I recently participated in a presentation about technology in education. Afterwards I spoke with a handful of educators who wondered at the resistance of educational institutions – and indeed some teachers – to try new teaching tools and approaches. Why is it, someone asked, that the very organizations we expect to live at the edge of new understandings in education – our schools – and the very people we employ to teach our young to learn – our teachers – often seem the most resistant to taking risks and learning new approaches?
This is the dirty secret of pedagogy, the core insecurity and unspoken fear in many teacher’s lives, and the hidden motivation of nearly all educational institutions: there is no product.
In most professions the practitioners can point to a product or an effect of their work. A better tool, a running program, a written document, satisfied clients, smoother operations. Yet there is no object produced in teaching and the teacher’s job is not to make people or institutions happy, but to draw the student to learn, to change. What is the product? It is not the curriculum, which is only one of many ways of organizing subject matter. It is not the student’s mind, which arrives mostly assembled. It is not an abstract ideal of knowledge which if it exists only exists inside this mostly assembled student’s mind. The teacher’s work is to lead the student to learn – perhaps the material, perhaps how to learn – but only the student can do the actual learning. So what is the product?
We must have a product, of course, so we can point to the result of the work. And so we have invented products: evaluations, grades, standardized tests, and so on, all attempts to prove the teacher and institution’s worth by measuring what can be measured, however irrelevant.
Having established these now-traditional means of proving their worth, having convinced the surrounding culture – rulers, taxpayers, elite, parents, students – that they are making something worth purchasing, educational institutions dare not risk change that might inspire purchasers to ask: do you know what you’re doing? Is your product worth buying? Fear of death is a powerful motivator.
But teaching does have a product, and it is hidden in plain sight: the teacher’s product is the teacher themself. Teaching is one’s ability to become a living and creative mirror that reflects a student’s best interest in learning. Not some abstract or theoretical student, but this one, now and here.
Such work requires the teacher to at least temporarily put aside what they know about teaching, about students, about institutional evaluations, and observe the situation, the subject, and the student as they are. To listen and look through the lens of their own insight.
This is hard work. Easier by far and less risky is to follow a textbook, to teach to a test, to do what has been done before.
My offered practice: consider those things you believe your teaching produces. These might be test results, student performance, projects, team research, attendance, classroom behavior, teacher evaluations, curriculum – anything that you believe your teaching produces. As you examine each one reflect on the change to your teaching if you no longer considered that a goal in your teaching work. How would your teaching change?
I think that one of my biggest annoyances (…criticisms? …frustrations?) in education today is that the majority of people in the media and the majority of people you just talk to would say that the product is an educated student. That is such a challenge, because I CAN’T produce an educated student. I totally agree with you, my product is me.
Excellent point. Thanks for brining it up.
Thank you, Matt. To complicate this, our own educational system creates an expectation of hard study and completion. Education is seen as something apart from life, something to get beyond so we can do what we really want to do. For many teachers, this results in an attitude not of continual life-long study and learning, which can be fruitfully be brought into the classroom, but an unspoken and often unconscious reluctance to treat themselves as works in progress.
As always, we must be the change we want to create.
I love this. I’m in my 6th year of teaching and I believe this more and more. I tell my students this old Chinese proverb all the time: “Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself.”
Thank you for joining us. While it’s easy to overestimate the power of the teacher to get the student through a door, it’s also easy to underestimate the power of the teacher in opening an appropriate door. A powerful teacher can open many doors, sometimes too many, sometimes too few, sometimes not the best one for that student at that moment.
The teacher and the door are not distinct, of course.
Education is definately a vital field, because almost everything in civilization is determined by education. I saw that on a website someplace — a non-profit organization in the Philippines. Teachers work tirelessly at their craft (a lot of them, anyway). But there are a few who seem to have a gift to inspire. My senior high school world history teacher was one particular. She had lived in China as a growing up. When she taught in Rockville, Maryland, you could possibly feel the wisdom of all her experience. She didn’t have us memorize dates. This was the first great thing I had heard from a history teacher. What she said next took the subject several magnitudes higher in value. She wanted us to be aware of the motivations of history — the deeply visceral, human areas of what can otherwise be a deadly dry subject. Jaime Escalante of “Stand and Deliver” fame, dared to dream big. Calculus for the typically dropout crowd? Pushing them to go on to college? Wow. And I have this publication called, “Calculus Made Easy,” by Sylvanus P. Thompson, first published in 1910. It’s been through lots of printings all for making an easy subject simple. What can we do to create more teachers who inspire world-changing quality? Einstein once testified that imagination is a lot more important than knowledge. Knowledge can present you with the building blocks. Imagination usually takes you to the stars. Don’t our kids deserve better?
I would say our kids deserve the best we can give them. I don’t think we are meeting that standard. There are systemic reasons why we are not, and change involving many people and many institutions rarely happens fast. But smaller schools, charter schools, experimental approaches, teachers with passion and insight who are willing to risk (and likely to lose) their jobs – I see these are incremental steps toward a better educational system. A change in the way we view the teacher is at least as important as a change in the way we view the student.
Teaching as reflection. All great teachers reflect constantly. I am in a district right now that is extremely large and has a standardized curriculum. It sucks. We are data driven (to extinction and exhaustion). I am a data nerd, myself. But, but–reflection is the key to data.
The proverb quoted really resonated with me. I hope this chaos we are experiencing is what happens in learning just before the learner experiences their aha moment. I think we are moving to a shift in the culture as it applies to learning and education.
Fingers, thank you. Data is not information until someone understands it, and that understanding requires context. If we fail to teach students what context means and how it can be achieved, we fail to teach them how to be more than ledger books. But we cannot teach what we do not know. Our educational system is sufficiently impoverished that it cannot afford to understand context, and therefore continues to teach data. Alas.
Ruth, thank you. The last 50 years have seen such predictions repeatedly yet the same patterns continue as our impoverished educational system clings desperately to life. I hope you are right; such a shift would be welcomed by many.