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