Module 2-3 Paper EDUC 401 Peter Worthington Submitted November 15, 2011

On reflection, it feels like folly to separate the acts of learning and teaching into separate papers. This is particularly clear after a field experience such as my classmates and I have just undergone, in which we were inserted into schools and occasionally asked to teach children, yet are there with the express purpose of observing and learning from those who do the job professionally. As a result, rather than risk a descent into academic navel-gazing, my intent with this paper is to describe in detail one particularly powerful experience I had while teaching a grade 3/4 split class. Afterwards, I will go into discussion of an issue it brought to my attention about both learning for myself and for the children, as well as teaching from my own perspective as well as1 from that of the children. There is little to no doubt in my mind that this event will greatly impact the teacher that I become, and documenting it feels like something important for me to do. Indeed, it is now one of my greatest motivations to get back into the classroom.

On my fourth day at the elementary school, I wasn't really sure what to expect. The first couple of days had been almost entirely observation, while on the third my partner and I were thrown in headfirst and expected to participate fully in teaching a grade one/two split class. Despite being a rather jarring experience at first, by the end of the day we were having an amazing time and learning things that we never would have by hanging back and taking notes. On this fourth morning then, I was hopeful that I would have a similar day but had no idea what this particular teacher would want us doing. On arriving, we found ourselves put on sort of a shift duty with the teacher. It was report card prep week, so she needed some time alone with certain students to interview them on specific skills. She would teach for a while, then take advantage of the extra adult presence by having us read a story to the kids, help them with math assignments, or in one case play hangman on the whiteboard with them. The kids were
1 In what turned out to be a fortuitous turn of events

incredibly receptive to us and were always happy to be doing any activity with the cool younger teachers, so there was no trouble with this. It was when they were working through their subtraction worksheet and my partner and I were walking around helping the kids that the moment which has come to define my field experience occurred. I noticed one boy who was not even attempting to look like he was working on his assignment. Instead, he was reading a graphic novel which he seemed very involved in. Being familiar with the book he was reading2 and knowing it was quite good, I was wary of discouraging him from spending time reading but eventually decided that I would try to get him working on his subtraction instead. I asked him if he wanted my help, and promised him we'd work together for a while if he'd put away the book after finishing the page he was on. He agreed, so we started working on the worksheet together.

The discussions we've been having in class regarding motivation quickly became very relevant to me. This kid obviously knew what he was doing3 but was more interested in experimentation than following the prescribed method. When I asked him if he remembered seeing his teacher demonstrate borrowing on the board at the beginning of class, he responded Yeah, but I want to do it a different way. I thought about it and figured that it would be more valuable for him to rule out whatever other methods he may try to use on his own than to just be corrected, so I let him suggest things and pretended to be surprised as I said things in the pattern of but wait, if we do Y there won't be any way to X! Eventually, after about five minutes, he accepted that borrowing was the way to go and started blazing through questions. He did them quickly and with minimal help, but after working through about half the sheet said to me My head hurts now. Can I take a bit of a break? Content that he had done as much work as he did and adopting a pick your battles mindset, I told him that was fine and went off to help another student. I found a younger boy who was struggling with the same sheet and started to help him. I got about five minutes in when the first boy came over to us and said I'm ready to keep going now.
2 Amulet, which the librarians at the Doucette keep recommending I read when I have the free time to. 3 This particular lesson involved borrowing from the tens column to subtract dual-digit numbers

That sentence completely blind-sided me. I had, perhaps too cynically, thought that the headache was his way of saying that he was done for the day and had not at all expected him to continue. I told him I'd be with him as soon as I'd finished with this boy I was working with, as I'd promised him I'd help him with this set of problems. It was then revealed to me that these two boys are brothers, and I looked at the question we were working on and realized it was one that I had done with the older brother. Taking advantage of this good fortune, I told the first boy to bring his worksheet over so that we could help his little brother figure out the question together. He explained it handily, and by forming a team we proceeded to get through the entire worksheet before the class broke for lunch. After the children left, the teacher pulled me aside and told me that I'd just taken on her two most difficult math students at the same time and how impressed she'd been.

When trying to think about what to write, I kept coming back to this experience. It has relevance to both the modules on learning and teaching, as in this case both the students and myself were doing both. I was learning to teach, and by the end they were teaching to learn. Along the way, we both fumbled through what we were doing in the hopes that we were getting it right. That it came off so successfully has more to do with the dynamics that we managed to create than with any one of our contributions specifically, and that the two of them found a way to learn mathematics when by all accounts they typically have a lot of difficulty wrestling with the subject is the issue that I feel is at the heart of all of this. These kids were not bad at arithmetic. In fact, the older brother was very good at it. So good, in fact, that he wanted to experiment with it, to play with possibilities until he found the correct method. If anything, this is far more like what an actual mathematician would do in the real world. All that he really needed was someone looking over his shoulder to help him move more quickly past his failed attempts. His younger brother was perfectly capable as well, just needing some one-on-one encouragement to keep moving along the right path. The older boy, who had just mastered the concepts himself, was just as good

as I at filling that role. What these children needed was individual time, nothing more. The issue then is that the system is designed in a way that they cannot get this time, and it only seems to be getting worse.

At this school, classes are fairly small. The school is one in which a full thirty-five percent of the students are coded with either a learning disability or a behavioural problem. Due to the system providing more funding to help with coded students this means that, per student, they have slightly above-average funds available and use this to keep class sizes low. In fact, the largest class that I saw while there was twenty-three students. That is much more similar to what many would think of as the ideal class size. To put this into perspective, when I switched schools the following week I saw classes which were more than twice this size that seemed to be near what the teachers expected. Even in the school's more tightlyfocused classes however, it was clear to me that the students were not getting the amount of individual attention that they required. This is no one's fault, just a sad reality of teaching. I watched the teachers doing everything they could for each of their students, but it was often those with the most pronounced problems who got the attention, leaving those in the middle to flounder. In the classroom with the brothers, there was also a boy who was reading at a first grade level in the fourth grade. Because of this, he could not even be given the math assignment. The teacher spent a good deal of her time trying to help him catch up, and as a result these two boys were experiencing a lot of difficulty and quickly becoming problem students themselves. The most tragic part of this situation was that the brothers were more than able to handle things, they just needed a bit of personal supervision. The following week I was observing at a high school and was met with an even more extreme example of this problem, a student in tenth grade who was still reading at a third grade level. His teacher knew that he needed to help him and very much wanted to, but in a class of fifty he simply did not have the time to devote to this.

There is unfortunately very little that can realistically be done in order to help with this problem. The fact is, the clearest solution is to make available the resources to have only a few students per

teacher. In fact, I was lucky enough to see just this one afternoon at this school in a Bridges class, a special program comprised of students with long track records of behavioural problems who are bussed in from other schools. This class had only six students in it and due to the amount of time they have with their teacher they were, despite their previous track records, some of the best behaved students I saw during my entire time in schools. They were learning at an incredible rate, quickly catching up to those the same age as themselves, and were probably the biggest surprise that I had. This was only made possible because these students received extra funding from the government however, and is not realistic at all for those students who are not put into any kind of special category. In lecture, Dr. Davis made reference to the idea that class sizes do not have an impact on learning if you are teaching in a certain way, but after seeing what I have, I am very sceptical of this claim. I am reminded much more in fact of Nicholas Burbules' Authority and the Tragic Dimension of Teaching (Burbules, 1995) which emphasizes the unfortunate dichotomies that teachers face on a daily basis. Among these are things like imparting political values at the risk of alienating students, sacrificing curriculum time to teach desirable behaviour, and (the most relevant one) that time spent helping one student is necessarily time lost that could be used to help another. Unfortunate as this is, I am unwilling to accept it fully. So, if it is unrealistic to simply have class sizes small enough to have the kind of interactions with these students that they need, we need to work out what our remaining options are.

As I see it, we really only have a couple of choices. The first is to just accept this dichotomy and resign one's self to the idea that you will be unable to help all of the students you have. The other is that rather than wishing for more teachers to help your students, you turn your students into teachers. While group work and collective learning have been brought up repeatedly in several classes as a way to get students more motivated in learning, having them so directly teach each other has not really been brought up. If we start with a small group, get them to where they need to be, and then have them pass this on to another group we are already ensuring that students are getting more individualized learning experiences

than the current standard provides. Once you have two groups, they will be teaching two others and so on and so forth. Of course, this will require monitoring over time in order to make sure that the lessons being passed on are the right ones, but this giant collaborative effort to create a fully knowledgeable classroom feels to me like the best way to minimize this tragic element of teaching. In this manner, I have begun to shift my interpretation of teaching from that of instructor to that of facilitator. The teacher I believe would be most effective would be one with a constantly buzzing classroom as opposed to a quiet one, as the students are always speaking with and teaching each other. It would fall to the teacher to manage all of this and ensure that the buzz is on topic and as factually correct as possible, but the teaching becomes a distributed effort between teacher and class. It is something of a cliche to say that a teacher is always learning from their students, so I have been attempting to avoid this. Still, in order to complete the geometric relationship alluded to in the introduction, it must be said. In that the students in this situation are both learning and teaching constantly, so are the teachers. What the teachers are learning is not necessarily any new material or anything as intangible as is usually invoked by statements of that type, but instead new ways of relating material that the children are able to come up with by approaching it from a new perspective. Like the older brother who needed to rule out any other methods of dual-digit subtraction before resorting to borrowing, there are new problems and solutions that would not occur to someone who has long ago found the most effective way to deal with certain problems and wants to pass that on and move forward. The students meanwhile, in addition to learning the material, would be learning meta-cognitive skills and encouraged to think from the perspectives of others in developing their skills to teach each other. After seeing those two boys working together, learning and teaching in turn, I have little doubt that this is a very effective way to build a successful classroom. It will no doubt require a very deft touch on the part of the teacher, but once a rhythm of the classroom has been found I believe the payoff will be dramatic.

Though my time with those two brothers was one of the more rewarding experiences I have ever

had, it served to illuminate for me a harsh reality of classroom life. Certainly, class size is often brought up as a challenge for teachers, but it was not the classroom management angle that is so often referenced as much as the unintentional, and to a depressing extent unavoidable, element of neglect that comes when trying to help so many students at once that stood out as the problem. I believe that creating a collective of learners is one of the few potential solutions that we have to this problem. While it would certainly not be a perfect solution, one can at least conceive of it as an effective means of minimizing the negative impact. The motivation to create this collective is fast becoming what drives my desire to teach. What remains then, is for me to begin to discover ways as a teacher to foster this kind of atmosphere without the class going off the rails, and to build my own skills in pedagogy to the point where it is a feasible thing for me to do. It is with this goal in mind that I will be approaching the rest of my time in the Education department, and I very much hope that I am able to make real progress towards it in the coming months. With students as capable as the ones I saw who are struggling as much as they are, it is the burden of the class to change to help them, not on them to change for the class.

Bibliography

1. Burbules, N. (1995). Authority and the tragic dimension of teaching. In J Garrison & A Rud (eds.), The educational conversation (pp. 29-40). Albany, NY. State University of New York Press. 2. Davis, B. Sumara, D., and Luce-Kapler, R. (2008). Engaging Minds: Second Edition. New York,

NY. Routledge. 3. Lecture notes from EDUC 401- Instructed by Brent Davis, University of Calgary Fall 2011 term