I expanded my educational horizons this summer and am presently teaching a population of children that are most definitely not my normal bailiwick. A colleague and friend of mine from our Middle School division convinced me to teach a STEM course to a group of rising 6th, 7th, and 8th graders in a regional program that pairs Baltimore private schools with Baltimore City public schools to prepare students for high school. Known as the Middle Grades Partnership (or MGP), it has been serving as a bridge program since 2005 to prevent summer learning loss and help students find greater academic success in what are critical developmental years in early adolescence. Thus, for the past three weeks (and two more to come), I have been teaching eleven, twelve, and thirteen-year-olds how to build bridges out of paper, study yeast metabolism, and write a computer program to make an animated dinosaur dance.
And it has been quite the education for me! Any inklings I ever harbored about being a middle school teacher have been banished, and my respect for those who do it full time for a living has reached the level of reverence. People who work effectively with eleven-year-olds should be worshiped and paid seven-figure salaries.
The experience has gotten me thinking, though, about the concept at the core of this whole project of mine, “authentic engagement.” For those not familiar with my introduction, the fundamental premise I posit is that we should understand education through an ecological rather than mechanistic lens, recognizing that classrooms are effectively ecosystems and that teachers inhabit that ecosystem as its keystone species—the one which determines the well-being of the entire thing. Authentically engaged teachers, then, are those that generate healthy ecosystems for learning in their classrooms and to achieve authentic engagement involves three critical things: embracing the role of co-learner in all educational situations; generating appropriately intimate rapport with students; and employing a full understanding of the tension between the brain’s plasticity and its hard-wiring.
I have already explored each of these properties in detail in Part I of this project. But these past few weeks have made me realize that I have explored them almost exclusively through my lens as a high school teacher, and while my experience at MGP has made me even more convinced that we need an ecological paradigm for education and that co-learner, rapport, and neuroscience are foundational to effective teaching, I have come to realize that the three properties of authentic engagement will look different depending on the age-group with whom you are working.
Take embracing the role of co-learner. In high school, that can mean sharing the latest in research you’ve been reading or collaborating on choreography in a dance class. But as I have recently discovered, to an eleven-year-old, it can mean being willing to play the cryptography game you’ve just taught them along with them. As for generating appropriately intimate rapport, I am awestruck by one of my colleagues in the program who employs what I can only describe as this gentle goofiness when teaching them math that just would never be in my capacity. And don’t even get me started on a full understanding of the brain…I thought I knew my stuff. But watching the behavior of rising 6th and 7th graders has me scurrying for the research journals!
The long and the short of it, then, is that while I remain even more confirmed in my belief that authentic engagement in the classroom is essential for genuine teaching and learning, what the qualities of its three properties look like varies more than my original analysis of them might suggest. I think I knew this intellectually—after all, elementary teachers legitimately employ well-timed hugs that would get me arrested—but now, I have a deeper existential appreciation for authentic engagement’s variability.
And an even deeper awareness of why I teach the age group that I do. I have no regrets that I chose to stretch myself to grow as an educator this summer and am even considering staying with MGP for another year to build on what I’ve learned. But my five weeks as a middle school teacher has most decidedly taught me what I am most definitely not, and I can’t wait to see my seniors in the Fall.
Light a Candle 