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

Space Junk Joyride

I don't get nearly enough chances to use Celestia in my classroom. I've loved messing around with Celestia for years, but it's the rare student who shares my enthusiasm for astronomy. In class I will use Celestia to demonstrate gravitational orbits - moons around planets, planets and comets around suns, stars orbiting stars orbiting more stars.

During one such class this past year, one of my brightest students asked me if I had heard about the time an asteroid had circled Earth three or four times and then disappeared. I encouraged her to explain further, though I was skeptical. So she whipped out her smartphone, found an animation of the event, and showed it to me. Sure enough, there it was.


The animation had specific dates, and the asteroid had a designation that I recognized as legit; J002E3. I promised the class that I would gather more information for the next class.

Wikipedia has an entry about J002E3, and in that page I found the NASA/JPL animation my student had shown me. I also found an amazing story. J002E3 was indeed first thought to be an asteroid, but later determined to be space junk, namely the third stage of the Apollo 12 Saturn V rocket launched in 1969. The rocket stage was intended to wind up in orbit around the Sun, but it didn't quite make it, and is now technically still in orbit around Earth. It's in a semi-stable orbit, though - J002E3 spends decades circling the Sun before it re-enters the Earth-Moon system, circles the Earth a half-dozen times, and gets shot back out around the Sun. Eventually it will crash into either the Earth or the Moon.

J002E3 orbited the Earth six times from the spring of 2002 until late spring of 2003, a little more than 13 months, and this is what the animation shows. I presented the animation to my students on the SmartBoard, and I knew right away that I would have to change it. The file is an animated GIF, which cannot be paused, have its speed changed, or be run in reverse. The deep blue orbital path, which shows up nicely on a computer screen, did not project brightly enough on the SmartBoard to be seen easily. The GIF's dimensions were too small. I would have to do a little editing and then turn it into a video.

Photoshop is the perfect tool for this. It will read all the frames of an animated GIF and turn them into individual layers. You can edit the layers, and then turn them back into a GIF or a video. I first changed the dimensions, doubling both the width and height. Then I changed the color of the orbit in each of the frames. This took some painstaking effort - about 80% of the work could be done very quickly, but each of the 516 frames had to be carefully checked. I exported it as an MP4 video which I posted on YouTube.



NASA link: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news134.html
Animation versions & credit: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/doc/j002e3/

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High (Voltage) Wire Act




My brother-in-law Peter visited last year and showed me and my wife some of his favorite short videos on YouTube. When I saw this one featuring a man inspecting high voltage lines, I knew that I would show it to my students. It's a lovely little video narrated by the electrical inspector who talks about his work, and his life, and even tells a story about how his suit is a special kind of Faraday cage.

I knew my students would find this video interesting. There are a lot of intriguing electrical details and small events that could almost go unnoticed, and which could form the basis of some interesting physics questions and demonstrations. Our technical school has an Electrical Technology shop, and students in the shop would already know about this kind of work, and would be excited to watch this and share their knowledge. This video is a perfect example of what I like to add to my instruction toolkit.

The version I first watched on YouTube was of poor quality, and there was no indication of who actually made the video. It was obviously clipped from a longer video about dangerous or exciting work. There are many copies scattered throughout YouTube, and I spent a lot of time hunting for the best and most complete version. I finally found a high-definition version of the clip. I used Filmora to clean up the beginning and the end of the audio track. I did watch other videos about high-voltage line inspectors, but this one best suited my purposes. It's calming, actually, rather than all hyped up, and you get a sense of the man rather than just a focus on the details or the danger of the job. The music sets the mood perfectly. There's a joke at the end that mostly goes over my students' heads.

I eventually discovered that the the clip is from an IMAX movie called "Straight Up: Helicopters In Action." It was produced in 2002 by SK Films for the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, and apparently aired as a cable TV broadcast by INHD, which later came to be called MOJO HD. I also came across a comment that it had appeared on Discovery HD.

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