The Who is More Important than the What

When it comes right down to it, every single learner is a person. And, as educators, so are we. We have families, so do they. Some of them have tenuous relationships and some have fulfilling ones. Like so many, there’s probably a mix in their lives when it comes to relationships, just like for us. Some of our learners remember some of the things that we teach them, but generally, they remember how they feel in our spaces. Overall, it’s more important to take care of the individual rather than the content knowledge or the curriculum or the pacing guide. Without putting the individual first, and recognizing their humanity, learning will not happen.

Think about COVID, and the beginning of the pandemic. Some students were worried. Some lost family. Some worked jobs to help financially. Most everyone was struggling to survive: mentally, emotionally, or physically. So if they took time to relax, to take a mental health period, to be sick or take care of another person, that was okay. The who - the person - is more important than the what - the subject matter. COVID laid bare what was always true - crises happen and they affect the individual and their performance at life. What COVID did was make all of us share in a collective crisis that affected, and still does affect, all of us. And, at the end of the day, we are all people.

In the long run, the time we spend with our learners is a blip in their lives. Learners will rarely recall the formulas, the strategies, the literature, or the dates, but they will remember how they felt during their time in the space with their educators. So, foundationally, when we make them feel good and supported, that matters. As teachers of children, we’re acting in loco parentis - and a parent must ensure that the individual is loved and cared for, no matter what. No matter our role in the educational space, we must always remember to lead with the ethic of care and remember to be good stewards to leave people and spaces better than when we found them. “Above all, do no harm.” Once we start to center our learners, and see who the learners are at the moment, then we can really create space for them to grow. School is not life, it’s just a part of it. 

During virtual school, I had a student who reached out to me in crisis, and I answered the call. I put the who ahead of the what. I called the parent, the head counselor, the department of student activities, and just asked them to do a wellness check. It was scary. Their situation read to me as a crisis. So, I had to jump in. She told me she was drowning, not waving. That experience centered this idea for me: a person is more important than any lesson we teach, any idea we articulate, any test we give.

It all comes back to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The foundational elements need to be secured before we begin to build upwards. So, we center the who. When we think about vision and development and all of the acronyms of education, we have to remember to put humans first. We are in the business of humans and their development; we have to remember that they are what we are. We’ve been where they are. They’re doing what they do for a reason - everything is feedback, so keep the door open. Recognize that the who is always more important than the what.

Controlled Burn > Controlled Chaos

Nowadays, a good learning environment is often described as one of “controlled chaos”. Visitors to classrooms expect to see students in motion: active and engaged. The room should be loud. The learning should look messy. The instructor should be everywhere all at once. Keynote speakers and presenters at conferences have sermonized from the lectern about these words and told educators how to “curate”, “construct” or “design and plan” this vaunted “controlled chaos.” 

The problem is the word chaos. Chaos is a mess. Chaos is frightening. People don’t want chaos. It’s the antithesis of control. How on earth is a lesson plan and slide deck going to be able to “curate” chaos? How can we “design and plan” standardized yet chaotic assessments? How can we “construct” a welcoming learning environment rife with uncertainty and mayhem? Imagine the dynamic, authentic, varied, differentiated, controlled chaos classroom through another metaphor: a controlled burn instead of controlled chaos.

In a controlled burn there is designing and planning and curating, but there is space for the moment to be. It’s a space for reality. A controlled burn is an attempt to use fire to both destroy and create. A chaotic thing - fire - in a dynamic environment - the forest - elements shift in each and every moment. These realities determine what the forest rangers and firefighters will do to keep the burn going. That’s the goal. To keep the fire going to accomplish the greater goal - create space for the new. As the facilitator, leader, coach, teacher, or whatever, educators are forest rangers and firefighters. There’s the education and skill acquired from training and the benefit of the experience that results from fighting fires year over year and growing through past successes and failures. The forest is the space that education inhabits. The goal is to clean out the old growth and trees to allow space for the new, for the forest to grow and thrive. In this way, the forest is also the individuals with whom we work as guides, facilitators, mentors, teachers, and yes, sometimes firefighters and forest rangers.

How do successful controlled burns happen? Read the wind, taste the air, put your hands in the dirt and see how it feels. Respond to the context and the moment, listen to the echo from the data from weeks ago, and the lesson first taught decades ago. But live in the now. Respond to what is seen and understood currently; there’s a fire! Planning and preparation are supports that facilitate the ability to change on the fly with success. Good preparation enables the ability to reflect, fail forward, and change when needed - especially when the wind shifts, the fire jumps the highway, and a few houses burn down. 

So fail forward, own the mistake, and move on with the knowledge of what happened and why it went bad. We are people who are dealing with other people. We cannot have chaos because it breeds more chaos. We have to have control with the ability to adapt, especially because the conversations, lessons, policies, discipline, or assessments of the past might not work in the future, for the future. With a controlled burn, we can plan for the best, while still leaving room change and growth for all of us.

Be Present, Participate, and Produce Learning Artifacts

Our norms and principles begin with “Be Present, Participate, and Produce Learning Artifacts.” Candidly, this is a late add on to the norms and guiding principles, but it is first for a reason. Like all of the norms, this emerged from “COVID school”; in the virtual setting, there were kids who were doing one or two of the three, but never all of them. There were students who were producing learning artifacts, but they weren’t really present. There was no interaction, so their learning artifact was limited. There were others who participated, but who weren’t fully present or producing artifacts. They picked and chose their spots where they wanted to engage comfortably. They excused themselves, and we excused them when it wasn’t comfortable or easy.

True learning and growth comes from all three of these in tandem. This is where we move beyond just accomplishing a task and create the space for real learning. Students are present by engaging both mentally and physically in class activities. They participate through their using their voices and adding to discourse. The production of the learning artifact then acts as a marker of how far the person has come by continuing to be present and participate. 

As for the students, same for us, right? We, as educators, must find ways to continue to walk our talk and continue to be present for our fellow teachers and students — our fellow learners. To always model. We fail to be fully present when we simply give an assignment or task and retreat behind our big desk. We are absent when we continue to think and practice education as it was. Lack of presence means we’re not fully participating. 

We’re not fully participating when we refuse to see our students where they are in each current moment. When we respond to the learner in their fullest context then we are fully present. This participation requires a relationship with the learners. If we are not participating, we cannot understand the context of their needs or strengths.  

The challenge that we face is to both exist in the learning and to curate it at the same time. So, how do we do this? We have to do double duty in our learning artifacts in that we produce many: our unit and lesson plans, our slides, handouts, content, assessments, and especially feedback. The feedback exists as an artifact not just for the students or for our fellow educators, but also for us as educators, coaches, and learners. By continuing to live in the present, we can continue to give ourselves - educators and learners - the grace that we need not to escape from learning but to fully lean into the messy nature of learning.