Tag Archives: teaching

If Not Taught At School, Then Where?

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Is school responsible for teaching children to understand and practice basic human values?  Values like honesty, personal integrity, respect for others, and civility; you can add or subtract what you believe are basic values.  Isn’t this the role of a child’s parents?  Of the child’s church leaders?  Traditionally, it was, but in the absence of these values-teachers we are left with this:  if not at school, then where will children learn and practice basic human values?

Teachers I talk with, ask “Is the teaching of values really a part of my teaching assignment?”  My answer is “Yes.”  A standard curricular assignment entails the instruction of content knowledge, skills necessary to acquire and understand content knowledge, problem-solving skills for using knowledge, and skills to reach supported conclusions, and, here it is, the personal dispositions necessary to be a successful learner and user of the curriculum.  Personal dispositions are laced with basic human values.

We all expect children in school to demonstrate a set of educational and social values.  I will use the word “expect” in this context.  An expectation begins with the teacher describing the positive characteristics of what a child should do and be.  “Keep your hands to yourself.  While listening to this story, don’t grab or hand-play with others.”  “Look at your classmates when they are talking.  Listen quietly.  If you want to add to what they say or ask a question, raise your hand.”  “When doing these math problems, please do your own work.  Don’t copy down what your classmate is writing.”  Teachers explain what children should do and then expect children to do it.

In PK and primary grades, teachers demonstrate expectations.  They model sitting attentively, raising hands, and engaging in the assignment without distracting others.  In intermediate grades teachers use verbal reminders.  In secondary grades, teachers expect these behaviors.

Daily instruction is subliminally loaded with values.  We expect children to be honest without writing the word “honest” in the specific lesson plan.  Children will submit their own work; they will not cheat.  Children will speak honestly; they will not lie.  Children will use and maintain their own learning materials; they will not steal from other children.  It is hard to imagine a classroom without honesty.

We expect children to act with integrity, at least an integrity corresponding to their age.  We understand that Kindergarten children are five years old and when confronted with responsibility may want to squirm and lay blame for their shortcomings onto others.  However, we consistently confront children with expectations that each child owns their personal behaviors with praise for appropriate acts and corrections for inappropriate acts.  It is hard to imagine a classroom without personal student integrity.

And, the list of basic school values grows as children are involved in school athletics, activities and arts programs.  Sportsmanship, being part of a team or troupe, accepting critical review, and putting personal performances on display all require children to exercise value systems. Discussion, modeling, and expectation of these are part and parcel to a school’s extensive curricula.

Outside the classroom, teachers help children to learn and practice civil behavior in the hallways, rest rooms, cafeteria and playground.  Many children and naturally competitive while others are submissive.  In order for all to participate positively in playground games, we teach children how to play “fairly”, how to stand in lunch lines and wait to be served, and how to walk in a crowd in the hallways.

To support school and academic values, we develop and enforce policies with penalties for serious infractions.  Fight, steal or bring or use specified contraband at school and you will be disciplined.  Plagiarize or hide notes for a test in your pocket and you will be penalized.  If we did not teach, practice and expect these values to guide students, we should not enforce punitive policies when the values are violated.

One of the relevant 21st century skill sets school teach is that children will learn to work together and demonstrate the values of cooperation and collaboration.  We teach children the roles necessary for good group work and the skill sets of each role.  We teach children how these roles interact, the value of each person’s contribution to the group, and the way that consensus-building creates results that the group can support.  Group work is all about basic human values.  Political and business leaders expect that school graduates are well versed in these values.

At the end of a conversation with teachers about these school-based dispositions, I often ask and say, “Does your well-run classroom happen by accident?  No.  Children are successful learners because you and your colleagues taught each child how to act as a learner so that he or she can succeed as a learner.  You are a teacher of values.”

Classroom Interactions Are Soccer Touches – Quality Touches Create Scoring Opportunities

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“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!!!!!!

If Students Did Not Learn, Were They Taught? No

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Start with this thought experiment.  “If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear it, did it really fall?”  You’ve heard it before.  It poses the relationship between observation and perception.  If you cannot observe something, it becomes hard to prove that it scientifically exists.  Similarly, Einstein posited that “…the moon does not exist if no one is looking at it.”  Now, extend the thought experiment to this:  “If I taught my students a unit of instruction and they did not learn it, did I really teach them anything?”  The answer is no.

Like observing a tree falling in the forest or the moon in a nighttime sky, the perception of teaching requires an observation of learning evidence in order to prove the reality that teaching occurred.  Just as George Bernard Shaw could not disprove Einstein’s statement that the moon must be observed to prove it exists, a demonstration of successful learning is required proof of successful teaching.

Given the above, why are educational leaders loath to be so direct in their evaluation of teaching?  Why do we place more emphasis on the delivery of instruction than on the learning outcomes teaching is designed to cause?  This is true.  Our scenarios for determining educator effectiveness show that a teacher who demonstrates high scores in the use of models of instructional delivery that result in lower scores of student achievement will be rated higher than a teacher who demonstrates low scores in instructional delivery that results in higher scores of student achievement.  Teaching practices are prioritized over student learning.  Why?

We want there to be a direct cause-effect line between a set of teaching practices and student learning.  But there are variables in the learner that disrupt this causation, we are told.  We know this by the ways in which we manipulate student achievement data based upon the presence of students with special education needs, who live in poverty or unstable home environments, are effected by drug and violence in their community, and attend schools with higher percentages of similar students.  Institutionally, we posit that these students will not demonstrate high levels of achievement in learning as compared with students without these challenges.

Yet, there are many stories of success with highly diverse students.  In each of these stories, teachers who add “the art of teaching” to the science of effective teaching practices find ways to connect their teaching to their students and cause high learning achievements.  These teachers observe falling trees and a nighttime moon, because they are present in ways that exceed and/or differ from the standardized instructional practices.

I refer to Billy Bean in the movie Money Ball.  “If he is a good hitter, why doesn’t he hit good.  We need more players that hit good.”  For Bean, the batter’s technical skills were not as important as the batter’s ability to get on base.  For educators, the teacher’s technical skills matter but not as much as the teacher’s ability to cause all children to successfully learn their grade level or course curriculum.  We need to prioritize our teachers who cause children to get on base and score with high regularity.  Otherwise, a teacher can teach a classroom empty of students or full of inattentive students and still believe that teaching occurred.  Without learning, there is no teaching.

(Prioritizing learning outcomes does not condone a reaching of achievement measures by any means possible.  Breaching professional ethics can and should lead to loss of employment and/or incarceration.)