What’s Your Aim?
By Sara Osborne
The midpoint of a semester naturally prompts some reflection, for both teachers and students. This half-way point often reveals whether a teacher’s fresh plan, new curriculum, or adjusted content has yielded its desired results. Similarly, students take stock of their performance on class assignments and assessments and consider whether or not their study strategies are working as planned. Interestingly, while these observations and reflections are prompted by the arrival of midterm, it is the end-of-the-year goal which determines our conclusions about perceived progress—or lack thereof.
Midterm reflections prompt us to consider where we are in light of where we hope to be. We have an opportunity to assess and recalibrate, not entirely dissimilar to a runner switching up fuel, shedding a layer of clothing, or adjusting pace in order to reach her race goals. As you pause to consider your students’ progress and plot your forward course, consider these questions for reflection.
1. Are your tools serving your aim or determining it?
Few teachers possess enough free time to construct every reading, handout, and course assignment from scratch. We rely on help from others, whether that be a classical publisher’s carefully crafted Latin text, an organized math curriculum, or a collection of writing prompts. Utilizing such tools allows us think more about concept delivery and application instead of worksheet aesthetics and requires less energy from increasingly weary professors. However, perhaps without us realizing it, these tools can begin to drive our aims instead of serving them. Is a table of contents directing the ideas you teach to your students? Does the content need to be adapted in order to best suit your aims? Do planned projects need to be tweaked in order to promote students’ holistic growth and not simply focus on skill production? As teachers, we are ever observing and adjusting. Take time at the midpoint of the semester to consider how well your tools are serving your end goals.
2. Do you need to adjust your pace to fit the needs of your students?
Most every teacher begins the schoolyear with a plan of attack—a syllabus, calendar, or outline for how we hope the semester will unfold. This makes sense from a scheduling perspective; rarely will we accomplish what we haven’t thought out ahead of time. Yet however compelling or exciting these schedules are, they are largely created in a vacuum: we don’t know our individual students or the culture of a particular class when we craft our plans. At the midpoint of the semester, both student and class personalities have begun to show. What have you noticed about your particular group of students? Is the pace of the course leading to discouragement and burnout? Or are students bored and in need of a challenge? Perhaps both scenarios are true, and you need to find ways to offer differentiation in activities and assignments. A calendar we create in June need not determine our exact pace all the way until December. Our willingness to adjust our plans to meet student needs demonstrates that people are more important than pace. Consider your students’ response to your teaching so far and adapt accordingly.
3. Do your students see how their work is leading to the aim(s) of the class?
The “midterm slump” often exhibited by yawning, tardiness, and/or general fatigue doesn’t just stem from a smattering of important tests that happen to fall in mid-October. At midterm, students—and teachers—no longer stand at the fresh beginning of the schoolyear; neither are they within sight of the finish line. We’re somewhere in the middle, a particularly unmotivating place to be. Striving to connect what students are doing in class on a random Tuesday in November to their end goal(s) cultivates perspective and motivation. The ability to see how what we are doing now is contributing to something we hope to achieve later is not only motivating; it cultivates character. Do your students need a reminder of where their work is taking them? Are there ways you could verbalize connections or build assignments and activities into your class that would promote this perspective?
Considering these questions and brainstorming new ways to teach and motivate your students will benefit student and teacher alike. However, as is often the case in the classroom, students may learn the most from you simply by watching you problem solve. Do they see a teacher so committed to her aims that she is willing to rework a textbook table of contents to better serve the goals of her class? Do they see a professor who is willing to adjust his pace, slowing down to help weaker students or looking for ways to challenge faster thinkers? Do your students encounter an instructor who wants to pursue students’ joy and formation through shaping perspective on mid-semester tasks? There is no perfect teaching tool, pace, or motivation strategy a teacher can employ to ensure student success. Still, we can be willing to grow alongside our students, giving them a view of Christian teaching that seeks to serve and consider others as more important than ourselves. What changes will you make as you shepherd students through the middle of this semester?
The Classical Thistle 