The Spectacular Way of Avoiding the Pedagogy of Poverty

I recently finished reading Brian Shultz’s interesting book “Spectacular Things Happen Along the Way,” during which two big things really jumped out at me.  The first is that Brian Shultz REALLY needs to learn that brevity truly is the soul of wit.  I think that his 157 page exposition could have been as fully fleshed out in about 70 pages.  Seriously, this man truly knows how to repeat himself and bore an audience.  The second thing that struck me was that this guy, as a new teacher, is one amazing educator.  Just looking at the hours that this man put in for his class, both in extra time before and after school, and in time invested at home during evenings and weekends, his dedication and drive is clearly evident.  And I honestly must confess that as a future educator, I can’t imagine undertaking a project anywhere near the scope of Project Citizen that Shultz  was willing to tackle with his class.  Allow me to correct myself and thereby move into what I would like to discuss here.  You see, it wasn’t really Shultz tackling Project Citizen with his students, it was really him giving the authority over to his students, and allowing them to tackle Project Citizen in the way that seemed best to them. This is truly a revolutionary (if not exactly new) teaching strategy, and I applaud the success that Shultz and his students had with it.  There is a caveat, however.  This sort of teaching takes a huge investment of time on the part of the educator to pull off, and a willingness to seemingly lose control, at which point actually losing control of the classroom seems a little more likely to occur.  What struck me is the great way that Shultz came up with an alternative to the Pedagogy of Poverty, as outlined by Martin Haberman.  Haberman speaks of the model for education in poor areas as very authoritative, giving information, collecting it back at some point in the future, while telling students what to do and how to do it.  Nothing could be further from the way that Shultz organized his classroom.  He allowed his students to guide their own learning, and when he wanted to steer them in certain directions, as often as not he made suggestions instead of demands.  I respect Shultz much for his novel approach.  That being said, I am not sure that I can match such an approach with his level of success, but he can certainly stand in my mind as inspiration.