Food for Thought: ‘I couldn’t continue as a teacher without understanding how students learn’

Dear all,

Its been a good week at ISHCMC. Good parent/ teacher/ student conferences, excellent volleyball and swimming results and an overall good feel as we move towards a well earned October break. In this first quarter all of you have reflected on your teaching through a SWOT, set measurable goals and are meeting with your principals ahead of classroom observations. Hence, I thought that this short Dylan Wiliam video, and a reflective blog post by a teacher fits well with what you have been thinking about so far this year and the culture we want to build for teaching at ISHCMC.

Have a good weekend,

Adrian

Esme Kettle reflects on her realisation that, after seven years in the classroom, she didn’t know how to teach

Esme Kettle had come across the title ‘master’ through films about Jedis but it wasn’t until she thought about master teachers that she began to question her techniques in the classroom. Photograph: Cine Text/Allstar/Sportsphoto Ltd.

The term “super teacher” is enjoying another outing into the fray, championed by the shadow minister for education, Tristram Hunt. The debate involves the usual suspects: improve standards, a model for best practice and a career path that doesn’t take good teachers out of the classroom.

My first encounter with the term “master” was as an older sister. My brother would receive cards on his birthday or at Christmas addressed to “Master Thomas” and, mute with envy, I would read the contents to him thinking, “If he’s such a master, shouldn’t he be able to read his own post?”

Further encounters would come through films about Jedis, a television show about cooking, the master of my college at university and an unassuming Korean man in Melbourne who invented a martial art. With the exception of its use as a salutation, the prevailing message conveyed with “master” is that this person is at the very top of their game.

As a political scientist (or, at the very least, a graduate of political science), first past the post (FPP) is a concept and process that I should be able to explain with clarity and panache (particularly given I delivered GCSE citizenship to two cohorts for two years). But when it comes to this model in the electoral process, I’m completely lost. It’s the off-side rule of politics for me.

There’s no need to hand back my undergraduate degree just yet. I can give the textbook explanation and make comparisons with proportional representation, but I can’t explain it in any detail or expand beyond that. I simply do not understand how it works. I can fake it; I know the right words, when to go left, when to go right. To the untrained ear, I am well versed in our nation’s electoral processes, but even now, I am at a loss to even make an analogy for the purpose of illustration.

For those with concern for my previous students, I’m an advocate of the teacher as a facilitator so you needn’t worry. Somewhat ironically, my students know this model far better than me because I challenged them to help me understand it. Their frustration at my continued lack of understanding propelled them into further research and they also achieved some empathy with me as a teacher: “I can’t make it any simpler, miss.” Indeed.

I raise it now because there are many concepts and processes in pedagogy that I could make a similar confession about. Until recently, I had more interest in what children were learning – the content of the curriculum – rather than how they learned it. I used bells-and-whistles strategies that engaged students there and then but were forgotten about once the bell rang. I could never understand why at the end of every term my students would say, “We like your lessons miss but we don’t like the subject.”

Until now, I had little interest in research-based models of practice for deeper learning. I thought about my classes as discrete groups and planned lessons according to our last encounter. If that sounds like “personalised learning” to you, then you and I would have got along great a year ago. What I’ve realised, however, is that this is personality-based learning. The hit and miss that I had come to accept as standard in my classroom was the result of me allowing my personality to take centre stage.

During an afternoon coffee with a colleague a year ago, I shared a fear I’d harboured for some time; I was good at my job (my classes made progress and we had a good relationship), but I wasn’t sure I could do it without the bells and whistles. I wasn’t sure I completely understood how to teach.

So I started to read and I was reminded of words that I’d sped read during my PGCE. From zones of proximal development to early cognitive development, I became interested in concepts I hadn’t considered since leaving university. Perhaps education has more in common with democracy than I first realised; could we establish a common framework for delivery that can work for the majority? And if so, is it a logical next step to have those who have mastered the process as our representatives?

Teaching is often referred to as a craft or an art, but to me it is a very human act that we cannot escape from regardless of our profession; consider how much is taught outside the classroom and how many people might fit the role of “teacher” in everyday exchanges. But to call yourself a professional teacher, or even master teacher, requires a deep understanding of the concepts involved and, most importantly, an ability to pass that understanding on in easy-to-follow processes.

In the year that has passed since that coffee, I have returned to the classroom on the other side of the world. I am teaching without bells or whistles, delivering a primary curriculum that I must teach myself first. Without engaging in this deeper understanding of how and why learning takes place, I couldn’t do the job. While I am happy to call myself a political science graduate without understanding how our elected officials come to power, I couldn’t continue as a teacher without understanding how students learn.

Next year will mark my eighth year from qualification. With those years, has come experience of course but also, age. I am not a young teacher any more and the bells and whistles I used to rely on, which were starting to feel cumbersome, would feel totally unwieldy now. Trying them out was important part of my development as a teacher, but there must come a time when you can explain not what you do or why you do it but how. That’s the hallmark of the master teacher.

Esme Kettle blogs at Those That Can and writes under a pseudonym.

http://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/teacher-blog/2014/oct/08/master-teacher-how-students-learn

I have just been sent an article by Martin that complements with the one above and is very relevant for high school or Diploma teachers in particular. I have posted it here:
http://whynotishcmc.blogspot.com/ 
or you can read the original here:
http://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2014/10/10/a-veteran-teacher-turned-coach-shadows-2-students-for-2-days-a-sobering-lesson-learned/