. It’s test scores. It’s a fixed, predictable objective of legislative strategic planning.

The article brought several questions to mind.  Are teachers the focus of our educational system?  Should it  be the objective of ed schools and professional development programs to make great teachers or to cause great learning?   Is it great teaching to ensure that all students master the same thing at the same time for a decontextualized measure that the media and government use to judge teachers and schools, rather than learning?  I feel like we face tremendous media and political pressure to define ourselves and any greatness allowed us by test scores, whereas the greatness we earn is shared with students and is endebtted to their learning which standardized tests frequently fail to measure.  The tests neither account for any academic growth made by a student who fails them, nor indicate whether or not a student who passes them could have passed them two years ago.  The “tendencies” of “superstar teachers” cited in the article seem good to me, but they also seem mischaracterized.  They don’t make a teacher great because they boost test scores; they help students learn, which is a great thing teachers support.

Education – schooling – should be about making all learners great. That should be our primary strategic intent.  Our strategic thinking should focus on what individual learners need to move forward in their acquisition of knowledge and skills so that they become great learners and great at what they love to do. How do we do this in the classrom?  How do we do this with scheduling?  How do we do this through school choice?

Intent 2 – Promote change to promote learning

We need to think strategically about all the non-negotiables schooling imposes on students, teachers, schools, and divisions. Why are students in public schools limited to their grade level’s standards and tests? Why aren’t alternative assessment mainstream? Why do we set up schools and classrooms like factories in a post-industrial society? Why do we so limit the scope of every course, grade-level, and student tracking-scheme to create predictable outcomes for students based on what we resource ourselves to teach?

We need leaders who can think strategically and come up with unpredictable solutions to our most pressing problems. We need to be able to work strategically to get students thinking strategically. Can an educational system stuck in strategic planning create leaders for a world that needs strategic thinking? How can we plan to have innovative thinkers when we won’t think strategically about school?

Our intent should be to cause disruptive innovations at the classroom, school, and division level that demonstrate new possibilities for students’ learning and our own. If we’re stuck with annual testing, I suggest we start there.

Intent 3 – Involve students in professional development

Becky Fisher (@beckyfisher73) has greatly helped my thinking here.

We need to radically change professional development. As much as social media makes it possible for teachers to engage in deeply meaningful, inquiry-based learning, we don’t work or teach in isolation. We work with teams of teachers and teams of students, even when PLCs, departments, and classes don’t feel very team-like. It’s vital that we find individual professional development for our own learning; it’s just as vital that we engage with the people with whom we work in thinking about how to all learners forward.

We need to create learning opportunities for ourselves that partner us with colleagues and students so that when we train to implement authentic, interdisciplinary project-based instruction, we train with the co-workers and students who will be part of the implementation.

For example, one way to reinvent both summer professional development and summer school might be to create academies attended by teachers and teams of students they’ll serve next year. These teams could work together to think strategically about last year’s challenges and opportunities and a variety of ways to meet them head-on in the Fall. Imagine combining professional development , curriculum development, at-risk, algebra-readiness, literacy, and appropriate grant funds for such a summer school. I bet you could pay both facilitators and attending teachers and provide teacher-student teams with the materials and technologies for which their Fall strategies call. Imagine enrolling your neediest students, establishing egalitarian relationships between them and their teachers, giving them voice in instructional intent, and sending them home with the technology and materials they’re going to use in their classes in the Fall – materials and technologies they help develop and secure for classmates and their teachers.

Intent 4 – Think instruction

We classroom teachers set ourselves and our students up for conflict by strategically planning units when our classroom interactions are based on strategic thinking. It’s our shared human nature to make discoveries and connections as we learn. When we insist on one path or outcome – when we coerce students to learn one thing or to learn one way – we truncate learning opportunities and short circuit students’ curiosity.  I’ve been asking myself this question a lot lately: is it better to redirect a student back to my plan, or to investigate with the student how a new path can lead to or past the day’s lesson? That seems like a rhetorical question, but it takes on ambiguity and urgency in the middle of class.

There’s no way individualize instruction this way in a classroom of 25-30 students set up for whole group instruction. We need flexible classrooms and outlooks. What learning can students direct? What options do we have for designing our classrooms? What are our options for grouping students in our classrooms? What are our options for providing each group with choices that prompt the learning we intend? What independent work can a group of students do in support of learning while we support another group? Can we see each group every class? Every other class? How can we brainstorm, test, and adopt multiple infrastructures and infra-schedules in our own rooms and across our teammates rooms?

This is more than planning a menu of differentiated instruction. This is the willingness and preparation required to cycle through multiple means of learning multiple times in designing and implementing classrooms and instruction. Thinking instruction instead of planning it asks us to stop seeing students’ actions as effects caused by our authoritative choices. Instead, thinking instruction asks us to consider how each student behavior can cause learning. To do so we need to develop a broad repertoire of spatial, relational, temporal and instructional designs. Thinking instruction asks us to translate the momentum of classroom behaviors in the present into learning in the future.

To think instruction, we have to begin open to a multitude of possibilities about how and when a student will learn what we intend in our instructional design, and then we need to work with the student to find the right combination of possibilities for that student so she feels great learning and creates something great with her learning.  What would you need for such radical differentiation?  How much of what you need could you get this year or next?

I feel fundamentally challenged by these intents. They have profound ramifications for my beliefs and practice. They ask me to let go of as much as they ask me to take on. They’re not entirely comfortable yet. Maybe if I think strategically enough – and shed enough of my bad habits – one day they’ll fit.