In this post I hope to throw light on one way in which learners and instructors are turned against each other. I propose dialogue as a solution and use a disagreement with a colleague over teacher training to address that.
I asked Dr Andrew Davis in my previous post how he thought teachers could improve if there was no such thing as a "method" for them to "try out" by way of improving their practice. You can read his full response on my previous post. Davis' words are in italics throughout.
"Yes- some teachers are better than others, and yes, it’s perfectly reasonable say that some teachers’ approaches are ‘better’ or ‘more effective’ than others. It’s how this should be conceptualised that divides me from those opponents who appear to favour teacher-proof and pupil proof methods, and who appear to believe that such methods have been researched. "
Davis accepts subject knowledge as important, and says that to restate this is "unoriginal". His question regards how we teach anything at all. His contention that the putative "methods" which have come to light can solve the problem of teacher quality are nonsense (I may be overstating this) forms the crux of my question to him: if trainees believe they are improving through applying "methods", as well as state that that is how they are improving, do we not endanger the project of teacher development by undermining the concept?
In Davis reply his conceptualisation of the question "what is the gap between good subject knowledge and good teaching?" calls to mind the famous "learning paradox". How do trainees get from the A of subject knowledge to the B of great teaching? The learning paradox asks a similar question of how we get from A to B. Plato describes an incident where Socrates leads a slave boy through a number of suppositions and deductions leading him to correctly deduce a geometrical rule. The problem is not what the rule is (subject knowledge) but rather how we arrive at it in a way that is independently understandable. This means the student conceiving of the rule not as something which makes sense "because Sir or Miss says so" but rather the student seeing that the rule stands independent of the situation of being, for example, someone else's inferior in learning, experience, time served etc. The right way of carrying on in, for example, geometry, must seem right to the student regardless of context if we are to regard the knowledge as "taught".
Take the example of grammar. A sentence, as it was taught to me, must contain a verb. To convince a student of this one way might be to give him or her a piece of writing and ask him to find the discrete sentences, and then find the discrete verbs. If this is done after giving the first principle, "sentences will contain verbs" then the student is able to deduce that the rule is indeed the case, independent of the teacher. However, in order for this to happen the student must accept that the page of writing is indeed writing. And how this happens is very mysterious, because it happens in the student's mind. What does it mean for the student to believe that the page of squiggles is indeed a page of writing. I don't mean by this "what is writing?" but rather what is it about writing, and students, that gives them this relationship to each other?
This is paradoxical because without trusting that it is writing the student cannot learn about writing, but without having learned about writing the basis for that trust is unclear. Similarly in Plato's example, the slave boy makes his own inferences, but in a way that is not visible in the situation. He ends up drawing the correct conclusion for himself, but at the beginning he "did not know". Plato concludes, controversially, that we all are born knowing everything, forget it and then subsequently "remember" it through learning.
This is not to say the teacher does nothing. Socrates compares himself to a midwife, "delivering" peoples' knowledge. The pupil, like the expectant mother, is the one who has to push! How does this compare to Davis' view of what teachers do?
"The practical knowledge of teachers is a kind of practical wisdom or phronesis, in which experienced teachers over the years steadily extend a rich and complex repertoire of strategies from which they constantly select in different ways to suit the pupils with whom they are dealing at any one time. When teachers 'improve', they extend this repertoire, and improve the judgements behind their unceasing selection from their repertoire.
The ‘repertoire’ includes possible pupil tasks, ways in which the teacher might explain an idea – analogies, metaphors, stories, etc, knowledge of relevant resources and appropriate questions that might be put to pupils to advance their knowledge, understanding and thinking."
His response draws on an Aristotelian idea, that of phronesis. His full response then sketches a highly elaborated picture of the different skills a teacher may draw on, the "differences", the variations which mean "sometimes a word is "read" by attending to context and sometimes not". I am interested in the word "sometimes". In Plato's account of the learning paradox the rule being deduced is not practical wisdom but "sophia" or absolute wisdom. Geometric rules are often conceived of in this form: as immutable, heavenly truths. They are not "sometimes" true. They "just are" true, something the Greeks called "sophia".
However, Plato is as so often using Socrates to hide the other side of the dialectic. Ask a midwife what the "best" way to deliver a baby is and you are likely to hear the kinds of language Davis uses. "Sometimes" it happens one way, women are "different". This is the language of practical wisdom or phronesis. Thus Socrates' characterisation of himself as a "midwife" puts the learning paradox into a new light. Whilst what is "delivered" out of the learner is immutable, it is not "delivered" to the learner in the sense that an industrialist "delivers" on a new order of parts to a customer.
So, if I have understood Davis correctly, we are supposed to conceive of the trainee teacher in the same way as Plato's slave or any other learner; that is to say, the "truths" that they arrive at will be formulated by unique moments of realisation, challenge, failure and frustration. This is because they, like all learners, are different from each other. I quote the final section in full:
"When novice teachers learn from expert teachers, this rarely, if ever, includes any kind of simple copying or mimicking the behaviour of the expert. It is rather a matter of being exposed to the subtle influence of someone with a high level of a particular form of phronesis. If an expert teacher watches a novice, with a view to helping the latter, the help would only rarely consist of the expert saying – ‘At time 'T' in the lesson you should have performed this specific action (said these words, set this specific task, etc)’. It is rather a matter of a dialogue in which the expert helps the novice to review the choices available to her at time T, and to think why alternative actions might have been ‘better’ than those she actually performed. The expert might also come up with more options than the novice was aware of." (my emphasis)
Do I feel my question has been addressed? Well, yes I do and no I do not: yes because I see how the idea of a comprehensive "method" which can meet the needs of all learners is opposed to the idea of a "repertoire" of different things to try as different situations arise. On the other hand, this account remains, quite understandably, oriented towards the view of the trainer rather than the trainee. In the spirit of the abovementioned dialogue, let me put the trainee's imagined view, based on my experience.
I trained more recently than Davis (although far be it from me to rub it in) and with the memories sort-of fresh in my mind let me say that firstly, I now see that a lot of the "techniques" I thought I was seeing I can recognise were far more ad hoc than I imagined. So far, so good: Davis and I appear to agree. Let's take the "technique" of chairs in a circle, full class debates. I once observed an excellent teacher orchestrate this, as I took it, daring 'method' with challenging students. The class were well prepared, contributing, referring to good resources etc. I took the experienced teacher's throwaway comment at the beginning "oh it won't be anything special, just sit and watch and join in if you like" as false modesty when I saw what they accomplished. I now realise that lessons like this in fact will just arise from planning in an experienced teacher's class without them thinking to themselves "today I shall deploy lesson pattern 234.5b Circular Discussion": but I thought that was what they did! In other words I couldn't conceive that the teacher's practical wisdom was creating the students scientific concepts, or that phronesis was creating sophia, OR (most significantly) that unlike was creating like. This is a hard lesson! As I wasn't ready to see this, I HAD to see it in a way it was, by Davis' lights, emphatically not, viz. as a method. So I did.
But seeing it in that way enabled me to get to this point, where I am able to see it differently. I can now see it from Davis' point of view, but very much remember seeing it from the opposite point of view. Was one right then, and the other right now?
This puts us at a pretty pass, and one I am not sure I can bridge. Do we put "teaching methods", then, under the category of "necessary falsehood"? Or do we, instead, confront trainees with the awful/wonderful truth early on: that there are no shortcuts, no hard and fast "solutions", just experience? What might we risk if we do the latter?
Faced with a student teacher doing what so many of them do end up doing, namely sobbing wretchedly, could *I* resist telling them that there was a "Magic Feather" they could carry into the next classroom? "Try this resource/method/programme...it's very good!" And if they do use it, and they have a sudden, dramatic breakthrough with a class, is it even as fictional as Davis is suggesting?
To a good midwife, it is just a question of getting the baby delivered. Nobody cares, when they hold their child in their arms, about whether they delivered it on their elbows, their hands, their knees or in a swimming pool. Similarly, when we know something we did not know before, we don't need anyone else to tell us it is beautiful, and we forget very quickly exactly how we got there. I am always struck by how vague everyone's recollections of school/training actually are, how few actual lessons they can remember, compared to how much wisdom it gave them. This is something teacher trainers must realise: once their students are teachers, none of this will matter to them very much.
My conclusion, then, is that the entire "controversy" over "who is right" begins to look on reflection like an odd curiosity which does not originate in the experience of learning. And if it does not, where then could this highly political, profitable, media-friendly opinion storm originate?
Diagnosing this might relieve us, as a profession, of a lot of anxiety.
3 comments:
I don't think anyone claims that there are, in all matters, universal methods which will always work best for every teacher with every class.
The problem is that this does not imply that anything goes or that we should simply ignore evidence of effectiveness and ineffectiveness in our judgements. Look at this
We may be in danger of running together two distinct questions (and this could well be my fault.)
1. What must expert teachers do to enable novice teachers to learn from them? Does this include demonstrating methods that can be copied, even if they need to be discarded later by the novice?
2. What kind of a thing is teaching expertise? (Identifiable and researchable methods that could be subjected to rigorous empirical research? Superior judgement when selecting words, tasks, questions etc. – judgement that cannot be codified into a set of rules? Subject knowledge? Some combination?
We should continue to oppose requirements on teachers to implement specific methods, requirements based on allegedly relevant research. For either there really were schools following the intervention-related scripts concerned, in which case they had temporarily abandoned teaching, or, more likely, the schools allegedly pursuing the said interventions were actually were engaging in a great variety of activities. Hence no element common to all of them actually constituted a causal agent responsible for learning success. And, in any case, teachers must apply knowledge of ‘what works’, if there is any such thing, to their particular context and individual students. If they don’t they are no longer teachers.
Isn’t this issue separable from how student teachers should be ‘trained’ ( I still prefer ‘educated’)?
There may be a stage when the learner does engage in copying of a kind, before achieving ‘wisdom’. She climbs this ladder before throwing it away. Yet surely different novices have to climb different kinds of ladders. The latter also vary enormously depending on the character of the expert. (For instance, I’m remembering a strong student I once supervised who said, of a particular senior teacher she encountered during her teaching placements: “I learned an enormous amount from Mrs X, but I’ll never forgive her for the way she made me learn it.”)
Compare, on the one hand, students learning from teachers with, on the other hand, learning moral goodness from a good and loving person. Suppose you think that the morally good person follows clear rules about what is right and wrong. Then, to learn from her, you learn the rules and you see how she applies them in her life.
But, arguably, that is a wholly unsatisfactory account of morality.
I’m influenced by one of my former teachers, Jonathan Dancy, well known for advocating ‘moral particularism’. When considering reasons favouring one action rather than another, for instance, he claims that:
1. A feature or part may have one value in one context and a different or opposite value in another.
2. The value of a complex or whole is not necessarily identical with the sum of the values of its elements or parts.
The fact that an action results in pleasure can make it better in some circumstances and worse in others. Suppose a possible action of mine results in letting people watch hangings. If the people get pleasure from the spectacle, then (it might be claimed) my action is morally worse than it otherwise would have been. A second case: ‘That one of the candidates wants the job very much indeed is sometimes a reason for giving it to her and sometimes a reason for doing the opposite’
.
So moral judgements must take account of the whole of a situation and the way its features relate to each other. They don’t involve verdicts to the effect that all actions of a certain type are right or wrong. ‘A feature can make one moral difference in one case, and a different difference in another.’
I believe that teachers exercising expert judgements in the classroom resemble people exhibiting moral virtue. This is partly why the ‘copying the expert teacher’s method’ model is the wrong way to characterise ‘becoming a better teacher’, whatever half truths might have to be involved at certain stages. The comparison between moral virtue and teaching expertise also reminds us once more of the point that being a teacher is playing a role that is shot through with value.
This will have to do for now!
OA: Who said "anything goes"?
AD: You're probably right that the two issues are overlapping or, more accurately, that I have changed the subject and am guilty of pretending it is congruent with the discussion previously at hand regarding early reading. Let's proceed on that basis.
I want to try and bring out the moral side of both questions a bit more. It will probably be a feature of future blog posts but here are some thoughts:
1. Teacher Training
This is the issue you wanted separated from your main concern of expertise. However, your approach to both is to do with morality. I'll try and keep it distinct.
It seems likely, as I take you to imply, that teachers should become better people morally as well as in terms of better organised, better managers of workload during their training. Perhaps you would distinguish between being good cogs in a machine (which they need to be at times) and being good people, morally.
It seems to me (grossly simplifying) that you are expecting teachers to grow in their capacity to take a case on its merits. This seems right to me, but I am interested in how. You stress that imitating the expert won't get us there, though it might have a part to play as we approach a point of practical, professional wisdom.
The missing element, then, must be trust. Public trust of the profession, political trust of the profession, the teacher educator's trust of their student and the student teacher's trust of themselves.
The critical question then is how can trust be encouraged? Fairly obviously not by measures which seek to "teacher proof" matters. QED
2. Teacher Expertise
If it is immoral for a culture to abandon teaching then to define imposing methods as (temporarily) abandoning teaching is likewise immoral. This is because goodness, unlike truth, leaves a stain behind it.
An actor who undertakes a role does not, on resumption of normal life, remain a pretender. However, a good person who commits a fraud "only" once is a fraudster forever, or until he is forgiven, pays his debt to society. Merely not commiting any more fraud doesn't remove the "stain".
Similarly, I take you to imply, an institution which is prepared to give up on teaching as the best means to educate, even if only "until the test" or "whilst we get this coursework done" is in some way *morally* corrupted. This is not the same as abandoning the truth pursuing function of teaching momentarily, such as we do when we let the students out for break. Rather it is to do with a lack of faith in teaching, not a mere alteration of our objectives.
The question which would redirect us at first principles is "Why would it be immoral for a culture to abandon teaching?" To put it more outlandishly, suppose a culture could become "post-pedagogical", what moral arguments would be strong enough to stop that happening? That's too big a question for this character limit though, so maybe next time.
Post a Comment