I always envied my colleagues in art and music. They were experts in growing a child’s skills and understandings so that the child changed from an “I don’t know how to do this” to an accomplished “doer.” Time and again, I watched these teachers change a class of beginners into children who made art and music that displayed learned skills and earned pride. And, I looked for instructional analogies for my English and social studies classroom.
When a child’s clay on the potter’s wheel remained just a blob after all children were given an initial instruction in how to work clay on the wheel into a small mug, Mrs. Hays took the seat at the wheel. She leaned over with her arms extended and hands pointed down with her fingers slightly bowed on the outside of the blob and thumbs inserted into the top of the clay. Then, with the dexterity of her experience, a nicely formed mug began to grow. As she began, she quietly explained what the clay felt like in her hands and how she judged the amount of pressure to apply and with which fingers to apply it in order to make the walls of the mug stand up. She talked about the quality of the clay and problems that too much or too little water could create. When the child reclaimed the seat and tried to emulate what Mrs. Hays had done, Mrs. Hays told the child to explain what she was feeling in her fingers and talk about the use of finger and thumb pressure. For many students, the teacher’s showing and talking was enough to give them a successful beginning point. For other children, if the glob began to resemble a mug for just moments before caving in, Mrs. Hays would take the child’s hands in hers and begin again with her explanation only this time helping the child to adjust her younger hands to feel what older hands were doing. The teaching moment of holding and forming the child’s hands into an artist’s hands and causing a great “oh, my” was something I wanted for my teaching.
Mr. Klun was the just the best when he sat next to a young trombonist whose ear was not yet matched to the length of the slide and the notes being played. Mr. K took the trombone and made sweet notes come forth and then talked about how he extended and retracted the slide to conform the sound to the notes that the music requested. He played. He stopped and explained and showed. He played some more and stopped to explain many times. As a musician, he knew what the child was and was not doing on this non-valve instrument to create what they both wanted to hear. His talking the child through the feel/sound moment moved the child from a “don’t know how to do this” to “I can play that note.” It took a lot of such moments to grow a school concert trombonist, but time and opportunity were available in the rehearsal hall and Mr. K knew how to move from telling to explaining and showing so that the children of his bands could play any music presented to them.
Absent a classroom these days, I pose this lesson.
“We’re going to read five source documents in order to identify what each author thought about isolationism as the best foreign relations policy in the 1930s. Then, we’re going to compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of an isolated nation and apply those to three international problems our nation faces today. Finally, we will write a letter to our US Senators with our recommendations for the kinds of legislation they should support to address these problems.”
This meaty assignment was laced with Common Core Standards, crossed disciplines, developed constructivist skills, but after my initial instruction in reading and document analysis I saw a need for Mrs. Hays’ and Mr. E’s “hands on hands” in order to grow my social studies children into informed students of foreign policy. I looked more fervently when children who were not cognitively meshing with the assignment gave every indication of “I don’t know how to do this.” It did not take much listening to understand that the documents contained terminology the children did not know and referred to historical events and stories from 80 years ago that were completely foreign to them. These where children whose hands did not feel the clay and whose ears and feel for the instrument were not yet developed. They needed a skillful explanation with hands on.
That was when technology once again became my friend. A document projector became my potter’s wheel and the pages projected on the screen became my clay. On one side of the classroom children who were well on their way with this assignment worked independently under my frequent gaze. On the other side, my novices gathered around the projector and, as I read the document aloud to them, I stopped on terms they did not know and references they had not heard. We marked up our documents together. We looked up some references together and they looked up others independently. We made a table showing authors at the head of the column and ideas from each author in the rows below. We labeled those rows with a word that summarized the row. In pairs, they discussed the ideas for similarities and differences and refined the table to display what they had gleaned from the source documents.
Using the projector attached to a student’s laptop, in small groups they initiated a new table with each of the given contemporary international problems atop the columns and each row headed with an idea from their source document reading. They filled in the table with their judgment of the applicability of the author’s ideas to the international problem.
With a new partner, they drafted a letter to a Senator explaining their take on one of the international problems and how isolationism would or would not be a valid policy for addressing the problem. They read their letters to each other and then combined what they thought were the best parts of their individual letters into a single letter. This small group smiled when they placed a stamp on the envelope and pressed the send key for their e-letter.
In retrospection, I found Mrs. Hays and Mr. Klun in this assignment. I heard my voice instead of their voices in the explaining and showing. At the end of the assignment, my children had grown new academic skills that were well matched with the skills they learned in art and music.