It Will Be Hard, But We Will Succeed

     We have all heard the saying that "It will be hard, but it will be worth it".  I would like to believe that this is always true, but honestly, it is not.  We have all had assignments that were hard and never have we found how they mattered or what the worth of the assignment was.  It is my job to provide challenging tasks to my students to help them grow, but I must make it valuable and meaningful to them.  I must explain to them explicitly why it is important for them to learn the skill or obtain the knowledge.  I must show them how it will assist them in the their current world and how it will help them become better people.  To get each child to grow we must place work just outside of their current ability or knowledge and then provide a way for them to meet the challenge and feel the rewards of overcoming a demanding task.  Chapter six of Fulfilling the Promise contains information on the importance of demanding more from students than they think is possible and using tools to ensure their personal growth.  This will be a two-part post.  This post will cover methods in which we can provide assistance to help students overcome demanding tasks.  The second post will cover tools from the toolbox that can be used to help every student reach their full potential.

   As discussed earlier, students get a strong feeling of affirmation and power, along with the other characteristics of what they seek, when we challenge them and provide a way for them to succeed.  It is impossible to challenge an entire class.  When we try to reach the entire class with the same challenges we help very few of them.  Only the student who is exactly at the readiness level at what we are teaching will be assisted.  The majority of the students will fit into one of the two other categories.  The lesson will be to easy and bore them and provide rob them of any sense of accomplishment.  The other category will be students who we tasked at a level that was so far over their heads that they will not be able to accomplish the task and will also be cheated out of success.

     There our a variety of methods we can use to ensure we reach individual students.  First we must pre-assess our students so we can find out where their readiness level is.  Once this is completed we can tier our instructions and tasks to the readiness level of the student.  In order to do this we will have to teach to small groups.  Groups can and should be paired by readiness levels.  Once we have established the small groups we can help students set up peer review and study groups.  We may have to spend time with each group teaching the skills that are required for success.  We may need to show some groups how to read a text and pull out the critical information, but with another group we may skip that step and provide additional reading material or web sources for them to extend the instruction. 

     The bottom line is that we will accept no excuses for a student not to learn and improve.  We will offer instruction and tasks that  demand them to shoot for stars they never thought they could reach.  Students are to important for failure to be an option and when students fail we fail.  One of my favorite quotes from the coaching world applies here. "Win or learn, never lose".  We will have set backs and success will not come easy, but if we continue to learn from our shortcomings as teachers and students we will succeed in the end.