Challenging Students

School was a challenge for my brother.

Reports cards often included statements like:
“behavior remains a problem for Andrew”
“it is a challenge for him to sit still”
“he is working on keeping his hands to himself and not talking so much”
“he struggles to stay focused on the task at hand”

Perhaps it is more accurate to say my brother was a challenge for his schools.

This is because my little brother is brilliant. Throughout school he was almost always bored. Every call home to my parents contained an untold story of Andrew’s quest for something interesting to do.

I know this is true because his best year in school, by far, was when he had a teacher who loved science as much as he did. She spent huge portions of the day doing hands-on experiments. That year Andrew’s report card looked very different. It said things about his creativity, curiosity, and eagerness to learn.

At home, keeping my brother out of trouble was not hard. Supply him with interesting books about how things work and some broken appliances and he was hooked for hours. Let him play with tools and wood scraps and he’d invent something beyond your wildest dreams. Give him the chance to create games with the neighbors and he was in his glory.

But traditional schools are not set up to handle people like my brother. He’s not the classic sit-in-a-chair-studiously-for-hours “gifted” kid that we’re taught to expect when we think of genius. But neither are most kids, and I don’t think that means intelligence is just exceptionally rare.

Andrew grew up before ADD had a label and a medication. Perhaps today Ritalin would enable him to fit the mold better.

But even beyond the possibility of a clinical diagnosis, as an educator I wish that Andrew’s teachers had understood him as well as his family did. Even if they didn’t have old telephones for him to take apart and put back together, his teachers would have been amazed by the knowledge he could glean at the age of ten from a scientific article. If they’d simply let him work with a partner on one of their uninspired assignments, he would have gotten the job done just because he would have been able to exercise his interpersonal intelligence.

Challenge comes in all forms for children. What Andrew learned from the kind of challenge he experienced in grade school was that he could learn more outside the classroom than he could within it.

I know he’s not alone in that discovery. He graduated, but countless other bored students simply get tired of wasting their time and don’t. How do we curb that tide? How can we create more of the educational challenge that engages, and less that makes students want to walk away? How do we make school meaningful for all children, not just the ones who can find meaning in a conventional instructional format?

Can Standardized Testing and Whole Child Teaching Coexist? Only if Whole Child Teaching Comes First.

In classrooms across the US students and teachers are busy getting ready for the big standardized tests that come each spring. These tests are often seen as antithetical to the whole child instructional approach. Although they have become too much of a focus in our schools, and have done damage to the reputation for creativity, spontaneity, and innovation that once made the teaching profession so exciting - for the near term they are here to stay, and we Inspired Teachers are here to stay, so it’s important to find a way to prove that good teaching (as we know it) and student achievement (as measured by these tests) are not mutually exclusive.

The growing consensus seems to be that if you want students to do well on the tests, every moment of your instruction must place a laser-like focus on their form and content. It is true that an exclusively narrow and content (rather than student) -centered approach is incompatible with whole child instruction. If the tests are the sole focus of your instruction, and the only tool you use to measure student achievement, it is unlikely that your classroom is a place in which things like social-emotional needs, divergent and creative thinking, problem solving, and self expression get a great deal of attention.

But here’s another way to think about the tests: in a classroom in which growing the whole child is a teacher’s focus, achievement on these annual tests will actually come naturally. More importantly, when a teacher looks at each student and figures out how to address his or her academic, physical, social, and emotional needs – she is teaching not for the test at the end of the school year but for the life-long aspirations and achievements that this child is destined to realize.

It’s hard to argue effectively against the validity of standardized tests when their results so often mirror the inequities that exist in our educational system. We know things need to get better, most of us don’t think tests themselves are going to do the trick. As Inspired Teachers we believe and have seen that good teaching given its proper time and support will ultimately enable students to achieve. So here's a provocative idea, what if instead of defeating the tests on the basis of their shortcomings as comprehensive assessment tools – we make them superfluous because the whole child instruction our students receive prepares them to do so much more than simply fill in the right bubbles on a standardized test?

If we move to make this point, achievement on these annual tests would simply become a side effect of good instruction – not its focus.