Tag Archives: causing learning

Disaggregated, There Is a Vast Difference in Teachers

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Teachers are a vast hodgepodge of people.  They come in all colors, shapes and sizes, and from the wide spectrum of cultural and socio-economic backgrounds.  At one point, each decided to be a teacher.  Some early in life, the majority during their education, and others after experiencing other vocations.  Each is the product of an educator preparation program.  Each has earned a baccalaureate or more degrees and each carry one or more teaching licenses.  As practitioners today, they range from first year teachers to four decade-long veterans.  Teachers also range across the spectrum of effectiveness.  That describes the hodgepodge of our profession.

Question?

If a teacher teaches a lesson and no one learns, did the teacher really teach?  Though a play on Cartesian logic, it is a question that is asked everyday about teachers.  We teach to cause children to learn. 

Every day there are millions of lessons taught in our schools.  A lesson is a complicated dance requiring teaching skills, teacher empathy, child readiness to learn, and child engagement with the teaching.  Teachers know the dance steps but too often their teaching does not lead to learning.  Some point to the other person(s) in the room – children.  “Only if the children …” is their lament.  Others point to the current morass of distractions confronting teaching and learning.  Technology, social media, unstable home life, poverty, harassment from their peers – take your pick, they each bear guilt.  On the Cartesian other hand, if a teacher teaches a lesson and every child learns, the teacher really did teach.

Not all teachers are created equal.

The following may be generalizations about teachers, but when you close your office or classroom door and consider your faculty peers, their names and faces fall into these.

We know teachers who have learned instruction as a form of mechanical teaching.  They can construct lessons.  They also know their curriculum.  They can attach content knowledge and skill development to their instruction.  They teach and some children learn some things sometimes.  If these teachers were inspired and excited about learning and if they were “connected” to the children they taught, the results would be different.  But they are not

We know teachers who innately care about children and in return children respond to them.  Their classrooms are happy and exciting places.  They teach and children engage because the teacher cares about them, their school life and their home life.  Children hear and see and do and learn something sometimes. However, being happy and excited overpowers their constructive instruction.  Class time is full of talk and activity and excitement, but their instruction is not focused and scaffolded to build learning outcomes.  These teachers are liked by children, but these students will need reteaching next year of what they did not learn this year.

We know teachers who can deliver high quality instruction and innately care about children.  They connect their caring of the child as a unique person to their instruction of the child as a student.  Because the teacher cares about children, children care about their learning what the teacher teaches.  These classrooms combine a caring and inspired teacher with honed and effective teaching skills with children who are wanting and ready to learn.  Children learn.

The crux.

We can teach teachers pedagogy.  We can teach teachers the content and skills of their curricular disciplines.  We can purchase and provide all the curricular print and media, install and train teachers in the appropriate technologies, employ simulations and games in a rich educational environment.  But we cannot teach teachers innate caring.  The amorphous “teacher’s heart” is a variable we cannot grow.

On the positive side, we can train teachers to be responders to child needs.  As trained teachers, they do wonders in assuring that children have the support and programs they need in school.  Training is what moves children from hunger to being fed, unclothed to being clothed.  Training helps them respond to students who are victims of bullying and harassment and low socio-emotional self-esteem.  As trained teachers, they can implement their training, but training is not caring.  There is a difference between caring that is from the heart and caring that is a trained response to need.

Our reality.

There is not a shortage of people who completed teacher preparation programs and are licensed to teach.  There is a shortage of licensed teachers who want to be in classrooms.  We need to acknowledge the latter.

As another generalization, the low arc of teacher compensation over the first decade of employment and the low esteem the public has for public school teachers means that undergraduates in the top half of their graduating class do not choose education as a degree program.  Engineering, medicine, law, and business draw the top half of each graduating class. 

The same reasons have diminished the annual numbers of graduates with a teaching license.  In yesteryear, a district posting a teaching vacancy could expect dozens to a hundred applications.  Today districts are lucky to receive five applications, and some postings result in zero applicants.

The shortage issue has caused state government to open apprenticeship pathways to a teaching license.  People without teaching licenses are hired by school districts on the condition that this person enrolls in a teacher preparation program.  Concurrently, these unlicensed teachers teach and learn how to teach.  Understand clearly that school boards are happy to have a teacher of any dimension in the classroom even as they acknowledge apprentice teachers are not yet trained teachers. 

This introduces a new category to our generalizations about teachers.

  • The inspired, caring, highly effective teacher who causes successful student learning and growth.
  • The caring teacher who engages children socially and emotionally and causes some children to learn some things sometimes.
  • The technically-efficiently but emotionally vague teacher who constructs lessons and causes some children to learn something sometimes.
  • The apprentice teacher who is learning how to teach on the job.

The Big Duh!

We need to know our teachers and their widely differentiated qualities and understand what we settle for when we place every teacher in a classroom.  Children know the difference, so should we.

Gifted Teachers Cause Indelible Effects

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Every adult who attended public school knows the truth of this statement:  there are teachers and there are gifted teachers.  We are taught by the former, but we are inspired and grow at the feet of the latter.  Gifted teachers are extraordinary human beings.  It is the nature of their extraordinary being that makes them gifted teachers.

What do we know?

A school faculty is much like a professional baseball team.  While all pro ballplayers met a high standard of screening to make the team, there still are significant differences between players who hit .250 year after year, the league average, and those who hit .300, a threshold for Hall of Fame candidates.  An MLB roster has 28 players.  A successful team lists an all-star or three, several players with all-star like statistics, and twenty or so who are steady and dependable players.  The combination of steady and dependable players and a few all-stars content for league pennants.

Most teachers in a school faculty are .250 players.  Day in and day out they are present and prepared to teach their assigned curriculum to children in their classrooms.  Day in and day out they don’t make significant teaching errors.  In the same days, they also don’t teach many supernal lessons that light up student learners or cause children to have “Aha” moments.

Some may read this a putdown of many teachers, but it is not.  The strength of public education is the steady and solid work of regular classroom teachers.  They are how we know and understand reading and writing, history and geography, math, art, music, PE, and speak at little Spanish.

Most teachers on a school faculty may be good at several skills sets for quality teaching; a gifted teacher elevates the performance of skills sets because of innate qualities of insight, perseverance, effectiveness of intellectual inquiry, empathy, and friendship.  These qualities certainly lie within regular teachers, but they remain fallow compared to the same qualities that burn brightly in a gifted teacher.

Game changers.

Children know.  They know their teachers who light them up on a frequent or daily basis versus their teachers who turn on the classroom lights and say, “Take out your books”.   A teacher who lights up children is a pathfinder to deeper learning.  Their insights into curriculum and pedagogy are 3D.  They know the sequence of facts and ideas and skills children need to learn to climb Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning Objectives, but they don’t stop at Remembering and Understanding.  They push harder with “Tell me more, explain that in your own words, how is it similar to and different than”.  Their students are used to the “so what and now what can you do with this” questions.

I marvel at the fact that gifted teachers, real game changers, don’t know who they are.  They just are.  They are unconscious of the ways they teach and relate to children. 

I am told that mathematics is the creation and use of elegant solutions to explain our world.  Simplicity and insightful are words that few strugglers with trigonometry, like me, understand.  Yet, I watch gifted math teachers help children to patiently unravel a math problem into understandable questions in their native language.  Gifted math teachers teach students to see the math question within the forest of words and digits on the page.  Insight is understanding what one is being asked to learn and the ability to state it in simple terms.  These teachers see problems, not just mathematical problems, differently and they teach children to see and think differently.  It is a gift.

My favorite band teacher is just a boy in man’s clothing playing his horn.  When he wears a tuxedo and waves his baton, his bands make wonderful music.  He is best, however, when he sits beside a child and together, they model and practice, model and practice, model and practice.  He slowly builds musical skills and the ability to read and interpret musical scores until children fit into an ensemble of players and then he gives them more difficult pieces to play.  He personalizes and perseveres and never quits on the individuals who are his band.  He grows musicians through patient and skillful instruction.  It is a gift.

“So what?” and “what do you mean by that” are the kinds of questions that cause many children to hunker down behind the child sitting in front of them hoping not to be called on.  Lots of hands go up when a teacher asks questions about facts; not so many when the questions require deeper inquiry.  A love of intellectual inquiry tolerates children who are reluctant to share and whose sharing contains inaccuracies.  Gifted inquirers know that these can be teased out and corrected.  It is the chase for understanding and reasoning they pursue.  Gifted teachers also know that children can learn in the periphery and listening to how one child sews together a reasoned response helps others with their own.  A gifted inquirer will smile and applaud louder for the unexpected yet slowly developed thinking of a reluctant sharer more than for the quick and always on point response of another child.  Chasing a well-reasoned and thoughtful response is a gift.

Some children come to school to learn to read, others to play an instrument, and others for the joys of recess and athletics.  Every child should have their own “go to” place in school.  I smile now thinking of an art teacher whose empathy for children caused him to seek out all children who had not found their school place.  He caused them to be artists and then to be proud of their artistry.  I remember him in his layers of baggy clothing and Birkenstocks helping a student with charcoal find depth through shading and a student at a potter’s wheel find the feel for drawing a vase out of a lump of clay.  It is easier to teach children who have a sense of who they are; it is more difficult to teach children who are lost in themselves.  His gift was in turning on the lights within wandering children.

Every child is different with a combination of admirable qualities and some things that cause us to shake our heads.  I watched a gifted science teacher who never shook his head because he focused on admirable qualities.  His teacher’s affect was as inviting as new snow and his expectations for student learning were as elevated as snow capped mountains.  It did not take students long into a new school year to know that his reputation was real.  He accepted who they were, found their strengths, and every day helped each child to build their understanding of Biology and AP Biology and computer science.  He was never in a hurry but, with his patience, caused all students to engage and learn.  Like Mr. Rogers of TV fame, he built students up and, in that building, taught them.  It is a gift.

Indelible effects that last a lifetime.

At their 50th reunions, alums invariably share stories about their school experiences and the teachers who taught them.  The passage of time has a way of rounding corners and evening out the particulars alums remember.  It is difficult to assign causation between a student’s schooling and their life at the age of 70.  However, the language and the tones change when alums talk of an exceptional teacher whose insight, perseverance, effectiveness of intellectual inquiry, empathy, or friendship made such an indelible imprint that it lasted 50 or more years.  The ability to cause such lifelong effects is a gift.

Esprit de Corps Elevates Teacher Capacity to Cause All Children to Learn

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Noble purpose and fraternity.  These are two aged concepts, yet they are the time-tested bonds uniting a band of people committed to a cause and to each other that allows them to move the proverbial mountain while others around them shovel gravel.  They are words that, if you must speak or define them to others, place the listener outside the circle of understanding of the power and force of esprit de corps. 

Esprit de corps is real.

What is it that causes collaborative work to reach a recognized higher plane of excellence?  As a French language term, esprit de corps is associated with both fictional and real-life manifestations.  We conjure D’Artagnan and the three musketeers yelling “One for All and All for One” and charging the guards of Cardinal Richelieu in the Alexander Dumas novel.  We hear the Marine Corps motto of Semper Fidelis (Always Faithful) and remember actual stories of courage in battle that are part of American lore.  Beyond Musketeers and Marines, how does esprit de corps apply to the work of teachers in a public school?  Or does it not?  I believe it does.

Esprit de corps cannot be manufactured.

We too often believe that teamwork and team management are the same as esprit de corps.  They are not.  I do not dis the value of teamwork.  Teaming adds the values of group membership, agreed upon group goals, concerted collegial work effort, and team recognition.  We form teams readily for our recreational activities, sports, and non-sports.  We team for organizational fund raising.  We team for a great number of spontaneous reasons – almost like crowdfunding – that draw us together for a short-lived purpose.

Organizational gurus work the circuit of conferences and book signings touting their recipes for increasing TEAM.  A common plan for increasing organization teamwork looks like this.

#1 – Know and communicate your clear WHY?

#2 – Create and communicate your value system

#3 – Live by your own values

#4 – Create a common aim

#5 – Hold a siege

#6 – Be aspirational

#7 – Celebrate

# 8 – Eat together

#9 – Communicate with passion

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nine-secrets-creating-culture-esprit-de-corps-within-your-brown

If real esprit de corps can be artificially manufactured in this way, why then do we keep talking about low employee morale and trying to find the next magic bullet that will align employees to employment purposes?  Why do we look for the next guru and keep attending the next conference?  Because true esprit de corps is not manufactured, it is birthed and continuously nurtured.

Teaching as a calling.

When interviewing teacher candidates, I often ask “Is teaching your calling?”  “Calling” is another of those seemingly antiquated concepts, yet it is a feeler question to discern those who understand what it is to be innately drawn to a purpose greater than employment.  It exposes a teacher’s intrinsic motivations to teach.  The “called” are passionate about teaching.  A candidate who understands the question typically hesitates to ensure she heard the question correctly and then explains how her itch to teach cannot be satisfied with scratching – she needs to teach to fulfill her greater needs.  This is not to say that all teachers must feel the calling to be successful teachers; they do not.  There are many teachers who cause children to learn and consider teaching their job not their passion.  An intrinsic passion to the noble purpose of teaching is a fire that burns brighter in the called and pushes them to do more than their job without questioning why.

Fraternity + passion = esprit de corps

Add fraternity to passion and the seed of esprit de corps is born.  The fraternity may begin with two teachers with similar assignments seeing themselves not as individual teachers in separate classrooms but as partners in the same assignment.  Collaboration and mutuality build fraternity.  Sharing concerns, combined problem-solving, and the enjoyments of success based upon passionate commitment build fraternity.  Fraternity often begins with the tangibles of friendship and grows to the intangibles of brother- or sisterhood. 

Cadre building is a contributor to nurturing esprit de corps.  Strong cadres form themselves when individuals identify their common cause.  Cadres can be differentiated from spontaneous or assigned teams by the bonds of their fraternity.  Perhaps, a cadre is a super team, a team that exceeds teaming because its members are bonded with esprit de corps.  Building a cadre of impassioned teachers is easy – you just give the time and opportunity and this key question – “what should we do?” – then let them go. 

Some argue that cadre building begets favoritism and the separation of faculty into factions.  I argue that every organization that achieves significant purposes over time contains a cadre or cadres of impassioned persons at its core.  Nurtured by institutional goals, cadres of impassioned persons are the heart of esprit de corps.  Consider the school organizations that are recognized as high performing, elite, exemplary – you choose the word meaning extraordinary – and you will find esprit de corps, cadre strength, and impassioned work at its core.

Leadership nurtures esprit de corps then gets out of the way.

If esprit de corps can be a powerful force in schools, why doesn’t it exist everywhere?  Simply stated, esprit de corps flourishes where school leadership also is driven by noble purpose and fraternity, understands its dynamics, and gives these time, resources, and opportunity to work.  Although it seems that leadership sublimates the cadre, it does not – leadership nurtures cadre work, including giving earned and appropriate internal and external recognitions.  Cadre work can outgrow the apparent work of leadership, and this is the pivot point at which leaders and cadre collegial extend their excellence or leadership extinguishes the cadre.  It is a control issue.  Nothing kills esprit de corps more than the artificial controls of leadership operating for other purposes.

Too often leadership and their cultural design cause teachers to become independent contractors working in isolation in closed-door classrooms.  This is a real phenomenon in school historically and today.  It is too easy when this condition exists to do nothing and allow education to sink into mediocrity.

Every period of excellent in student outcomes is associated with teacher esprit de corps.

In hindsight, we can identify many schools that enjoyed a “golden era” of student successes.  Peel back the layers and you will find an esprit de corps that flourished with enlightened leadership and a band of teachers whose passion and fraternal instincts caused them to excel in the noble purpose of teaching.

Classroom Interactions Are Soccer Touches – Quality Touches Create Scoring Opportunities

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(This is a reposting from December 14, 2018. I repost this because the ability to create quality teacher and student interactions is needed even more today in 2024 post-pandemic schooling.)

“How many touches did you have?”

“How many were quality touches?”

“And, what did you do with your quality touches?”

I listen to kid-talk about their soccer game. I did not play soccer, so I am learning by watching and listening. A touch is a player getting a foot to touch the ball for a pass, shot, dribble, trap or tackle. I have learned that a tackle in soccer is not a tackle in football. Everything in soccer revolves around touches. Touch the ball and make good things happen.

The kid-talk is genuine. They are very candid in declaring or describing a good touch and in explaining how a touch failed. Interestingly, they talk about the importance of seeing ahead – how their preparation for a touch needs to be viewed by the next two or three touches to follow. Few touches immediately result in a score, but a quality touch in a sequence of quality touches can lead to a score or keep an opponent from scoring.

The same questions can be asked about what happens in a classroom at school. Causing learning is all about touches, of a different yet similar kind.

“How may interactions did a teacher have with a student?”

“How many of these were quality interactions?”

“And, what did the teacher and student do with their quality interactions?”

Like watching soccer, I visit classrooms to watch and listen for how a teacher causes each child in class to learn in that specific period of instruction. Unlike my viewing of soccer, I know what quality touches or interactions in a classroom look, sound and feel like. I look for a teacher’s intentional touches.

  • Questions or statements a teacher directs at the class or at a particular group of students to cause them to think and respond, to apply a problem resolution and share their solution with classmates, and to ask questions or make statements to set up the next questions.
  • Questions asked of a specific student to elicit a specific response.
  • Kicked questions that use one student’s response to seek agreement or disagreement from another student or to ask for add-on thinking from successive students.
  • Questions that are not to be answered immediately, but after more information and thinking have been exposed.
  • Questions that expose students’ readiness for the next teaching.

I listen for student questions and statements that expose what they know and can do with confidence, what they are unsure of, and what is just plain misunderstood. And, I listen for the teacher’s responses, the touches that reinforce, build confidence, clarify and correct. This type of interaction is essential. If there is a strong sense of teamwork between students and their teacher, I expect to hear these touches all the time. If there is no trust between students and their teacher, students will not risk exposing their uncertainties.

The sociometrics of classroom interactions are fascinating and telling. When the interactions ping-pong around between teacher and students, kids are scoring all the time. When the interactions are stilted, contrived, unidirectional, and closed, there is little scoring. Students just wait for the quiz or test without confidence that every student is able to share in a good score.

Interactions can be questions, as shown above. Interactions can be visual looks of support and reinforcement, quizzical looks that ask a question without words, a physical proximity that says “I care”, a kneeling down next to a child’s chair to make a conversation private, and a smile to say “well done.” A tally of the interactions between a teacher and all the students in a class rises to the thousands every day. How many are quality interactions?

For teachers, the ability to make quality interactions is a learned and acquired skill set. It is intentional within a teaching and learning design. It is mentally rehearsed. It is practiced often enough that students will risk their engagement. Good interactions beget more good interactions. Quality interactions are the heart and soul of good teaching.

Every now and then, I hear teacher-talk that sounds like kid-talk about their soccer game, talking about how well a teaching episode felt as a result of quality interactions. Teachers know all about quality and no-quality touches with students.  The task is increase the number of quality, diminish the number of no-quality, and improve the likelihood of student scoring.  Goal!!!!!!

Suspending Reality Can Cause Learning.

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When a teacher suspends reality for the duration of an instructional unit, children have few limits to their learning.  Suspension opens possibilities for each child’s thinking and doing that the conditions of instructional normalcy and “same old” can limit.  While not quite make-believe, a suspended reality induces creativity and alternative thinking, and invites exploration and risk taking.

Close your eyes and listen.

A classroom is Never-Never Land for children when a teacher learns how to suspend reality.  She doesn’t need Tinkerbell’s dust.  As mistress of her teaching domain, she says, “Close your eyes and listen” as she walks around the classroom placing things on the tables around which children were seated.  “We are now in a place long ago when people just like you were trying to understand how to count their possessions and the things they saw in their world.  They knew there was more than one of almost everything, but they did not have any ideas about how number them.  When you open your eyes, you will find two piles of things on your table.  Your first job is to find a way to tell me how you determined how many things are in each pile.  Your second job is to tell me how you can combine the objects in the two piles into one pile without recounting them.  And your third job is to tell me how you can remove some of the items in the larger pile so that you have two equal piles with some items left over.  When you have completed each job, you will explain your thinking and reasoning to me.”  She waits while silently counting to 30.  “Oh, there is a slip of paper next to your piles with these three jobs listed.  And I expect that each table may have differing yet very appropriate explanations for me.”  She waits while silently counting to 15.  “Now open your eyes and begin.”  If children have questions, she answers the children at their table directly and not the entire class.

Problem-based learning (PBL)

I first encountered suspended realities at teacher workshops in problem-based learning at the Illinois Math and Science Academy in the late 1990s.  Our workshop team was so enthused we pursued more training and then organized a district training in PBL so that all teachers, no matter their assignment could add PBL to their instructional toolbox.  We were into building instructional toolboxes.

Although our training was only to add a possible teaching tool for each teacher, we still experienced the usual change theory pathway of new programs.  Our goal was professional development and pleasingly we experienced many teachers who found value in a new teaching strategy.  Interestingly, our secondary teachers adopted PBL more quickly and thoroughly than our elementary teachers.  ELA, social studies, and science teachers, some veterans, and some early career teachers, modified selected units for PBL applications.  Each teacher embedded initial instruction, modeling, formative assessment, and instructional adjustment in their PBL units, but these came at different places and times in their unit’s progression compared to their usual unit designs.

Twenty-plus years later veterans of our PBL training still display aspects of suspended realities.  They have refined their applications, made the teaching tool more their own, and use it wisely to cause children to learn.

Student-centeredness causes learning.

The big Duh! of suspending reality lies in the acceptance of student-centered thinking and outcomes.  Teachers assure that key skill sets, content, and concepts are taught and learned during suspended reality.  Post-assessments indicate that student learning in PBL or suspended reality units is as strong if not stronger than in traditional directed instruction units of learning.  The real differential is in student engagement.  When children understand the power that “you explain it me” it allows them to create answers, solutions, and outcomes, opens their willingness to think beyond “usual” and past “this is how I usually act/think in class”, and their level of excitement and “I can do” accelerates. 

We can only smile proudly at the conclusion of a suspended lesson or unit and a child demonstrates learning of the academic content and skills, an ability to hold out an individualized product, explain a solution that both makes sense to her and to her teacher, and be independent of other children or groups of children.

Using tools to cause children to learn – isn’t this why we became teachers of children?