Meeting students where they are

Schools of fish move in sync. Schools of humans don’t. (Image by RobpSF)

One of the newer members of my teaching team had a breakthrough moment recently.

She was working with a student on a straightforward topic: Nouns. (I just accidentally typed “nuns” and it made me laugh, but let’s stick with the true story.) The lesson material was basic. It gave a little info about what a noun is, some examples — and then the student was asked to circle the nouns in a series of sentences.

When the student circled only some of the nouns and not others, her teacher was perplexed. She asked the student to look at every single word and decide whether it was a noun. Again, the student failed to circle all of the nouns — and circled some other words that weren’t nouns.

Back and forth they went, until the teacher reached out to me in frustration. “She is not listening to me.”

After a brief conversation, this teacher was stunned by a profound realization: This student was doing her very best.

The performance that the teacher had attributed to laziness or apathy was actually the result of lack of understanding. If I don’t know what a noun is, how can I show you what a noun is?

It didn’t matter that the instructions explained what a noun is. Explaining is not teaching.

In order to serve this student, we need to break things down further. We must find small wins — for instance, inviting the student to find one noun in one sentence or give several examples of nouns. Once we find something she can do, we can build on that.

We have to meet her where she is, with what she knows, and go from there. Our goal, with assignments like the noun lesson, is to use it to help build a map of our student’s current capabilities, not to extract perfect performance.

It’s often surprising to see what students know and can do — and what they don’t know and can’t do. Parents and teachers need to take our own context out of it, so that we’re not distracted by “what I could do at that age” or “how last year’s sixth graders performed on this assessment” and whether the student is more or less advanced than we were expecting. Each person is an individual, with a unique array of strengths to build upon, and deserves respect and the benefit of the doubt.

Beyond lesson content, we often assume that students have scholarly habits that they haven’t been explicitly taught. Thus, a fifth grader might fail a science test because he “didn’t study for it.” But who taught the ten-year-old how to study? No one. Why is he accountable for a skill that he has never been coached on? Studying, note-taking, physical organization, and time management are not skills we magically absorb. We need to be given instruction on these things, too. If students are missing them, it doesn’t mean they’re lazy or can’t be bothered. They might not even know what the problem is. They don’t know what they don’t know.

Many parts of our educational system are broken. There is a problematic assumption underpinning traditional school, which is that some kids will excel, some will fail, and some will land in the middle, and this “bell curve” accurately reflects students’ relative aptitudes and thus, their relative worthiness for elite colleges and careers. In other words, if you get bad grades, you’re either not smart enough or not trying hard enough. It’s on you, as the student, and neither the system nor the teachers bear responsibility.

This framework is an absurd waste of human potential. Kids, like all humans, want so badly to succeed; they just don’t always know how. After trying and failing for years, they give up. It’s logical — and tragic.

Despite the pain and trauma that early failure causes students, intervention is possible before it’s too late. Students can learn effectively if things are broken down for them. If we can meet them where they are, we can lead them forward. Perhaps it would be better say that we can walk forward with them.

I’m proud of this teacher for being willing to let go of years of societal programming to see that her student is trying, and to grasp the tremendous opportunity that represents. The student has been extremely patient in waiting for this moment — waiting for us to find her and truly see her. Now that our expectations are properly calibrated, the fun part starts.