Note: This entry continues the focus on the founding principles of Sustainable Teaching, this one on two of those principles: Learning how to think is more important than learning what to think (so larger, cross-disciplinary skills receive greater emphasis than factual content.) Teachers determine the essential intellectual skills so that students can understand and apply knowledge and learn how to create “new” knowledge; students take more control over content.

“… But Teach a Man to Fish”

Let’s make some assumptions here. Let’s assume that more and more teachers are accepting that students are not sausages to be stuffed with the odds and ends of centuries of information. Let’s assume that, instead of wringing their hands over students’ inability to memorize, teachers understand that people tend to remember what matters to them and what they actually use. Let’s assume that teachers realize that students need to be responsible for their own learning—responsible not in the tiresome sense of accepting whatever they are told but responsible in the sense of constructing knowledge and building understanding.

What, then, do students need from us? They need to learn HOW to do these things. They need the skills, and while teachers increasingly understand this need and work to address it in their classrooms, the schools themselves remain largely unchanged. I have listened for 40 years to clichés about “the guide on the side” and creating “life-long learners” and “critical thinkers,” marketing slogans that suggest an emphasis on skills, but nothing much has really changed in a systemic sort of way. School is still mostly about learning stuff for tests about stuff. Graduation requirements continue to be so many years of so much stuff—four years of English, three of math, and so on.

So what might school look like if it truly committed itself to teaching the skills students need to become independent learners and thinkers? Well, once upon a time, I got a glimpse of such a school, an independent high school.

The teachers came really to understand the difference between teaching stuff and helping students develop skills, so we decided to rethink the school, starting with a new curriculum for the ninth graders. We would bring together the arts, English, science and history, but instead of creating the usual interdisciplinary course around content themes (the Renaissance, environmental issues), we identified the essential skills that these disciplines have in common: reading, writing, reasoning, speaking and listening, study, organization and research. A team of teachers, one from each of the content areas, then identified the components of each skill, created a sequence for developing the skills, and selected some content that they felt would be most engaging and suited for developing the skills in ninth graders.

One of the principles we hoped to show the students was that intellectual skills and habits of mind are the keys to thinking well and solving problems across disciplines. Creativity, for example, is no more restricted to the arts than testing hypotheses is the exclusive domain of the sciences.

To emphasize the notion of student responsibility and to increase student engagement, the teachers allowed students much more control over the content they studied. What were important to the teachers were the skills, and they decided to encourage the students, whenever possible, to study content that mattered to the students.
The final six to eight weeks of the year were devoted to student-designed projects through which students could demonstrate their mastery of the skills and their understanding of an interesting topic. Topics ranged from witchcraft to violence in sports to anorexia and images of women in advertising to genetics. Students submitted their projects and participated in a final oral defense before a panel of teachers.

Perhaps the smartest thing we did in creating this ninth grade curriculum was to realize that, after years of comfortably teaching stuff, the teachers’ greatest struggle would be resisting the gravity of habit, so we made three structural changes: The team of teachers met regularly to present and challenge the lessons each planned for the next day or week. The grades they gave and sent home were for the skills—no grades in science or history; instead, grades in reading and reasoning. And they were given large, unscheduled blocks of teaching time that allowed them to place students into sections and schedule the individual classes themselves, so that the schedule was fluid, rather than fixed, and driven by shifting teaching/learning needs and goals, rather than the reverse.

And it was here that we began to see the sorts of systemic changes that are needed to support new discoveries about how people learn and to support changes in teaching methods: new ways to schedule classes and group students, new ways to grade, new ways to group teachers other than by subject departments, and, perhaps, eventually, new ways to look at graduation requirements. It wasn’t just a classroom that looked different; the school looked different.

When I attended high school, I was a sausage. Even at my graduation, and certainly in the years that followed, I recalled almost nothing from my ninth grade year and little from the ensuing years—memorize it, regurgitate it, forget it. When I became a teacher, I found that my colleagues joked about the ninth grade, chuckling ruefully at how little the students remembered from that year. So it’s with a measure of joy that I have listened to so many of the graduates from that ninth grade program, which taught skills and freed students so much to shape the content according to their interests. Like Jessica, who wrote one of her ninth grade teachers ten years later, when she was studying to become a teacher:

More and more in my teaching credential program, I am learning how spoiled I was to be a student in a program that teaches how to organize one’s thoughts, notes and reading, how to evaluate and address a genuine question, and how to form a judgment and back it up. I still remember most of the topics, discussions and projects.

Fed for a lifetime.