Teachers talk a lot about scaffolding for student success, but teachers understand scaffolding in different ways. In my view, good scaffolds allow students to access material, ideas, and skills they might not otherwise have the skills or knowledge to access. However, scaffolds can also be an unnecessary crutch that over-structure and overdetermine students’ thinking. Over…
Author: Alexander Rolnick
Asking For Help
An interesting trend I am noticing in my students’ final reflections on the year, is that some are mentioning they didn’t ask for help as much as they should have, and they are recommending that future students ask for help when they need it. This is despite my constant refrains that, “the only dumb question…
Powerful Learning Remotely
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my students who were failing remote learning. In the end, as I approach my grading deadline, only six students will fail. That seems like a success relative to the 22 who were in danger of failing two weeks ago, particularly since I saw four of the six…
Eleven Days on the Picket Line
What follows are some reflections based on my notes from the 2019 Chicago Teachers Union strike where I served as my school’s strike captain. On our eleven days on the picket line, we sang, danced, ate, and engaged in conversation punctuated by honking cars and trucks, and the occasional middle finger angrily aimed in our…
Student Motivation
This pandemic year has, broadly speaking, had a pretty significant impact on student motivation to learn, and particularly to complete assignments. When I check in with students, I often hear, “I’m just not motivated right now, Mr. Rolnick.” While finding the motivation to complete schoolwork has always been a challenge for some of my students,…
Graduating Seniors
For the first time in my career, I am enjoying the experience of seeing students I first taught as freshmen, and then again as juniors and seniors, graduate from high school. Of course, these students have had their high school experience dramatically altered as a result of the pandemic, but as Illinois and the United…
Serving a Community
Throughout my early college years, I struggled with wanting to know more about the world and its problems and wanting to make a genuinely positive impact on the world. I often felt paralyzed into inaction by my desire to know more. How could I be sure I was doing something meaningful or impactful, or that…
Critical Race Theory Panic
As a teacher of history and politics, I’ve been following the news about conservative objections to the teaching about race and racism in history, as well as the ensuing critical race theory panic closely. What is not so clear from the coverage about this topic is what exactly conservative forces mean by critical race theory….
Reflection and Learning
How do we know what we know and what we don’t know? Can we put our knowledge in context? Can we connect it to other things we know? Can we express how our knowledge influences or alters our worldview? How do our views and ideas change and develop? How do we determine when our ideas…
On a Pale Blue Dot
Many people profess to be aware of their smallness in the scheme of existence, but when it comes down it – on a day-to-day basis – people, myself included, get caught up in the details, passions, and conflicts of their everyday lives. In doing so, they embody what Carl Sagan, imagining looking down from space…