Students Teaching
Students teach in a lot of different ways in the classroom. In my opinion, a few methods often go unnoticed or under-used. As people, a lot can be learned from a person’s interactions - vocally, physically, level of attention, or degree of focus - with a space or other people. Children, in particular, have a ridiculous level of curiosity, imagination, and wonder that, unfortunately, often dissipates as we grow older. Therefore, a lot can be learned from a child’s fresh, untainted view of the world and their experiences, reactions, and questions that pertain to new information.
In a classroom setting, I think of students teaching in groups, pairs, working individually, and as a class while reflecting on what was learned in the small groups. Students teaching also involves taking the lead, standing in front of the room, or guiding a conversation.
Often, when I look back on videos of myself teaching and, at first glance, chaos is beginning to ensue, it is, in reality, students taking authority and agency in the classroom. They are morphing a lesson to consider their interests, questions, or background knowledge in a way I hadn’t in my preparation for the day. Thus, students teaching in a classroom sometimes look more unorganized to the untrained eye because my voice, as the teacher, grows quieter and the students grow louder.
Who is asking the questions?
When students are teaching in the classroom, they have the floor. They can question not only me but also each other. However, for student-led questioning to take place, I, as the authority figure, need to engage student questions so that the children feel comfortable leading conversations. Emdin (2016) writes that everyone who is affiliated with the classroom is a stakeholder who wants to ensure the school is operating properly. As significant stakeholders of the classroom, students can contribute to Emdin’s idea of a cosmopolitan school, which allows “students to feel as though they’re not just guests in the school but active participants in how these spaces operate [which] is a powerful step in connecting them to academic content” (Emdin, 2016). As the authority figure, validating student voice during learning deeply affects how students are engaging with the content. The image to the right is
a know-wonder-learn chart that I filled out with kindergarten when we began talking about rainforests during the reading portion of our day. As can be seen in the wonder section, a lot of wonderful questions are being asked. I particularly love those talking about reindeer or reindeer made out of water. Here, students are connecting words they already know to the term rainforest to better understand what could live in that habitat. Although we later learned that there are no reindeer in rainforests, students were given the space to investigate and explore their initial questions to make their own discoveries. Then, the following week, we returned to this anchor chart, and students asked new questions to further develop their understanding of this habitat. By giving students the opportunity to freely question our topic for science, we touched on questions that I would’ve never expected the students to have. I learned that students were using their known vocabulary to grapple with and make sense of this habitat that was just introduced to them. By creating no boundaries to the type of questions students could ask and surrendering my authority to control the conversation, students began to speak of their own questions and interests. They had a buy-in, as stakeholders, looking forward to the following science lesson where we would be finding answers to their initial questions. If I had not engaged student voice and simply lectured to the kindergarteners about the rainforest habitat, they would feel like guests, as Emdin suggests. As the authority figure, I must allow space for student questions so that they may be active participants in our learning community and bridge the gaps between their pre-existing knowledge and new information.
What is being taught?
When I said that we’d be counting to a big number, J taught me what his idea of a big number really is: 1,000. Comically, afterward, one student added on, saying, after counting to 1,000, “we’d be old!” This comment was especially interesting to me, as it taught me that the class’ understanding of a big number and taking a long time to count is wildly different from my measure of quantity and time. When J taught the class and me a new perspective on our math content, he gave me, as the authority figure, context as to how students were understanding this new warm-up strategy. When students teach, it highlights their fresh perspective of content and issues they are faced with while being introduced to new information.
How does relationship-building affect the presence of authority ?
For students to teach, the authority figure must routinely encourage students’ questioning of authority to create a culture of self-efficacy in the classroom. This can only come after building a good relationship with students and a system where students can rely on designated times throughout the day when they can have the floor to teach and make mistakes. Hammond suggests that mistakes could be reframed as information. Building a culture of self-efficacy in the classroom encourages students to think they can and “see errors and mistakes as information to help them improve the outcome next time around” (Hammond, 2015, p. 115). By celebrating students’ questioning, mistake-making, and teaching, they will feel more comfortable questioning me and advocating for their learning. An example of this practice can be found to the left in a feedback session with AA, ER, and M, which was not meant to be between me and three students. I asked one of them to help me with my homework, which asked student-teachers to use Zoretta Hammond’s (2015) feedback protocol to provide feedback to a student. The whole group wanted to be part of the feedback session and questioned why it had to be just one person. Looking back, the protocol does not say that it must be between one student and the teacher, so we engaged in this feedback
session as a group. The group’s self-efficacy was astonishing to me! As a result of our relationships, my students were not only willing and comfortable enough to challenge my authority but were also confident in the relationships that we had to question my understanding of Hammond’s (2015) authority over the structure of our conversation. In other words, by feeling comfortable enough to question my protocol for feedback sessions,
we were all able to engage in a new format of feedback. My encouragement of questions and ideas from students led to a format of small group feedback that I had never experienced before. These students challenged me to step outside of my comfort zone, which taught me a lesson I hadn’t expected to learn that day: how to engage in this protocol with a small group. When students feel comfortable with the routine of questioning, which the authority figure must implement, their self-efficacy can introduce the potential for new learning opportunities in the classroom.
Often, when students are teaching, they are offering a new perspective or lens to the information that their classmates and I may have never considered. This teaches me, the authority figure, where my lessons are falling short of fully supporting student’s comprehension of new material. Student’s teaching also allows students the opportunity to teach one another. This experience can be so powerful that it can be used “to address injustice, oppression, and inequality…” (Ginwright, 2022, p. 177). Specifically, student’s teaching can be driven by “imagination [which] may be one of ‘the most revolutionary ideas available to us’” (Ginwright, 2022, p. 177). When students are leading conversations and teaching, it signals to me what next steps I should take to further engage and address their ideas surrounding our curricular content. During one of our Illustrative Math warm-ups, seen below, the class was asked to chorally count to 90. I prompted them by saying, “We have only been working with numbers 1 to 20, so if anyone gets stuck, that is very normal. 90 is a pretty big number compared to 20.” Once we finished counting, J asked me, one-on-one, what the number 90 looked like. He then asked if we could count to the number 1,000 because that’s also a big number. In the warm-up, no slides had the numbers 1 to 90 posted for students to look at while they chorally counted. J’s questions taught me two important lessons. The first was what was missing in my instruction that would’ve supported his learning during the warm-up: visual scaffolding. It was unfair for me to expect the students to be able to count without that visual support because saying the numbers 1 to 90 while also seeing them is very different from just saying them aloud from ‘memory.’ Secondly, J was teaching me what his understanding of a big number is: his brain went to 1,000. As I relayed my conversation with J to the class, I explained that if we took the time to count to 1,000, we’d be in school all day.
Lingering positionality questions…
How can I make space for students to dream of a better future or use their imaginations to find solutions to problems they are posed?
How can this be done by adding little bits of the reality and logistics of the present day to blend the present with their desired future (sort of like a pathway or the steps to ultimately achieve their hopes for the future)?