Heart of Teaching- Being True to your Teaching

In this episode, I ask us to consider what is at the heart of our teaching. What is it that you hold onto that you must make happen in your teaching?

From this episode:

Our primary work is building a relationship with students.  A relationship about something worth learning. What does it mean when the school curriculum asks you to compromise what you believe matters?  Asks you to teach some shallow, some hollow facsimile, of what should be taught genuinely and full-heartedly. And when you teach the expected school curriculum that way you break that promise to your students, to teach what is important in the way you know that it should be taught.

Transcript

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Hi everybody, this is Johnny. Thanks for listening. I want to push on something this session, something I believe you should challenge me about. I am motivated by a math teacher friend. She asked how the ideas I set out work in the actual world in real classrooms. Most of us have this question at hand whenever someone comes along and tells us what we need to do better as teachers. I will wrestle with this here. I want to start with what we want for our teaching. What we believe good teaching should be if we could make the world the way we want it to be. Think about what brought you into teaching in the first place. It's not the same for everyone. I've worked with many beginning teachers and the motives range from I had this great teacher and I have always wanted to be like them to teaching is important work and I want to make a positive influence on our world. Think about what happened to your initial aspiration for teaching when you began to spend time in real schools and real classrooms. My beginning students, after a few weeks in their field work, always had stories to tell, stories about kids having much harder lives than they expected, stories about absurd school practices that were not kind or considerate to kids or teachers. I share this because I want to hold on to the idea that school is not great in and of itself, and that all kids don't come to us whole and ready to learn. We all know this, and yet we keep showing up. So what is it that holds us to the profession? There is something inside each of us that holds us to it. We may have gotten in because we wanted to be that great teacher, or wanted to make the world better, but those primal reasons get beaten up in the reality of teaching. So what is it for you now? For me, I became a teacher because I wanted a respectable middle class job. I did not grow up with much. Over time what has kept me teaching has been a fierce desire to do something well, to be good at teaching. When I say teaching I am not saying school teaching, I'm saying teaching as something more meaningful, something deeper, a core human endeavor, the important thing humans do for one another, to make each other better, to make us all better together. I think you will get this when you think about what is at the heart of your teaching. At the heart of our teaching is not some pedagogical maxim we learned in teacher school. It's not some institutional proclamation about raising achievement for all learners. I expect at the heart of your teaching is the relationship you make with your students. I know that it has long been so for me. I want to push us a bit here. I want us to think about relationship with students as the heart of teaching, as something more than how you get along with your students. A teacher can get along just fine with kids and not teach them much. The relationship we have with our students has to be more than just how we get along. It has to be about something. It has to be about what is being taught, what is being learned. Think about the most important relationships in your life. They are about something important that you share in together. In our teaching, our care for students must be bound to care for their learning. That means we have to care for the stuff of their learning. This comes easily for some. My brother, the English teacher, loves books. My math teacher friends love puzzling through problems. My history teacher friends love to make connections between this time and the past. Teachers of younger students love giving the gifts of reading and writing because they know how powerful and meaningful these will be in their students' lives. Think about that care for what you teach as both a passion and an obligation. The passion drives you to bring what you find wonderful in that subject to what you teach to your students, the ones who might have that passion themselves if you teach them well. The obligation is to the subject itself. You want to teach literature in ways that are true to understanding author's voice, to meaning making, to how what we read connects to what it means to be human. You want to teach math in ways that are true to problem solving, discovery, and the revelation that comes with good solutions. You want to teach history in ways true to its complexities, its recurring themes and multiple viewpoints. You want to teach reading to bring children into the stories we share that bind us, help us understand the world, ourselves, and each other. Take a moment to think about what you teach, the thing that you care most about to give to your students. Understand that your teaching of that passion is an act of care, the strong fiber binding your relationship with your students. Hold on to that. Because I am now going to ask you something uncomfortable. How does school enable or get in the way of teaching your passion in the way that you believe it should be taught? I take us here because this is a hard, sharp place we all experience as school teachers. You know this place. The place where you believe that the school curriculum misses the point, does not get it right, pushes you to teach a hollow or wrong version of that thing you love. This brings me back to the question what does it mean to teach in real classrooms? And by implication, real classrooms not being the best places to teach richly, deeply, aspirationally. As school teachers, we are required to teach the school curriculum. For many this looks like a standard space curriculum. I'm going to say that a standard-space curriculum organizes content in measurable bits, and that those bits are to be taught and learned in sequences organized by grade levels. I will stop here for just a moment and ask us to think about what this says about how we learn and how anything we learn is structured. Good things to learn do not always come in stackable bits of knowledge. Not everything we learn can be assigned an appropriate grade or age level, and finally, not everything worth learning can be measured with school tests and measures. Our primary work is building a relationship with students, a relationship about something worth learning. What does it mean when the school curriculum asks you to compromise what you believe matters? Asks you to teach some shallow, some hollow facsimile of what should be taught genuinely and fullheartedly. And when you teach the expected school curriculum that way, you break that promise to your students, to teach what is important in the way you know that it should be taught. This is a hard place to be. On the one side, your obligation to keep your relationship with your students about teaching and learning stuff that really matters, on the other side, your obligation to teach the school curriculum. We have three choices in this space. The first is to simply do what is expected. We can just accept that schools work the way they do. We can trust that curriculum designers and administrators are smart and are working in students' best interest. The second is to do the opposite. Close our doors and do what we believe in, and hope that we don't get found out or get grief for not following the program. We've all known teachers that do this. If they are truly great teachers, then good for their kids and good for them. If not, then we wonder if they just do what they want from comfort and ease. The third choice is what most of us take. We do what we need to meet the school requirement. In a standards-based curriculum we teach the standards, work hard to meet every one of them. But we always try to teach them right, the way we believe they should be taught, the way the subject deserves to be taught, the way our students deserve to engage the subject. We compromise to be true to the curriculum and to assert some authority over our own good teaching. But this gets us into trouble. How many times have you spent more time on a lesson than the curriculum set out for you? Because you just had to make it right, make it meaningful for your kids. You know what happens. You get behind, you feel bad that you are not keeping up with where you should be in the curriculum. You blame yourself for being a bad teacher, always behind, never really getting to teach in the good ways you know you should. I know this because I have been there. I know this because I've had too many conversations with teachers where they beat themselves up over this dilemma. What I want for us for you is to stop this. We should more fully own our part, the part where we make our good teaching happen because it needs to happen, and to be unapologetic about insisting that we be that great teacher our students need and deserve. I'm calling on us to trust ourselves. Trust in the good motives that brought us into teaching, trust in our knowledge and teaching strengths. Trust in ourselves because we are the ones that show up every day with real kids in a real classroom. That curriculum doesn't know your kids, you do. That curriculum does not live in the moment, you do, with your kids' surprises, questions, misunderstandings, and wonderings. So own your teaching. I'm not saying abandon the curriculum, even standards based curriculum. I'm saying that we need to put any curriculum through tests of validity. Does this curriculum get to the heart of what matters? Does this curriculum invite learners in? Does it spark their interest? Does it encourage their own agency to know more? And most importantly, does this curriculum foster a relationship that is positively grounded in something worth sharing, worth your teaching, worth your students' abiding attention? That's a lot to ask. You know that most curricula won't meet these requirements. That's our job. To take what we are given and fashion it to make it work for our kids and for our teaching. Better to live with teaching that matters well than to struggle to get through the curriculum. Good teachers are always a bit subversive, bending things doing what is needed, to do right by what they are teaching and who they are teaching. One last thought. Many of us are that good teacher who bends and breaks school expectations as we believe we need to. But there is an alternative. Within your subject area or your grade level, or if you are fortunate, your school, find others who believe deeply in the importance of teaching well, the ones who want more than to just get through the curriculum, who want more for their kids and for their teaching. Work with them to purposefully and openly reform approaches to the curriculum. This is hard work, but can be so much more satisfying than closing your door and trying to make it right on your own. When your group is challenged, always put kids first. What your teaching will do for their learning, for the depth of their understanding, for the quality of their engagement. I have said that we need to make the curriculum work for our kids in our teaching. In a grander way, consider how to make the school work better for our kids and our teaching, by making concerted efforts with peers to shape the curriculum and the teaching across the school. Comments are welcome. Thanks for listening.