Never Work Harder Than Your Students

In Never Work Harder than Your Students, author Robyn Jackson defines a master teacher as one who follows seven principles:

 

1.       Start where your students are.

2.       Know where your students are going.

3.       Expect to get your students to their goal.

4.       Support your students along the way.

5.       Use frequent and thoughtful feedback to help you and your students get better.

6.       Focus on quality rather than quantity.

7.       Never work harder than your students.

 

To the last point, Jackson argues that teachers commonly do all the work in planning and delivering lessons, assessing the lessons, and dictating the learning (Jackson, p.172).  Jackson further argues that swinging to a completely “student centered” classroom is not the answer to this problem, but rather suggests that the classroom should be a community that should establish a balance between the roles of teacher and student in the learning process. It’s an interesting proposition to consider how much of the responsibility in the learning process falls on the shoulders of the classroom teacher. Teachers who lecture exclusively, or provide the questions or the variables a student must answer to solve complex problems may be shouldering more of the load than necessary or appropriate. Teaching students to ask the right questions is a critical element of the journey.

 

I once evaluated an English teacher who assigned two portions to every assessment. For part I, he required students to write questions for the test that they thought would force one another to think at complex / application levels. He then graded students on their questions for part I of their assessment grade. Part II of their grade was completing an assessment made up of entirely student written questions from Part I. I’ve always thought it was a brilliant model – one of the most important skills a student can learn, is what questions to ask. I’d be willing to bet that each of you can remember times when you or someone you knew studied long hours for an assessment and did poorly because you didn’t study the material that the teacher thought was important enough to be on the assessment. Conversely, you can probably think of times when you studied the right material for a relatively short time, and did much better than students who studied longer, but studied non-critical material. Cultivating the skill of asking questions is critical, and the questions students ask will reveal much about their understanding of content.