If you’ve ever seen a great stage production, you understand the importance of the person operating the spotlight.
When the spotlight clicks on, it helps the audience to focus. It lets us know what’s important, and draws our attention from what may be happening in the shadows.
In education, our spotlight is focused on very specific things. Test scores. The number of AP and Honors classes. College acceptance rates.
It’s easy to rank all of these things, thus making them easy to spotlight.
And because we focus the spotlight on these things, students learn quickly how to play the game. We want correct answers, and compliance, and kids who are good at following directions.
But part of the education stage is outside of the spotlight.
In those shadows lie students who are curious. They are the ones who are resilient and empathetic. They are struggling with complex and interesting problems. Learning for them is messy but they get to remain in the shadows because when they fail, they use it to move forward and keep learning.
We are so focused on what’s merely visible. We need to realize that there’s a lot more to see.
Yes, we have to adjust the spotlight. We need to move it to see those students operating in the shadows.
We can start by asking different questions. Instead of “what did you get on the test?” we can ask “what are you excited about working on?”
This school year, let’s make a conscious decision to shine the spotlight on those other parts of the education stage.
Rich
