Dear colleague,
As I've been saying, the Value Puzzle can be solved from two angles: teacher-generated Mini-Sermons and student-generated Valued Within exercises. The Utility-Value “T-Chart” Intervention that we looked at last time is a prime example of a “Valued Within” exercise. Today we'll look at another.
Some years ago, I was engaged in a PD partnership in Bethel, ME. Many of the folks I was working with taught lower elementary students. When I introduced the abovementioned t-chart exercise to them, the lower elementary teachers had their brows furrowed.
- “What if my students can't write yet?”
- “That's a lot of abstract reasoning for a group of second graders, isn't it?”
And even for secondary educators, I got questions like, “Okay, but how could I make this simpler?”
The discussion that followed gave us a useful, simpler tool: Why Conversations.
Why Conversations
The main problem with the t-chart intervention we looked at last time is that it's quite involved. Even when my students get used to the activity, it still takes 15 minutes.
Another problem is that, if you had an entire school doing the t-chart thing with students, I'm not sure it would have the same effect that it does in the Hulleman et al. studies. Any time you're doing Will to Learn strategies at a whole-school level, it's important to think about which strategies could get unhelpfully repetitive all across the school day.
Why Conversations are a perfect simplification. To initiate a Why Conversation, you basically just ask a student or a group or a class why the work you're doing in class is worth doing. You can be creative here and add your own teacher style:
- I like to give this warm-up to my students sometimes: “A guy walks into our classroom and starts ranting about how [our subject] is a complete waste of time. ‘It's not worth studying. It's not worth the work.' What would you say to such a maniac? What arguments would you bring against this naysayer?”
- The Led Tasso is a related teaching move I wrote about last spring.
- A Phys Ed teacher in Lindon, UT, once shared with me that when parent-teacher conferences were about to happen, he would tell his students there are always at least a few parents who come in questioning the Value of Phys Ed for all students. “My kid's healthy enough; it doesn't matter if they try in this class.” He'd then ask his students to share out what arguments they could come up with to disprove this viewpoint.
- During your MGCs, start asking students, “Hey — I see you trying your best in this class. Why are you doing that? Why is it important to you to work hard? What do you stand to get out of this effort?”
Even for younger students (e.g., I sometimes do this with my son Dean, who is currently a second grader), you can ask, “Why do you think we do math in school? Why is math important to learn?”
What you're doing with a Why Conversation is basically a simplified, less systematic t-chart exercise.
- You're having students make connections between what they think is important and what they do in your class. As they do this, they practice finding Value themselves rather than simply hearing about Value from a teacher's perspective.
This is a really simple one to start playing around with. If you do, here are a few final recommendations:
- Keep track of what you do to prompt the conversation and what responses you hear from students.
- Take note of student responses that are especially insightful or poignant. Work these into your Mini-Sermons in the future.
- Have. Fun. The good news about the Value of school is that there is a LOT of it. Activities like Why Conversations help you latch on to that Value and mine its riches.
Teaching right beside you,
DSJR
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