Talk That Teaches: Teaching Practices That Work
Leaders at Deighton Primary have encouraged teachers to talk to each other and learn from each other. Overtime, teachers have opened their classrooms to their colleagues and have shared their practice with and learnt from other schools. Teachers in the school are confident and ready to take measured pedagogical risks and try new approaches and strategies in order to continue to develop professionally.
There are pupils on roll, who are taught in three single age and three mixed-age classes. There is also a part-time nursery class. Most pupils are of white British ethnicity and none speak Welsh at home. A very few pupils speak English as an additional language. A very few pupils have a statement of special educational needs. A very few pupils are looked after by the local authority.
The headteacher has been in post since April , and the deputy headteacher was appointed in April Senior leaders have high expectations of themselves, their staff and their pupils.
- The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation?
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Staff agree that the school has to provide the best life chances that it can for its pupils and raise their aspirations. This is the driving force behind everything the school does. When the headteacher was appointed in , the school did not have a culture of sharing practice between teachers. After a difficult start, the culture changed gradually and gained impetus after the inspection of , in response to the recommendation about sharing good practice. Now, the school uses a mixture of formal lesson observations by senior leaders and more informal observations in teacher triads to continue to raise the quality of teaching across the school.
In doing so, teachers aim to embed the four purposes from Successful Futures Donaldson, into the curriculum and move towards an area of learning and experience approach. The headteacher and deputy headteacher focused initially on improving collaboration between teachers in the school. In recent years, they have extended this approach to develop a culture of collaboration with other schools in the regional consortium and further afield to help improve teaching.
School leaders encourage teachers to visit other schools in Wales and beyond to acquire new ideas to influence and improve their practice.
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In , the headteacher tried to introduce termly lesson observations. Despite some initial opposition, by , regular lesson observations and sharing good practice across the school became the norm. Observations concentrate on different elements of the framework across the year, while maintaining a focus on pupil progress and standards at all times.
When senior leaders carry out their termly formal lesson observations, they provide teachers with a very detailed analysis of their lessons, including how long the teacher has spent delivering each section of the lesson. It aids senior leaders when providing teachers with clear developmental feedback and enables them to identify specific issues that individuals can work to improve. That sort of leadership evokes energies within people that far exceed the powers of coercion.
I first learned about this kind of leadership as a community organizer working on white racism. The whites in our community, contrary to their racist reputation, wanted to have a humane dialogue with their new black neighbors, but, having no idea how to create that conversation, sank into deeper and deeper isolation from the newcomers and into the racism that isolation breeds. Of course, this kind of leadership depends on our ability to look beyond the masks people wear and into their true condition. Some faculty may wear a mask of indifference about teaching, but the best academic leaders know that beneath the mask there may be real concern—if only because most faculty spend so many hours in the classroom that self-interest cries out for those hours to be made more fruitful.
- Origine du nom de famille LONGUET (French Edition).
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And beyond narrow self-interest, there are reasons to care about teaching that are rooted deep in the human soul. When the bond is broken, both groups feel fearful and incomplete, and both will wish to reweave the relationship, no matter how profoundly alienated they may be.
The Smart Way to Talk to Teachers
Experience tells me not only that there is a deep reservoir of insight about teaching among faculty, but also that faculty have a deep need to draw upon that life-giving source. The reservoir waits to be tapped by leaders who perceive its presence, who expect and invite people to draw upon it, who offer excuses and permissions for the dialogue to happen—and who can help make that dialogue less woeful than it sometimes is and as winsome as it can easily be. Are you going to spend the next two days telling me that I have to teach organic chemistry through role-playing? His anger humorous in retrospect, but a bit dismaying in the moment reflects one factor that has made our discourse about teaching more woeful than winsome: But at its source, the bias is created by our penchant for evading the human challenges of selfhood and community by seeking refuge in the safer, technical dimension of things.
If leaders want to create a new conversation about teaching, they must find topics that do not exclude technique but that take us into realms more truthful, more demanding, more productive of insight—topics that do not deny the need for technical knowledge but that bring us into a community of discourse fed by the richness of our corporate experience. From the myriad topics that emerge once one starts looking deeper than technique, I want to describe four that I have found effective in my work with faculty: I define a critical moment as one when a learning opportunity will either open up or shut down for your students—depending, in part, on how you respond.
The moments are many and marvelous.
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The first day of class, or even the first 15 minutes, are often mentioned. Equally as critical as these moments of tension and dissension are moments of a more positive sort: As we brainstorm these moments, and locate them on the time line with a word or two, a simple but vital thing happens. People start speaking openly about events that have perplexed and troubled and defeated them in classroom teaching—and also about those they have managed and mastered and turned into teachable moments.
That is, they do the one thing most necessary if we are to help each other grow as teachers: Everyone can feel both honored and challenged in his or her own teaching style. As the map-making slows down, we choose three or four of the most important critical moments and we talk to each other about what we have done in those moments—for better and for worse. The choices are somewhat predictable; e.
But what faculty say to each other about what they have done, and might do, in those moments is marvelously unpredictable.
It allows us to plot our own locations as teachers by relating to the locations of others. We are free to speak about our own practice in a way that makes us only as vulnerable as we choose to be-a freedom that makes the conversation both possible and fruitful. A second topic for good talk about good teaching is the human condition of teachers and learners. An obsession with technique often leads us to ignore the human dynamics of the classroom.
But when we reflect on teaching in a more open-ended way as in the critical moments exercise , we soon see that our response to any given moment depends primarily on what is happening inside of us—and on how we diagnose what is happening inside our students—and only secondarily on the methods at our command. Good teaching depends less on technique than it does on the human condition of the teacher, and only by knowing the truth of our own condition can we hope to know the true condition of our students.
As I speak with faculty about the human condition, I am increasingly convinced that one of the biggest barriers to good teaching is our diagnosis of students today. Briefly stated, this diagnosis holds that the classroom behaviors of many students e. If that is a caricature, it is nevertheless instructive: The young have been thoroughly marginalized by the elders of this society, and their deepest response is not an angry rejection of us but a fearful internalization of our rejection of them.
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This fear leads them to hide behind masks of silence and indifference in the classroom—the same silence that marginalized people have always practiced in the presence of people with power. But I believe that much of my diagnosis applies to this group as well. Though our image of non-traditional students is often of self-confidence and expressiveness, it may be that adult learners are simply mature enough to know how to mask their fears.
Their return to school is often triggered by an experience of marginalization—a divorce, the death of a spouse, the failure of a career. To diagnose our students well, we must diagnose ourselves.
Why are we, the mentors, unable to see the fear within our students? Why do we insist, instead, on accusing them of banality? The answer, I think, has to do with our own fearfulness: Our fear of the judgment of our students helps account for the tendency of too many academics to grow more cynical about students and teaching as the years go by; we are growing a shell of self-protection.
Once we understand the fearful condition of teachers and learners, the classroom can become a place where fear is faced and overcome. I know of no technique to overcome fear. And I know that I am less likely to face my own fear if I do not have a community of honest and open colleagues with whom to explore my struggles as a teacher. The human condition is vast and varied, and fear is only one of its faces. But whether the focus is fear or power or ego, or grace or humility or love, an effort to understand the inner lives of teachers and learners not only makes for compelling conversation but for better teaching and learning as well.
A third approach to good talk about good teaching is to explore metaphors and images about who we are, what we are doing and what we would like to be and do—when we teach. There is only the indirectness of imagination and poetry and art, and that is the value of metaphor: By articulating and exploring the metaphors that arise when we reflect on our own teaching, we touch the deep dimensions of self and vocation that defy headlong analysis. This process is not as precious as I may have just made it sound, as my own case will illustrate.
Though the image seemed insane to me at the time, I now understand that it was an apt and amusing challenge to my actual practice as a young teacher: It took me years to appreciate that this strange metaphor was calling me to new insights about my work, insights more consistent with my own nature as teacher and learner.
Good Talk About Good Teaching
I worked doggedly sorry to unpack the metaphor, looking, for example, at the various functions a sheepdog performs: How does a sheepdog do these things? By creating an invisible but firmly enforced boundary around the sheep, by holding them within a space where they have a certain freedom within a certain discipline and demand. Eventually, that became the key to my own best work as a teacher: That insight alone became an immense challenge. The image of teaching that I had absorbed from the academy requires the professor not to create space but to fill it up, a task I had learned to perform with a vengeance.
Over the years, the metaphor has continued to unfold for me. I began asking deeper questions about what needed to happen within the space I was creating. Unlike the sheepdog, who wants unquestioning obedience from the sheep, I wanted my students to come into selfhood and community within that space—not just any form of community, but a learning community, one in which the interactions between students and teacher are disciplined by the subject that is at the center of our circle. As time went by, the seemingly crude sheepdog metaphor evolved into an image that continues to help me teach from my own deepest identity: But had I not taken the metaphor seriously, I do not think I would have evolved an image of teaching that speaks so deeply to my condition and that continues to challenge me in daily practice.
We reveal ourselves at levels that makes us vulnerable to real growth, and we discern solutions that no rational strategy could generate. In short, talking about teaching through metaphors can make us available to ourselves, and to each other, in fresh and surprising ways.