Introduction

What does a teacher really contribute to learning? ►


Is it not the student's responsibility to inspire and motivate himself? The teacher leads by example, establishes trust (partly by easing the fear of failure), presents to students interesting or desired topics or skills, and provides instruction and assessment (that hopefully doesn't punish). The rest is up to the student. Or is it? Is successful teaching only measurable by the extent to which a student is somehow induced to learn?

What teachers often share with each other is the craft of teaching; the employment of techniques and the solution to problems. Teachers rarely discuss what teaching itself actually is. It is like asking a fish what swimming is: "I don't know, I just do it."

There is such a thing as teaching. ►


Teaching is not coaching, though it can include coaching. Teaching is not training, though training can be a part of teaching. Teaching is not just explaining, not just instructing, it is not supervising, it is not facilitating, not babysitting, not managing, not providing services, not delivering curriculum, not simply and somehow the inverse of learning. It is its own activity, its own expertise, an expertise that happens to have student learning as an end goal.


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David Labaree - Targeting Teachers

David Labaree is a historian and retired Professor of Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. This essay is taken from his website (https://davidlabaree.com/).

He introduces the essay thus: ►

In this piece, I explore a major problem I have with recent educational policy discourse — the way we have turned teachers from the heroes of the public school story to its villains. If students are failing, we now hear, it is the fault of teachers. This targeting of teachers employs a new form of educational firepower, value-added measures. I show how this measure misses the mark by profoundly misunderstanding the nature of teaching as a professional practice, which has the following core characteristics:

  • Teaching is hard
    • Teachers depend on their students for their professional success
    • Students are conscripts in the classroom
    • Teachers need to develop a complex teacher persona in order to manage their relationship with students
    • Teachers need to carry out their practice under conditions of high uncertainty
  • Teaching looks easy
    • It looks like an extension of child raising
    • It is widely familiar to anyone who has been a student
    • The knowledge and skills that teachers teach are ones that most competent adults have
    • Unlike any other professionals, teachers give away their expertise instead of renting it to the client, so success means your students no longer need you
  • Teachers are an easy target
    • Teachers are too visible to be inscrutable and too numerous to be elite
    • They don’t have the distance, obscurity, and selectivity of the high professions — so no one is willing to bow to their authority or yield to their expertise

Here's the link to the complete essay on his website: https://davidlabaree.com/2024/07/04/targeting-teachers-3/

Here's the link to the original publication in Dissent, 2011: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1RvOPUrxd9UKMJGDPLB7UY5ZFlzrUmsHf

Posts

Monday, December 23, 2024

Teaching and its Predicaments

By World War II teaching already was America's most investigated profession, the object of many studies, much criticism, and repeated proposals for reform. The postwar explosion of higher education, the consequent growth of the social sciences, and increasing efforts at school reform fueled a huge growth in research on education, and more investigations and reform proposals followed. Investigators scrutinized teachers' education, the conditions of their work, the unions they joined, the salaries they earned, how and why they made decisions, and many related subjects.

As I worked on this project, I read many of these studies, but I gradually saw that even in this accelerating blizzard of research there was little about the work of teaching itself. Researchers probed the occupation from dozens of angles and produced boxcar loads of studies, but only a few asked the rudimentary questions: What sort of an endeavor is teaching? What kinds of problems must teachers solve, and how do they solve them? And what would it take to solve them in ways that promote ambitious teaching and learning?

Cohen, David K (2011). Teaching and its Predicaments, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA

Thursday, July 25, 2024

The Triumph of Efficiency over Effectiveness

Teaching and learning — especially in the US — takes place behind the doors of millions of self-contained classrooms, and this drives reformers crazy. Historians of education have long documented how often past efforts at school reform bounced off the classroom door, thus buffering the process of teaching and learning within from outside influence.

This local autonomy, which makes education annoyingly inefficient in the eye of policymakers, is essential in the effort to make education effective. Teaching is not a delivery system for academic content but a fiendishly complex form of professional practice that seeks to induce students to learn in the absence of any efficient mechanism for insuring that they will do so. Students only learn when and what they choose to learn. The classroom art is in luring them into making the choice the teacher is aiming for. And this means that teachers need to have the flexibility to adapt their teaching approaches to the peculiarities of the group of students they find before them and also to the differences in individual students in the class. The variables that shape this process are legion: school subject, age, sex, class, ethnicity, community, home life, health, hunger, time of day, day of year, weather, and state of mind — to name just a few. The accountability movement disrupts this teaching and learning process by forcing teachers and students to focus entirely on learning particular subject matter at a particular level measured by the high-stakes test. It deliberately ties the teacher’s hands, compelling the same pedagogy for every classroom — and that pedagogy is teaching to the test.

Teaching to the test is an efficiency mechanism masquerading as effectiveness. One problem is that it runs smack into Goodhart’s Law: Once a measure becomes a target, it is no longer a valid measure. Initially a student’s test score may capture something about the amount of specific subject matter that student has accumulated. But once teachers, schools, school systems, and whole countries make raising test scores the object of schooling, the scores become ends in themselves. Everyone learns quickly how to game the system in order to raise scores with a minimum of real learning.

Another problem with the accountability approach is that it radically narrows the aims of education. Instead seeing education as an effort to gain a broad array of skills and forms of knowledge, to explore interests, experience personal growth, become a good citizen and a productive worker, it focuses learning on a tiny subset of school subjects that bear only a marginal relationship to these broader goals.

And perhaps most depressing of all, accountability systems are the most efficient tool ever devised to destroy a student’s interest in learning. It makes school the world's deadliest job — where the best strategy is to phone it in, in order to keep school from grinding you down into a grain of sand in the desert of test prep. In education, as in many other things, efficiency is the death of effectiveness.

Excerpted from https://davidlabaree.com/2024/07/25/the-triumph-of-efficiency-over-effectiveness-in-both-public-health-and-public-schooling/