I’m very grateful to be here at the 3-day MAP Conference in South San Francisco — finally got to meet Malcolm Swan, whose lessons I’ve used with my students for many years. I was delighted to see this slide because we had done that lesson in class, and it was one of my favorites.
At the end of today's session, we were asked to share questions we might have for tomorrow’s panel of speakers. A teacher asked something that stuck with me. He said:
The students in the video [from Malcolm’s talk] are awesome. But my students aren’t there. They’re at zero. Not even zero—they’re at negative something...
Negative?? Zero??
It made me sad to hear this.
No matter how “low” his students are, no matter how out-of-control they seem, no matter how unmotivated they act—they cannot be at level zero. That’s impossible.
We talk a lot about students’ mindsets. I worry more about the teacher’s mindset.
Maybe he didn’t mean it the way I heard it. But I’ve heard too many teachers say directly to me, “My kids can’t do that.”
How do we know what they can or can’t do unless we give them a chance?