What you see above is what I did after school yesterday. I wrote a lot of objectives, agendas, essential questions, and vocabulary on my boards. I am required to do this. Now, I don't have to put multiple objectives on the board, but I always try to teach for connections these days, and students are always studying more than one objective at a time during a class period in order to go after those connections.There's nothing inherently wrong with writing all of this on my whiteboard; however, I couldn't help but think how much of this even makes sense to students, even though I do my best to review the objectives and have students analyze the verbs in the objectives and what that means for them on their final assessments. I wonder how much becomes so much visual clutter to be ignored by students after a while and if, because they see this stuff in every single class, it just fades into the background, becoming much like all of the posters on the walls that were once noticed but now ignored.
What got me thinking about this was this post by Grant Wiggins called "Avoiding stupidification;" more specifically, this part of that post:
Similarly, Madeline Hunter developed a perfectly sensible way of describing lessons, their structure, and a design process in support of it – only to have it bastardized and stuffed down the throats of teachers by thoughtless administrators. I often saw fast-moving and stern supervisors walking in and out of classrooms, with their clipboards of Hunter-esque checklists looking for the precise ‘anticipatory set’ that was mapped out and standardized at the district office with God knows what rationale.
Now, we see the same thing with Standards: in many schools you have to post the Standard being “learned” in today’s lesson on the board. With my own eyes and ears, I have even heard teachers asking students to repeat after them:What Standard are we working on today, boys and girls? Standard 6.3.a.1. I am not making this up. This is like the cargo-cult people in the South Pacific described by Richard Feynman.
Alas, I have seen my own work made similarly rigid and simplistic. In many schools doing teachers must post the Essential Question for the current lessonon the board– despite the fact that we specifically recommend against EQs for lessons and that the whole idea is to help students internalize the question so as to ask it independently moving forward.
I couldn't help but question my own role in the stupidification of my students as I wrote out all that stuff on my boards. Is this what standardization of what teachers do in their classrooms leads to? Oversimplification to stupidification? Learning reduced to nothing but white noise on a whiteboard?
