Real Teacher Education

After a long day of PD yesterday, I've been thinking about how we see ourselves as educators. Been thinking about what our own education means and how we continue to develop as teachers. Been thinking about real teacher education.

Our PD session ended in a faculty discussion where we debated what the role of lecturing is in the high school classroom. On one side, we had folks who said that kids need to "learn to become engaged in a lecture" because that's the primary form of classroom communication they'd see in college. On the other side were the folks who argued that outside of the college classroom, there wasn't a job on Earth where the primary form of communication is lecturing and therefore we should dispel with it in our classrooms in favor of 'real world' education.

This of course, is a classic argument that's been going on since at least Mr. Dewey's days.

And I think it misses the boat.

Because the argument is structured in such a way to propagate the false dichotomy between 'levels' of learning and experience. I'd argue that rather than gear your instructional strategy towards expectations in educational leveling -- i.e. teaching with different strategies to second graders than to college freshmen based on the 'ideas' of what the expectations of teaching and motivation are -- what we really should be doing is understanding who our students are in a meaningful and compassionate way and, without any preconceptions about what's going to 'work', we should be formulating approaches democratically with the input -- and veto power -- of our students.

The students deserve the veto. It's their education, after all. And if the teaching method you are using isn't working for them -- be it lecture or open learning or project-based or what-have-you -- then they have a right and obligation to petition you to understand what would work for them and you have a professional obligation to try out new strategies.

Hard? Yes.

Professional and necessary? Even more so.

I'm tired of teachers acting like their 'tried-and-true' method is the only way. I was tired of it as a student and I'm tired of it as a teacher. It's arrogant and it stinks of the fear of losing the comfort of the 'normal'.

Nothing about your students is 'normal'.

I realize that I can be a bit militant in the pages of this blog. And I fully realize that I've got an ego and personal arrogance that occasionally makes me look like a jackass. So I'm gonna say right here right now: Don't base your teaching approaches on the arguments that you hear on this blog. Rather, base your teaching approaches on the conversations you have with your students. Find out who they are. Ask them how they learn. Challenge yourself to figure out how to teach them. Each of them.

Because in the end, this isn't about lecturing vs. not lecturing. It's not about preparing kids to be able to handle college. It's not about the authority of one form of instruction over another.

It's about engaging minds and empowering individuals.

That's it. That's the whole point of education.

And you ain't gonna engage the mind of a student by arguing the finer points of pedagogy with your colleagues. You're only going to engage the minds of your students by learning from them how their minds work. You've got to talk to them. You've got to know them. And you have to trust one another.

Real teacher education happens when you leave your ego behind and jump into the learning process as not a 'teacher' or a 'facilitator' but as a fellow human being who has compassion for human beings and who recognizes the real importance of education as the armor of empowerment. Because the 'real world' is an endlessly relative term; and what we really want is not to produce students capable of dealing with one kind of 'real world', but capable of adapting, showing compassion, and helping to empower others in whatever world in which they may find themselves.