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

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Showing posts with label Response. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Response. Show all posts

A New Literacy

A Response to Lankshear & Knobel, New Literacies, Chapter 1


The teachers were all dreading the professional development session. It was to be two-and-a-half hours of how to implement the Common Core Curriculum in our technical high school. "I guess we're supposed to all become Language Arts Teachers now" was a common refrain in our grumblings. It turned out to be one of the best PD's we've ever had.

The consultants had a well-thought-out and comprehensive framework about literacy. The idea was that the word "text," as used in the Common Core Standards, could be quite broadly interpreted. It didn't mean just written text. As a physics teacher I already considered "text" to include graphs, charts, diagrams, and equations. But these consultants had done their homework. For an example they described a possible outing to a work site by one of our technical programs, carpentry. The task would be to inspect a damaged deck, create an estimate for repair or replacement, and consult with the homeowner. Each of these three tasks involved skills that could be considered literacy. The damaged deck was a "text" that could be "read" through inspection. The "text" was then interpreted through the means of creating the estimate, which itself was another text. Finally, the interaction with the customer, determining his needs and budget and presenting an appropriate proposal, was all interpretation of another text.

"Wow, I hadn't really thought of it that way" became a new refrain. The anxiety around implementing the Common Core Curriculum was replaced with a certain excitement around utilizing this new idea about literacy.

The first chapter of New Literacies was basically a summary of how the concept of literacy has changed over the decades. I was afraid that it would be a dry run-through, but Lankshear and Knobel steered through the details with a steady eye on their destination - their own interpretation of "new literacy." I was surprised by how much of the summary I recognized. I guess I've been around for a while! But I had never connected all the dots in quite the way that Lankshear and Knobel had. By the time the summary had gotten to "The radical 'multiplicity' of literacy" (p. 21) the memory of that professional development session had popped into my head and I knew I would have to write about it.

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