Story time!
Gather ’round, children, and be regaled with a tale from the Adventures in Business Ownership Series by the Held Family.
Once upon a time, a couple owned a family business in the trades. As word got around about their commitment to high-quality work and attention to detail, their business grew, and it became necessary to hire employees.
Having never been bosses before, they didn’t know what to look for in an employee, so they hired a variety of people and learned from what worked…and what didn’t.
They took responsibility when they hired the wrong people, and didn’t charge customers for time spent learning lessons.
More importantly, they took OWNERSHIP of the hiring process the next time around, and they made more specific, better choices.
You got me.
It’s me, I’m the business owner. My husband and I own a business, and it has taught me a lot about how to run a classroom. And running a classroom has taught me a lot about how to be a boss. But that’s a post for another blog!
So…The Classroom?
If you’re on the same journey I am, you’re letting them choose:
- What they read
- What they write
- What skills they are going to work on
- How they are going to demonstrate mastery of those skills
But what good does that really do? Why does empowering students with choice and agency make a difference?
The difference is taking responsibility versus taking ownership.
When students are in a traditional classroom, we teach them to take responsibility for their actions. No homework? 0. Didn’t study? You get a bad grade on the test. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Taking responsibility is a vital part of becoming an adult. But taking responsibility is all about what you do AFTER decisions are made.
The real goal in student-led teaching is to help students take ownership of their learning.
When students make choices about their learning, they are not just taking responsibility for mistakes; they are taking ownership of their future.
When the school year starts, my classroom looks almost traditional. Students are given assignments with clear expectations and I give a fair amount of instruction.
However, I see these things as a scaffold, and the best teaching advice I ever got was “never put a scaffold in place without a plan to remove it”.
By the end of first quarter, students are making more and more of their own choices, guided by what they have learned from their past choices. The goal is to have students taking full ownership by the end of the year.
Now, as we wrap up the school year, my room looks like this:
- Students come in, check the board for immediate directions. Often, there aren’t any.
- When the bell rings, I tell them what is due in the next week or so.
- I project the list of things students can work on – revisions, missing work, current assignments, etc.
- They work and come get me if they need help.
Now that they know my expectations, they run themselves. And it WORKS. Four kids in first period today asked to sit and go over their grades with me today. We did, and they went off to work on revising work specific to the skills they needed to practice.
Don’t just hold kids responsible; make them own it.
Learning, Not Just Teaching 