As educators, we often underestimate the potential of student autonomy in the classroom.
This was certainly the case for me in my first year in the classroom. Although I had experienced self-directed learning during childhood, I believed there was a “limit” to how much students could do without me. I believed that it was required for students to learn to their full potential.
In my early years as an educator, I worked tirelessly outside of school hours to develop my curriculum and pedagogy. On one night in particular, I was struggling to develop the perfect plan for the following day. As it was getting late, my wife asked me:
“Why can’t you just give them something to do? Why do you have to lead them through everything?”
At the time, I dismissed her question as a misunderstanding of my role. I firmly believed that as a teacher, it was my job to craft each moment of learning for the students in my care. While my students were active, at this stage in my teaching, they were only active in ways that I prescribed.
Looking back, it’s clear that in my early days of teaching, I fell into a common trap, which Phillips Exeter instructor Nina Pettigrew calls the “teacher as choreographer.”
In her essay, “The Art of Listening,” Pettigrew reflects on her early years as an educator, writing, “I never entered the classroom without knowing my goals… I thought carefully about the steps by which I would bring my charges from point A to point B or C or D. I thought of myself as a coach, but in fact, I was a pretty good example of Teacher-as-Choreographer. The students danced, but I controlled the music and the steps they took… I was active and my students, though lively, were passive- ‘little pitchers’ into which I poured all my bright ideas.”
It is easy to become a “teacher as choreographer” because this approach is built on the same core beliefs about students as traditional education, namely that unless they are directly told what to do, they will be aimless, waste their time, and not “learn” anything. Of course, this is simply not the case, yet this attitude persists.
And yet, these were the subliminal ideas that I, too, held. During my first year of teaching full-time in a Montessori adolescent program, I was urged by a colleague to use the Harkness Discussion method with my students. The Harkness Method allows students to have fully student-led discussions on any type of text without any interference from the teacher. My initial reaction to my colleague was disbelief:
How is it possible that students could have a discussion entirely on their own? How would they know what to do without me telling them?
Despite my serious reservations, I decided to try the method with one of my classes. I prepared them well, told them the expectations, and sat back to let them discuss. I was used to traditional Socratic discussions, where I asked all the questions and often had to “pull teeth” to get responses. I didn’t know what would happen next.
Silence.
One minute passed, and I was getting antsy, but I had promised myself that I would see this through at least once. Another minute passed, and the students continued to look at each other. I could see the beginnings of non-verbal communication between them. Finally, one student jumped in.
“Ok guys, where should we get started?”
And they were off!
Students who were strong participants shared their thoughts confidently. Students who I had never heard from before in class also chimed in. The dialogue was thoughtful and organic, and the students were in charge of it all. I took feverish notes of their discussion, sitting in disbelief at my students’ ability to self-direct. I left the class energized in a way that I had never felt before. Not only could my students handle the responsibility of leading a discussion on their own, but it was also the best discussion we had so far that year.
It made me ponder the question: How can I prepare the environment to foster the maximum level of student self-direction?
I’ve been creating curriculum and pedagogy to support student autonomy ever since, and I am more convinced than ever that the first step for student autonomy begins within the teacher:
Are we prepared to unlearn our beliefs about students?
Are we prepared to trust them, to allow them to fail, and learn from that failure?
Because the truth is that my limiting beliefs of my students was holding them back. Once I began to work through my own beliefs, my students flourished.
In How Children Learn, John Holt writes “Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple- or more difficult. Difficult, because to trust children we must trust ourselves- and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.”
I invite you to be on the journey of trusting children with me!
Want to learn more about my work to transform education? Check out my Substack blog and podcast, Breaking the Paradigm!
