Who Moved My Standards? Joyful Teaching in an Age of Change: A SOAR-ing Tale (Michael D. Toth)

Thank you for listening to the story “A Soaring Tale” from the book Who Moved my Standards.  I forgot how much I enjoyed doing read-alouds with a class.  I felt this story was a great way to depict the challenges we as educators are faced with today.  We have to get our students a lot farther along in order to be successful.  We felt this struggle when the standards began to change.  The nut tree in the distance represents more than new standards.  It is a symbol of the changing world we are preparing our students to enter.  We are preparing our students for jobs that may not even exist right now. 

Teachers and educators quickly realized that the traditional model of lesson planning and instruction is no longer adequate for the challenges of meeting new standards or for the success in the new economy.  Education in the past prepared students for manufacturing jobs.  The traditional learning environment was good at producing the skills needed for assembly line jobs and mass production.  Skills and domains of knowledge were taught in isolation.  Science class did not have any connection to English, math, or art.  Order and efficiency were very important.  Students were directed on what to do and when to do it.  When students tried to work with other students, teachers quickly responded to that action by asking students to do their own work.  Problem solving skills were not necessary in an assembly line or production workplace.  Most of us learned in classrooms like this.  This model is still seen in many classrooms of today. 

With today’s technology and globalization, the skills necessary for today’s new economy are quite different.  Many of today’s jobs require dynamic teaming.  We may be asked to serve on one or more teams that were specifically formed to resolve issues or create a solution.  With this teaming, team leadership may shift.  Employees take ownership of their work and their teams’ results.  Employees need interpersonal skills for success.  Many times they are confronted with challenging projects that require fluid and complex problem solving, persistence in the face of difficult tasks, and less direction from superiors.  They are required to have the ability to do research, analyze, and synthesize information into persuasive arguments or compelling presentations. 

The new standards were developed to reflect the demands of today’s world and to foster the skills for success in the new economy.  Do our classrooms today reflect this? It makes little sense to teach academic standards developed for a new economy in a classroom learning environment that reflects the old economy.  We must transform the way students experience their learning.  Teachers who make this transformation in their classes are skilled at forming and facilitating student academic teams, where kids wrestle with the content as applied to real-world scenarios, where their thinking and problem-solving skills are fully engaged, and where the teacher expertly moves to the background to facilitate and guide when learning goes off track.  When classrooms make this transition, both teachers and students are able to master the full intent and rigor of new standards.

Old Economy Classroom Environment	New Economy Classroom Environment
Teacher is doing most of the work	Students are doing most of the work
Teacher is doing most of the talking and directing	Students are doing most of the talking and are directing their own work
Teacher feels like she/he is pushing the students to learn	Students take ownership of their academic progress and pull toward their learning goals
Students have a hard time visualizing how the learning will help them in the real world	Students are seeing the connections to the real world through their work
Teacher feels the pressure to engage and hold students’ attention	Students are highly engaged in complex tasks and real world problems
Teachers feel fatigue and the pressure to cover content	Students are feeling mentally stretched but excited about the task and what they are discovering

Here are some tips from Michael Toth to help transform our classroom learning environment.

• ·       Students can’t be direct-instructed into becoming critical thinkers.  Students develop critical-thinking skills by working with a level of autonomy from the teacher while applying the learned content to complex tasks in real-world scenarios.
• ·       Teacher over-support can rob students of the autonomy necessary to develop critical-thinking and teamwork skills.  Focus on scaffolding the release of responsibility to the students for their own learning.  If students are on task but struggling with content, allow them to practice persistence and stretch themselves mentally.  If they have misconceptions, errors in reasoning, or gaps in understanding that are preventing progress in the complex performance task, they may not yet be ready for the complexity of the task.  Clear up misunderstandings and content gaps and try again.
• ·       All learning in classrooms should be based on the academic standards, with thoughtful planning to align performance tasks, success criteria, and levels of deeper thinking with the standards.  The standards-aligned learning goal should always be clear to students, so they can track their own progress to mastery.
• ·       Not all standards are equal.  Work with your curriculum office to identify the power standards and the supporting standards.
• ·       Student academic teams need well developed roles and expectations, including team leaders, common performance tasks but accountable individual work, and visible peer coaching.  The team is only successful if all team members are successful.  If it feels like you are pushing the team to learn, then you do not yet have a student learning team.
• ·       As students perform real-world complex tasks, make sure they use correct academic vocabulary and engage in discussions and thinking like student scientists, engineers, mathematicians, essayists, or historians.  They should be questioning each other’s claims, probing reasoning, and examining text evidence as they investigate and solve problems or create new solutions.
• ·       Most important of all, have fun with it!  If you as a teacher are not feeling creative and excited about the performance task, it’s not likely your students will be either.  If you’re having fun teaching it, they most likely will have fun learning it. 

So many of these suggestions directly relate to the Charlotte County Expectations.