An Ethic of Excellence: Food for the educator's soul

For the last weeks, I've been searching incessantly for meaningful educational literature. At times, educational literature can sound repetitive and predictable, but Ron Berger's An Ethic of Excellence, isn't just like any other book about education. His genuine voice speaks directly to the educator's soul.

While many books highlight the failures with current educational systems, very few manage to bring out its sheer beauty.  Education, which is often portrayed as a mechanical system driven by data, takes a new form in Ron Berger's world: it's organic and harmonious. The opening anecdote where Berger is building a playhouse with his students conveys a zen-like state which is lightyears away from the distressed school environments which are generally portrayed in the media.

The reader should not misconstrue Berger's approach to education as one that lacks rigour and celebrates mediocrity; far from it. In Ron Berger's worldview, education should stretch students to create work that is beautiful. And for this to happen schools need to embrace a culture that values excellence. In educational systems that often glorify quantity over quality, students rarely understand the purpose behind school. The author has experienced this first hand:

"I had no audience while doing my work when I was a student and no sense that my work meant something to someone. Actually I did have a singular audience: my teacher. I turned in my work to a teacher who retuned it with a grade, occasionally a comment. The importance of the work seemed to be singular: pleasing or at least satisfying a teacher."(98) 

However, Ron Berger's deep fascination for learning clearly transpires in his anecdotes. As he narrates about his students' inquiry about rough semi-precious stones, the reader can easily perceive Berger's childlike curiosity and passion for learning. In this context, when fostering students' habits of minds and allowing them to create authentic work for a real audience, accountability takes a new form and context.

So what are the habits that teachers could instil in their students to ensure great work? The book provides different examples of how students go through a rigorous process when they create work which entails various drafts of a product and peer critiquing. Any work produced that is short from being excellent would go against the school's culture:

"The overall quality of work that emerges from the workshop is a concern for every member in it. If any student is failing to succeed or producing work without care, it is a concern for every student. There is a sense of whole class pride in the quality of learning and products in the workshop, and there is a sense of peer pressure to keep up with the standard. These projects are made public and every student knows it. Anything weak work reflects on all of us." (70)

Watch the video clip below, to learn more about critiquing and descriptive feedback from Berger himself: 

  

In An Ethic of Excellence, the author's passion for education is frequently juxtaposed to legislators' shortsighted fixation with numbers and data.  Berger' recounts the time he turned up to an opulent luncheon to showcase some of his student work to a group of policymakers. Even though the purpose of the meeting was for policymakers to learn more about student progress, the very prized work samples that highlighted deeper learning were put away because they cluttered the space. This anecdote highlights the irony that plagues education: The very people who have a say in education are often those who discard the evidence of deeper learning in their quest to gauge rigour.

Having said that, this book gives readers a sense of hope for the future of education.  An Ethic of Excellence is indeed an exhortation to educators to take pride in their own work and impart this mantra to their students.  Like students, teachers are not immune to the disillusionment and the agonizing feeling of powerlessness in the classroom.  How many educators start their teaching careers with a genuine passion, a drive to make a difference in students life, only to see their flame slowly dim at the hand of an inept educational system? Well, this book is a heartening reminder that it doesn't have to end that way.

Hindsight is twenty-twenty

I had planned to write this post for some time now. I wanted to celebrate students' work and had even put together some paragraphs, but my ideas didn't feel genuine enough.  I felt as if I was trying too hard to promote what we do in class instead of digging deeper. This weekend, I read An Ethic of Excellence by Ron Berger, and my thoughts all fell into place.   

Before I delve any deeper, I ought to provide a context first.  My students' culminating work from the Grade 9 Revolutions unit was the creation of a crash course. As discussed in Keeping it Real, we had looked closely at the stages of the Egyptian revolution as a case study and then students researched a revolution of their choice that spanned from political to cultural and technological revolutions.

Even though students possessed a conceptual understanding of the stages of a revolution, this simply wouldn't suffice in the creation of a video crash course.  Students were presented with many challenges such as the choice of suitable video clips and background music, the use of humour and the editing of the final project, just to mention a few.  They did not use any professional equipment; most of them were armed with their iPhones, laptops and tons of ingenuity. As we were in the thick of the design and creation stages, I felt confident that the unit was structured well enough for students to achieve the best successful outcomes. After all, we had learned explicit skills and also looked at sample crash courses.  However, I hadn't thought about promoting a culture of excellence. 

In Ethic of Excellence, Ron Berger tells us about the importance of critiquing in creating work of value. Teachers need to display student work and have a genuine conversation with the students about its strengths and the areas that need improvement. Students need to display their work and receive purposeful feedback from their peers, so that they can improve their drafts. This has made me reflect on my own teaching. Too often in Humanities we've done meaningful projects but we've rushed through them and haven't taken the time to make the work beautiful. Like any other skill, this needs to be taught explicitly and modelled by the teacher. I had clearly dropped the ball on this one. 

As I watch my students' crash courses, I'm haunted by "what if's". What if we had taken the time to critique various drafts of the script? What if I had set time aside for students to show initial versions of their footage to receive constructive feedback. What if we had discussed in more detail the qualities of effective crash courses? What if instead of hiding the crash courses from the previous year because of my silly fear of stifling creativity, we had, instead, unpacked them together comparing the strong ones with the less engaging ones?  

The truth is that had we delved more into the process, I would not be displaying only some of the students' work on this post. Had I promoted a culture of excellence in my class where students are held accountable to critique one another's work and taught them how to pay attention to those subtle details that can refine the final product, then the outcomes would have been different. Like any other product that requires a good dose of creativity one, it is unrealistic to expect students to get it right on their first draft. 

Having said that, I cannot but feel a sense of admiration towards my students because considering all the aforementioned shortcomings, they were still able to create products of value. Some of them are posted below: