Sticky Lessons
Modern pedagogy has mastered the short term data collection loop. Constant formative assessments and exit tickets generate a plethora of data on every single period of the school day and can help a reflective teacher ensure key learnings reach every student. But the same can not be said about long term growth. For understandable logistic reasons, there is a devastating deficit of long term educational progress, especially in regards to specific programs or strategies.
When I was getting my M. Ed. we got to do a couple small research projects so I used that opportunity to attempt to reverse engineer some longitudinal work. I had some experience with qualitative educational research methods so I conducted interviews with a simple anchor - what do people remember from their Science classes? I interview some of my peers in college, people working in Education connected to the University, and anyone my social media outreach could reel in. What I found was probably the worst thing possible for an early career teacher to see.
The most common thread in the stories I heard, regardless of age, was somethin unexpected and unintentional. An experiment reacting a little more intensely than calculated, broken lab equipment hidden away in mischievous ways, or miscalculations that took a whole period to correct. I found this while in the midst of my teacher training program that had me making meticulous plans at multiple scales using research-backed methods but apparently if I wanted the students to remember what I did, I have to make sure things went a little awry. It reminded me of the crafty burdens in mythology; I must plan and then see those plans crumble ad nauseum. But I found it liberating! This did not mean my plans were useless, it meant that the safety net was elastic. If all goes according to plan, great! And if something else happens, even better! As long as I am confident enough to play it by ear, I could wield the serendipity to craft an even stronger learning experience!
There was one other story I heard during my interviews that left me uneasy. I had reached out to a mentor of mine, a Physics teacher who was previously an engineer. I wanted to know what she remembered from her Physics classes in high school that shaped her work in both careers. She had a fairly straightforward answer: her teacher was awful. She could not understand what he was trying to teach, but she was determined to learn Physics. So she did it herself. She dove into the textbook and whatever (pre-internet) resources she could find and her love and mastery of the subject stayed with her!
That does align with most research. Students learn the most when they do the work! And maybe that really is the perfect storm of circumstances for learning, as tragic as it may seem. A motivated student and no easy way out. I do wonder if my teaching has had a detrimental effect by denying some of these opportunities to students. I have always been proud of my ability to articulate abstract concepts in STEM, but doesn't that betray the struggle students should go through to paint those pictures themselves? The weakening open internet is also an uneasy elephant in the room of that thought - if I can't provide a digestible explanation, what if they seek out gratification that might not be accurate?
All I can do is keep making plans, and that's what I will continue doing.