Process vs. Product

When it comes to student work, I love a well-crafted, polished finished product as much as anyone.  From a beautifully crafted, well-edited story to a creative science fair project, I certainly enjoy seeing my students’ handiwork.

Some of the time, I’m convinced, that enjoyment is fine.  Students do need to work through the writing process, sometimes publishing their most exemplary pieces.  Students should sweat the small stuff on rare occasion to ensure that they have created a beautiful brochure, map, model of Jupiter, or whatever it is that they’re working on.

Much of the time, however, what really matters should not be the finished product, but the process of thinking by which the student could arrive at that finished product.  It’s creating the hypothesis, deciding on the perfect word choice in a persuasive paragraph, or understanding why long division works that really matters.  Sometimes in our zeal for a perfect finished product we assign far too many math problems instead of having students deeply understand the process behind solving just two sample problems.  We ask students to spend an hour illustrating something when a two-minute sketch would suffice.  We force students to plow through a sea of reading comprehension questions instead of simply having a conversation with them asking for their thoughts about what they just read.

The solution to this, in my opinion, is for teachers to ask themselves not what finished product they wish to assign when teaching a particular standard, but rather what key understandings and thought processes they want the students to gain from having learned about that standard.  Viewing the final goal as a thinking/understanding goal can free us up to dramatically shift the product we expect, allowing a much larger percentage of class time to be spent having students actually think.

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Posted in: Education, Teaching, thinking