My reflection for this week is in response to an excerpt from the book Passionate Learners: How to Engage & Empower Your Students by Pernille Ripp. Right off the bat, I think the question of "would I want to be a student in my own classroom?" is really interesting because of its primary underlying assumption: that "the teacher" is categorically excluded from the role of being "a student." Can't I be both? Personally, I feel that teaching is really more about role-modelling what it means to be a student. A continual student throughout life! Even though this phrasing bugs me, after reading the whole excerpt, I think I see that we're pretty much on the same page.
I appreciate what Ripp has to say about kids' natural love of learning and curiosity. That is something I certainly believe in, but I wonder how much difference it makes that she is writing about her experiences with elementary and middle schoolers, whereas I work with older high schoolers. My sense is that curiosity gets more and more squashed down for a lot of kids as they go through school and it takes more and more effort to coax it back out by the time they're getting close to graduation. I'll be paying close attention to how my students grow and change in that department this semester.
Ripp suggests the phrase, "How will you find out?" for answering students' questions. I love the idea of this, especially for my teenagers who I think ought to be practicing more self-sufficiency like that. I've been trying it out whenever a kid asks me a question that I know they have the direct resource to answer it with, or if it is something that is more off the beaten path of the lesson and I genuinely don't have a concrete answer. Sometimes I'll start exploring and looking it up with them if I have time, or at the very least make sure they report back to me on whatever interesting stuff they find out. I want to learn too!! Still, this doesn't always go over well. Some kids tell me that I'm just being sassy, or that I'm trying to shirk my responsibility of helping them with every little thing (lol). It's more funny than it is frustrating, so I just explain why I'm answering their question with a question instead of showing those emotions. I'll just have to wait and see if they get more used to that kind of thing as I keep doing it over the year. This feels like a good, low-stakes way of getting kids started on taking ownership of their learning and their classroom, which is what Ripp is talking about in the whole rest of her piece.
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