The siren song of the explicit outcome
… we must steer clear of the Sirens, their enchanting song, their meadow starred with flowers … … you must bind me with tight chaffing ropes so I cannot move a muscle, bound to the spot, erect at the mast-block, lashed by ropes to the mast …
[The Odyssey, Book 1217—280 Fagle translation]
So Odysseus commands his crew as they approach the Sirens and their ‘urgent song’. They obey and they all survive.
There’s a siren song that we English teachers heard some time ago, but unfortunately we listened and got waylaid.
It was the song of the explicit outcome.
The following scene is inspired by the dizzying I experienced as an English teacher, attempting to satisfy the requirements of explicit outcomes
This is taking longer than she thought it would. Filling in a plan for the poetry lesson seemed like such an obvious and helpful thing to do, especially given the warm and encouraging supervision of her mentor teacher. But she kept getting stuck on the ‘Lesson Outcomes’ box.
‘It’s important,’ her mentor had advised, ‘that the outcomes are explicit and measurable, otherwise you’ll have no way of knowing if you’ve achieved your aim, no way of knowing if the students have learned what you want them to learn.’
It seemed so reasonable, so useful, this advice. She had a tendency, she suspected, to get lost in her love of stories and words, and maybe the students didn’t learn anything particularly useful as a result. Being explicit should help.
But what was it that she wanted her students to learn? And did she want Sophie (who loved their present text and wrote poetry herself) to learn the same things as Brad (who thought English was a waste of time and was desperately trying to get by to please his parents)? Did she want Ayati (who was struggling with the language) to be learning the same as Desheng (who wanted to be a doctor, was a high achiever, but who struggled to see beyond the literal)?
‘The students will respond to the text in various ways,’ she wrote, but immediately scribbled it out. She could hear her mentor saying ‘too vague’, and ‘not measurable’.
‘The students will understand that poetry can open our eyes to the previously unseen.’ She liked this. It was what Maxine Greene had always said about the function of literature. But how would she measure it? She giggled inwardly as she imagined a test which said ‘describe what you could see before and after reading this poem’. Desheng would go ape.
Perhaps, she began to think, the problem was with the assumption that lurked beneath the whole idea of outcomes, the idea the English teaching was entirely to do with teaching what can be made explicit and what could be measured.
What had her own English teacher done, she wondered. How had she become someone in love with the English language and the stories it continually tells?
Her mind drifted back to her own school days and lessons spent where the students read their favourite poems, where they played with language (along with her teacher) in ways that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t, where the school librarian would bring each Tuesday a box of books (different genres, different lengths) for the students to choose from.
Were these the keys to her love of English?
Or was it the friendship group, and the time spent listening to Alysha?
Or perhaps it was the work they all did on preparing a school play?
English, for her, was more about engaging with the world through language – something she now realized she’d been doing from the moment she’d been born.
Birds fly, fish swim; people language.
Outcomes were a distraction, a siren call. Could she tie herself to the mast and resist it?