How We Learn About Teaching

How We Learn About Teaching

Mary Kennedy

Michigan State University

The phrase, “learning about teaching” refers to two things: First, gaining an understanding about what teachers actually do that causes students to learn; and second, gaining an understanding about what kind ofthings would enable teachers to do those things. Answers to these two questions provide the foundation for virtually all arguments and debates about teaching. The first question leads to discussions about how teachers represent subject matter or manage classrooms ornurture students or evaluate them, while the second leads to discussions about a very broad range of potential enablers, including their own knowledge and personal character, the curriculum and otherresources available to them, the quality of their preservice teacher education orprofessional development, the stability of their school, and so forth, all of which might enable teachers to do a their job.

Many people believe they have learned a lot about these two questionsand many have clear ideas about the answers to these two questions. Yet our answers to these questions often differ. In this paper, I distinguishfour groups who have learned different things about teaching. One group, which I will call Regular People (RP)consists of people who have learned about teaching through their everyday experiences, either as children attending school, as parents of children attending school, or as adults whose neighbors are teachers. Another group consists ofTeachers Themselves(TTs), who began life as RPs but who eventually become teachers and who learned about teaching throughteacher education programs and through direct experience teaching. Then there is a group of people whose job is toactively influence teaching. In this group are state and federal bureaucrats who write regulations governing schools and teachers, entrepreneurs who create and sell textbooks, educational videos and professional development programs for teachers, local school boards and administrators who govern teachers, and legislators who write laws that influence teachers. I refer to this group as REALs, an abbreviation for Regulators, Entrepreneurs, Administrators and Legislators. Finally, there is a group that includes university professors and educational researchers who conduct formal research on teaching, may teach college courses to prospective teachers or professional development courses to practicing teachers, and are generally expected to have some specialized knowledge about these issues. I refer to these people as Ostensible Authorities (OAs) about teaching. I add the adjective “ostensible” because their knowledge is frequently contested by members of other groups.

Members of all of these groups believe they know something about teaching, even though they may have different answers to the two questions posed above. That so many people believe they have answers to these questions has implications for TTs –the teachers themselves—because their own learning is affected by all the other groups. TTs begin their lives as RPs. They attend school for 13 years as RPs, watching teachers and drawing conclusions about teaching from their vantage point as students. Their decisions to enter the profession result from what they have learned as RPs. That is, they may decide to become teachers because they think teachers areimportant orpowerful, because people in the community look up to teachers, or because the work looks easy or interesting or fun. These perceptions are based on what they learned as Regular People. When they go to college to study teaching, they are taught by OAs, so what they learn about teaching while in college depends on what OAs have concluded about teaching. Then, when they take jobs in schools, their work is structured and overseen by REALs, who use what they have learned about teaching to design the educationoversight systems. REALs determine which textbooks teachers will use, when and how often students will be tested, how the teaching day will be scheduled, and what kinds of professional development will be offered. Ultimately, teachers’ understanding of their practice reflects the sum of their experiences as RPs, their interactions with OAs, and how REALs have designed and structured their jobs.

Notice that all these groups, regardless of their roles, began learning about teaching as RPs, for all began their learning as children in school. Everydayexperiences and everyday thinking, therefore,provide a foundation of everyone’s understandings about teaching, regardless of whether they eventually become OAs, REALs, or TTs.

This paper examines the complex set of relationships among these different groups. It asks what each group learns and how the full system of interactions affects Teachers Themselves. Sections are arranged according to their net effect on teachers. The first section addressesone of the foundational questions raised here, of what teachers actually do. The second section examinesliterature on how Regular People interpret their everyday experiences and, in particular,what they conclude about teaching. Since all four groups begin their lives as Regular People, this section provides a foundation for everyone’s initial, albeit naïve, understandings about teaching. The third and fourth sections address what might be added to our understandingsthrough higher education in general, or through teacher education, in particular. So far, all of these influences may have similar effects on all four of the groups I have identified. The fifth section then returns to Teachers Themselves, examining what they learn from their direct experience teaching, and the last section examines the role of REALs, people whose adult jobs entail governing or regulating teachers or teaching. In this section I consider how their understanding of teaching influences the organization and governance of teaching.

1.Four Essential Tasks of Teaching

The practice of teaching is so commonplace that it is difficult to examine it in an analytic way. We all have seen dozens of teachers throughout our experience as students, so we all have plenty of images of teachers speaking, writing on the board, showing overheads, pacing about the room, scolding students and so forth. The practice of teaching is so widespread and visible that its underlying mechanisms may not be noticed.

Even though we have all seen a lot of teaching, we have not seen all of teaching. We don’t see teachers’ planning, nor do we see what they are thinking throughout their lessons. In fact, we really don’t even see everything they do, because we aren’t always aware that they are doing something. In fact, teachers are actually doing multiple things simultaneously, and all of them are essential to teaching. But even though all of these tasks are essential, they are not complimentary, and strategies for achieving one task can interfere with their ability to achieve another task, so that classroom teaching entails a difficult balance among these four essential tasks.

Enacting the Curriculum

School curricula reside in textbooks, curriculum frameworks, and “scope and sequence” manuals. If students could (and would) learn content simply by reading these documents, there would be no need for teachers. The teachers’ task is to convert the lists, words, and outlines, concepts and so forth into a set of live classroom activities that will help students grasp this content. To teach a given body of knowledge, teachers first figure out how to divide the content into discrete daily segments, then figure out how each day’s segment can be represented in real time—what events will occur, what materials that will be needed, where students will sit, and so forth. Then they must actually enact these lessons so that they conclude according to plan and on schedule.

Two important principles of learning are relevant to how teachers enact the curriculum. One is that students can’t learn simply by being told about it or by memorizing sentences about it. They need to understand it. In its report on human learning, the National Research Council {Bransford, 2000 #5021} argued that instruction needed focus on underlying relationships so that students develop their own internal mental representations of the ideas. It is these internal representations that are remembered. Willingham {, 2009 #8579}adds to this by pointing out thatmemory is the residue of thought. Thus teachers must engage their students in some way with the content.Teachers may stimulate thinking, and thedevelopment of mental representations, in many different ways. They may “walk through” problems on the board, leading students step by step to ensure that they understand the entire process. They may ask students to predict what will happen next, or why something just happened, pushing them to see and understand causal relationships. They may ask students to engage in their own explorations or experiments. These questions and prods are intended to help students to think about the underlying relationships and concepts that the teacher is addressingand increase the chances that students will see and understand those relationships.

The second principle of learningis that knowledge is tends to be “anchored” {Bransford, 1990 #2131} to the particular contexts in which it is learned, so that students often have difficulty seeits relevance to other situations. Thus, if a youngster learns geometry in a classroom, he might not see its relevance when he takes a job as an apprentice carpenter. He might face carpentry problems that could be solved with geometry, yet be unable to solve them because his geometry knowledge is in a separate compartment of his mind. At the same time, if a youngster learns geometry in the context of building structures, she might not see its relevance to drawingsuch a structure, so that drawing tasks would continue to be difficult or even un-solvable.

These features of learning mean that the a critical factor in teaching is developing representations of the content that help students “see” underlying relationshipsand help them “see” how this content relates to a variety of different types of problems or situations. Imagine trying to teach students what a piano is, or how it works, if students never actually see or touch a real piano. A lecture about pianos could never be as powerful asthe physical experience of seeing the mechanism, pressing its keys and hearing the effect of that touch. This is not to say that teachers need to bring everything that exists in the world into their classrooms, but rather that they need to think hard about their representations, for these can be very consequential.

There are many different ways in which any given bit of knowledge could be represented, each stimulating different thoughts from students and each “situating” the content in a different context. If we observed multiple teachers teaching the same curriculum—say, third grade mathematics, or 10th grade biology—we would find tremendous variation in how that bit of knowledge was represented for students. One teacher mightuse a physical example and show how it works, another might engage students in a thought experiment, another might put a diagram on the board, and ask students to label parts or speculate about how different parts work, still another might ask students to engage in a group activity, and yet another might show a video or simply write on the board.Even if teachers chose the same representation, they are likely to pose different questions or hypothetical problems as they engage student thought.

Representations help students “see” abstract ideas, but they are difficult for teachers because they must be enacted in real time and space, often with materials and with student activities. Studies of teacher planning suggest that teachers begin their planning with a general idea and then progressively develop and elaborate on it. Further, these plans are not developed around topics, but around activities{Shavelson, 1983 #7931}. Each activity is defined in terms of its content, materials, goals, activities and duration. Kennedy {Kennedy, 2006 #6616} describes teachers’ plans as visions: They envision particular students and what might be interesting or boring for them or what would be difficult for them to grasp. They also envision the physical space, who will sit where, what materials need to be accessible, and whether everyone will be able to see a particular demonstration. When teachers enter their classrooms, they have in mind a specific sequence of events that will unfold in a specific way. Clark and Peterson{, 1986 #5295} refer to these plans as “activity flows.” Lesson plans represent their way of enacting the curriculum, or converting a passive textbookinto a live activity.

Contain the Crowd

The second essential task is to contain student movements. This is necessary because classrooms contain from 20 – 40 students in a relatively confined space. Further, thesestudents are young, energetic, restless, and more interested in one another than in the lesson. An early portrait of life in classrooms {Jackson, 1968/1990 #6463} pointed to crowdedness as a central feature that governed life in classrooms. Crowdedness means that students are continuously disrupting each other. Most teachers contain their crowds by creating a system of standardized rules and routines which define where things are kept, when students may be out of their seats to sharpen pencils or use the restrooms, when and how materials can be accessed, how desks and students are arranged, how materials will be distributed and retrieved,where to go with lost or found items, how homework can be made up following absences, and so forth. This underlying organizational system is typically introduced at the beginning of the year and persists throughout the year. It enables students to coordinate their actions without having to ask the teacher for permission for every move they want to make.

Along with this general system of rules and routines, however,there is also a process of continual oversight and reminders. Teachers remind their students not to poke their neighbors or pull out their cell phones, and they try to intercept potential disruptions before they become real disruptions. One early researcher{Kounin, 1970 #6713}set out to study what he called “desists,” meaning teacher actions intended to stop misbehaviors. But on observing teachers in action, hediscovered that much of their classroom management consisted of prevention of misbehaviors rather than stopping misbehaviors once they had begun. He noticed that teachers continuously demonstrated to students that they were aware of, and paying attention to, what everyone was doing. These communications themselves often discouraged misbehavior. A teacher might say, “So you can see that the area of this triangle, Christina, is . . .” The teacher is speaking to the entire class, but simply by mentioning one student’s name, she warns the named student to settle down and she reminds all the other students that she is alert totheir individual actions.

Enlist Student Participation

While most observers are aware that teachers are enacting a curriculum, and are aware that they occasionally discipline students, they may be less aware of the importance of enlisting student participation. But this third task is just as essential as the first two, for the simple reason that education is mandatory but learning is not. Students may respond to their situation in one of three ways: They may actively resist; they may actively engage; or they may cooperate, in the sense of that they remain quiet and polite, but do not really engage with it. I use the verb “enlist” rather than, say, “motivate” or “entice” to describe this essential teaching task because teachers are rarely able to motivate or entice all of students, and many teachers settle for the more achievable goal of gaining their cooperation. If students are willing to at least cooperate, they don’t disrupt the learning of those who are actively engaged.

This simple fact that education is mandatory but learning is not places teachers in an untenable position for, as Cohen {, 1988 #5341;, 2011 #9007} points out, teachers cannot themselves succeed unless their students are willing to participate. Teachers, Cohen reminds us,belong in a class of “human improvement” professions, like psychotherapy and fitness training, in which the professional’s success depends on the clients’ willingness to improve themselves. If clients do not wish to learn, to lose weight, to improve their golf swing, or to save for retirement, then professional help is likely to fail. Teachers, like other helping professionals, cannot succeed unless their clients choose to engage.

Insert cite to Willingham here, about how the human mind is not designed for hard thought and no one really wants to do it.

This third essential task also complicates the first one: It reminds us that the task of enacting the curriculum cannot refer to merely informing students about particular content. Instead, it must refer to an activity that also interests students and motivates them to engage in learning. Some teachers motivate students by trying to intrigue them, while others createsocial communities in their classroomsthat motivate students to conform. All of these strategies, ultimately, must necessarily be concurrent with and part of “enacting the curriculum.”