Embrace the Messy Nature of Learning

One of the things that we have to understand as leaders and educators is that learning takes time and doesn’t look the same for everyone. Unfortunately, in the zero-sum game of schooling, learners are afraid of the messy because they equate messiness with failure or see a messy product as a failure on their end. When we force learners to display perfection or mastery on their first attempt, their stress and ours is through the roof, and as we know, nobody really performs well under stress – even if that’s a lie that we sometimes tell ourselves. When we help learners to understand that learning takes time, repeat performances, and revision on a process or product, then we help our learners to see the larger process and their progress in a positive direction. 

It really doesn’t matter if we’re teaching skills – how to be literate, communicate, teach, plan, lead a school - or if we’re teaching content – naming ionic compounds, conjugating for the past tense in French, factoring an equation in Algebra – when we use products to track progress toward learning and demonstrate that growth, then our learners are more likely to stay involved in the process. One of the practices that has made so much of a difference is the act of not grading practice assignments. The feedback is given, but the grade is unimportant, because the learner is learning. A grade would, for some, stunt their process of development and lead to unnecessary stress or anxiety. I can remember the old days in which I would use a grade on an assessment in early September to determine which students could “make it” through my Honors course. One family called me to task on this one year, and they were right. I was actively limiting that student because of the grade and feedback I gave. It took me a lot of reflection, but I realized that I was the barrier to student success by holding them accountable for what they hadn’t learned yet. My job is to teach, so my job is also to create an environment conducive to learning. These are environments where learners don’t feel judged, anxious, or stressed by their teachers. Let’s aim to reduce that stress whenever possible and focus on growth, learning, and development. As we find ways to shift that conversation with our learners and embrace the messy, we can find ways to shift the conversation from the past and present to the present and future. 

When thinking about the best aspects of embracing the messy nature of learning, it’s important that we all think about the first time we tried something that we now do well. My first time living abroad and trying to speak and live the language 24/7 was a challenge. I knew that there were times I was speaking sentences that a two year old could correct, but I still was able to go to the grocery and buy the food I needed to survive. I was still able to point at the tub and say “it doesn’t work” to the plumber who came to my pre-revolution era apartment. I could understand when a sixty-year-old fashionista at a bar wanted to dance with me. It was messy, but it was good enough, and when I came back from that first summer, all of my professors were impressed with how much better I was speaking and the sound of the language I was making.

When we recognize, embrace, and lead others into, through, and out of the messiness — sometimes to more messiness — we facilitate learning. We get to take our learners on a journey with its twists and turns, its successes and failures, but we always keep focused on progress and moving ahead. Messy learning is still learning, and learning that lasts is what we want the most. Recognizing the messy nature of learning allows the learner to be where they are in the moment, and encourages them to move on into different phases of the process. This allows students to continue to grow and hang with the challenge because they know they’ll be supported through it. We can all be a bit messy sometimes, and we can embrace our common humanity and progress together. Through this, we create an open, honest, and transparent learning space that allows each person to be as they are and develop into the person they want to become.

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.

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.

Welcome to Education ReNormed…

Here’s our opportunity to take ideas and make them into words. To start to share those words with others who know that there’s another way forward for education. We’re educators who saw the potential to change education for the better when we returned to school after COVID-19, only to have those hopes dashed by education’s rush to “what it was before”. This put us in a panic response: we couldn’t accept going backwards, so we decided to fight. We took the best parts of COVID school and kept them going. We changed and continue to change to meet the context of the moment in one of the most dynamic environments on Earth - a classroom with other bodies in it. 

This blog is an attempt to spread that fight outside of our little corner of the universe - our attempt to engage in the coaching and collaboration discussion on a wider scare. To share. To discuss. To debate. To argue. To chart a path forward. To make a larger impact in more classrooms because we know what we do works, and we want to know what works in other classrooms. 

So, who are we? We’re Dave and Dani - high school English educators - both of us with seventeen years in the high school classroom. We’ve taught in affluent districts, Title 1 schools; a mixture of ESOL, Special Education, Advanced Placement. We’ve taught Russian Language, Peer Tutoring, run writing centers, and coached athletic teams. After COVID, where we are with our careers, testing and revising these ideas, and engaging in coaching and reflection, we’ve come to the conclusion that although some life-long educators may claim that no changes need to be made to classroom or school structures, it is clear that in a post-COVID reality, education needs to be ReNormed in order to be reformed because all of us need to change as the world changes.

That brings us to this blog, Education ReNormed. To begin, we’d like to share some of our practices and philosophies. Let us know what sticks and where you think we’re flying off the handle. Our next post is going to go into our teaching philosophy and how we start our classrooms and coaching conversations with colleagues.