Tell us a little bit about your teacher story.
I think for me it really began as a student. The first time I ever had voice and choice in learning was this yearlong national History Day project with two amazing teachers. It was really the first time I owned the process from project management and research to designing my own script for the presentation to interviewing people. It was somewhat nerve wracking to have that much freedom and choice. I loved it and hated it at times to have that productive struggle. But all the soft skills I developed were important. I really owned the learning myself as a student.
In college I majored in education but I was active in the nonprofit world. I thought I would be in that realm, not public education. I loved learning about learning but I never thought I’d be in the classroom. I thought I'd be in program design in the nonprofit world. So in that process I was introduced to design thinking and creating frameworks that empower people but not in the K12 setting. Then, as a student teacher, I fell in love with it. In my first student teaching practicums, my first day, I thought, “This is where I’m supposed to be.” I really thought I was going to be in the nonprofit world but instead I knew this was my space. For the next 12 years I taught middle school. So that’s my whole K12 journey. Personalized learning and student-centered learning within that story was a gradual process. It was conquering my fears as a teacher: What if the scores are low? What if the classroom management doesn't work? And then realizing we could go project-based on a small scale, and then eventually giving more student ownership over the projects. Then more student-centered assessment and eventually students helping design the class space and develop norms. So it was an incremental process.
Why should we be shifting to a truly student-centered model?
A lot of these ideas for student-centered learning are old, not necessarily new. Project-based learning came out in the early 1900s. Dewey and progressive education showed these are not new ideas. A good proportion of America's education was student-centered for a long time and then as a reaction to war times, we went more traditionalist with the behaviorism lens of the 1950s and 60s. So none of that is new, but the context has changed. In the 50s and 60s, preparing people for the workforce was about compliance. We needed rule followers. A lot of fear was involved within the Cold War era. What we wonder now with automation, artificial intelligence, and all these big changes is, “What will our students actually need in the new economy?” I would argue one of the things computers can't do is collaborate, connect with others, be human-centered and empathetic. If you believe in preparing students for the future, they need those skills and taking ownership of learning. We saw in the pandemic that the lack of engagement was a lack of empowerment and a lack of self-direction. Students who were not self-starters or self-managers. We know when they own the learning, there's higher engagement, focus, and commitment within that productive struggle. On a purely academic level, they achieve better. If your goal is jobs, it’s going to prepare them for a better job. I want to see passionate, lifelong learners, that is student-centered learning. It just makes life more fun to be student-centered.
What does an empowered learner look like to you?
An empowered learner is going to look different for every student. Some are more linear; some are more connective. Some are messy and chaotic; some are more organized. An empowered learner is the freedom to be who you are. Sometimes you need quiet; sometimes you need loud. But there are common pieces: having initiative, being a self-starter, being a self-manager, having metacognition, knowing how to collaborate with each other, being creative, being a listener. Folks will call them soft skills but I think they are really, really hard skills. They are the ones that will trip you up in the future. You can easily relearn matrices and how they work, but it's hard to unlearn the ability to be unempathetic to others. An empowered learner has these lifetime transferable skills.
What are some professional development strategies you’ve seen that offer empowerment to teachers?
When teachers get the chance to engage in their own professional development that mirrors the way we want for students, they are more likely to implement it. I had to do a capstone project around redesigning our PD. We had weekly 90 minute staff meetings that were almost entirely focused on things that weren't professional learning. So I said, “Let's do personalized PD with multiple tracks and multiple formats.”
I did a tech one that involved blogging, podcasting, and video creation. When teachers learned about those and tried to plan a lesson for it, they did not implement it. But when they created their own blog, their own podcast on a topic in their discipline, I found the act of creating allowed them to implement it with students. So do they get that ownership? Are they creating in the PD?
We had a rotation process where different teachers taught things to others based on their expertise. It was a choice based on a menu. So at any given time there were short, one-off, single day things, or weekly courses, or book studies, or online options. So there was a choice in format, time, and topic. I immediately saw when teachers owned the process of choosing their PD and taught one another, people got excited instead of dreading it. A great starting point was giving them a choice in their PD.
Learn more about John Spencer’s experiences with and views on student-centered learning by listening to more of his conversation with us here:
https://anchor.fm/additional-resources/personalizesc/episodes/Ep--33---The-HOW-of-Empowering-Students--Educators-A-Conversation-with-Dr--John-Spencer-e1h6hbh
