Flip the Script/Flip the Classroom

When someone smiles at us, we generally smile back. When someone is hostile towards us, we tend to react with hostility. But what if we flip the script? Do the unexpected? Treat hostility with kindness? Assume the best in everyone? 

Yesterday I listened to an Invisibilia podcast from last July – “Flip the Script”. I highly recommend giving the entire podcast a listen, but at the very least, read this transcript of the introductory segment (from http://www.npr.org/2016/07/15/485904654/read-the-transcript):

ALIX SPIEGEL, HOST:

This story starts in Washington, D.C., on a warm summer night. There were eight friends gathered around a backyard dinner table. They were toasting family and friendship. And everybody was having a good time.

MICHAEL RABDOU: Kind of one of those great evenings - lots of awesome food and French wine. And it was like a magical night.

SPIEGEL: That's Michael Rabdau. He was there with his wife and his 14-year-old daughter Khyber. And he says it was getting late, maybe around 10 p.m., when it happened.

RABDOU: I was standing beside my wife. And I just saw this arm with a long barrel gun come between us. It was as if in slow motion this hand - and then it just got really quiet.

SPIEGEL: The hand belonged to a man, medium height, in clean, high-end sweats. He raised the gun and held it first to the head of Michael's friend, Christina, and then to the head of Michael's wife.

RABDOU: Then he said...

KHYBER: Give me your money.

SPIEGEL: That's Khyber, Michael's daughter.

KHYBER: Kept repeating, give me your money.

RABDOU: Or I'm going to start effing shooting. And we believed him.

SPIEGEL: But there was a problem. No one had any money. So they started talking, grasping for some way to dissuade the man. They started with guilt.

RABDOU: What would your mother...

KHYBER: What would your mother think of you?

RABDOU: And he said something like, I don't have an effing mother.

SPIEGEL: Michael remembers thinking, this is headed towards a very bad end.

RABDOU: Someone was going to get hurt.

SPIEGEL: But then one of the women at the table, this woman Christina, pipes up. She has an offer for the man.

KHYBER: She said, you know, we're here celebrating. Why don't you have a glass of wine (laughter)?

RABDOU: It was like a switch. He could feel the difference.

SPIEGEL: All of a sudden, Michael says, the look on the man's face changed.

RABDOU: And he tasted the wine - and just said to him, that's a really good glass wine. We had some cheese there, too. And so he reached down for the cheese. And then he put the gun in his pocket.

SPIEGEL: The man drank his wine, ate his cheese. And then he said something that no one expected.

RABDOU: I think I've come to the wrong place. And we were all like, hey, I understand.

SPIEGEL: For a moment, they all sat there together, the stars overhead twinkling, the sound of chirping insects in the night air.

RABDOU: And then he said something just so strange - just said, can I get a hug? My wife hugged him. And then our friend hugged him. Then he said, can we have a group hug?

SPIEGEL: And so everyone got up and formed a circle around the man.

RABDOU: I can't tell you how strange that was. But we all did come around him and hug him. And he said, he was sorry. And he walked out with a glass of wine out the gate.

SPIEGEL: Later that evening, after everything had calmed down, they would find the glass neatly placed on the sidewalk by their alley - not thrown, not carelessly discarded - placed. But that was later. At the time, all they could think to do was run into the house and cry in gratitude.

The podcast goes on to tell two other stories of people who have flipped the script, done the unexpected. One story is about a town that wooed back young men who were being radicalized and groomed for ISIS. The other story is about a man who tried to make online dating more “real” and less demanding of perfection. The stories all made me think of parenting, teaching, critical pedagogy, cross-cultural connections, and the gradeless classroom. What do they have in common?

Respect. Treating everyone as an individual human with a mind of their own and a figurative suitcase full of cultural background and life experiences which affect their perception of reality. Assuming that we all have room for growth and we all have things we can teach each other.

One beautiful example I thought of while listening was Monte Syrie's Project 180. Monte handed each student an “A” on the first day of class. Talk about flipping the script! Imagine how shocked and surprised those students must have been, to know they already had an A for the year. Instead of the traditional power play that grades can be in a teacher’s hands (see Aaron Blackwelder's confession about his past grading practices), this teacher treated his students with respect, treated them as learners, let them know that he had faith in them. He recognized their humanity. As Aaron Blackwelder so eloquently wrote, 

"When I decided to remove grades from the equation, what would replace it? What filled the gap left by letters and numbers had to be better. It had to have some meaning. It had to be human. I wanted to give my students what they deserved more than anything — recognition."

When I read the blogs of my fellow learners in Teachers Going Gradeless (TG2), the words in the following list occur over and over:

becoming
culture
feedback
growth mindset
humanity
individuality
inspiration
learning
possibility
recognition
students as experts
yet

They are all ways of expressing respect, hope, and faith in students. I'm not saying anything new here. I'm just saying it again in my own words. It bears repeating. These ideals, I believe, are at the heart of true pedagogy, at the heart of the gradeless movement, and at the heart of what every teacher wants to see in their classroom.

Flip the script. Flip your classroom.