Why this blog?

"... Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves ... Do not search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. The point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." - Letters to a Young Artist, R. M. Rilke

Rooted in the promise and challenge of growth ...

these are letters from a young teacher.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

"In charge" and "in control"

Today I am recalling something a colleague shared with us at the Charter before leaving the school for retirement. She left us with a challenge, I suppose you could call it, to work always toward an ideal classroom, in which "the teachers are in charge, but the students are in control of their learning." Not only would this take a significant load of a teachers' shoulders, but it would allow children more ownership of their learning, and be more actively involved in how their learning develops.

It's been nice these last few days to be doing some substitute work within the Charter, but in different classrooms than I'm usually in. I've been with the younger students in the preschool and pre-Kindergarten, which are a bit more loosely scheduled during the day. Play seems to have absolute rule, and it is always refreshing to watch them play for such extended spans of time.

In the back of my mind, I am reflecting on the project work I've observed recently, especially on the relationship between playfulness in project work and its extension into formal instruction. And I'm wondering about that oh so delicate balance between the two - when do teachers "take charge" and when do they let the children "take control"? I'm still making sense of that as I look around and prepare for some own mini-lessons and units of my own coming up.

For now, one thing makes a whole lot of sense: If students are to take more ownership of their learning, they must be given the opportunity to know themselves as learners, to follow their own choices, observe its consequences, and make meaning of everything they do. As Alfie Kohn says, "Children don't learn how to make decisions by following directions."

As I watch young children in their play, and think about the positive energy going into the project work in the older classroom, I have an immense amount of trust in walking that fine line between "in charge" and "in control". And that trust is helping me trust myself.

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