What of Inquiry was also a feeling?

4/6/18

“Let’s sit down and be quiet and pay attention because you have the chance to learn from a real scientist- Mrs. Ranken is a real scientist!” That is how a 5th grade class started today as kids were filing in and getting settled. A few things came up for me as a result of this brief interaction:

1. I put some effort into thinking about transitions and clean beginnings/clean endings.  I post a note on a whiteboard outside the door to let students know where we will be gathering.  I have a Think About It NOW question or statement in the same place on the front board for students to read and start getting their heads into where we might be going as a group.  I try to great everyone and set up a welcoming, relaxed atmosphere. With all of my well-considered preparation, there is stuff I do not know. I don’t know what was just happening in the classroom, if kids were in the middle of something and the teacher forgot about STEAM and they were ripped away from work. Maybe they just came from recess and are still sort of amped up. Perhaps there was a discipline problem on the “commute” to my class that got the group out of sync.  Iv’e spent more time thinking about the place that each student is coming from this year. That thought process extends to how the stuents see themelves as part of the leanrning community in the class and in various setting they encounter in the school day. Maybe coming to STEAM gives them an opportunity to get into a different space-literally and figuratively.

There isn’t always time for me to exchange info with the teacher or even take the temperature of the kids before we have to jump right in. Anyway, I can handle a bit of semi-organized chaos and I have a few classroom management tricks up my sleeve so it feels a bit abrupt and authoritarian for the teacher to feel like she had to bring the kids to “order”.  

2.In this case, the teacher was making a statement that may have been meant to impress the kids or to give me some sort of complement. She knows a bit about my history of work before coming back to teaching, maybe that is what the comment about my being “a real scientist” is in reference to? I don’t want the students to see me as some authority whose thought process is in some way superior just because I’ve had more opportunities to put it to use. On the contrary, I want to embrace learning together and have the students see themselves as scientist. I don’t want the teachers to feel like I have some skill set that makes this STEM teaching thing more accessible to me or, more to the point, out of reach to them.

By way of helping get the students settled in to class, I would have much preferred a statement like, “Mrs. Ranken is waiting for us, I think she would like to get class started” or, “Mrs. Ranken has a great lesson planned, let’s pay attention so we can get started!”

One of the things I heard during my interviews so far is that the students get excited about coming to STEAM.  They have expectations for a positive outcome. I don’t know how well the experience always matched up with that expectation but it is certainly something I can build upon. The more engaged and excited the kids are about coming to STEAM, the less the teacher may feel she/he needs to do to manage behavior. In addition, the teacher may come to see the type of learning we do in STEAM is its own sort of classroom management- it can work in my room and in their classroom as well.

It feels like the teacher’s comment today has really opened up something for me to do more thinking about and planning on. How can I be more active in releasing kids from the confines of a mental, physical, social place that they might be “stuck” in by way of branding/reputation/past experiences? How can I open up the space in my classroom so that it not only embraces inquiry but really encourages kids to populate the learning space with their ideas. Less rigid seating, more fluidity and sharing, co-construct expectations and really spend some time on the “why” of those expectations to get peer-to-peer buy in. How much opposition might I get from teachers who say things like “that is not a strong choice for her” or “they can not work together”?