What are students learning?

As I read Nespor's Tangled Up in School, I was reminded of emotions and turmoil that I experienced as a teacher in a large urban high school in Texas. I taught high school science classes there for seven years. I intentionally left that job because I refused to engage in the tracking practices and hidden curricular agendas that are so ubiquitous in our schools. Nespor's description of this elementary school mirrors my own experiences teaching high school.

A question that plagued me throughout my first years of teaching, throughout this book, and that continues to plague me when I visit classrooms (including my own!) is, what are the students learning? For example, in Nespor's account of the entrepreneurship activity where students organize small businesses, apply for a start-up loan, and plan to manufacture a product to sell to classmates, I found myself asking my question repeatedly. What do you think they were learning? Were they learning fiscal reasoning? Were they learning mathematical concepts? Or were they learning capitalism and a commodity-based worldview? Sadly, I don't think that very many of the teachers, administrators, parents, and corporate volunteers bothered to ask what the children were learning.

A similar dilemma happened for me during my first years of teaching. As I would walk the hallways of the school where I taught I would see other teachers lecturing while students sat in quiet rows. Or I would see students following precise directions to complete a "lab" in chemistry or physics classes. I frequently saw darkened rooms where students watched National Geographic and Discover channel videos for the full class period. What were the students learning? My science classes included lectures, "labs," and videos too, but my classes also overflowed out of the classroom into the hallway to test car engineering projects and onto the balcony to drop helicopters or gliders. My biology classes argued passionately (and loudly) about evolutionary theory, archeological evidence, stem cell research, and health care in the developing world. What were those students learning?

I made sure to invite my principal to observe on days where I was lecturing, because it was that mode of instruction (and student silence) that best fit the evaluation instrument used to determine teacher quality. And I got reprimanded (every year) for the audible arguments heard from my classroom and the excited cheering heard from the balcony when a helicopter would successfully hover before slowly falling two floors to the lobby floor.

On p. 123 Nespor writes about this strange quality of schools where silence is golden and noise is associated with misbehavior. Thankfully, since 2003 I have worked in alternative schools and non-school programs where silence is looked upon as dictatorial and noise is seen as evidence of engagement and sense-making. The first question I ask teachers when I sit in on their classes is, what do you think the students were learning? The second question is, what did you hear them talking about? How can we get more teachers, administrators, and parents to ask those questions? How do we alter the culture of school so no one else ends up tangled?