Dima Yarovinsky, “I Agree” (2018)
Meeting the Course on Its Own Terms
Every instructional post, however long or short, has a thesis1. The thesis of the post you are now reading:
You must meet this course on its own terms.
But it’s not just that you must meet the course on its own terms; you must also stop yourself from substituting your own terms and using your own assumptions.
This is true for every stakeholder, not just students. Innovation requires a good-faith investment from parents, administrators, interested teachers, and anyone else who cares about student learning. There is too much bad faith out there already.
You can start with this quotation:
The challenge is to set up systems that allow students to follow their interests. People tend to dichotomize approaches in education: The teacher is either telling students what to do, or standing back and letting them figure it out. I think that’s a false choice: The issue is not structure versus no structure, but rather creating a different structure. Students need to be exposed to new ideas and learn how to persist. They also need support.
~Tony Wagner, Creating Innovators
This course uses just such a unique structure.
For the first part of the year, students learn how to learn. They are exposed to new ideas and helped to master important skills and traits. They explore the expected reading and writing of ELA as they learn universal tools and processes.
During the first part of the year, individual feedback is given alongside a framework of instructional, interstitial writing. Students are assessed through a unique, profile-based system based on universal skills and traits.
For the second part of the year, students put their skills and traits to work on a series of projects in the Humanities: reading and responding to literature; writing research-driven essays; public speaking and letter-writing; and the student-driven “genius hour” projects that can be tied into the final exam.
I would usually fill paragraphs like those last three with hyperlinks to demonstrate that each element of this structure supports the rest in improving student learning. That is what you’ll see everywhere else in this post, as well as everywhere else on this site.
In this case, however, the lack of links is there to emphasize the thesis we’re working with: You must meet this course on its own terms, and you cannot replace those terms and conditions with your own.
In Good Faith
You can always look to the testimonials and history of the course to dispel any misinformation or disinformation. If you act in good faith, honestly looking to understand what we do, you can avoid low-information sepsis.
Even when you are informed, you must still face down your assumptions. If you’re a student, some of those assumptions are that you will be spoon-fed information; that you will be asked to regurgitate facts and insight on tests; and that the teacher should perform in front of you, Keating-style, to hold your attention.
In this course, the teacher interacts with students constantly and responsively through writing. This is part and parcel of the course. We meet in person regularly; there is constant, feedback on student work; and every period is designed as a workshop in which students collaborate with the teacher and peers. The use of the written word, however, is paramount: Writing is the most essential act in the Humanities.
This is also about teaching in a new way instead of capitulating to outdated assumptions about learning. I’m thinking specifically about “Teaching as an Amusing Activity,” the tenth chapter in Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, which gives us the following quotation:
We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes… may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do.
That is embedded on the homepage, in the course syllabus, and throughout the course. It is the essential philosophy of effective education: a focus on the process, not just the product.
Postman goes on in that chapter to explain that performative, entertainment-based education is like watching television — a passive act that mostly teaches you how to watch, not learn. If you’re a student, your learning cannot passive, because it is most importantly about you. You must be an active agent in the process of creating those “enduring attitudes.”
This course rejects the “rapid emergence of a new education based on the speed-of-light electronic image,” as Postman predicted decades ago, and embraces instead “the slow-moving printed word.” The computer screen is just the medium for the written word.
Look at our guide to writing, especially at the quotations that are used to illustrate each universal component:
The first quotation is in Latin and elevated to the top of the guide. It is the philosophy of a Humanities makerspace: Verba volant, scripta manent. Spoken words fly away, while written words remain.
And that brings us back to one of the most ineluctable terms and conditions of the course:
You must read what is written.
This isn’t unique to a makerspace, of course. Textbooks must be read, lectures must be heard, videos must be watched, etc. Whatever a teacher uses for instruction must be honored in good faith.
The difference here is what this kind of interstitial instruction requires — and what it does to help students.
The first advantage of this kind of carefully constructed instruction is that it teaches students how to write and how to read. This is Dewey’s idea of enduring habits and self-efficacy: It is more important to build skills and traits than to internalize knowledge.
So the instruction is not just informational. It adds more to student learning than other forms of flipped instruction.
The post you are reading right now is an example: It is designed to model effective writing and to strengthen close reading. It repeatedly invites students to learn more about philosophy. It defines new vocabulary. It varies style and rhetoric to invite emulation.
The second advantage is that the work stacks. The more students read this kind of writing, the faster their writing and reading improves. Paul Graham puts it this way: “[T]he more you learn, the more hooks you have for new facts to stick onto — which means you accumulate knowledge at what’s colloquially called an exponential rate.”
These posts are meant to build habits, not simply impart facts and directions. This is the key.
Contrasting Space
A contrast is found on the whiteboards used regularly in the physical classroom. (You can take a tour of that space online.) Whiteboard writing is temporary by design, unlike everything else written to students.
Here is an example of the whiteboards in Room 210, taken from the week of September 21, 2020 (and presented with all the glares and discoloration you’d expect):
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- Whiteboard #1
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- Whiteboard #2
The first whiteboard allows us to talk in person, early in the year, about how feedback works. It is a visual reference for me to use during discussions and individual conferences, too.
The phrase “feedback chain” is a reference to a post: The Feedback Chain. That post is essential reading.
The metaphor on the whiteboard is “[c]loning the teacher and instruction,” with a note that this is done “via flipped and interstitial writing, video, and audio.” This is a summary of how this site and most other feedback works: It effectively clones the teacher, freeing up class time for more individual and small-group discussion.
The second whiteboard is an overview of current course work, circa 9/23/20. Since this is also from early in the year, it contains significant emphasis on the backbone of the course — which is, again, the way a student interacts with letters, posts, guides, and other teacher-written materials.
That metaphor — a fairly clichéd “backbone” metaphor — is also found in the letter given to students at the start of school in 2020:
Letters like that work on multiple levels. One is, again, to teach writing and reading through exposure; another is to emphasize the terms of the course in order to invite more reading, thinking, and writing. Here are the first three paragraphs of that letter, reprinted because they evoke Neil Postman’s prescient analysis of education:
This letter will be read to you in class. It is available online, too, to illustrate its central argument, which is that reading letters like this is the most critical skill in our course and the most important element of your growth in the skills and traits that matter most.
The backbone of this course is its instructional method, which is based in reading and taking notes on what you read. The difference between students who benefit tremendously from this space and students who struggle is their investment in this instructional method.
You also have access to face-to-face meetings, of course, plus scheduled visits to office hours, virtual meetings in class, and just about any form of written back-and-forth you can think of. The online instructional method does not exist in a vacuum, and there are dozens of ways to make it work for you or to supplement it with additional instruction.
The bolded clause is another condition of the course: If you invest in reading the posts, letters, guides, and so on, you will improve the skills and traits that matter most. For students, this is the backbone of learning. You’ll gain the information you need, but you’ll more importantly deepen your ability to learn.
In other words, it’s not just about becoming a better reader and write, but improving in all the skills and traits that matter.
2020 also featured the first attempt at an FAQ driven by student questions early in the year:
Each response models effective writing, and the interlocking links and references promote close reading. The length of the FAQ requires students to organize their time, and the new ideas and insights require critical thinking.
The FAQ is, therefore, designed not just to answer questions but to teach students more about how they learn.
Contrast this with more forms of flipped instruction, especially most video-based instruction, which transmits information and insight that is independent of the medium used. The medium isn’t the message; the goal of a video lecture, for instance, is not to help students create their own video lectures.
Here, the medium is the message: Every written post, guide, FAQ response, etc, is constructed to model effective writing for students. Each one is written specifically to invite emulation. Each is also written with meta-commentary to identify what students should be learning.
That’s why a post might link to the definition of terms a student might not know2. It’s why the use of rhetorical strategies is made transparent, with definitions or examples provided through meta-commentary. It’s a different kind of writing.
The Conclusion
The conclusion is a proven one:
The more students read the instructional writing of this course, the more they will improve as students.
For non-student stakeholders, the conclusion would be that delving into the course writings will erase every concern and illuminate every success. A good-faith effort to learn about what we do will reward that faith with ironclad data and evidence; a bad-faith dismissal of what we do reinforces ignorance and resistance.
If you are a student, each and every letter, post, guide, and comment is designed to expose you to effective writing so you can learn from it. It’s not just about embracing the slow pace of the written word or deepening your thinking; it’s about the oldest form of learning, which is to copy what you see.
This is the age of the essay, as people like Paul Graham noted 15 years ago. It is the age of online discourse. In here, you read that kind of writing as part of each assignment, which builds the skills and traits you need. You read what you are later asked to write.
The reading must be pervasive, too. It needs to be part of every day. That is why the term for this is interstitial. You can access the course at any time, from any device that can get onto the Web.
Look up the literal definition of the term interstitial and apply it to your learning. You can read a post, FAQ, or letter whenever you have a chunk of time. You can read the text in sections, jump from one section to another, or linger over one section until it is clear. You can ask questions privately or publicly. You can read answers on your own time, too.
That means that you do not need to be physically present in a classroom to benefit from the instruction. You do not always need to consume the instructional materials in one sitting, either. You can be anywhere, and as long as you have a device with an Internet connection, you can practice close reading, absorb strategies for effective writing, and deepen your knowledge in the Humanities.
Along with that interstitial instructional model, we have grade abatement and makerspace-based projects to weather almost any storm. These are our building blocks. They work in concert. It all rests on the writing, however.
I think the best way to understand this is to read what students gain from this approach. This, too, emphasizes writing as central. Another of Neil Postman’s insights is that writing, because of its permanence, gets us closer to the truth; for students, their own writing is the vehicle for truth.
That said, it is also important to highlight what students stand to lose, especially now:
The two linked examples also demonstrate the way instruction is explicitly differentiated. Students can access the course at a level that is appropriate for them. If there is a lengthier, more detailed version of an instructional post, it is for stronger or more invested students. The depth is responsive to student needs and interest. ↩
In this “Terms and Conditions” post, for instance, you’ve gotten prescient and ineluctable. Vocabulary is about encountering words in context, as one of the FAQ responses details; an instructional text, however, might link directly to the definition. ↩