Moving from delivering curriculum to creating the context for learning…

Who am I, as a teacher, and what is the purpose of my craft?

After almost 30 years of teaching, I continue to regularly question my role as a teacher and the purpose for my daily practice. In fact, contrary to popular opinion, which believes that the more you do something the more confident and comfortable you should become with it, the more I’m in teaching the more questions I have about it. Some may interpret this as perhaps a sign that I may have chosen a career that “wasn’t for me”. I chose to look at it as an affirmation that I am exactly where I should be. The very fact that I continue to question what I do, indicates that I am still learning and I am still engaged. We speak often of the necessity of remaining uncomfortable with how we position ourselves in the world, for when we become comfortably numb we become passive observers of the world instead of active participants in it. So what does this all have to do with teaching? I suppose the very fact that I am writing about yet another seemingly uncomfortable position, wherein I am questioning myself, my role and my craft on a regular basis, indicates that I am still alive and well. For as long as we are reflexive practitioners we continue to engage our students in the learning process and WE will continue to engage as well.

I believe the true indicator of success is that teachers and students are both LEARNERS!  Both reveal the learning to each other.  When a teacher is truly a responsive teacher who cares about engaging her students in the learning process, she cannot rely solely on the predetermined curriculum and worry about whether or not she can ‘cover’ the curriculum. Rather, her teaching should be directed by the learning needs of her students and she should be concerned about whether or not she has helped her students to ‘discover’ learning. “Good teaching requires courage…the courage to expose one’s ignorance as well as insight, to invite contradiction as well as consent, to yield some control in order to empower the group, to evoke other people’s lives as well as reveal one’s own. ( Palmer 1990).Teaching and learning are inseparable.  However, I question what we mean by ‘knowing’ and what we mean by ‘learning’. Whose knowing is valued and what learning is most important? So how do we reform education so that the target for success isn’t being able to reiterate the prescribed curriculum, but, rather, the act of learning to produce meaning, and that the target isn’t a high percentage grade on the report card, but the active knowing that influences action?

We need to rethink learning so that it is liberated from the shackles of the classroom walls and becomes embodied in all that we are and all that we do. And since we are social beings, it is incumbent on educators to make learning a social practice. Students need to see themselves in the learning. It cannot remain a passive act that they witness while they sit at their desks and the teachers impart their wisdom upon them from the front of the classroom. They need to be active participants in this process. They need to be given the opportunities to be engage and contribute to the learning environment and the social community in which they find themselves, be it, the classroom, the school yard, the field trip, the library… If we want their learning to be transformative, then we must provide opportunities for that to happen. Learning needs to be a natural part of their everyday lives, not some separate event that happens between 8:30 am and 3:30 pm from Monday to Friday for 10 months of the year. Learning is a process not and event!

For students to become members of a learning community of practice it must be made explicit to them. I am a true proponent of explicit teaching. When students are made aware of the ‘why’, the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ are more relevant. Helping my students discover the why helps them to define the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ as it relates to them. Only then, in my opinion, will students stay ‘tuned-in’. Sometimes it appears that the  educational system is sifting our kids and making it seem like students chose to ‘drop-out’, when in fact they are being ‘pushed-out’ or ‘tuned-out’ of the learning community of practice because membership is not extended to include ALL students.

It is time for us to continue to explore self-directed learning. Putting students at the helm, equipped with the skills to navigate their own learning based on knowledge that is valuable and relevant to them is the educational reform needed for modern learning and teaching. We must acknowledge the elephant in the room…we must resign ourselves to the fact that the education system of the 1800s, which is still prevalent in some educational circles, needs reform, and that that reform needs to come from the inside out. The torch should be passed onto the students and they should become the writers of their own books, the guides of their own journeys and the leaders of their own futures. As Picene put it, landing a plane is like learning... “No two landings are ever the same. A good pilot [like a good teacher] exercises good judgement; you can’t teach that. You have to give the student lots of opportunities to develop it. And that’s going to mean some rough landings!”