The Eye Roll Seen 'Round the World

I start my daily scroll. I have set a time limit. (Usually 20 minutes that turns into 45 minutes). 

First - it’s a lot of ads. Then my For You Page (fyp) begins to take on my interests… which is mostly large cats. Tigers. Lions. Panthers. BIG cats. 

I love them. In fact, it is a full blown obsession of mine. When I am lucky enough to escape the tundra and go to a zoo, I can stand at the same tiger exhibit for hours. And I mean hours (much to the chagrin of my usual travel companion). 

But I digres…

It makes sense that BIG cats dominate my fyp, but not every TikTok fits this mold. Because of my past searches, reading interest, and what I can only assume is a constant microphone listening to my every word, TikTok knows that I am a teacher. So a fair amount of my fyp is made up of teacher content. 

Sometimes its that lady who just records her after school routine every day - which is inexplicably, deeply satisfying to watch. 
Sometimes, its a funny clip about teacher besties - which I immediately send to my own teacher besties. And sometimes… it just pisses me off.

For instance, there is one TikTok teacher (who has to be making twice his teaching salary on the platform) who loves to poke fun at admin asking if students know the learning target by approaching his sleeping toddler to ask. Or there is the tired memes of admin acting like the magical solution to every problem was posting a learning target or building relationships. 

At first, none of these annoyed me. And I even found them funny.

But after a couple years of TeacherTok and more infamously, QuitTok, they make me a little sick to my stomach. Sad, mostly.

Now that I have a leg in both words - teaching and administration, simultaneously - I have the advantage of knowing the full story. Instead of having things parlayed to me after some training the admin went to, I am now usually with them. I see the information first hand that backs up all those initiatives, new approaches, etc. And from this new perspective, I’ve come to see how the message doesn’t always translate too well to the teachers getting the summary in the staff meeting. 

Instead, a kind of ugly things happen. Admin try to keep it short (“to be considerate of your time”) and in doing so, usually skip explaining the real why behind administrative choices, or they oversimplifying the strategy all together in their effort to be concise.

And that’s when I hear the muttering as people exit the meeting, which happens to be the same muttering that becomes material for TikTok teachers: the oversimplification of something meaningful diluted further and further with each conversation and exchange of the original idea.

I’ll start with the more contentious of the messages I previously described: learning targets.

Classroom educators - because of years and years of message dilution - don’t really seem to understand why posting the learning target matters. How could putting a piece of paper with a statement on the board fix anything? How does a simple statement written on your PowerPoint (or Canva presentation, if you’re cool) make any real difference? 

And when you look at is as that simple - they don’t matter. You could religiously post your daily learning target and even acknowledge it in class, but it isn’t going to make any substantial difference. When used in this simplified way, its just words. And words are empty when they are just lain bare.

So let me take a stab at explaining this one - in a way that makes sense to the classroom teacher. (I hope. I mean, I am a classroom teacher, and it makes sense to me).

First, conveying a single learning target is a great start, but more important is the progression of learning. The step-by-step process of learning that you are going to go through with students. 

Let me explain using my own class: AP Language and Composition.

One learning target for AP Language is that students can explain how an argument demonstrates understanding of an audience’s beliefs, values, or needs.

The unfortunate reality is that neurologically, a sixteen-year-old is not mentally developed enough to analyze rhetoric like this. It takes a fully developed brain to achieve cognition at that level, which usually happens around age 25. No 16. Imagine learning that - despite the fact that you are not wired to do this really hard thing - you have to do it. On a time limit, even.

Our kids are up against (what feels like) impossible things. Even what you feel is “something they should already know” or “pretty basic stuff” may not feel so basic to your learners. And facing something that feels truly gargantuan can be diminishing. (For me and my students, this is the world we live in for all of our second semester.) And if you experience that experience over and over again… it chips away at the fragile self-efficacy our students have. 

So how does a piece of paper on the board fix that?

Duh. I already told you. It doesn’t.

Instead, let me illustrate how I use a progression of learning to build their confidence. Prior to this “scene,” I just make a slide with my progression of learning (see below).