Questions. Wonderings. The struggle to understand and make sense of the world around us. Questions. For me, it all comes down to questions. Big life altering ones. Small clarifications. And everything in between. It is the way we take responsibility for our learning and the path we walk on our journey through life.
In university, as an International Studies Major, I began to grappled with seemingly unsolvable problems in the world and to explore how the International Community was trying to address them. I found there were more questions than answers. I found this both exciting and frustrating. My advisor was the first to share with me a very famous quote, that I have had tacked up in everyplace I have lived and taught.
In Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, he writes, “ Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far into the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way unto the answer.”
Live the questions now. Every time I reread it, I connect to something different in that passage. I think our primary role as teachers is to help our students develop the skills they will need to ask their own questions and live them.
As a learning support teacher working with students who have greater academic challenges than others, I believe my role is to empower them to understand their difficulties and not be limited by them. I see my role to be an advocate, a facilitator, a model, a manager, and an instructor.
I believe our work with students with unique learning profiles should follow a model which strengthens the strengths, addresses the weaknesses, and bypasses the difficulties while we are working on them. (Similar to Mel Levine's structure from the Schools Attuned Program.) My role as case manager is to co-ordinate the collection of a wide variety of data and information from multiple sources – work samples, teacher and parent observations, and student interviews - to form a complete picture of strengths and difficulties and develop a unique learner profile.
We use the learner profile and work to strengthen the strengths. These are their gifts and passions and we must help them to shine. Then, we develop strategies, accommodations, and tools to help them bypass their weaknesses to access the general curriculum. For the struggling writer, it might mean that they dictate or record their thinking in Units of Inquiry or they have an e-math journal, so their writing difficulties don’t limit their ability to problem solve and think mathematically. It is my job to advocate for the student with my colleagues, to ensure students have the supports in place to be successful. Similarly, I must model and provide professional support and development to my colleagues, so they can understand the needs of my students and differentiate within the general classroom environment.
Next, I provide direct instruction in the areas of weakness. This of course will vary based on need. For our youngest dyslexics, this might be systematic, multi-sensory instruction in phonemic awareness, word families, and word structure following a program like Wilson Language or the Hill Center. For students who struggle with comprehension, this might be direct instruction, modeling, and practice in Visible Thinking Strategies as taught by Harvard University's Project Zero. Demystifying and rehearsing these strategies can make seemingly magical and invisible processes that happen in our brains more concrete, enabling my students to make connections, synthesize information and wonder, as they read, discuss, and write. Our struggling writers need mnemonics like COPS (Capitalization, Organization, Punctuation, and Spelling) to help them remember what to edit in their writing and I provide explicit practice to move towards automaticity in these skills, so they transfer to the general classroom environment and then life.
In all areas of instruction, I seek to model and make explicit my thinking and questioning. Through modeling the process and practicing it with them, I seek to facilitate their acquisition of understanding and perhaps more importantly, the skills necessary to take responsibility for their own learning. I don’t believe in answering students’ questions, I believe in asking them guiding questions so they can begin to construct their understanding in ways that makes sense to them. They need to “own it” as David Ott said in a workshop on Developing Mathematical Thinkers. They have to own the knowledge and understanding or they don’t take it with them. When working with students with special learning needs, we need to provide extra experiences and tasks for them to build this knowledge. If they still struggle, then we need to provide direct instruction to help them “rent to own”. As their foundation of skills strengthens, and we provide them enough learning tasks to explore the application of those skills, they will slowly move from renting to owning that understanding.
And so I teach because I believe in questions. I believe it is the only way we can seek to make sense of our world and to take responsibility for our learning. I believe that our learners who struggle the most need strong advocates who can create the opportunities for them to strengthen their strengths, bypass their weaknesses, and address their challenges. I believe education should be individualized to allow students to create their own learning journey, guided by their questions, with facilitators along the way to provide the modeling, direct instruction, and encouragement, when needed. I believe teachers should live their own questions and inspire our students to do the same. This blog is my attempt to live my questions with you.
Welcome. Thank you for beginning a journey with me. I hope together we explore ideas about inclusion, differentiation, and greater individualization of education for all students, but specifically those with unique learning needs in the International School setting. Maybe, we can learn to do it better. I don't know where we are headed, but we have to start somewhere. So, here it is, my first post. I thought I would introduce my teaching philosophy. That way you know who I am, what I believe, and what motivates me.