Trial and Error

The first year teacher's vision of his/her classroom so vividly captured on the front page of the NYtimes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/education/11class.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

On my second snow day this week (Southerners are baffled by the snow) I picked up my NYtimes only to find this article on the front page. Although the students are younger, and the layout of the classroom is quite a bit different than mine, I could not help but feel that the life of a first year teacher was clearly painted out in this article. Just last week I found myself attempting to give directions to a chatty bunch of 6th graders only to start the music (my cue for them to work) and find that they were all still staring at me wondering what it was they should be doing.

This feeling of empathy, however, is not what inspired me to blog today, it was actually the idea of trial and error that the students featured in the article are subjected to on a daily basis. I think that there is a large part of teaching that is about trial and error, because you are constantly trying to figure out what really works for your students. Nevertheless there is also an element of consistency that is crucial to your students' learning. I think that it is really admirable that the people who started this school went out on a limb to give something new a try, but I also feel that it is not fair that the subject of the educational experiments that so often happen today always have to be the students.

In my own classroom there is an element of guilt that comes with my experiments. I worry that while I am still trying to figure out what really works student learning is not actually happening. Luckily, my most recent experiment has been somewhat of a success. My school sent me to a Peak training before break so that I could learn some new methods and bring them back to my classroom. One that seemed the easiest and most effective to implement immediately was the use of music in the classroom. I use music as a "launch pad," so I constantly say "When the music starts" while I am giving directions. The result is actually pretty great, I find that I am happier because there is music instead of screaming children filling the transitions and my students move more quickly from one task to the next.

In my trial and error I adapted something for my classroom that had proven success in classrooms of the same racial and ses make up as my students. In the article, however, their adaptation was from students of a completely different age group, and ses group. I worry that when we proceed with trial and error experiments like the example in the article we are actually harming our students' academic gains, because even if it works out in the end (5 or 6 years later) you still have students who have been part of the experiment and who have not been learning. There needs to be a way for educational reform never to produce any types of disadvantages for the students, even if some students may benefit at the end.