This weekend, my water heater quit. One second, I was hoping for a warm shower, and the next, I was boiling water on the stove to wash my hair. My husband clambered into our dirt crawl space to investigate and came back covered in cobwebs to declare, “Pilot’s out and I can’t relight it.” Not really a profound statement, but I think it sums up what happens to a lot of our students. They come to us with lights out, and it’s up to us to reignite their love of learning, but what happens when we can’t?
In the case of my water heater, we called our plumber, who gets paid big bucks to understand the inner workings of the beast in my basement. He came to the house with a giant metal box of tools and somehow relit what seemed to be a lost cause. As educators, we are not so different from my plumber. We spend our lives trying to understand the intricate inner workings of the student mind. And when students fail year after year, it is up to us to find appropriate tools to get them working again.
In my practice, I have found that the best way to do this is Universal Design for Learning (UDL). Igniting student passion by engaging them, making learning authentic, and making students realize, that even when their lights are out, somebody out there has a match. My greatest goal as an educator, of both teachers and students, is to be that person.
Great educators must promote expectations that optimize motivation, we must minimize all the threats, distractions, and barriers that get in the way of success, and most importantly, we must optimize relevance, value, and authenticity, so students realize that learning can actually get them somewhere. And that knowledge is a heck of a lot more rewarding than a warm shower.
