Marsha Ratzel is a National Board-certified teacher in the Blue Valley School District in Kansas, where she teaches 6th & 7th grade science, math and sometimes social studies. She blogs at Reflections of a Techie and tweets with the handle @ratzelster.

Marsha’s first book, describing her journey to more student-centered, inquiry teaching and learning, will be published in early 2013 by Powerful Learning Press. This is an excerpt. You can read more about Marsha’s classroom adventures in several posts at the Powerful Learning Practice group blog Voices from the Learning Revolution, including: “Teaching by Getting Out of the Way” and “Helping Students Own the Learning Environment.”

by Marsha Ratzel

This year’s action research — getting myself to the place where I can routinely carry out student-centered, question-centered instruction — has been (to use a word from my mountain biking comrades) EPIC! To a rider this means that I started on a journey that I thought would take a month or two, but has extended well beyond anything I could have dreamed. Remember how Gilligan’s Island always started off with the idea that they were going on (hum along) a “three-hour tour”? Short trips can turn out to be much longer undertakings. This has not been three hours or three months…it’s extended to the entire school year. And I’m sure the trip’s not over yet.

Marsha’s classroom

Knowing where I started helps me reconnect to my core beliefs and the essential questions that I always try to ask myself about my teaching practice. It helps me mark how far I’ve come. I started off on my epic trek in granny gears, where all mountain biking beginners find their groove. It’s the easiest gear to pedal and designed to help you scale even the toughest grades.

As I climbed the steep hill, I had to really lean on other colleagues to help me figure out the questions to ask myself and the things I should do. I had to rely on students telling me what they needed. They kept me from face-planting (which is never a good thing) and got me back on my bike if things faltered a bit. While I had loads of expertise in teaching, I was far from expert in approaching this new learning. I had to learn different ways of thinking and doing with my students.

My Personal Learning Network definitely helped me find my “mo” (momentum) — to take the small successes that I was experiencing with students and build those into some bigger feats. Remember when I wasn’t sure if students could withstand not knowing exactly how to proceed, and then I changed things so that they invented the lab procedures? Not only were they able to survive the ambiguity, but they are thriving on it. They are building their independence and I’m now witnessing their “5-year-old” level of curiosity re-emerging. They are full of questions now and feel capable of answering them.

I hadn’t expected to find a community of practice (a CoP—other teachers who are working on this kind of professional development). In fact, I didn’t really even know what a CoP was before I started on this journey. It was exciting to read more deeply about the idea of a virtual community of co-learners and to be living it at the same time.

“We are the people who do hard stuff”

As I stop and look back, the whole landscape has changed for me. My students are stronger and more self-confident. They are willing to take on hard tasks and don’t always want the easy way out. I just told one of my kids the other day: we are the kind of people who do the hard stuff now, and if we wanted it easy we would have looked it up in a book. Instead we have developed confidence in each other, and we want to discover the answers for ourselves. My students “get” that learning is a process. And while they may encounter moments where something doesn’t turn out the way they expected, they know how to change that into something positive. If students have a better idea than the one I present, they ask me to change things up. We co-create and co-learn with each other.

I feel that I’m a totally different teacher. This style of coaching learners allows me to find the Zone. You know — that place where you just “do” teaching. It’s probably not something I can explain very well if you haven’t experienced it. But maybe it’s happened to you in some situation where you took on a challenge — a sport, a hobby, even having a child. When you start out, just like in mountain biking, it’s all a technical undertaking. Small problems are magnified. Now, instead of being confounded by a narrow trail, rocks and too much sand, I have developed a natural sense of just how to take those trails. More importantly, my students know how to avoid spinouts as well. They’ve learned along with me.

Once you’ve tasted this kind of teaching — seen students learn so much more in your classes than they ever have learned before — then the fun of it, the reward of it, is so great that you strive to get back into this kind of flow every time you walk into the classroom. It changes the way you do lesson design. You look for the same content, but you’re imagining different approaches that make it student centered. Now it’s less about the teacher talking or showing how and more of the kiddos doing.

The end is just the beginning

The funny thing about all this is that I thought there would be an ending place. Now I realize that the end is just the beginning. I will finish the year with these students and I’ll have to restart with a new batch of kids in the fall. The current batch will leave Gilligan’s Island, but I won’t! Luckily, not everything will have to be built up from scratch.

Certainly the relational pieces — the trust, the common understanding of each other, students knowing when they can push me and me knowing when I can push them — will all have to be done anew. But all the rest stays and will improve with each additional use. If my previous experience tells me anything, I think I can count on getting us all in the Zone faster each successive year because I’ll be better at the instructional part. I will have to customize it each round so it’s responsive to the needs of each particular community of students. But those are all little tweaks.

The big part I’ll need to do (this) summer is to sit back, reflect, read through my student feedback, figure out the destination of the next epic adventure and how to get there. It’s like mountain biking…as soon as you get to the peak of one hill, you see another hill that calls you. So you go through the journey again and again, to get to the top and see the next vista.

Anthony Cody spent 24 years working in Oakland schools, 18 of them as a science teacher at a high needs middle school. He is a National Board Certified Teacher (NBCT) and a Project Based Learning workshop leader. Visit his website Teachers Lead and follow him on Twitter at @anthonycody.

Since 2007, Anthony’s policy-oriented Ed Week blog Living in Dialogue has become a rallying place for teachers who value their professionalism. He also writes about practice, as this 2007 advice for new teachers indicates.

by Anthony Cody

I recently observed a teacher passing out an assignment to a class of high school English students. “This is hard,” complained one. “No, it’s really not hard, it’s easy!” replied the teacher.

Even though I could recall saying the same thing myself on occasion, something about this exchange bothered me. What can our students possibly learn if we only gave them easy tasks? On the other hand, how can we motivate our students to accept a challenge if they doubt their own ability?

I asked Lynn Scott, an experienced teaching colleague, what she thought. Her reply: “If my second graders say something is hard, I say ‘That’s ok. You can do hard things!’”

To make her case, Lynn talked to her students about hard things they had mastered. They all were born not knowing how to walk. Did they just stand up one day and run around? No, they taught themselves, by grabbing onto furniture and other people, and they gradually learned to walk without falling. They learned to ride bicycles the same way — by hard practice and by sometimes falling down.

Research shows that students who lack motivation are often not convinced that the effort they invest in themselves is going to be rewarded. They simply have not been academically successful in the past, so why bother? Furthermore, their parents may have been ineffectual in school, creating a template for failure easier to live up to than disprove.

So how do we teach our students they are capable of doing so much more than they even realize? This is the true art of teaching. Here are some ideas:

> Keep a portfolio of work, beginning with samples from the first week of school (or any fixed point in time). Then, in November or December, you can take a look at their earlier work, and highlight all the things they know how to do now that they could not do in September. This helps students understand their goal is to improve from their current level, and no matter where they are starting, they can learn and grow.

> Researchers tell us that if you give students a letter grade along with feedback, all they focus on is the grade, and the value of the feedback is lost. Therefore I try to avoid giving grades, especially on first or second drafts. Instead, I try to give specific suggestions to guide students toward improvement. Rubrics that describe your expectations can be especially helpful with this. Look at the path to quality work as a ladder, not a leap, and support them as they climb.

> Sometimes students do not really know what high quality work looks like — or how to produce it. The first time I asked students to do science projects, I was disappointed by some of the work they turned in (apparently assembled the night before with a roll of scotch tape and a magic marker). But when I thought about it, I realized they did not have any clear models.

The next time, when I introduced the assignment I shared some of the better projects I had saved. I also had the students take a close look at the projects and develop a list of characteristics associated with quality work. What do the great projects have? What do less successful projects look like? We took the notes from this discussion and created a rubric the students could use to guide them as they worked. Then the students used the rubric to score their own projects with the help of their peers and make improvements before turning them in.

Anthony Cody

I’ve really come to see the power of peer review after years of practicing this teaching method. When students are involved in reviewing each other’s work using a clear set of guidelines, they not only have a tool that promotes honest and objective judgments, they also become more familiar with the hallmarks of quality, and they can apply that understanding to their own work as well.

Our students can do hard things, but they do not always know that. High self-regard is important for all the kids we teach, but it is not built through empty praise. It grows as the student actually succeeds in creating quality work. True satisfaction comes when we know for sure that we have achieved excellence. Then let the celebration begin!

This article first appeared at Education Week Teacher. Used with permission of the author.