image: davestuartjr.com
For reasons we need not go into, our district finds itself short a couple of days this year. It has made the decision that our PD days have gone away, replaced by a couple of after-school PD sessions and a few hours where teachers are to set up their own professional development. As a result of the second of those, I am leading a book study on Dave Stuart, Jr.’s book The Will to Learn.
The book was recommended to me by a younger-ish (they’re all younger to me anymore) English teacher who had showed me a few videos from his quite cool YouTube channel. And given that student motivation is very much on the minds of teachers these days, I bought it and am participating in a discussion with 7 of my teachers.
This is a good book. I feel like Dave Stuart, Jr. and I could be friends. He likes the deep and philosophical.
I’m about halfway through the book and have a couple of thoughts.
The pyramid (above) depicts how Stuart feels: the whole teacher world begins and settles in on credibility. If students feel a teacher is not credible, they’re not going to buy in. He spends about 60 pages talking about what this means, and I think wisely. Too many teachers feel that they should have credibility simply by virtue of being a teacher. If this was ever true (it wasn’t), it’s certainly not true anymore. The younger generation, I have learned, doesn’t value hierarchy for hierarchy’s sake, and I think that’s true of their younger siblings in our classrooms as well. We build credibility (to oversimplify Stuart: you should read the whole book) in two ways: by building relationships and by loving our content.
Building relationships: Stuart recommends trying to get one Moment of Genuine Connection (MGC) with each student every week. These take 60-90 seconds. Half should be personal statements, whether specific (“Hey—you like baseball. How is it that the Mariners are beating far better teams?”) or even more general (“Wow, those are cool shoes—where did you get them?”). The other half should be academic statements, whether specific (“Hey, you did a great job using evidence in your paragraph yesterday”) or more general (“Saw on my computer your grade in Biology has dropped. Is everything okay?”) The key is to actually track these interactions to make sure nobody falls through the cracks.
I have tried this before and fell on my face, but I think it’s because I was trying to do longer, more elaborate conversations about how things were going in class. My notebook of everyone’s conversations didn’t last long, as I was taking on too much.
And that’s one thing in Stuart’s favor. He’s all about the sustainability. The subtitle of his book is “Cultivating Student Motivation Without Losing Your Own.” The second half of that sentence is just as important as the first. If it’s too hard to do, Stuart won’t shame you into doing it.
The second level of his pyramid is Value. Here’s where I am really grooving with him. Teachers have to find what is sacred and beautiful about what they teach and communicate that often. He argues that teachers fall back to justifications for their subject area by defensively providing answers to the question “When are we ever going to use this in life?” By answering this, he says, we send the message that only things that have utility have value. Anyone who has ever done something unnecessary, like solve a Sudoku, fall in love, or learn to play an instrument that you won’t ever be good enough to get paid for, knows that most of the things that have the most value have the least utility.
When I coach, one of my biggest pet peeves is a teacher who is anything less than geekily enthusiastic about their subject matter. It often sounds like this.
TEACHER: All right, it’s time for us to [some routine thing for the discipline, like reading a thing in English or doing a proof in Geometry or stretching in PE].
TEENAGERS: [indistinct moans of complaint]
TEACHER: I know, [thing] is not your favorite thing. But if you work through it, you won’t have to do it anymore!
Why would you respond in a way that accepts as a norm not liking a thing you’re the face of? To them, I was English Language Arts. To me, my sophomore year Biology teacher was (and remains, as I haven’t studied it since) the face of Biology. If we give permission for kids to have a less-than-cordial relationship with the discipline, they’ll take it. What we permit, we promote.
So I try to get nerdy. I tell them what’s so awesome about Shakespeare, or Achebe, or grammar, or a beautiful paragraph. I do not demand that they feel the same way, but I communicate what’s awesome about it. And while our students will roll their teenage eyes at us, I remain convinced that they like it when their teachers like what they teach and show it.
Stuart gives legions of examples from teachers in all sorts of different disciplines communicating what is sacred and beautiful about what they teach, and it’s a delight to read. Kids want reasons to love a thing, not just to use a thing.
The thing my brain continues to go back and forth with is the pyramid structure Stuart offers. If a teacher has credibility—they present the material in a clear way, they establish relationships with kids via MGCs, they practice beautiful and humane “classroom stewardship” (his much-improved label for what we usually call classroom management), but they don’t effectively communicate the value of their subject matter, won’t that classroom be nothing but a pleasant bore? In the reverse—if a teacher isn’t ideal—is merely base-level competent—at relationships or stewardship, but they exhibit a passion for their subject area that rubs off, won’t that set of kids do a lot of learning?
It feels to me, at this halfway point of the book, that rather than a pyramid, these characteristics Stuart offers are more ingredients in a stew. Some have more potatoes, some more onion, some more meat, and some are even more present in one bite than in the next, but all can be tasty stews.
I’ll keep an eye out going forward. Meanwhile, buy the book and read it. It’s way worth your time.
Happy May!