April 28, 2013
Dear Past, Present, and Future Students:
To understand who I am as your teacher is to understand who
I have been, and continue to be, as a learner.
By taking you on a journey of my life’s learning experiences, I hope you
will gain a better understanding of my beliefs about education and my approach
to instruction. I also hope you find
pieces of your own identity in my story so that you may become, as I have,
someone who is motivated to make learning a meaningful, lifelong endeavor. Writing
this letter to you will allow me to reflect upon my teaching and learning, thereby
enabling me to better understand you and your experiences in life’s
curriculum.
Let us begin with who I was at your age. My high school was in a blue-collar, lower-middle
class town. The expectation was that we
were to graduate and go to college to avoid a life of manual or technical
labor, even though that is exactly what our families did to provide for
us. The high school, which was recognized
for academic excellence, was our door to opportunity and success; but I did not
view it as such. I remained studious and
earned good grades mostly to please my parents.
What I was learning, how much I was learning, and how I could apply new
knowledge and skills was of little concern to me; I was motivated by grades and
praise.
Education became a game to me. I wanted to cut corners and push the limits
to see what I could get away with and still earn an ‘A’. This led to failing to study when I knew I needed
to, cheating when I did not have to, and completing my homework minutes before
it was due to test my ability to perform under pressure. In the
U.S., we have a culture that values schooling over learning. I knew that my parents, colleges, and
employers would be more concerned about the classes I took and the grades I
received than what I actually learned.
Unfortunately, I know that too many of you can relate to my high school
experience and absence of intrinsic motivation.
A general lack of ownership over my own learning persisted until
my junior year of college. It was then
that I enrolled in one semester at the Universidad de Burgos, in northern
Spain, to study Spanish art, history, geography, and language. My studies included excursions to castles,
cathedrals, vineyards, museums, aqueducts, and other sites that seemed to bring
to life the material I was learning in the classroom. Almost instantly, I developed an insatiable
thirst for knowledge and new experiences.
I learned by exploring the country, experiencing the culture, and
interacting with people, and I realized that this learning was enabled by (and
dependent upon) my Spanish language proficiency. I was motivated like never before to become
more proficient.
My experiences in Spain ignited my passion for learning, and
it also changed my global perspective.
For the first time in my life, I had considered the world that exists
outside of my home country. I became
aware of the impact my country’s decisions have on people in other parts of the
world. I met people that challenged my
ideals and beliefs and made me consider how other people live life. Those who had traveled the globe, learned
multiple languages, and developed a “work to live, not live to work” mantra
inspired me. I wanted the same for myself. But even more, I wanted the same for other
Americans. With a mission to promote
second-language learning, cultural studies, and international travel, my
decision to become a teacher was an easy one to make.
Upon returning to the U.S., I found my classroom studies to
be more meaningful. No longer was I
attending class and completing coursework just for the grade and the
praise. One particular professor made an
impression on me with her approach to assessing student learning. She assigned us to research the topic of our
choice and present it to the class to demonstrate what we had learned. There were no guidelines or rubrics. We did not know how she wanted us to present
our findings, how many sources we should include, or how we would be graded. Her vague explanations were frustrating. As it happened, I ended up putting more work
into that assignment than any other that semester because I was driven by my
own interests. Though the inquiry
project was nearly 10 years ago, I can still recite most of my findings, and,
oddly enough, I cannot remember the grade I received.
Image: Our Classroom
as a Foreign Country
Those of you who were my past students will likely relate to
my experience in high school, because your high school was in a similar setting
and the expectations of your parents and teachers were relatively the
same. This led to many of you becoming
extrinsically motivated and not taking an interest in your own education. Reading of my evolution as a learner and what
motivated me might help you make sense of the experiences you had in our
classroom. Our classroom was a foreign
country within the school.
When you entered the classroom, I wanted you to have the
feeling that you had been transported to another country. The room was decorated with the flags of
every Spanish-speaking country in the world.
We had pictures of architectural and geographical sights from many nations. The Spanish language covered our walls and we
had posters illustrating cultural practices that differ from our own. We used both Spanish and English to
communicate. We learned about other
cultures by experiencing them. We danced
and sang, made food and shared it, celebrated Latin American and European
holidays, and interacted with media in the target language. Most of you were motivated to advance your
second-language skills because the classroom activities were authentic and you
could see the purpose for them because you were assessing your own learning. An underlying goal of the classes’ curriculum
was to broaden your global perspective and promote the understanding and
acceptance of people from other walks of life.
Those of you I had in recent years may have had a different
experience than those of you from my first year and second year of teaching. When I first started teaching, I believed in
drilling, rote memorization, and frequent testing. With more classroom experience and continued
teacher training, I began realizing that rote memorization was not truly
learning and that traditional pencil-and-paper tests are unauthentic and often
inaccurate ways of measuring students’ learning. I also remembered the impact that my college
inquiry project had on my learning. As a
result, I moved to a performance-based approach to assessment. Cultural studies were transformed into
inquiry projects that allowed you to explore your own interests and language
learning was demonstrated through real-world application. You were no longer asked to complete
multiple-choice tests because our classroom was a foreign country and you were
being tested each day with authentic experiences in a language and culture
unlike your own.
I earned a reputation among you students as being “The Cell
Phone Nazi”. With just the sight of your
cell phone, I would confiscate it and require your parents to come to the
school to get it back. As you know, I
believe in using technology to enhance the learning experience, but I viewed
your cell phones as a distraction. I
wanted you to be present in the moment and engaged in the lesson instead of
texting your friends or using social media.
This view of mine has been challenged by my graduate-level coursework
and I now see a place for cell phones in the classroom. They offer access to a wealth of information
and seemingly endless opportunities to interact with the outside world. I am interested in exploring how to maximize the
use of cell phones and tablet devices.
After all, we want the citizens of our country within a classroom to be innovative
and competitive in a global society.
I am not presently teaching in a classroom, so it has become
more difficult to identify who my current students are. My girlfriend has allowed me to continue my
role as an educator. Although she has
nearly completed her master’s degree in teaching, she still looks to me for
guidance with planning lessons, developing curriculum and assessing students’
learning. My graduate work and
experience in the classroom have been useful resources for her ongoing
development of a teaching philosophy, and she, too, has adopted the “classroom
as a foreign country” image for her middle school Spanish classroom. Our frequent collaboration has allowed me to
continue impacting students’ experiences with school and life’s
curriculum.
It is not known whether I will find my future students in a
classroom or elsewhere. I dream of one
day operating an organization that takes high school students from the United
States abroad to participate in language and cultural immersion programs. I would recruit you students from all walks
of American life to enroll in these programs.
The curriculum would encourage you to become an intrinsically motivated
learner of life’s curriculum. You would develop
second language skills, a global citizenship perspective, and an acceptance of
diverse populations by becoming part of a foreign community. Instead of an image of a classroom as a
foreign country, the foreign country would be your classroom, and you would
learn by experiencing it. My hope is
that you would gain an understanding of the world’s interconnectedness and how
our actions affect one another. I would
want you to experience how others live life and to learn that there are many
pathways to happiness and success.
The truth is that this vision for my future students’
education has been heavily influenced by my own experiences in life’s
curriculum. My interactions with you
past and current students have been guided by these experiences as well. I have this vision for your education because
it is what ignited my passion for learning and brought me success in life’s
curriculum. However, there is no
definitive answer to what should be learned in life or how it should be taught,
so perhaps my vision is no better than any other person’s vision when
developing a curriculum. More important
is to understand how my personal convictions and experiences influence the
curriculum set before you, and writing this letter to you has brought me to
this realization.
I thank you for giving me this opportunity to reflect.
Sincerely,
Christopher Shier
