My journey as a teacher is much like most out there. We all went to college, we learned content and strategies, we student taught. After that, we were turned loose in a classroom of our very own, responsible for the education of anywhere from 20-120 students. And what did we do when we had our own class? We taught just like those teachers before us did. Don’t get me wrong. Some of us jazzed things up, adding in creative projects, engaging activities, and energizing lessons. But at the heart of what we did in the classroom, we really just recycled what we thought teaching should look like based on our past experiences.
I began teaching in August 2000 having done just that. I had all the content knowledge in the world, classroom management techniques down, and could teach with the best of them. But what I didn’t know then was that my job was never supposed to be about teaching. My job was, and still is, about LEARNING. Looking back, if I would have known just how much more I could have offered my students in the classroom, while also taking a lot more off my workload as a teacher, I would have been a much more effective educator.
We can’t beat ourselves up. Traditional teaching has been passed down for generations in the same way. This is what we think school is and should be about and as long as students are learning something moving on, then we’ve done our job. But now, we know better. In the last 10 years, we have learned so much about learning and what it takes for learning to happen in the classroom. There’s been more research and evidence accumulated in the last decade about learning than in the century prior, and if we are to break the cycle of teaching to move into a future where learning is the prior, we have to change.
Let me strike that last word, “change.” Let’s replace it with “improve.” The reason is that moving from teaching to learning is not the herculean task many fear it will be. We just need to make some improvements. Is it hard work? Sure. Teaching already is hard work, harder than any other profession I can think of. But if we want to improve what we do, which is to provide learning, then we have to focus on everything involved in learning first. We need to become Learning Engineers. This means taking what we know about learning and what it requires us to design and crafting that into our lessons. My promise to teachers has always been this: “Give me all of your planning time to dedicate to design, and I will give you all of your class time and energy back to you in return.”
If you want a classroom of students who are energized in their learning, who seek their own sources and escapes from misunderstanding, who move themselves forward, who are motivated experiencing success, who have less discipline issues, who are accessing an equitable education, giving each one exactly what is needed, then we have to design that learning for it to happen. Have I met teachers who have a hard time believing this approach works? Absolutely. Some of those same teachers who said that “this will never work in my room” are also the same ones now who see the success that happens when you put learning first ahead of teaching.
The heart of the matter is this. We became teachers because we loved making a difference in students. If we didn’t love kids, we would not be doing this. The best thing we can do for our kids, and ourselves, is to design learning and quit teaching. Our kids will have more success in the classroom, learn the content, achieve more, gain the real-world skills they need later, and we will also have success, influence learners, and provide learning like never before. Our kids deserve it, and we deserve it as teachers. Become a learning engineer today.
