For the last two weeks, I have been teaching a credit recovery course for students who failed (have a D or F on their transcripts) IB English.
They are smart. They ask great questions. They like to discuss. They like to learn. They smile at and with me and themselves. They laugh easily. They help each other understand together. Their enrollment in IB English also proves that they are willing to challenge themselves. Yet, they failed, on paper. Many reported that they felt stifled (my language, not theirs). Feedback was lacking, there was no joy in the classroom, students could not ask questions, teachers would roll their eyes at them, everything was taught from a “figure it out on your own” pedagogy, and over time, they felt like they did not belong in the course. Many of them dropped the course at the semester.
I think almost every year (going into my 10th!!!) that I have taught at Sequoia, I have recruited, planned, and/or taught a course called Summer Bridge, a supplemental summer program aimed to prepare students for the curriculum and “rigor” (I place in parenthesis because I am skeptical of that word, and I think you should be too) of IB English. I am also skeptical of Summer Bridge's ability to do what we say it is going to do. I do not believe that every teacher should teach the same way, and I do not think that students should call all the shots. But I do believe in mutuality and that being heard makes you more invested in contributing and learning. I have trouble believing that it prepares students for the course because I wonder, deeply, if we have spent so much time preparing students for a course, but we have not done the work to prepare ourselves for these students…
Teachers teach from how they have been taught, and they often believe that they have to reproduce the same structures and patterns that they learned to create success (there is also a lot to unpack around the definition of “success”). We do not have to teach the same way that we were taught. We do not have to sequence learning the way we learned something. We do not have to reproduce the stressful structures that we underwent. The purpose of our freedom–our power–in the classroom is to make everyone else a little more free in the process
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