A teacher’s voice. We all have heard a teacher talking. The sound is a part of each of us who has been schooled, whether in a public, private or home setting. Part of our growing up was caused by the sound of a teacher’s voice. Some of those voices have been lost to time; but one or two of those voices still talk to us no matter how long we have been away from their teaching.
Part of my job is to listen to teachers talk. It is great work. Even though I have done this work for almost forty years and am highly trained in pedagogy and instructional supervision, I am never more than one more child sitting in a desk in the back of the classroom ready to learn from the teacher who is talking.
Adults listen to a teacher’s voice differently than how a child listens to the same voice.
We listen for expertise. We listen for certainty. We listen for a context and message that makes sense to us. We want the teacher to demonstrate a mastery of subject matter. If the teacher is talking history, we want to hear names and places, dates and events, cause and effect, interpretation and meaning. We want a story that creates mental images of the history we learned as children and reassures us that our children also will know those same stories. If the teacher is talking chemistry, we want to hear the names of elements and balanced equations. We want to observe a scientific approach to verified knowledge. We want the truth of proven or disproven hypotheses. If the teacher is talking French or Spanish or Manchurian, we want to hear a mastery of dialect and observe the structure of grammar even if we do not comprehend the words. We want our teacher’s voice to convey to children that their teacher knows what she or he is teaching.
We want our teacher’s voice to be directing. Teaching a classroom full of children is not a place for a timid voice or the sound of the unsure. Lessons that are planned for student learning also need a voice that directs children through the learning activities. We want a voice that can move twenty to thirty children from their innate, self-engrossed, highly social normalcy into a lesson created for them. It doesn’t matter if that voice is younger or older, female or male; the voice must be heard and listened to by children. The directing words vary greatly teacher to teacher. Some use humor. Some immediately connect the moment to yesterday’s lesson. Some are challenging and pose questions intended to cause children to turn their attention toward the teacher’s purpose. As adults, we want the teacher’s voice to the voice of THE adult in the room. Our teacher is in charge of children.
Our teacher’s voice needs to know the children being taught. When the teacher uses children’s names in an easy and familiar fashion, we are assured that our teacher knows these children. When the voice smiles or frowns at what children do, we know that this voice knows the individual child in the class. When the voice laughs and children laugh, we laugh with relief that our teacher and these children are okay together.
I hear the teacher’s voice and draw supervisory conclusions.
Then, the child in me listens.
My child wants to hear my name and see the teacher looking and talking with me not at or over me. As a child, I know if my teacher knows me. Some of my teachers look across the room with wide eyes that don’t see me or my friends; they see the class and they see children who are not paying attention. That is when the teacher’s voice changes and I know that that particular voice doesn’t know me or any other child in this room very well. This teacher wants her voice to be the most important voice in this room. I want my teacher’s voice and eyes and the look on her face to be one and the same; interested in me and concerned with my learning.
The child in me wants to hear my teacher listen. There is a sound to listening. It starts with the listener being quiet. I know that it is the teacher’s job to teach and that means to talk. But, if all I hear are the teacher’s words, I know that my teacher is not listening. Listen! When I hear my teacher using my words, I know that my teacher is listening to me. When she uses my friends’ words, I know that she is listening to them. It gets even better when my teacher says that she agrees with what she heard. If she says “that’s right” or “very good” or even “okay” now again, then it is much easier to pay attention when she also says, “let’s look at (or say that) again.” I want to get it right and when I know that my teacher wants to help me get it right, I want it even more. Listening to me takes time and even more time when what I say or do needs correcting or refining. And, when she says, “have you thought about…,” she has me hooked. My teacher’s voice hooks me and pulls on my learning and doesn’t let go.
I hear a lot of teacher voices tell me what to tell them. Usually that means my teacher wants me to know exactly what she said and be able to answer true or false or pick out the right answer to a question from three or four possible answers. This voice is teaching, I suppose, but I am not really learning. I can do this. I memorize and recall what I need to tell the teacher from what I remember her saying. I listen to telling teachers all the time. But, I am not really learning. The teacher who has me learning is the one who hooked me. She is more interested in my voice than hearing me repeat her voice.
Learning in school doesn’t stop at the last bell when I hear my real teacher’s voice. Her words, her questions, her interest in me stays with me when I talk to my parents about “how’d it go in school today?” I have no interest in telling them about my “telling” teachers, but I usually tell my parents more than they want to hear about my teacher who listens and cares about what I say and do. Her voice stays with me day after day and year after year.
It is difficult to be an adult when the child in me is listening to a voice that is about hooking the minds of children and causing them to learn. I want to remain in that child mode and not be supervisory. Supervision is for the voice of the telling teacher. However, it is easy to be a fellow professional with my learning teacher’s voice, because she will want to know what I heard and saw and thought. Just like the children she was teaching, there is a learning child in her that also wants to learn and not just be taught. She will learn more and more about causing children to learn and still not know enough. Our conversation will be so very different than a talk with a “telling” teacher.
After years of doing this work, I know that I have not heard enough classroom voices that touch the learning child in me. The good news is that there are lots of classrooms where children are doing what the teacher requires and those children and their teacher are very successful in school testing and the metrics that compare what children have learned with the expectation of what they should have learned. In fact, every day of every school year there are many more instructional successes like this than we ever hear about when news media is more interested in reporting on problems and failures. Still, when I hear the voice a teacher who is totally focused on how and what children think and problem solve than in repeating common knowledge, it causes the child and professional listener in me to be hooked once again.
I hear these teacher voices over and over again. They teach me still.