Stagnant is how you might describe your classroom. Students sit, stewing in a collective cesspool of gloom. Heads sag and eyes roll as strings of stale sentences stroll off some teacher’s tongue.
Often, students reject socialization with their peers, not because of mutual dislike, but because of a lack of opportunities to connect with peers and teachers. This passivity in the classroom serves only to allow students to detest learning.
The Western Michigan University study The Impact of Social Interaction on Student Learning describes how social interaction in the classroom creates an active learning environment for students and teachers. Social interaction in the classroom exposes students to a wide range of ideas presented by their peers, which helps to inform students’ greater understanding of the world around them. By extension, this communal show-and-tell of ideas fosters connection within the student body, allowing students to learn and grow from their differences.
Kalamazoo Central Assistant Principal and 2024 Michigan Teacher of the Year Kyle Shack has years of experience with classroom connections both from his time working at MSU and Loy Norrix.
“You have to make people feel safe,” said Shack. “There’s Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and the most fundamental one is that if people don’t feel safe, everything stops. If you feel unsafe, it doesn’t matter how interested or outgoing you are or how outgoing the topic is.”
However, since the Bush administration in 2002 passed “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) which aimed to provide better education opportunities to students in need, schools have shifted to test-centric methods.
A Stanford University article written by Linda Darling-Hammond, Evaluating ‘No Child Left Behind,’ states that “critics claim that the law’s focus on complicated tallies of multiple-choice test scores has dumbed down the curriculum, fostered a ‘drill and kill’ approach to teaching, mistakenly labeled successful schools as failing, driven teachers and middle-class students out of public schools and harmed special education.”
Also, since the adoption of NCLB, senior reading scores have dropped significantly throughout the U.S., according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Schools that once created more progressive testing systems have shifted to machine-scored tests that satisfy laws but are worse at actually assessing students.
When our school systems are focused solely on preparing students for specific tests, teachers lose their ability to teach directly to their students and implement things like independent and personal projects.
“The ability for students to act on their own and have an impact on their learning is just going to increase how interested they are,” said Shack. “Now, it’s not a panacea, it’s not going to solve everything, but if a student gets to drive a bit more, they’re more likely to find an area they’re interested in. We all know that feeling when you’re learning something you want to learn about – that thirst, that curiosity, that is more powerful than anything else.”
Independent projects act as an equalizer in the classroom, which allows students to pick a subject that interests them and relate it back to the core topics and ideas of the class. These projects also allow students to dictate the difficulty of class projects which can relieve stress from struggling students.
The NCLB places extreme emphasis on whether schools are “succeeding” or “failing” at preparing students for standardized tests, which dictates how much federal funding is allocated to schools. Schools respond by attempting to raise test scores, and low-scoring students are, ironically, left behind.
In swaths of great numbers, these students, typically African-American or Latino, are transferred, held back, suspended, or expelled according to The School-To-Prison Pipeline by Nancy Heitzeg.
When we prioritize standardized testing, we are naturally forced to limit the amount the teacher and the student can interact with the course material in their own unique way.
Instead of prioritizing tedious tests, we should make significant efforts to help students get what they need in the classroom, whatever that may be. The classroom is a place where open conversation and debate should be faci
litated and encouraged.
When students feel that their voice, opinions and perspectives are valued, they are able to fully engage in a classroom setting. A classroom setting in which students cling to the words of their teacher and one another. A classroom driven by a communal desire to learn.
