Teaching in the Margins

For a given science class, being able to go the margins of your classroom can differentiate a great teacher and an adequate teacher. I, like many, grew up hearing the word “margins” referring to paper ones like these:

We end up self-defining these red streaks as our limits, or our bounds. Things don’t belong on the outside of these lines. Doodles and extra writings outside these margins are criticize-able by teachers everywhere, consequently obstructing creativity and different styles of thinking. Why pick up a thought process that teaches in them and not beyond them.

Word definitions depend on context and tone, and that’s why I love to dwell on looking into the rhetoric behind the idea. I’d always thought of the margin as the wall, the barrier, the separator when really that’s not what the margin of the classroom is. Ann Haley-Oliphant defines margins as “the connecting bridges” like between a forest and a prairie or the beach between civilization and the ocean. The margins are the changing point from one item or area to the other maintaining a healthy blend of the two.

Margin, of course, is a relative term. You can’t have a margin without the center of what it’s the margin of. In a classroom setting the “center” of these margins is your typical lecture style run class. The margins that Ann Haley-Oliphant refers to of that setting could be:

• the experiential projects
• the inquiry behind researching
• even the in depth hypothetical discussions about scientific topics

This talk about this middle ground reminds me of this developmental concept of the comfort zone, learning zone, and danger zone.

• The Comfort zone is something that completely safe for you to do, that you are used to doing. I think of traditional lecture style as this.
• The Danger zone is where you’re completely uncomfortable with the task or idea, and your mind and self kind of shut down. This is where I amended my original “go beyond the margins” thought process, because if you go to far out there with your class, you lose them.
• The Learning zone is where you take risks to try and expand your comfort zone. This is what I think about when I think of teaching to the margins.

The Danger zone can be pretty easy to identify as you can tell obvious discomfort when you have your students do something completely out of left field. However, how can you tell whether or not you’re teaching to the center, or to everyone’s comfort zone, or to the margins, in their learning zone? Here’s a graphic that provides some questions to help answer that.

While the graphic rather pertains to everyday life, you can easily implement some to a classroom setting.

It’s important to know that teaching to margins should have a healthy balance with teaching in the center. Keep that in mind, stretch those learning zone muscles often, but don’t strain them!

Applications:

For our future classrooms, it’s going to be important for us to realize that we can’t always plan for going to the margins. As discussed in class, a recent hurricane can be a margins style lesson for perhaps a physical science or biology life, getting students to think about how it may work or how it will affect others.

For a Chemistry class, your classroom could:

• Discuss what elements would bond with what elements and why some elements want to bond more readily than others
• create their own conversion factor and figure out how that will relate when we talk about moles
• maybe inquire how why the periodic table is shaped if they’ve learned about mass number and atomic number
• perform experiments that they are curious about and have them find their own “answers”

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Teaching in the Margins vs Teachable moments

Telling someone teachable moments are the same as teaching in the margins is like telling them what happened is the same as letting them figure out why it happened.

Teaching in the margins is a style that can generate autonomy, mastery, and purpose (which we’ll drive into next week). While it may still lead to some sort of extrinsic motivation in a classroom, it provokes students and teachers to think of different ways to accomplish a similar task, or more open-minded to broaden the thoughts.

Teachable moments can occur anytime and anywhere. People can learn something by any sort of event happening. It’s a time where the person receives an answer from an outside source. They are also moments in time, not periods.

Teaching within the margins can allow students to answer things themselves as opposed to teachable moments having a cut and dry answer to them. I think that’s my ultimate distinction between the two, a teachable moment can answer what a student should do, and teaching in the margins can provoke a student to learn why they do what they do.

Telling someone “why” can involve many different “whats” along the way, but telling someone “what”, does not always answer “why”. Teaching to the margins can elicit teachable moments, but having teachable moments may not mean you are teaching to the margins. Both are vital to a successful classroom.