This blog is Part 2 of 3.
My goal is to unpack the concept pf teaching for you, offering some different angles through which we can think about it.
I started this in Part 1 and will continue it here and through Part 3.
We finished Part 1 having just considered the importance of building rapport with your learners and using this to create positive relationships.
Next, we’ll start thinking about lessons.
Creating Lessons
But what is that task?
We have our general answer in the previous post.
Yet it remains to be seen how this (helping learners to develop their knowledge and understanding and, by extension, to learn) plays out in practice.
Outside the confines of the classroom, teaching can be viewed as both singular and multifaceted.
Singular because all teaching shares the same general basis.
Multifaceted because it can take many forms.
A parent showing a child how to tie a shoelace, for example.
Or a manager talking a junior colleague through the process of delivering an appraisal before inviting them to sit in on one and then try it out for themselves.
Inside the classroom, teaching becomes somewhat more homogenous in terms of form, if not in terms of the content, style and delivery that fills that form.
The basic unit through which most professional teachers work is the lesson.
This is partly defined by administrative considerations – the division of the school day and (in a secondary context) timetabling matters – partly by tradition, and partly by the continued efficacy of the lesson as a unit into which learning can be placed.
Lessons have a beginning and an end.
They are discrete blocks of time that give teachers and learners the opportunity to focus on a shared goal to the benefit of all concerned (at least, they do in an ideal world).
That goal is defined by the teacher, usually with reference to a wider curriculum provided by the school or government.
(Notice how we again see that interweaving of teaching as an interaction between teacher and learners and teaching as a bureaucratically informed exercise).
All this means that teaching is about creating lessons.
A curriculum is prescribed for children of a given age, in relation to given subjects.
The level of flexibility within this curriculum varies depending on the age of the child and the values/trends/goals of the issuing state or institution.
The teacher’s role is to interpret the curriculum for their charges.
They do this by creating lessons.
These lessons underpin the communication that takes place between teachers and learners.
They are the structure upon which learning sits.
As we noted, the style, delivery and content of lessons can vary wildly.
But their essential purpose – the role they play in the teaching process – hardly ever varies.
The lesson is the space in which teaching takes place.
The vessel into which we pour content, ideas, concepts, processes and skills.
So that learning can happen.
Planning lessons is thus one of the most important skills any early career teacher needs to develop.
For now, you might like to reflect on a couple of questions – one concrete and linked to your own experiences, the other rather more speculative…
- Looking back on your experiences of schooling, to what extent did the structure of the school day define your learning?
And,
- If lessons didn’t exist, how else might teaching and learning be structured?
Facilitating Progress
Lessons are where learning takes place.
They are created and delivered by teachers, whose aim is … what, exactly?
Well, there may be various answers to this question.
But one to which there is widespread agreement runs as follows.
- The aim of creating and teaching lessons is to help learners learn as much as possible.
- By learning as much as possible, they make progress.
- That is, they know more and can do more than was previously the case.
Great teachers maximise progress – they help all learners to learn as much as possible.
Teaching becomes all about progress: the progress learners can make while they are in the classroom.
(Though, we must also note that progress isn’t linear. Sometimes it happens quickly and uniformly. Sometimes it is slower and/or circuitous. We might say, then, that great teachers maximise progress over time.)
That there are countless ways in which progress can be facilitated is beyond dispute.
That there are better and worse ways is slightly more contentious.
Certainly, evidence exists that gives strong support to specific classroom strategies and techniques.
(And if you haven’t yet looked at the Education Endowment Foundation’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit, John Hattie’s Visible Learning, and Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction, now is the time.)
Yet, teaching being an art rather than a science means that no definitive method, based on proven and immutable laws, presently exists.
And nor is it ever likely to.
With that said, we are not descending into relativism here.
Some things are better than others, that much is clear.
This might be because they are supported by evidence, because they are underpinned by sound reasoning, or because they are logically deducible from certain premises.
Because of the practical nature of teaching, and the inherent uncertainty over what will work best with who and in what context, trial and error is an important part of the job.
This is never truer than in your first few years; especially while you are training.
Learners are not objects, they are subjects.
Unlike atoms or celestial bodies, their behaviour can be difficult to predict.
They have wills, motives, desires and intentions.
These – solely or in combination – cause them to act in ways familiar, unfamiliar and, sometimes, long forgotten.
(See if you can dredge up any memories of some of your own actions as a child or, better yet, a teenager. It is likely these vignettes will stand in stark contrast to the rather more sober and upright self you now present.)
To facilitate progress – to maximise progress – we need to develop a repertoire of effective teaching tools.
These include strategies, activities and techniques.
Developing such a suite of tools requires a fair amount of trial and error.
Ideally, we begin from evidence, example and sound reasoning.
(Though anecdote, innovation and creative thought are also important here.)
But then we need to test whatever follows in the heat of reality.
Not just to see if it works, but also to see how we might need to adapt it for our own teaching style and for the learners which whom we are working.
Making Mistakes
It took Edison a long time to invent the lightbulb.
One story, possibly apocryphal, quotes him as saying he found 10,000 ways the light bulb would not work, all of which led him to the method that proved successful.
The tale illustrates the importance of failure – and of making mistakes – to any undertaking in which the goal is to be successful.
Particularly an undertaking of any practical kind, such as the development of a new product or, indeed, teaching.
That teaching is a practical activity goes without saying.
In fact, it is one of the features that attracts many to the profession.
Of course, this sense of practical endeavour is underwritten by intellectual work, but the practical focus always remains.
It is this, after all, that describes the actual act of teaching – of delivering a lesson.
Making mistakes is an important part of how we learn.
This is easy to remember (and experience) in the kitchen, on the sports field, or while learning to drive.
It is perhaps harder to keep in mind – maybe even to accept – when one is engaged in a professional activity.
But great teaching relies on mistakes.
Or, to put it another way, great teaching relies on the teacher spotting, reflecting on, analysing and using their mistakes.
This sets the issue in a slightly different light.
Every time we plan a lesson we are creating something that does not yet exist.
How do we know whether it will work?
Answer: We don’t.
Every time we teach a lesson to a class, how do we know whether they will respond to it as we predict?
Answer: We don’t.
In both cases, experience undoubtedly plays a big part, but even the most experienced teachers make mistakes or find themselves surprised by new characters, group dynamics and unexpected responses.
This means that training to teaching is as much about making mistakes as it is about getting things right.
Turn this around and we see that getting things right is sometimes a function of getting things wrong first (and maybe second, third and fourth) time around, reflecting on this and then applying our learning in the future.
Teaching involves continuous adjustments – during lessons, during planning and while marking.
These adjustments can be difficult to gauge at first.
This is natural and to be expected.
If you find yourself in this position, do not be disheartened.
Fine-tuning the adjustments becomes easier the more mistakes you make, providing you set out with the aim of learning from these.
It is, in fact, rather as Oscar Wilde put it: ‘Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.’
And, as I would add: Experience broadens the terms of reference through which you can make decisions about the future.
Assessing Learning
We mentioned the facilitation of progress as one of our answers to the question: What is teaching all about?
What we didn’t do there is consider how we actually measure progress.
And, if we do not have a means of so doing, progress becomes a concept that is ungrounded.
It floats on the breeze; lacks relevance; becomes impossible to pin down.
Seen from this angle, teaching is primarily concerned with assessing learning.
(And remember, I am here presenting different, competing answers to the question ‘What is teaching all about?’)
The teacher’s job is to see what learners know, what they don’t know, and to then use this information as the basis of their attempts to bridge the gap.
That gap might be to things learners should know already, but don’t.
Or a gap to things they haven’t yet encountered and which, therefore, will be knew learning.
We can assess learning in a few different ways.
First, we have the formal assessments we all remember – GCSEs, SATS, A Levels.
These measures have a younger sibling called in-class assessments – essays, questions, tests, coursework and project work – set by the teacher.
Second, we can ask questions.
This form of assessment can be written or verbal.
It will not have escaped your attention that it tends to form part of the first type of assessments as well.
Most exam papers consist of a series of questions, to be answered in timed conditions.
I emphasise questions as a separate category because questioning is such a vital part of the teacher’s toolkit.
Through questions we can draw out information from learners at almost any point of any lesson.
They are always there, ready to be deployed for the purposes of assessing learning (as well as making learners think, with these two purposes often overlapping).
(For more on questioning, see the specific questioning blogs in my Training to Teach Knowledge Base, as well as my Questioning Knowledge Base, which offers a comprehensive practical overview of the topic.)
Here, let me just say that as teachers we tend to ask hundreds of questions every day.
Yet the quality of those questions is unlikely to be uniformly high unless we attend to their subject, their structure and the type of answers they invite learners to give.
Our third and final means of assessing learning is the general elicitation of information.
This is not mutually exclusive from the previous two ways.
In fact, it can encompass both, as well as much else besides.
Eliciting information includes setting and marking formal assessments and asking questions.
It also involves listening to learners, reading their work, observing them in class, using techniques that allow the entire class to show you their thinking at the same time (such as mini whiteboards) and anything else that gives you access to what learners think, know, understand and can do.
Looking back, you will see that we have moved from the specific to the general in trying to unpick what it means to say teaching is about assessing learning.
Not only does this show why assessing learning might be thought of as such an important concept, it also illustrates how any interaction with learners or the work learners produce is an opportunity to assess (in the broad sense) where they are at.
And of course, we can then use this information to inform our teaching – ensuring that what we do matches the needs of our learners as closely as possible.
