ASCD Talks with an Author: Robyn Jackson

Letting Go in the Classroom

For many teachers, letting go of both classroom control and well-designed lesson plans seems extremely difficult. It also seems like a really bad idea. But teachers need to "embrace the messiness that is learning," says master teacher and author Robyn Jackson.

In this video interview about her book Never Work Harder Than Your Students, Jackson discusses why teachers should leave "spaces" that can be filled in by students. "We have sanitized learning so that we want to make it so clean, and everything in the classroom has to go just like we planned it. And if you really think about how you plan a lesson, if you leave spaces for kids to occupy, that's when they're going to start to take control of it. It's going to mean that sometimes you're going to veer away from your plan. That's the difference between scripting and planning—you plan an outcome; you plan a pathway towards an outcome—then you have space," says Jackson.

Traditionally, teachers learn to plan for 50 minutes to fill a 45-minute class; but, says Jackson, teachers should plan for 30 minutes instead and ask students to perform tasks that will allow them to engage with content and more fully understand the lesson.

"[People] think kids are lazy, they don't want to work—they want to work. They just don't want to work the way we often ask them to work," Jackson says.

Source: From Talks with an Author: Robyn Jackson, in which the author discusses her book Never Work Harder Than Your Students, Segment 15: Letting Go in the Classroom. Copyright 2010 by ASCD.

ASCD Express, Vol. 5, No. 24. Copyright 2010 by ASCD. All rights reserved. Visit www.ascd.org/ascdexpress.