I spent several days last week at the delightful Ambleside School‘s internship for teachers.
One of the things that stood out at Ambleside was the collegiality of the students in the classroom.
In the middle and high school classes I observed, students maintained a disciplined engagement with each other and the material across subjects, no matter who in the class was talking and no matter what they said.
The school has cultivated this engagement in four ways that I can see:
1) Students don’t compete with each other. No grades (yes, you heard right), no little competitions in class (like who can finish filling in the map first), no awards–there are no times when a student is encouraged to compare her work with someone else’s.
2) Collaborative learning. In math and science classes, much mental and memory work happens on white-boards. Students didn’t just have to have the right answer on their own board to move on; rather the class made sure their boards agreed and then explained what they ALL had produced. They looked at each other’s boards and stayed invested. If a student demonstrated impatience during this progress, the teacher would respond with a gentle encouragement toward empathy or a reminder that the class should operate as a unit or a team.
In the humanities, if a student floundered in recalling a passage, the teacher would ask, “Would you like some support from your classmates?” If the answer was yes, the teacher would say, “Can anyone help Anna out?” After Anna had heard someone else’s memory of the material, the teacher would ask, “Anna, do you think you can explain it now?”
3) Teachers at Ambleside are trained not to give demonstrative responses, either positive or negative, to students as they narrate what they’re learning. Whether a student gave a thorough and correct answer or (occasionally) an inaccurate one, a teacher would listen attentively but without great expression, nod, and say, “Does anyone have anything to add?” Good answers were usually taken up and echoed in other responses. Incorrect ones were almost always righted by other students’ memories, but indirectly, not with triumph or embarrassment or any sort of personal comment.
Reflecting on this practice, I realize how much of the behavior of “strong” students in the classroom is controlled by teachers’ reactions. When I say, “Great job, Jack! You nailed it.” while 12 other students are working away, that comment gives Jack permission to check out of what’s happening around him. He’s focused on himself and his performance, possibly motivated by praise and working toward it instead of focused on the material. He’s also been trained to look to me to determine how deeply he ought to explore. When I make myself the authority on his performance the student is not responsible for knowing whether he has done his best work.
Without high-energy teacher comments, too, lower students seem to experience less self-consciousness. They do not perceive favoritism or feel as if they are in competition with students who frequently receive praise.
4) Unpressured time. Ambleside seems to favor quality over quantity, both in aesthetic and in curriculum choices. Each class reads only three literature books, for instance. I’m still turning over this sparseness in my mind (and counting the four to six read-alouds my classes typically do a year), and I must confess I’m not entirely sure how it all fits together with my beloved feasting metaphor yet. What it does mean, though, is that classes linger in discussion over each episode of a book.
I sat in on the fifth and sixth grade classes reading Carry On, Mr. Bowditch. They had just read a page or two in which Nat teaches Elizabeth how to tell time by the stars, using the alignment of the North Star and the big dipper to form a clock. Now, I read this book several times as a child and a young adult, and always when I reached such conversations I divined the emotional content (Nat is trying to cheer Elizabeth up) and left the mechanics of the time-telling alone. It didn’t seem important to the story and I wanted to see what happened next.
In the Ambleside class, the teacher had prepared by drawing the dipper on the board. During narration time, with books still closed, he asked the class to tell back what they could remember about the time-telling method. One student and then another got up to draw diagrams around the dipper on the board, with the teacher observing and asking them clarifying questions about their own mental model, but never saying whether they had arrived at a correct visualization of Nat’s method.
No one opened the book, but all the students talked it out, some getting up to draw, listening to others or correcting their drawings or their memory of Nat’s explanation, till at last they arrived a correct model of the process. The teacher asked if a student could then narrate the time-telling technique back to him using the picture, and she did. He asked why it appears to us that the constellations move around the sky. “Because the earth is spinning!” a student enthusiastically answered. The whole process took at least ten minutes. The time-telling method, such a brief episode in the book, became:
1) an opportunity for collaboration.
2) a time to strengthen recall and visualization skills.
3) a time to problem-solve and think logically.
4) a reminder of our relationship with space.
5) a reinforcement of the fact that words in texts have real meaning that we can visualize, which is just where weak learners often struggle when rushed through things.
I never sensed the teacher wishing they would arrive at the solution more quickly. Each technical nautical episode probably receives the same measured analysis. They are challenging enough visualizations that strong students don’t lose interest at any depth, but at that pace strugglers can develop real relationship with the text too. Although the pace is slow, classes at Ambleside do not re-read; the students know they need to engage their minds fully at first hearing because they will not get another one, but also know that they do not need to fear endless re-hashing of the same text in a future lesson.
I don’t have all the kinks worked out yet, but I’m inspired to work toward a collegial environment in my classroom by reducing competitions to a minimum, making group reception of knowledge the normal mode of learning, listening well instead of giving strong positive or negative feedback about student comments, and lingering in conversation.
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CC image courtesy of Named Faces from the Past on Flickr.