Educational Leadership - September 2015

semester-long archaeological dig. At first, they were puzzled by why they were digging holes in the schoolyard and trying to make sense of clues (written by the previous year’s science students) that seemed totally disassociated from biology. In the end, they understood the dig to be an analogy for the process of scientific inquiry. They saw themselves as inquirers who understood both the process and its power to inform.

Lisa, an art teacher, consistently asked her students why a particular artist worked in a certain style; why that style might change over time; why the artist may have chosen to depict a single object over the course of many years; or how a painting might reflect the architecture, music, or dance being done by other artists from the same period. The discussions that followed such probing questions shifted how students thought about their own art and its role in making meaning of their world.

Sharing Bloom’s Taxonomy

During this time, I confessed to students that I often didn’t like reading their responses to prompts because they generally all said much the same thing in the same language. We looked at the elements of Bloom’s taxonomy—a relatively new tool in classrooms at the time—and explored how a response written to prove we knew what a poem said literally, for instance, might differ from one written to show we grasped its deeper meaning. In time, my students became comfortable and then skilled (for 13-year-olds) in writing more effective and original responses.

At another point, I suggested that
we don’t really understand a thing
in depth until we begin to generate
insights about it. We studied insights
of noted people (not always about pro-
found things) and our own insights.
A common culminating assignment
became generating an insight about
something we were studying,
explaining how you arrived at it, and
defending why it was worthy of being
called an insight. I could see my stu-
dents begin to think differently—and
I saw myself changing even more than
they did.

Hopeful Signs

The “good old days” weren’t perfect; every time has its merits and challenges. Nonetheless, I felt more like a teacher when my colleagues and I discussed how to help our students become better questioners and thinkers—as opposed to more recent professional discussions that, necessarily, focus on maximizing student proficiency in getting the right answers on tests with long-expired freshness dates. We weren’t better people than today’s teachers. We did our work, I believe, in a better time—one more conducive to asking questions about the generative role of the teacher in evoking powerful learning.

Here’s the real point of this reminis-
cence: Many days now, I think I hear
stirrings of the conversations common
in that other era. I see more educators
questioning how their practices could
better enliven learning and the young
people who engage in it. I read more
books that sketch out mind-focused
images of teaching. I’m hopeful. It
would be good for us all to be free
again to question what learning really
means—and to question for real
learning. EL

Carol Ann Tomlinson (cat3y@virginia .edu) is William Clay Parrish Jr. Professor and Chair of Educational Leadership, Foundation, and Policy at the Curry School of Education, University of Virginia in Charlottesville. She is the author of The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of All Learners (2nd ed., ASCD, 2014) and, with Tonya R. Moon, Assessment and Student Success in a Differentiated Classroom (ASCD, 2013).