Child labor? Yes!

A few weeks ago, I was having the students play a vocabulary review game in preparation for a quiz they would be having the next day. It was a version of the game Concentration, or Memory, in which players turn cards over and try to match them. In this case, the students would put cards with vocabulary words face-down on one desk and cards with their definitions face-down on another desk. They would turn one of each over and try to match the word with its definition. Now, I certainly didn't want to spend hours preparing cards for this game, so I was having the students make their own cards. I also reasoned that the process of making the cards would be a bit of review on its own. (Besides, I had kind of changed my mind on how we would do the review that morning and wouldn't have had time to make the cards, anyway.) As the students were making the cards and laying out the game, I was walking around monitoring their progress. As I passed one group, a student looked at me and said, “Ms Engle, I think you're using us as child labor! This is a lot of work!” I responded with a smile, “Yes, that's exactly it! Child labor is my goal every school day.”

I may have been joking with him a little, but the truth is that I do believe that students should be working hard every day. This exchange came to mind immediately when I read the article for our student teaching seminar this week, a piece by Robyn Jackson entitled “Never Work Harder Than Your Students.” The article basically talks about making sure the students are doing the bulk of the work in the classroom so that they can be learning in the process. Spoon-feeding them is way too much work for us and doesn't benefit them the way more intense, involved learning activities do. As I read the article, I started thinking about ways to help our students learn about their learning, meta-learning, if you will. Students learn better when they know how they learn and work from their strengths. They can also use this information to try to build up their weak spots methodically. I think most of us teachers are familiar with learning styles and multiple intelligences, but I know that when I was a high school student I didn't know anything about these concepts or how they related to me. It could be worthwhile to spend a little time at the beginning of the year exploring these ideas, especially with freshmen. We can also explicitly point out learning strategies the students are already using, helping them expand on these methods. With my sophomore language students this week, we practiced some of this when they were doing a web quest. Some of them were having a hard time finding the information they wanted on the websites, especially when there was a lot of text to wade through. I'd ask them how they were looking. Several of them were trying to read everything to find one little piece of information. This was a great opportunity to help them learn some skim and scan skills. I'd ask which word was the most important in the question they were trying to answer, then have them skim over the text looking for just that word. When they found it, I had them read that one sentence to see if the information they were looking for was there. It was always in that sentence or the one after. They learned something about how they can find information and learn more on their own more easily.

As we teach, we can also engage in a little meta-teaching, teaching about our teaching. Having transparency in purpose and intention with our teaching increases student engagement. We've all had the dreaded question, “Why do I need to know this?” Letting the students know exactly what they're supposed to be learning and why it will benefit them helps them figure out how they want to approach it and hopefully helps them find some purpose of their own for learning it, as well.

Learning is hard work. These skills are not inborn. We learn what we practice, so let's form good habits and help our students form them, also. Most of all, use child labor! Make them work. It's how they learn.