What I Did with my Summer Vacation

Thought I might as well share this piece, which is an essay I was asked to write for a job application.

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What is the difference between teaching students what to think and teaching them how to think? What role can research play in bringing about this kind of transformation in schooling?

When a teacher’s goal shifts from covering material to creating habits of mind, radically different instructional strategies emerge in the classroom. The most dynamic educators I know expect their students to be producers, not consumers, of knowledge, and they see their job as one of providing structured opportunities for learners to engage actively with required content. My senior English teacher assigned Their Eyes Were Watching God but skipped the usual lectures on the author’s historical context; instead, she asked us to produce a Harlem Renaissance-themed variety show. My dissertation advisor, a Stanford full professor, culminates his annual undergraduate survey class with a mini-conference where students present collaborative research projects and produce a volume of papers of near-publishable quality. A fantastic fifth-grade teacher I know integrates science, history, and language arts in a theme cycle on sound. His students research the history of sound recording devices, make posters on all the traditional stuff about soundwaves and eardrums, and then produce podcasts of poetry readings. In each of these teaching contexts, learners move beyond pencil-and-paper exercises that require a prescribed answer. They get into the thick of intellectual life, where questions are generated, not assigned, and the way of asking is just as important as the answer. Requiring students to exercise their intellects in this way is the difference between telling them what to think and asking them to learn how to think.

An emphasis on student research can transform a classroom, but action/activist research has the potential to transform the entire school system. While the currently-fashionable rhetoric of “accountability” and “data-driven instruction” often masks an agenda that maintains inequities in educational quality and resources, the potential of research-based innovation as a catalyst for progressive reform cannot be underestimated. Scholarly research can influence teacher attitudes and practices if and when it is presented in a digestible, practical form; and participation in research studies can support teachers in becoming more reflective and effective in the classroom.

My own work with urban elementary teachers provides an illustration of the power of research for fostering teacher change. In a district where the teaching staff was mostly white and the student population was largely African American, cultural and linguistic differences contributed to low teacher expectations, and in turn, student underachievement. I designed and evaluated a classroom intervention that incorporated key insights of sociolinguistic research, preparing teachers to respond more effectively to their students’ dialect by avoiding spot correction of nonstandard dialect forms, recognizing the cultural value of African American language, and using children’s literature to engage students in critical discussions of language use. My evaluation--which relied on language attitude surveys, interviews with teachers and students, dozens of hours of classroom observation, and analysis of the written work of nearly 300 students--concluded that integrating research on language variation into the elementary classroom made a positive, measurable difference for both teachers and students. When I compared the attitudes of teachers who just participated in a training workshop with the attitudes of their colleagues who attended a workshop and tried out sociolinguistic ideas in the classroom, the teachers who had gotten hands-on practice showed greater changes in their attitudes, and their students did better as well. This is yet another illustration of the difference between active and passive engagement with ideas—and evidence that no matter what the age of the learner, or the topic at hand, hands-on means minds-on.

Rave critical reviews

Today I got a nice email from the pre-K teacher today about the class book we wrote at the end of the year:

Ms. Sweetland,

I have spent a few hours reading your classes writings. THEY DID A WONDERFUL JOB! I could not put it down! You did a great job with your class! That book is SUPER! They put a lot of effort into their work and make the audience FEEL their words. I really enjoyed reading it. Congrats to YOU and the FANTASTIC FIFTH GRADE CLASS! It was a pleasure!!!

Ms. H