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Sarah Zerwin says to let the students drive their learning
59 Plays10 days ago
Linked in: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-zerwin-78719956/
Shout outs:
Cornelius Minor, Tricia Ebarvia, Felicia Rose Chavez, Zaretta Hammond, Katie Wood Ray
Music by AudioCoffee: https://www.audiocoffee.net/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Purpose
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Learner Centered Spaces podcast, where we empower and inspire ownership of learning.
Hosts and Sponsorship
00:00:07
Speaker
Sponsored by Mastery Portfolio, hosted by Starr Saxton and Crystal Frommert. In each episode, we will bring you engaging conversations with a wide variety of educators. both in and out of the classroom. this podcast is created for educators who wants or learn more about how to make the shift toward learner-centered spaces for their students schools
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Speaker
and districts The Learner Sentence Spaces podcast is a member of the Teach Better Podcast Network.
Guest Introduction: Dr. Sarah Zerwin
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get ready to be inspired as we dive right into the conversation with today's guest on today's show we have dr sarah serwin she is currently a high school language arts teacher where she's been since ninety ninety six she's also the author of the wonderful book called pointless and an upcoming book called Step aside, strategies for student-driven learning with secondary readers and writers scheduled to come out in winter of 2024. Previously, she was a journal editor and teacher consultant for Colorado Writing Project. She's also been a past instructor for College of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
00:01:23
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When we asked her what her passion was, she says, I aim to create a classroom space where students feel they can be exactly who they are, driving their own learning. Some interesting facts about Sarah. She was NCTE's high school teacher of excellence for Colorado award winner in 2014. She enjoys yoga, hiking, writing a memoir via comic panels. She's a sneaker enthusiast and she's obsessed with octopuses. We are so excited to have her on our show.
00:01:57
Speaker
Hey Sarah, i I am... I am such a big fan of your work too. And as we were talking before we got started, I just, I admire the way that you've been able to put your work out into the universe and still stay in the classroom for all the years that you have. So what I'm curious about is, was there a particular moment in your journey that led you to where you are right now that you could share with us? Thank you. And Crystal and Starr, thank you so much for having me here today. I'm just thrilled to be here with you
Influences on Teaching Philosophy
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today. And um when I think about a defining moment in my educational journey that really sort of helps explain the trajectory I've been on as a teacher and a writer,
00:02:40
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I have to go back to my senior year in high school to my AP Lit class. And I had the most like delightful human as a teacher. And in fact, when I found out um early in my teaching career that I would be teaching AP Lit, she's the first person that I contacted. ah So the story I'm going to tell, I don't want people to think that like I didn't like absolutely love my AP Lit teacher. But um what happened as I remember it, and who knows what it actually how it actually played out, was that we were um we were studying Gulliver's Travels, and I was actually reading it, which was kind of a big deal because I had not been reading the books that had been assigned in school. And I thought, this is AP Lit. I'm going to read everything. Here we go.
00:03:25
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And, um, she said something and I disagreed with her. I didn't agree that her interpretation was like, I saw it differently. And so I responded in such a way where I was like, wait a minute, how can you say this when that, like I was using evidence from the texts to back up what I was saying. And she walked over to my desk. This is the part that maybe I'm over remembering or something, but, and, um, looked down at me and said, Sarah, you're wrong. And I said, how can I be wrong when I can back up my thinking with evidence from the text? And she said, I don't care, you're wrong. And she walked away.
00:04:03
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And that one moment shut me down as a reader. I stopped reading in that class and I realized that all I needed to do was listen carefully to her interpretations and I would be able to do fine. And I did. I mean, I got to be in the class and I got, which I was fine with that because it was a, it was a, a weighted class. So my GPA was fine. And, um, I got, uh, a five on the AP Lit exam. So somehow I still learned how to do the thing just by watching her do it, but it was not like I didn't actually read any of the books that year, not a single one. And so that moment, um there's so much going on there that has really influenced the classroom that I have built as a teacher and also the writing that I have been doing, um especially my next book that's coming out is all about um building spaces for student agency.
Building a Student-Driven Classroom
00:05:00
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so they're really driving the learning. like It's always been, how can I build an English classroom that you know would have inspired a student like me to um to want to do the work is really where it all started for me. and it Since then, I've had to you know open it up to inspire not just students like me, but any student bringing anything to the table. so That's really the defining moment, I think, for me in terms of my career long obsession to put students in the driver's seat. So, aside from the fact that you can't see my face right now, while you were telling that story, my my heart kind of hurt a little bit. um I also had an experience like that in 10th grade with my honors English teacher, and you know that I i taught English as well.
00:05:46
Speaker
and always strive to help my students not be fearful of having ideas about what texts meant that I didn't necessarily see. And I think the longer I was in the classroom, I realized that the context that we bring to our reading really informs the way we understand the language that's there, the syntax. And it's it's not irrelevant what the author meant, but it's more relevant what the reader takes. yeah So, I really appreciate that. Like, I'm i'm sad that you had that that experience. And i I sincerely hope that students, and I'm sure not in your york classroom, but i' I sincerely hope other teachers don't do things like that anymore. um Because i I arrived at the same conclusion you did um in my space. like
00:06:38
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as long as you could prove it in the text, it's right as far as I'm concerned, even if it's far from the way that I perceived it when I was reading it. So to that end, when you're thinking about building that space that you just talked so about, every child in the room feels like the learning is for them, what is what does a learner centered space look like, feel like, sound like? How do you know when you've arrived? Yeah. Great question. And for me, it's this is something I've also struggled with my whole career because my classroom has also been a little chaotic and a little noisy. and But that's what I want, right? And um I used to share in my school, we used to have these classrooms with these movable walls in between them. I have this idea for flexible space and the movable walls were not very soundproof.
00:07:30
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and I used to teach across one of those movable walls from a ah good friend of mine um who prefers a much quieter classroom than I do. and He would often show up at my classroom door with this look on his face like, come on, Zerwin. I just think that like engaged teens, are they're not always sitting still and quiet. right There are times that they are, but not always. right and so um What I'm always looking for is a nice productive hum and either it's that, that engaged conversation that you're hearing all around the room as the kids are talking with each other or it's that keyboard's clicking all across the room because they're all like super engaged in what they're doing um on their computers or maybe it's st during a silent reading and you're hearing pages turning and you're hearing them writing notes in their you know on sticky notes or in their notebooks or whatever
00:08:22
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And um so that's well always what I'm looking for is that kind of productive hum. um Or if we're all doing something together, like everybody's super focused on the person who's talking and um everybody, you can feel it, right? That there's everybody's sort of doing the same thing at the same time and thinking about the same idea at the same time. I think um a learner centered space has lots of negotiation and conversation going on because um about what goes on in the classroom. Because if you're ah really sharing that space with students, you're going to have to be talking with them about what it what they want it to look like and feel like and sound like. And so there needs to be lots of
00:09:03
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that And then um laughter. Like if teenagers aren't laughing, I think that there's a problem. um Sometimes people ask me like, what's that like dealing with teenagers? Aren't they like annoying? And it's like, well, sure, they're adolescents. There are things that are annoying, but I literally laugh all day long. So if ah if like that is not happening in my classroom um on the regular, I definitely get worried that I don't have um a learner centered space.
00:09:31
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And I'm a math teacher, as as the listeners know and as you know, and I heard about your book at a conference. And even though it was very much focused for the English classroom, the humanities classroom, I picked up the book and I found so many wonderful nuggets that I could take into my math classroom. And um your your book is very similar to, in my eyes, it's very similar to the Building Thinking Classrooms book where the students are talking, they're learning, there's a learner-centered environment, there's laughter, but there's that, like you said, that hum, there's just a buzz of just kind of a debate going on with the math, a conversation going on.
Importance of Student Self-Assessment
00:10:18
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But one thing that I took away, a concrete piece that I took away from your book, Pointless, was the student self-assessment, which I don't think shows up enough in a math classroom and maybe just doesn't show up enough in any classroom, really. And I started using that. Thanks to your book, I started using that this year of having my students do some more self-assessment. really reflecting on how they're learning the math and how they're feeling about the math and what they're doing to be better ah learners with material that they struggle with. So could you talk more, and i I know the listeners probably need to go out and buy the book to get all the details, but could you give us a broad brushstroke of what that looks like in a classroom as far as assessment for the student reflection piece?
00:11:04
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Sure, absolutely. And i just I'm always pushing when people are talking about assessment and grading, I'm always pushing to remind people that we've got to bring students into it. ah Because that is really the most, um I think, high leverage place in the classroom for getting students engaged and having them feel like they're really driving the work. And it's also a place where students can help us manage the the load of teaching. If we turn over a lot of the the assessment ah tasks and um you know things that fall under the umbrella of grading, if we turn those over to to kids, it actually helps us out quite a bit too.
00:11:45
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And I think it's important. I think often people lump um grading and assessment into the same bucket, but they're actually really different things. you know For me, the word assessment is happening constantly in the classroom. And there's a spectrum from kid watching, which I love. you know And I tell the kids, i the minute you walk in the door, I'm assessing. I'm like always asking, how are they doing? How are they responding to what's going into the classroom? and It's a spectrum from kid watching all the way to you know more formal assessments where you're deliberately collecting data to very intentionally to see how students are doing towards what's happening in the class.
00:12:23
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And grading is something else, right? But people lump it into that. Like grading is how we have to report out, um how we have to record stuff in the gradebook um for whatever reason that we have to do it. And so my whole movement with grading um is to teachers can design a different path to the grade we have to put in the gradebook that is um more meaningful for students and more engaging for students and put and draws more on student agency. In my world, what that looks like is it starts with learning goals that I take the the curricular goals for the class, which as you know, is often more than any teacher can reasonably teach in a given school year. and so We've got to narrow them down to something that is
00:13:13
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Is tangible for the students to to look at and make sense of and so I encourage teachers to narrow down your curricular goals to like no more than seven or so. um What I call content goals and then um I also have some student habit goals. So I've got a list of 10 learning goals for each of the classes that I teach. and so It starts with that, with a nice tight list of learning goals. and Then the students, um once they they can see that and understand what the goals look like in terms of what kind of work they they they um mean that they're doing, ah they set goals for themselves off of those goals. ah Their own personal plans for learning and growth is what I call them. and
00:13:56
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Then every week they take a look at their plans and they look at their data coming out of the classroom. And this like this changes, when you do this, this changes the purpose of classroom assessment data. It's no longer for you to somehow boil it down to a grade in the grade book. It's for students, classroom assessment data is for students to be able to monitor their own learning and growth based on the goals they set for themselves. And so, um So that's what my students do. They set goals and then they use classroom assessment data to monitor their growth. And then at the end of the term, in the semester or whatever, um they write to me a letter where they describe the growth that they've achieved and they select the grade that they think matches up with that um for their final grade.
00:14:47
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And in most cases, I'd say 95% of the cases, that's the grade that goes in the grade book. In a few cases, students and I have have to go back and forth a little bit, but they actually really do a lot, a really good job with um with determining their own grade and doing their own assessment um toward the goals that they set for themselves. So um that is that's for me like the most important piece of of the whole pointless approach is the student goal setting and the reflection on that.
00:15:21
Speaker
So my next question for you along those lines is you probably work with some teachers who are a little bit leaning ah traditional and maybe there are some teachers who want to lean a little bit more learner centered. So what advice would you give a teacher who is traveling in that direction and how could they get started on that journey?
Trusting Students with Their Learning
00:15:43
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Yeah, and the first thing I think of is that you've got to come from a place of trust. um That's like if you don't have that, you're not going to be successful with really stepping aside and letting ah the students be driving the work. Like you have to trust a few things. ah You have to trust that students can and want to drive their own learning.
00:16:05
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You have to and they do like no matter how disengaged they seem like I really start from an underlying assumption that my students are interested in learning as long as the work matters to them. And so um we've got to start there that you have to trust that the students want to do the work and want to be out front driving it. And so that's the first thing. I think the second thing, too, is like a student learner space. Often people when they hear student driven learning or a student learner space or I'm sorry, a learner centered space that they often think it means the teacher is standing out in the hall and it's a complete free for all in the classroom.
00:16:45
Speaker
And like you've got to understand that that is so far from the truth. like The teacher actually does an enormous amount of um planning and building the space where the students then are able to drive around in, because they still have to work towards your curricular goals. You still have to make sure that they are starting somewhere and growing to some deliberate place. And so we have to set that up for them. And um in my new book that's coming out, I use the metaphor of like literally teaching teenagers to drive to help people think about this. Like when you teach a teenager to drive, you do not throw them the keys and a credit card and say, okay, have fun, right? You don't do that. It actually is a long process. You have to teach them
00:17:31
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um how to operate the car and what the rules of the road are and how to be safe and not hurt other people and so um how to use you know GPS or a map to help you get where you want to be. like There's so much we have
Empowering Teaching Strategies
00:17:44
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to teach them. and so You have to think, like what are the things that I have to teach my students so they can then drive on their own? and so So I think that that's important for people to realize and get like super focused on that kind of work. And in my book that's coming out, um i are I advocate for teaching students um again and again, this three step meaning making process where they start small.
00:18:10
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at the beginning with their own initial ideas that are popping up about something and then they start to see connections either by talking with others to build their ideas or looking across all of the things that they noticed to begin with and see what bigger ideas are are forming and then eventually take action, figure out what they've learned and and figured out and do something with it. and In my book, I've got like, here are some reading strategies to teach them that follow that three-step process, and here are some writing strategies to teach them that follow that three-step process, and here are some talk strategies in the classroom that follow that, and here are some grading practices to follow that follow that three-step process.
00:18:49
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and um in order to in that three-step process like it keeps us honest about staying out of the kid's way because it always step one is always what the kids are seeing initially and then it grows from there so and it also simplifies things too like Student driven learning a learner center classroom can be pretty complex and so the more we can simplify so the students can see really clearly what it is that they're trying to achieve and why the things you're teaching them already going to get them there then I think that that that really helps and my last bit of advice is to listen.
00:19:26
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um I had ah an administrator who used to say that the ones who are doing the talking are the ones who are learning. Just to remind us that we've got to um quiet down and decenter our own voices to make room for the kids. And so, um you know, a lot, a lot of listening to try to to figure out if it's a learner centered space, like what do my kids need? That means they've got to listen. So.
00:19:54
Speaker
I've heard that too, Sarah, and I would wholeheartedly agree that kids need to be doing more of the heavy lifting, especially in high school. In in a lot of ways, we move backward in high school from where they are in elementary school. um They have a lot of autonomy in an elementary school classroom, and suddenly they get to high school and all of a sudden, teachers get fearful that they are incapable of being the owner of their learning. But that could be a whole other conversation for sure. Yeah, for sure. Well, and I really think that um you know when we see students struggling, we with all the best intentions of the world, we lean in to help them, right? And in you know in my world of, like say, teaching a tough work of literature, we see them struggling with it, we might start just explaining the literature to them instead of teaching them how to make sense of a complex text.
00:20:49
Speaker
right which is which are skills for making sense of a complex life as a human. And so and we have to hold ourselves accountable for not doing that um because we could end up doing you know the thinking and reading and writing work that we need to be teaching them how to do for themselves. yeah it does It does rob them of that opportunity for sure. like and I think most English teachers in the beginning, and I know I was definitely guilty of this. like You go through all the research to figure out what the scholars are saying the text actually means before you become comfortable with the text yourself and then even more comfortable with the kids.
00:21:29
Speaker
looking at the text and learning something new. I taught AP Lit also, so a lot of the a lot of the stuff that I was teaching wasn't necessarily stuff that I had read dozens of times when I first moved into that course. and so you know it took It took me a little time to get comfortable enough with my own understanding to let go of that and give the kids the opportunity to take the risks around what they were reading. Yeah, I agree. And I kind of have have had a similar trajectory too. and And I still do a lot of that research um to make sure that I, because I have to help the kids ah build bigger ideas about the tax. I just make sure that whatever ideas I have in my head um are just offered up to the kids as the ideas of you know a person in the room who's
00:22:19
Speaker
also having the conversation with them, if that makes sense. It sure does. Yeah, rather than the one who's saying, this is what you need to believe about this book, right? Yep. So to that end, Sarah, do you have some recommendations? Like, who who would you like to shout out? um People who have had an impact on your thinking around these things or specific folks or listeners should be following to learn more about these
Recommended Resources and Influences
00:22:48
Speaker
practices. Yeah, for sure. And I mean, there's an enormous list, but I have just a few for ah for today. um So Cornelius Miner in his book, We Got This, he reminds us that we've got to share power with students if they're really going to be learning. And he makes the argument so eloquently, basically any time he speaks about education. And so
00:23:10
Speaker
he's He's one voice that's always rolling around in my head. um I've been reading this week because my colleagues and I are doing a book club, a summer book club on it, but Tricia Ibarvia's new book, Get Free. um It has so many strategies for learner-centered, humanized, equitable classrooms. so I highly recommend that book, if you're if you're especially if you're a high school English teacher or middle school English teacher. And of course, if you teach other things too, you can definitely draw strategies out of that. But um her work is just genius, brilliant. um Felicia Rose Chavis' book, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, um I've pulled so many strategies out of there that are very, very Lerner Center. She writes for an audience of of college um writing teachers.
00:23:58
Speaker
But you know if you're someone who teaches writing for sure, you can pull so much out of there. ah Just like her protocols for um a whole class workshop on one person's writing um are so beautifully learner-centered and equitable. um I always go back to Zaretta Hammond and culturally responsive teaching in the brain and her argument like using neuroscience to help us understand why we we have to avoid creating dependent learners out of our students. Um, so that one is always rattling around in my brain too. And, um, you know, the whole like workshop movement in, in ah teaching writing and teaching reading, I think is very, very learner centered. And I was thinking about, um,
00:24:42
Speaker
I was thinking about like, which book do I keep going back to? And my favorite depiction of a of what a classroom writing workshop looks like is Katie Wood Ray. She was the editor on my book Pointless. But Katie Wood Ray's book about doing workshop with kindergarten through second graders. It is the most beautiful depiction of what a workshop looks like. and also how to teach kids very concretely to do it. And this vision of this like kindergarten classroom where, um and the book is about the authors, I don't think I said that, this kindergarten classroom where the it's completely driven by the kiddos doing the writing. It's the most beautiful thing ever. So that's my short list for today.
Where to Find Sarah Zerwin
00:25:28
Speaker
Well, thank you for sharing that list. ah Where could listeners find you online to learn more about your work?
00:25:35
Speaker
Yeah, thank you. Well, I have a website um and you'll if you just Google Sarah Zerwin, you'll find it. It's at sarahmzerwin.com, sarahzerwin.com dot.net dot dot.org. So it's it's just Google me and you'll find it. um I'm also trying to get re-engaged in social media. um I'm very sad that teacher Twitter isn't what it used to be. Um, so, but I'm leaning into LinkedIn is where I've been kind of trying to engage professionally. So, um, so LinkedIn and my website, and I'm also on Instagram. Um, that's more of for mostly like seeing what my college child is up to, but I'm there too. I just don't, um, go there very often. So. Well, thank you, Sarah. This has been a great conversation and we appreciate your time. Thank you so much.
Closing and Engagement
00:26:26
Speaker
We hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. If you'd like any additional information from the show, check out the show notes. Learn more about Mastery Portfolio and how we support schools at masteryportfolio dot.com. You can follow us on X at MasteryForAll and linked to in our Mastery Portfolio page. We'd love for you to engage with us. If you'd like to be a guest in the show or know someone who would be an inspiring guest, please fill out the survey found in the show notes. And we'd love your feedback. Please write a review on your favorite podcasting app.