William H Calhoun

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.

Why define teaching? ➤

If teachers don't define teaching for themselves, others will, and quite likely to the detriment of teachers. The problem is that the "wrong" definition of teaching can harm and interfere with a teacher's ability to really teach. What is a "wrong" description of teaching? Here are just a few examples: babysitting, coaching, facilitating, managing, providing services, delivering curriculum, the inverse of learning. Why are these descriptions wrong? Because the focus is either on behavior control or delivery of instruction, but not at all on what can be described as engagement.

There are two problems. Delivery of instruction includes designing instructional materials and designing tests. Both of these activities can be done on a corporate or academic level by experts, with an eye toward monopolizing, automating, and monetizing such activity. Teachers are just expected to deliver the canned curriculum to students. And much of what could be thought of as engagement is instead thought of as classroom management, often resulting in, at worst, moralistic or belittling approaches to control and discipline. Behavior modification approaches are an improvement, but best would be a sociological approach to adjusting student behavior, directly and indirectly, in the service of engagement.

Teachers need to engage to be effective. The key to this is understanding how a teacher's stagecraft and presence can help students interact with instructional materials. While discipline first, instruction second is a common recipe, it results unfortunately in poor outcomes. Instructional materials cannot teach themselves. Without an engaging teacher, any student is simply self-taught, for better or worse.

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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

Brain and Mind

I've addressed in the past a particular dichotomy: teaching (the responsibility of the teacher) and learning (the responsibility of the student.) I want to address here another dichotomy: What is happening in the student's brain versus what is happening in the student's mind.

Thanks to the work of modern neuroscience, what is happening in a human brain is better understood now more than ever. But of course, what we once could easily understand or picture (say, literally, "pouring information or knowledge into a brain") is now replaced with an accumulation of small, neurochemical details gleaned from many studies and investigations. These small details can be stitched together into a coherent picture, and this is work that is current, ongoing, and available.

What is happening in a student's mind is harder to pin down. But what is a mind? How does it work versus how a brain works? Is there really such a thing as a mind? Is learning a product of the mind or of the brain?

These are all good questions, for which I certainly don't have answers. What I can say is that you cannot somehow examine a student's brain to determine what the student thinks. Even the student doesn't necessarily know what he thinks. Plenty of times I think I know something only to discover I really don't. And other times I have come to realize, to my surprise, that I somehow do know something.

Perhaps, more to the point, we could simply ask a student, "What are you thinking right now?" I frequently find myself on the verge of telling a student some piece of information - I am the teacher, the subject expert, after all! But instead I catch myself and try to ask a question instead, especially if it's more important that I have a better idea of what the student is thinking. And why would I want to know what a student is thinking? Because it would, I hope, help me understand what she has learned. Her answer could lead to more questions from me, as I attempt to fully understand what she knows.

Have you ever been subject to an oral exam, i.e. viva voce? When I was an undergrad, I participated in an observational astronomy program with a small number of fellow students. The program was off-campus since it required being near an observatory. At the end of the semester, the professor decided that an oral exam would be an appropriate final exam for each of us in our small group.

The way an exam viva voce works is that a question is asked, and your answer determines what the next question will be. The professor pokes and probes in this way to find out what you know and, more importantly, what you don't know. When it appears that what you know or can figure out has been exhausted, the professor moves on to another question. From the student's point of view, each series of questions ends in failure. It's exhausting, and when you're done you feel like you've failed every question. Of course none of us failed, we all just reached the limits of what we knew and understood. The professor, being the expert, had a much more realistic idea of what we knew, what we should have known, and where we could go next.

What has a student learned? And learned as opposed to what a student has memorized, or looked up (or asked AI). Do the examinations we give students really probe their thinking and give us an idea of what students know?

In the school where I taught this past year, it seemed that all the students had already figured out AI. One student, who I suspected had used AI surreptitiously during a quiz, was upset that I was calling him on it. "But you want us to give you the right answers, right?"

Who's Responsible for What?

In the classroom, a teacher teaches, and a student learns. But who is responsible for what? I'll give you the short answer: the teacher is responsible for teaching, the student is responsible for learning. This sounds pretty straightforward, but consider the implications.

The teacher teaches. This is an act of performance (see here), and the teacher is definitely responsible for the nature and content of his or her instruction. The classroom environment will reflect what the teacher does, what materials the teacher uses, what rules are set, but the teacher cannot control what students learn.

The student is responsible for learning. Whether and what the student learns is up to the student. If a student doesn't want to learn, he won't. If the student learns incorrectly, that's her doing. It might not be her fault however. Students learn different things at different rates, often in spite of themselves. Their brains are not yet mature, especially those frontal lobes. Yet the teacher's responsibility is to be aware of who is learning what, and to make appropriate adjustments. But for good or for ill, learning is up to the student.

An important implication of this fact is this: you cannot judge teaching by testing what it is students have learned. Every teacher knows this. Every teacher contents him or herself with the understanding that most students do the best they can most of the time. Every teacher adjusts what they are doing to what the students seem able to do. What would be the point of doing otherwise?

Since you can't honestly judge teaching by testing the students, you also cannot compare teachers against each other, even if they presumably teach the same class or material. Teachers will always adjust to the students they have, which will create differences from class to class, from course to course, in spite of attempts to standardize the curriculum or the grading policies.

But the difficulty for administrators, who need to understand what is happening in classrooms, is the time it takes to actually visit classes, watch what is going on, sit down and talk with teachers, and so on. In my current school, I get visited by administrators (whether they have ever taught or not) two, maybe three times in a year, for about 15 or 20 minutes per visit.

I can only imagine that the desire to standardize what happens in classrooms must stem from the sheer impossibility of their responsibility, which is to monitor everything happening in the building.