Transparency in the Classroom

A small revelation came to me during a group Design Thinking session when I was asked to show empathy for specific users. I would visit my school through the eyes of prospective parents and pupils, what would I notice? Well, while others worked on this I glazed over and began to think about my classroom, my teaching and approach from the view of a child. I realised I never thought from this perspective! When we as a class, embark on a new unit, a new project, how do the children feel? Excited, overwhelmed? Lost? Confident? Unsure?

Well… I decided to ask them.

The result was that children feel enthusiastic – who doesn’t like a new start? But the overwhelming majority said they felt unsure/uncertain about what was to come. One student described it like being ‘in a foggy place’ which I found to be an amazingly powerful visual and one very apt to the situation. I looked at teaching in school and looked back on my own teaching experience and found a surprisingly common practice that we teachers have… we keep a great deal of things a mystery from the students. We spend hours on long term, medium term and short term plans, objective maps, rubrics, gradebooks, tests, formative checklists and all to hide it behind a shadowy pedagogical curtain like a wily old magician. No wonder children feel like they’re walking on unknown ground! I wasn’t sure why this was the natural tendency, but I was sure it was something to do with release of power… I decided not to go down that psychological rabbit-hole any further – I just knew a change was surely in order.

I began to consider transparency. Could this be the way forward? Could letting children inside the magic circle help us all?

We began working on a project with the driving question ‘How can we serve the needs of our growing community?’ (We were to plan a use for a piece of wasteland behind our school). On the very first lesson we visited the scrub land in question and I laid out the momentous task for the children and let their imagination run wild. I asked for two products from the students: a 3D model (to scale) of what they would build on the land and a typed proposal for their structure. I also provided them the rubrics I would use to grade them at the end. This helped the children see two vital things – what the end destination looks like when they get there and if they are ‘successful’ when they arrive.

Now the children had an end goal, I wanted them to help me direct the teaching. What did they require from me to get to their finish line? What did we need to learn together? Here is what the children decided and what we drew out:

So, we had mapped out the teaching across the different subjects which would help us arrive at our goal and the children would be able to see if they were successful when they get there! What I liked about the poster we created was that we could track all our learning objectives as we went along. A small exercise but one my children seemed happy to undertake – they had a say in our learning and felt in control of their course.

We repeated the poll, how did children now feel about their learning journey after this short exercise? The students said they felt much more confident about tackling the work – they were able to break down their journey into smaller steps, measure their learning against the big picture and they could see the point of their learning and how it fed into our end product. We could see all the curriculum links and ties between learning.

A great success for a small change in practice – as teachers, we do spend this time planning, grading, and devising the children’s learning journeys…why not bring the children in on it? For our next piece we will design the assessment rubrics together, so we all have a say in what success looks like. Ill keep you posted!