One day, Adam Holman decided he was fed up with trying to cram knowledge into the brains of the high school students he taught. They weren’t grasping the physics he was teaching at the level he knew they were capable of, so he decided to change up his teaching style. It wasn’t that his students didn’t care about achieving — he taught at high performing, affluent schools where students knew they needed high grades to get into good colleges. They argued for every point to make sure their grades were as high as possible, but were they learning?
“I felt I had to remove all the barriers I could on my end before I could ask my kids to meet me halfway,” Holman said. The first thing he did was move to standards-based grading. He told his students to show him they’d learned the material, it didn’t matter how long it took them.
“The kids realized this made sense,” Holman said. He taught physics and math at Anderson High School in Austin, before moving on to become a vice-principal. His students were mostly well-off, high achievers, and they knew how to play the game to get the grades they needed. But Holman found when he changed the grading policy, students worried about grades less and focused more on working together to understand the material.
“It turned my students into classmates and collaborators because I didn’t have a system in place to deny the collaboration,” Holman said. His students stopped copying homework. There was no curve that guaranteed some kids would be at the bottom. Instead, the class moved at its regular pace, but if a student persisted at a topic until they could show they understood it, Holman would give them credit. “It turned the kids on my side,” Holman said. “I was there to help them learn.”
BUILDING TRUST
Holman didn’t just change his grading policies. He also changed his teaching style to focus on inquiry, good questions and independent discovery. Starting off, he knew juniors and seniors weren’t used to learning that way, so first he had to build trust with them so they’d understand why he was asking so much of them.
At the start of each class period Holman and his students did icebreakers and read and discussed articles about how human brains learn best. Holman knew he was asking students to be vulnerable with one another–to share their misperceptions about math and physics–and so he spent precious class time working to make sure students trusted one another and him.
by MindMake via MindMake Blog
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