Compliance or Learning?

I was talking to a friend the other day about my frustrations with the amount of governmental interference there seems to be in education.  I feel like there is way too much time and focus on the things that we are "required" to do that often have little to do with the actual teaching and learning that we as educators are most passionate about.  All of the mandates and policies that require teachers to jump through hoops are causing fatigue and frustration for our educators.  They have great skill and I, for one, want them to be set free to put all of their time and effort into applying that skill to what they do best and that is teach students, or ignite learning in students.  As an administrator, I am dedicated to protecting the teachers from the onslaught of compliance driven tasks.

As I continue to grapple with this problem and think about how best to tackle it, I do have to wonder whether our students have a similar plight.  Are they also frustrated and fatigued by a system that is more focused on compliance than learning?  Certainly, the traditional schooling model that was built on the behaviorist theory of learning had a very heavy compliance component.  However,  we now know so much more about how students learn and about the social emotional needs of students.  We know the importance of a healthy balance.

Think about your own classroom.  Is your focus more on learning or compliance?  Both are important, but it is important that compliance does not become a barrier to learning.  Ask yourself these two questions:
Are there students who struggle academically simply because they are non compliant?
Are there students who succeed academically simply because they are compliant?
In the first case, you may have a student who is interested in learning, but will quickly lose interest because of a perceived lack of success.  In the second case, you may have a student who appears to succeed but has learned nothing.  By this, I mean the student who came into class with high skills and simply played the game by being compliant but did not grow in his/her learning at all.  In both cases, it is possible the student will get frustrated by their lack of learning and give up on school and learning.

You may have said no to both questions and that is great. I know that we have come a long way and that is exciting.  You may have said yes to one or both questions.  Decide if it is something you want to address and then evaluate your practice to find a small adjustment that you can make as a first step.

I am, by no means, saying that compliance is not important.  It definitely is.  I am just encouraging balance.  Recently I was interviewing a friend who teaches 7th grade Social Studies in a school with a challenging population.  I asked her to describe the kind of student who gets the highest marks in her class and she started out by saying "Well, that is most of them..."  I asked her why she thought it was most of them and she said that they are just always busy and engaged in a variety of tasks and she just doesn't let anyone off the hook.  She tells them exactly what the target is and helps them get there.  I think that if you focus on learning and your students know that, you don't have to worry so much about compliance.