Illuminating the Classroom: A Path to Transparency and Student Success
For this year’s District Day of Learning, we invite you to ask, consider, and explore the ways in which we can continue to make our institutions more transparent for our students by, more specifically, narrowing our focus on a site most familiar to us and our students–the classroom.
On the one hand, the classroom is the site where the most potential for transformation resides. It is the space where an assignment, a reading, a discussion, a lecture, a conversation, or an activity can positively change how a student may conceptualize themselves and their lives.
On the other hand, the classroom is also a site where our students most struggle. It is a place where students get stuck; a space that many of them end up abandoning; a place where confusion abounds; a context where our disciplinary knowledge and expertise can often limit rather than expand access.
With this in mind, for this year's District Day of Learning, we invite you to continue the important work of making our institutions more transparent for our students by exploring ways to demystify the classroom. To do this, we ask: what are the specific tasks or concepts within our discipline that students often struggle to understand or master? How can we make the processes by which to get past these “bottlenecks” more explicit to our students? How can we make more transparent the steps, decisions, and mental processes involved in solving the problems or understanding the concepts of our disciplines?
We look forward to your participation in this year's District Day of Learning as we explore these vital questions and seek to make our classrooms perennial sites of student success.