Tag Archives: pedagogy

No Time For Dull Teaching Tools

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I turn wood on a lathe.  A sharp edge on a steel tool is required to ensure clean cuts expose the beauty of the wood and the shapes I design.  As a rule, I sharpen a chisel or gouge after 15 to 20 minutes of use.  The contrast between using a sharp or dull chisel is apparent when I stand back and examine my work.  Dull tools leave torn and ragged wood fibers, uneven edges, and the appearance of sloppy craftsmanship.  Products I will not display.  Who would choose to use tools that are not sharp?

How does this apply to causing learning?

Professionally speaking, sharp tools also cause better results.  A professional tool is a strategy or methodology used to cause a positive response or to eliminate an unwanted outcome.  Some professional tools are hardened steel, but most are mental or dispositional or best practices for doing the work.  Prospective teachers in their teacher preparation programs learn a variety of pedagogical strategies for causing children to learn content, skills, and ways of considering their world.  They take methods classes and use student teaching to practice and learn to apply the strategies of teaching.  This is an introduction to the tools of their profession.

A teaching tool is the philosophical construct used to design units and lessons of instruction.  Sharply cut designs engage children with questions and problems and ideas that get into each child’s head at the start of a unit or lesson.  Good designs cause children to want to know what comes next.  Every lesson in a unit needs to fit into this pre-conceived pathway along which the teacher uses other specific teaching tools to shape student knowledge, skills, and dispositions for learning. 

Teaching tools include strategies for introducing and engaging children in a daily lesson, leading a discussion with insightful questions, using positive reinforcement to strengthen learning outcomes, or reflection and reteaching to correct or strengthen lesson outcomes.  Drill down on any of these, the use of positive reinforcement for example, for the explicit words, phrases, body language, and context for giving a child reinforcing positive messages.  Each teacher will find their personal use of specific words, a way of saying those words, and a way of looking at a child when saying the words that causes the most positive reinforcement for that child.  This is a sharp tool.  Conversely, using the dull tool of a casual comment leaves a child unsure of the strength of their learning, uncertain that their learning matters, and more likely to disengage.

While there are general pedagogical tools used by all teachers, there also are grade level and subject area tools that are required across the 4K-12 continuum.  Down on your knees physical proximity to a young student works wonders but not so much with a high schooler.  Shared glee with a kindergarten child is not only contagious but an essential tool shaping their young ownership of their learning.  Inquiry and problem-based learning strategies are strong tools for social studies teachers.  Sharply honed lessons with timely propositions, strategic access to resources, time outs for “tell me what you know and what you need to know next”, and opportunities for differentiated presentation of results hook children into being avid learners at all ages. 

Specific tools are used by teachers of children with special education and gifted educational needs.  Some exceptional needs children need tasks and ideas broken down into smaller tasks and ideas with special consideration for sequencing and pacing and reinforcement.  Others require more room for creativity than the classroom and teaching skills and mentoring that push the teacher as much as the student.

And, the universe of teaching tools is constantly being added to and modified, even though we think good teaching practices are timeless.

How often does an educator stand back to inspect the effects of her teaching tools – the sharpness of her teaching practices?  Inspection is a meta-self-analysis of a teaching practice and the individual tools a teacher uses to shape student learning.  It requires taking lessons apart after they are taught for tool inspection.  “What did I say and what did I do?  And, how did students respond?”. 

Once examined, how often do we resharpen our teaching tools?  Sharpening is focusing on the “What did I say and what did I do” that could be reworded to provoke a clearer meaning, a more specific direction, a more illustrative modeling, or a leave a student with a better understanding.  Sharpening is changing unit and lesson designs to ensure that the next time the lesson is taught, the teacher will use these sharper tools.

The children we teach are our products.  Sharp teaching tools cause children to be successful learners and achieve educational outcomes we can be proud of displaying.  Just as in wood turning, dull teaching tools cause dull products.  How often do we inspect – not often enough.

Why is thus?

  • Every teacher is the product of a teacher-as-student academic preparation program.   The teacher-as-student learns the content knowledge and skills to be taught and the pedagogical tools of teaching.  Colleges and post-baccalaureate teacher prep agencies provide the prospective teacher with an initial toolbox of teaching skills.  Learned and practiced in student teaching, these are the tools a teacher brings to her first classroom.  This academic and sheltered preparation is intended to be adequate for her to be a successful teacher of children.
  • The first year on the job is a test drive of teaching skills.  Just like a new car owner test drives a vehicle that has passed assembly line inspections yet needs to be road tested to create confidence and assurance, a first-year teacher tests her tools against the realities of school and a classroom of children.  Absent mentor observation and coaching, the test driver also is test assessor.  Yikes!  It is hard to make critical self-assessments while trying to steer a test drive.
  • We assume that continuous practice keeps teaching tools sharp.  However, the school year is a constantly moving conveyor belt of units and lessons.  The school calendar does not stop for an inspection of tools, or the effects caused by teaching tools.  A teaching tool literally is used and placed back in the teacher’s toolbox for a next use without dedicated inspection or consideration of its sharpness.  The pace of schooling creates its own obstruction to tool inspection and sharpening.  The calendar presents little to no time to do so.   
  • Each child and class of children is like a new specie of wood to be turned on a lathe.  A teaching strategy that worked well in causing one child or one class to learn may not be as efficient or effective with other children.  Tools are constantly being modified rather than remaining constant, hence sharpening a tool is sharpening a constantly changing tool.
  • Teacher evaluation systems take a broad view of teaching effectiveness and efficiency.  Pedagogical skill is less than 25%, perhaps 10%, of the evaluation process.  Wisconsin’s Effective Educator system looks at planning and preparation, learning environment, instruction, and professional responsibilities.  Inspection of effective teaching tools is smothered by non-instructional concerns.  Combine a flaccid EE with the statutory fiat prohibiting the use of student achievement scores on state mandated assessments to describe a teacher’s effectiveness and the sharpness of teaching tools falls out of evaluation conversations.

What to do

When facing obfuscation, don’t go there.  Obfuscation is all the reasons we tell ourselves or others that the status is okay or even very good.  Or, it is the reasons we accept for why we cannot change.  Instead, make new declarations for improvement of teaching tools at the school site level.

Principals need to declare that the conscientious use of universal learning designs is prioritized by all teachers.  If adopting UDL, declare that a teacher’s application of UDL will be part of the teacher’s professional development and professional evaluation.  Tools that are embedded in UDL need constant professional discussion, demonstration, refinement, and critical examination.  Walk the talk of engagement, representation, and action/expression.

Use lesson studies.  Record teachers’ classroom teaching and establish collegial, non-evaluative study groups to provide the teacher with feedback on what they see in the recordings.  When every teacher records and every teacher provide feedback, every teacher grows sharper teaching practices.

In the sequence of professional development make learning new teaching tools, refining teaching tools, sharing knowledge and experience of teaching tools, and evaluating the effectiveness of teaching tools in causing student learning an essential part of the school culture.  Important things in school a given time in the calendar; give discussion and examination of teaching important.

Don’t abide teaching that is chronically not sharp.  I have known some great people, really kind and caring people, people who will do everything asked of them at school, who could not teach a coherent lesson.  They did not have nor did they work at acquiring sharp teaching skills.  Help them find their way to another profession.

The Big Duh!

Teaching children is the most important profession in the world.  It also is incredibly hard.  And, teaching is impossibly hard without efficient and effective teaching skills.  We no longer can assume that skills learned in a baccalaureate program are sharp enough to last a career.  Professional development of our pedagogy needs to be a way of life for every teacher.  If it isn’t sharp, sharpen it.  If it can’t be sharpened, find a new tool.  If professional work isn’t sharp, find a new professional.

Never Take Good Teaching For Granted

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Looking in through classroom doors at teachers and children at work is a treat.  It is like watching the conductor of an orchestra cause an ensemble of musicians to perform complex pieces of music, or the pilot of a plane take off, fly a thousand miles on a constantly altered flight plan, and land safely at the planned destination, or watching a sculptor size up a block stone knowing there is a mermaid in it waiting to be exposed. 

Good teaching is not magic, though causing some children to understand the division of fractions disproves the statement.  First, good teaching is understanding strategies of pedagogy and the ability to create a string of exercises that result in a learned and understood outcome.  Second, good teaching is knowing your students and their readiness to learn.  Put those two requirements together, and no matter the grade level or course content, good teaching is very identifiable and predictable.

Through one classroom door I saw a veteran teacher with 30 years experience in the district quietly reading and reviewing the lesson plan she would teach later in the day.  I know this because she looked up and we spoke.  She was reviewing a plan she had taught many times to ensure that she knew exactly how to cause each of her students to learn from the lesson.  She might as well have been an Olympic gymnast mentally moving through all the gyrations of a floor exercise routine, eyes closed and envisioning each change in motion she must perform.  This teacher was making a preparation for good teaching and taking nothing for granted.  As many times, as she had taught this lesson, she committed time and energy to ensuring and pedagogy and student readiness were aligned to create learned outcomes.

Good teaching is an intellectual design transforming the lives of learners.  There are 98,000-plus public schools in our nation.  The most important thing we do to assure that every child in every school is receiving good teaching is understanding that good teaching is professional work requiring dedicated professional teachers.  We cannot take good teaching for granted.  Appreciate it when you see it.

Finding A Teacher

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Teacher.  A noun.  The word means “a person who educates.”  Synonyms for the word teacher include these nouns: abecedary, advisor, coach, disciplinarian, educator, faculty member, guide, instructor, lecturer, mentor, pedagogue, scholar, trainer, and tutor.

Teach.  A verb.  The word means “to educate or instill knowledge.”  Synonyms for teach include these verbs: advise, break in, brief, catechize, coach, communicate, demonstrate, develop, direct, discipline, drill, edify, enlighten, exercise, explain, expound, form, give instruction, ground, guide, illustrate, imbue, impart, implant, improve mind, inculcate, indoctrinate, inform, initiate, instruct, interpret, lecture, nurture, open eyes, pound into, prepare, profess, read, sharpen, show, train, tutor.

Today there is a shortage of people who want to be teachers.  There is even a more critical shortage of people who can teach.

“Currently, there are not enough qualified teachers applying for teaching jobs to meet the demand in all locations and fields,” said the Learning Policy Institute, a national education think tank, in a research brief in September (2017).  The institute estimated last year that if trends continue, there could be a nationwide shortfall of 112,000 teachers by 2018.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/21/health/teacher-shortage-data-trnd/index.html

The scarcity of teachers has caused a variety of responses by school district and state educational leaders.  Substitute teachers are the first local school district response.  When a licensed teacher cannot be found for a classroom assignment in September, substitute teachers become classroom teachers.  Daily subs are hired to be short-term subs, short-term subs are stretched into long-term subs and long-term subs become year-long teachers.  Another local response is to drop courses.  If the course is elective and and not required by statute or local promotion or graduation requirements and there is no teacher, then the course is removed from the daily schedule of classes.  Or, classes without teachers are combined with classes with teachers.  Class sizes are increased with the apology that “at least the course is not dropped.”  These are local responses.  They do not address the underlying issue that there are not enough qualified, trained, licensed teachers.  These responses only meet the daily needs when the school bell rings.

State educational leaders take a different tack.  In Wisconsin, the legislature is liberalizing the professional preparation requirements for classroom teachers.  Traditional teacher preparation is part of a baccalaureate degree program, often in the liberal arts.  A baccalaureate teacher prep program requires an academic major, statutory courses in human relations, cultural sensitivity, conflict resolution, and working with students challenged with disability or disadvantage, teaching methodology and instructional design courses, and a semester of student teaching. A baccalaureate typically is a four-year endeavor.  For a variety of reasons, including low career salary status and decreasing esteem for public employees, fewer college students select education as their career choice.

The Wisconsin legislature has created alternative “pathways” to classroom teaching. A new pathway, for example, connects academic-based vocations to public education teaching.  The connection:  schools teach math and science and technologies and there are non-educational careers that significantly apply math, science and technologies.  The concept is that a person trained as an engineer, almost any field of “engineering,” applies concepts of mathematics and science.  Hence, this person can be a math or a science teacher.  A person trained and working in laboratory or field sciences can become a science teacher.  A degree in computer science is a pathway to teaching mathematics and computer applications instruction.

Pathway requirements include a baccalaureate degree in a math or science-related field, five years of verified work experience in a math or science related job, and 100 hours of training in “modern curricular applications” in math or science.  With the exception of the 100 hours of training, a would-be-teacher does not not need any further education or preparation to be a teacher.

Liberalization assures several important attributes of teaching and reduces others.  Specifically, liberalization values content knowledge and disciplinary skills sets and devalues trained teaching skills.

The issue is this:  We are improving the quantity of people willing to be the noun “teacher,” but not giving equal attention to the quality of the verb “to teach.”

I have observed persons who love mathematics and are very successful students of mathematics.  They thrive on the challenge of understanding mathematical concepts, solving math problems and frequently choose to extend their math learning beyond a high school math curricula.  When the rest of use “hit the math wall” in Pre-Calc, these math wizards breezed on through.  They major in mathematics in college, because they are mathematicians.  However, these same persons frequently are fully incapable of teaching another person to understand math concepts and solve math problems.  They frown when a person they are trying to teach says, “I don’t understand.”  When mathematics comes so easily to a mathematician, they often cannot comprehend why it is difficult for others.

I hear mathematicians telling non-mathematicians, “Let’s do it again.”  “Do these problems tonight for your homework.”  “Do what I do.”  “Copy this down.”  “Memorize this.”

I hear science majors explaining the scientific method to science-shy students who do not reason deductively.

Mathematicians, lab and field scientists, and computer scientists achieved their degrees and employment based upon their learned knowledge and skill sets, not their ability to teach others to be mathematicians or scientists.

This said, 100 hours of “modern curricular applications” may provide the label of teacher but will not prepare a person to teach.  Pedagogy did not achieve “-ogy” status because it could be learned in two and a half weeks time.  It is an “-ogy” because it is based upon the theories and practices that influence a person to learn.  Pedagogy that works for one student may not work for another.  Pedagogy that works for unchallenged students may not work for challenged students.  Pedagogy that works for motivated students may not work for unmotivated students.  Teaching methodologies and instructional designs are learned and developed over time and they are the heart of the verb teach.

It is very likely that a shortage of teachers will be the new status quo.  It will take solutions far beyond licensing pathways to make teaching a career of choice.  A shortage of numbers however is not a reason for accepting teachers who cannot teach.

The focus of finding teachers must be on finding people who can teach.