"School should not be a place where young people go to watch old people work!"

"I don't know if teachers can work any harder  than they're already working, so we've go to find ways to make students carry more of the thinking load in our classrooms. As I walk out of school with my colleagues at the end of each day, we're all tired. We're carrying heavy bags of books and papers, and our shoulders are slumped. Meanwhile, our students bound past us to the parking lot, running and jumping down the steps two at a time, full of energy. I once heard someone say: 'School should not be a place where young people go to watch old people work' We've got to figure out how to work smarter, because what we're being asked to do is really a challenge."- Cris Tovani in Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? (2004)

This is one of my all time favorite quotes for today's teachers. There are so many demands on us, and so many people and government structures telling us that we aren't doing enough. And at times, we preach that message to ourselves, questioning a lesson or a student's engagement level and if there is anything we could even possibly to do change it. And then something "new" comes along from our district or instructional leaders and we walk away from a conversation, email or PD thinking "I just can't handle another thing!" But Tovani makes an excellent point. If we were spending our days as facilitators of thinking, delivering short bursts of high quality modeling followed by a large stretch of time to support learners in small groups and individually as THEY work, we may have a little something left at the end of the day.Many teachers find themselves giving the "This is our community and we all have responsibilities" speech to their classes several times a year, but somehow when it comes to the learning, we have most of the responsibility.

Do you know about Emperor Penguin mothers? After delivering an egg into the care of the father, they travel, by walking and swimming, for 2-3 MONTHS eating food for their babies. They return from their long trip, only to regurgitate already digested food into their baby's mouth, which the young penguin receives without so much as a "Thanks Mom, you didn't have to do all that work and digest it for me too!"

I don't want to be a "penguin mother" teacher. I don't want to spend all my evenings and weekends swimming the seas of worksheets and papers, waddling across the snowy plains of lesson plans and show up on Monday to deliver a "student-proof" lesson.

I want to make them do a lot of the work.... and MOST of the thinking in my classroom. If they don't, they won't learn.

Give some responsibility away, ask a student to tell you what they're thinking instead of answering a specific question. Encourage them to communicate their new learning with a poem or diagram and then ask them to help you see the holes in their own thinking.