Thinking about the teaching cage

I guess lately I have been feeling very unsettled in my teaching of the Professional Studies course for pre-service teachers. I am concerned I might have gotten into habit patterns that are largely shaped by the teaching cage I am in. What is my normal way of teaching? What is the cage? In what way are they interacting to produce perhaps something different to what I am used to, and is this OK, or do I need to find a way to liberate myself? Why do I feel I am losing a part of myself?

This is a key dilemma for most of us teachers who have a sense of our values and philosophy of education and find that there is a mismatch between them and the teaching environment they are operating in. So what might it mean to clarify my own values and those underpinning the teaching environment - the implicit "curriculum metaphors", the syllabus constraints, the assessment metaphors and regimens.

Lock-step culture

One big thing I notice is that I am now engaged in "lock-step" teaching. Each week the students have a lecture on a topic which brings a philosophic lens to the ideas of teaching, followed by a tute whose aim is to help students explore those issues a bit more deeply - so it is set on a pre-schedule with not a lot of movement for emergent topics of exploration.

Versus authentic learning experiences

Normally I would prefer to teach using rich, authentic, meaningful, collaborative, multi-layered, multi-tasking, multi-potential projects where students are producing things for the real world and receiving feedback from the world. Learning is emergent and while I might have in mind different experiences I want to cover, I wait until it comes up as a real need before designing class activities to explore the issues. That way students are eager and ready to learn and can apply it straight away to real contexts, get feedback and then modify what they do and how they think about it.

It is a collaborative iterative process where I am tuning into their needs and development processes as well as their responses to what I am providing. I train them to be highly meta-cognitive - with much debriefing and reflecting on what they have experienced and learned. The students are engaged in self-evaluations against the course criteria and reflect on how their thinking and being has changed. This is based on curriculum metaphors "curriculum as experience" and "curriculum as currere" - learning through real experiences and then reflecting on self in context with past, present and future. I help to "lead out" what is there already and help them vision into who they might become. So I am getting feedback constantly about how I might be aligning with their present needs, their learning journey and self-vision.

Losing a key "sense"

This is perhaps in comparison to my current tutes - which are about preparing students for something in the future using a curriculum metaphor "curriculum as set tasks". So while my students seem to be enjoying the tutes and seem to have the opportunity to go deeper in exploring the meaning of the weekly topic this has not yet been tested in the real world. So they are not sure yet what meaning it has for them, and so I can't yet gain this feedback of whether I am on track in helping them be real teachers, or helping in their development towards that aim. I am realising that a key "sense" that I have been relying on is not there for me. A dimension of my usual "I-thou" relationship with my students is missing - my current pre-service students have a certain invisibility to me.

No wonder I feel I have lost a part of me! The relational one. This is not to say I am not beginning to develop relationships with my students - I certainly have, but that my ability to understand them in the same way I have understood my year 11/12 students in the role of an integral teacher is just not there.

I realise how much I need many layers of feedback from my students. While my current students (pre-service teachers) have done a first assignment - a piece on why reflection might be important to them as a teacher - I realise that this doesn't help me enough to get inside my students. I read one paper where someone actually did some heartfelt reflection -some wondering - about something he had read from Parker Palmer. I thought "thankyou, you have given me an insight into you".

Yet the assignment criteria was based on objective standards such as "shows a clarity of insight about the importance of reflection". The very wording of the assignment puts students into an "objective space" of evaluating reflection. How do I know whether reflection is truly useful or important to these students or whether they are saying what the teacher wants to hear? A door has been shut for me in coming to know them.

Yes, what I most valued out of all the papers I read was the ability of this one student to give me a true insight into himself and his thinking/reflecting processes - how he was coming to know - and his embodiment of the reflective process. Can you imagine that as a key assessment criterion?

The teacher gives the student permission to use whatever form they need to give the teacher insight about themselves; their thinking, their meaning making, their needs, their processes, their values - choosing to embody it in ways suitable to them. They offer the teacher this insight to help build the "I-thou" relationship where each can take on agreed roles. Perhaps the teacher dances between coach, mentor, critical friend, collaborator, nurturer, gardener, alchemist, liberator. The teacher then understands what the student is grasping towards and what the student has actually embodied.

What roles would the student like to take on in such a relationship?

What am I now? The conductor who orchestrates experiences. Perhaps I need to come down from the stage and discuss with the students how we can create learning environments which develop the "I-thou" relationships better.

Reflection on my reflection

It is interesting when I first sat down to write this blog I thought perhaps I should be moving into more project-based teaching - I was wondering how could I fit some project-based learning into my tutes and what it might look like. But actually being engaged in a process of "writing as inquiry" - with the aim to try to come to understand the reasons behind things - has actually helped me find a more fundamental aspect to what I value.

Does this realisation perhaps liberate me, as I hoped? Perhaps now I can find other ways to articulate my deep values through the assessment, the tute action and my ongoing relationships with my students... perhaps I can be in the cage and feel OK, or by bringing these ideas into the cage, the cage begins to morph into something else...

And perhaps I am being unfair to the cage - seeing it as a lot more confining than it actually is. I might see the lock-step nature and the setting of specific assessment tasks as belonging to the curriculum metaphor of "curriculum as set tasks" when in fact there are lot richer educational metaphors underpinning the course. Perhaps a challenge is helping these become more visible and articulated coherently into the assessment paradigm?

Picture: cc Tansan

Challenging moments

I had my second tutorial for my first group of pre-service teachers (Tute 3) in Professional Studies today which I think was quite challenging for all of us. I layered it - entwining affective and effective agendas into maybe a far too rich torte - with perhaps too much bitterness and not enough cream.

The key focus was exploring (through discussing it and living it) "Why is reflection important in developing teacher identity?" Critical reflection is about challenging our assumptions. For the first part of our discussion we challenged what we thought we knew learning was - what it looked, like, sounded like, felt like, and what learning moments could be. It seemed to generate rich insights. But really, I would have to say, while some of us might have had some of our ideas shook up, we all felt pretty safe in doing so (though there were some heated moments of debate).

Then we had a wake-up activity provided by one student. Following this I asked everyone to form small groups and just to say:

"What I noticed about how I felt, what I was thinking as I did this activity..."

This seemed very hard for my group - everyone wanted to move out of the phenomena of the experience into judging or analysing it. It seemed other groups did too.

Then we formed discussion groups to explore the readings. The extra dimension was that each person took on a role outside their comfort zone - each reflecting aspects of the roles teachers take in the classroom:

• facilitator - to give a clear vision and purpose, guide the discussion, and weave in the different threads
• time-keeper/task-orientation - to make judgments on when to rein in discussion or let it continue - based on value of emergence versus need to meet a set agenda
• recorder/historian of learning moments - to capture the groups key learning moments as signposts of their journey and to reflect back at appropriate times to help them clarify or tease out meaning
• socialiser/group needs - concerned with ensuring everyone's needs are met, no-one dominates, all given a turn, and to manage any inappropriate behaviours
• witness of self - to notice what is happening - how they are reacting, and to be the person that reminds them to breathe when situations get sticky
• researcher - this is the person who doesn't make assumptions from body language or responses of how people are learning - they really try to find out.
  

By being able to put on one role at a time the aim was to build classroom confidence. After 20 minutes I asked the groups to debrief by a TRIBES community circle - one person has the pen and only they can talk while holding it before passing it around the group. They had to say "what I noticed from my role was..." and not to analyse or be judgmental. It helped that we had tried this in relation to the wake-up activity.

Only now do I realise how challenging this debriefing process was, and how different it was to challenging an idea that we might hold (though some people's self-identity can be deeply intertwined with the ideas they have).

Each group was confronted with having to listen to someone else's perspective about themselves and how the group operated (some seemingly good and some not so good), with some people picking up on really interesting aspects that no-one had considered. In terms of group dynamics some people found out that they dominated, that discussion was often between several people, and that some, while interesting, were leading the group off track too often.

So what is it like to hear something (that usually no-one ever tells you) which actually might challenge how you think about yourself? Is this a challenge to our own identity? How easy is it to slip into defensive mode? What does it mean for us in developing a professional capacity to be open to feedback?

I felt that the insights the groups made about the content learning as well as their learning about the debriefing was so deep and valuable. (But now I wonder if I acknowledged this enough. I certainly didn't acknowledge the fact that students were really putting themselves on the line... because it just didn't occur to me until I had a chance to reflect about it.)

To finish the session I invited comment back on my own lesson structure, some of which seemed a little negative. After talking this over with a teacher colleague I now realise the importance of asking for feedback which might be positive, negative, or interesting. When we get into a critical voice we tend to focus on what is problematic rather than all those things that should be celebrated!

I left the class feeling a bit all over the place, unsettled, energy spiky and not quite there. I was certainly not in a state of resolution. I came away wondering if I should have closed it better, helped create a sense of buoyancy like last time, or whether it was OK to leave things hanging. Especially since one of our insights about learning was about creating conditions for students to move acrosss Vygotsky's proximity gap - from curiosity, to uncomfortablity to insight.... and giving time for people to make the connections for themselves, rather than the teacher trying to tie everything up. But not making the gap too big!

Was the learning gap too big? How did everyone else feel?

Critical Reflection

On one hand I am valuing stimulating classroom experiences to promote the challenge of assumptions, yet on the other hand, at the heart of me, I am a caring teacher. I hadn't thought through the consequences of my experiments on my students - that my methods might move from challenging ideas to challenging self. I hadn't wondered if this was in the students' best interests. Is that lack of foresight or am I ethically irresponsible?

In my original planning of the lesson I had a strong intuitive need to follow the discussion with a creative activity. I didn't have time for this and I wonder whether this in fact was really important and I should have gone with my gut. Coincidentally I just received an email from an international colleague which looks at the relationship between locked-into assumptions, vulnerability and creativity. Is giving people a creative outlet extremely important after such sessions - another way of knowing and being, a form of expressing something that is yet to be seen or understood, and only in the expressing is it formed? Does it provide a celebration of the midwifery process which perhaps comes before the actual rite of passage into enlightenment?

One of my students questioned why teachers need to critically reflect - surely it becomes very tiresome after awhile. The critical practice we were engaged with in this session was very tiring. It definitely needs balance. Brookfield suggests we use the lenses of colleague teachers, autobiography, student feedback and literature sources in a process of critical reflectivity. Yes, but I would like to add more - creativity, contemplation, and asking what is whole, true, good and beautiful in what we do.

One student said she felt she got to know me this lesson. We had a moment where she was lampooning the "witness" idea: "I am breathing, Sue, I am breathing." And I was quite playful back. When I am so in my head about the agendas of the class I forget to laugh... so one of the roles we need is the laughing teacher!

I wonder what learnings everyone in the class has gained from this, and whether they will apply critical reflection or other forms of gaining insight? Perhaps they are laughing about it, in which case they have achieved teacher-mastery level 4.2.

Picture CC: Daquella manera

Developing a community of practice - part 2

In this post I describe my tute for my second group of pre-service teachers in the Professional Studies unit. It follows on from the last post where I reflected on my tuturial for my first group.

Last post I said the first tute seemed to confirm my sense of vocation for teaching teachers; the second made me seriously doubt it. I left feeling I had a lot of cheek standing up in front of prospective teachers and believing that who I was and what I knew was in anyway aligned to what they wanted and needed - which was to get out into prac with real students and real schools. I felt humbled.

Okay, so that was my typical angsty emotional response that Brookfield says we teachers can get into. Can critical reflection really stop the cycle of self-blame and help us into a a more useful perspective?

Some critical reflection

The whole experience brought back memories of my "difficult" maths students who had been so disempowered all through their schooling that they took on behaviours that continued to sabotage their learning. When I invited them to have a voice, debrief about past injustices and be part of negotiating the processes and content for their own learning I opened a floodgate. Suddenly I was the recipient of pent up anger and resentment. And once that was out of the way, we could move on and develop real relationships and learn how to help each other tune onto learning.

So when I gave my second group of pre-service teachers an opportunity to "really" explore what sort of community practice they wanted a whole lot of stuff came out about their whole course:

• a sense of disempowerment,
• a concern that the census date (which locks you into paying fees for the course) was before the pracs - so students could not test whether teaching was for them,
• concern that they were just overwhlemed by content after content with no space to digest,
  
• concern that simple basic needs such as sufficient break to eat lunch, walk around etc was not factored into their timetables.

My topic is based on the notion "we teach who we are." When I stand up within a classroom in a building I am more than this me, who is teaching. I am part of the systemic whole; the policies, the buildings, the timetable, the lack of access to water. I am complicit in it all. And while I might stand up and try to model a critical constructivist teaching philosophy, the environment that I am in teaches something different. It stands for something different - it teaches who it is - which is perhaps not the modelling we want our pre-service teachers to take with them into schools.

When I asked the course co-ordinator whether the students could have access to filtered water (the water in the building is problematic) she said that they had asked the university previously and were refused, because the uni management wanted students to go down to the ref in the union buildings to get access to food and water - so encouraging centrality of student mixing. Hello? Isn't access to water a basic human right?

So really what we are talking here about is making visible the set of values that are guiding educational decisions. Brookfield suggestes we need to challenge the assumptions of such values. The value of student mixing might be a good one, but we need to also ask, "what might be diminished if we whole heartedly privilege this view?" Perhaps each value comes with an opposite. Our role as teachers is to see the dilemmas, and then see the greater landscape. so rather just staying in complicit holding patterns we can begin to challenge those greater factors which conspire to detract from learning.

Reflection on critical reflection

Moving into a critical reflection stance has left me militant, and full of flem. I want to rebel, make waves, stand up for the rights of others, treat issues at their source.

Calm down, calm down. Is there another way? What is whole, good and beautiful in what we do and how can we build on this?

Parker Parmer says we need to take responsibility in owning all of ourselves - the shadow as well as the light, the fears as well as our gifts. How does a whole organization do this?

I am left with a feeling of asking, what is me, what isn't me? What can I change, what do we need to change? I am into teaching primarily because I want to transform the world, evolve consciousness, help heal society. I know that means a commitment to my own transformative journey and a commitment to engaging with many reflective lenses that can help challenge me and move me into new perspectives and insights. How do I invite others to join me, because I need partners in helping to create social transformation.

First step, a water cooler in the the education building.

Image Creative Commons: Robillard