Empathy, Personalization, and High Standards

Rich McKinney

I remember my first performance evaluation as a teacher. I was commended for my planning, management, and assessment. But what I most remember were 13 words in the evaluation that still have a profound effect on my teaching: "You taught a good lesson, but you have to stop spoon-feeding them."

To be honest, I knew that I was spoon-feeding them, and I was no more pleased with it than was my evaluator. I understood E. M. Forster's eloquent quip, "Spoon-feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon."

So how did I move from spoon-feeding students to challenging them to take charge of their own education? By finding a way to personalize learning for each student while maintaining high expectations for the whole class.

Knowing the Theory

As a preservice teacher, I envisioned myself as a modern-day Socrates who would carefully and thoughtfully guide my students toward deeper understanding by challenging them with probing questions. I saw myself encouraging students to tap into their own past experiences to make better sense of new content.

I knew that the more connections students could make with new information, the better their comprehension and retention would be. I knew that each student came to the classroom with different talents, abilities, and learning styles. I understood Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences—and admitted that current education practice often reduces schools to using only linguistic and mathematical intelligences. Additionally, I understood the importance of preparing lessons that encouraged each of those intelligences by using different learning styles.

I knew all these things and intended for them to inform my teaching practice—until I stepped into a classroom and confronted the realities of large classes, reluctant learners, and standardized tests.

Living the Practice

I suspected I was not alone. Teachers often find themselves pulled between the theories of personalized learning and the realities of high-stakes testing. The era of accountability mandates that no student be left behind, regardless of where they are academically when they enter the classroom. This goal is noble, yet complicated when shrinking education budgets demand that schools use a one-size-fits-all approach to learning for the sake of fiscal efficiency. Of course I was spoon-feeding my students; I simply couldn't find any other way to ensure that they were prepared to perform well on the state test.

Personal diligence and some great professional development, however, helped me to begin to figure out how to manage the requirements of high standards, large classes, and reluctant learners. Daggett's (2005) Rigor/Relevance framework suggested that students could perform at a very high level if the teacher made learning relevant to each individual, and more of Gardner's intelligences and the nine essential strategies for effective teaching (Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001) helped me craft my style of making learning personal to every student by teaching them to create nonlinguistic representations or novel analogies to link content to their own experiences.

Contextualizing Empathy

My most effective strategy was to develop lessons that used primary sources (Sheets, 2010; Cleary & Neumann, 2009), which called on students to use their own background and experience to analyze the thoughts, emotions, and actions of people who shaped and were affected by the events being studied. This approach allowed me to encourage students' interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences (Gardner, 1989) and to make learning personally relevant for each student.

I called this approach "contextual empathy" because it allowed students to insert themselves into different situations to better analyze the causes, effects, and significance of events such as the drive to ratify the 19th Amendment, which gave the vote to women, or the paranoia-fueled McCarthy witch hunts in the 1950s. Furthermore, this approach encouraged habits of mind (Costa & Kallick, 2000) such as metacognition, application of past knowledge, listening with empathy, and thinking flexibly.

By employing contextual empathy, my class of 35 students turned into 35 classes of one: my reluctant learners began to be more involved, my students achieved at higher levels than their academic history would have suggested, and I realized large gains in teacher value-added scores on state exams.

Ready for the Common Core

Now as schools enter into a new phase of education in which students will be evaluated more on the abilities outlined in the Common Core State Standards and less on specific content information, my students and I are prepared for the changes.

The skills my students have developed though analyzing issues with contextual empathy are consistent with ACT college-readiness standards and the common core standards identified by the Partnership for Readiness for College and Careers, including evaluating arguments, reflecting on perspectives, and analyzing tone in a given text.

As many states rewrite curriculum and redesign assessments to reflect such objectives, I can continue to individually prepare students to pick up their own spoons and feed themselves.

References

Cleary, P., & Neumann, D. (2009). The challenges of primary sources, collaboration, and the K–16 Elizabeth Murray Project. History Teacher, 43(1), 67–86.

Costa, A. L., & Kallick, B. (2000). Habits of mind: A developmental series. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Daggett, W. R. (2005). Achieving academic excellence through rigor and relevance. Rexford, NY: International Center for Leadership in Education. Retrieved from http://www.leadered.com/resources.html

Gardner, H., & Hatch, T. (1989). Multiple intelligences go to school: Educational implications of the theory of multiple intelligences. Educational Researcher, 18(8), 4–9.

Marzano, R. J., Pickering, D. J., & Pollock, J. E. (2001). Classroom instruction that works. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Sheets, K. (2010). Thinking historically, teaching historically: Perspectives on the professional development of teachers from a teaching American history grant. History Teacher, 43(3), 455–461.

Rich McKinney teaches Advanced Placement /International Baccalaureate psychology, AP human geography, IB geography, and United States history at West High School in Knoxville, Tenn.

ASCD Express, Vol. 7, No. 9. Copyright 2012 by ASCD. All rights reserved. Visit www.ascd.org/ascdexpress.