This blog is Part 1 of 3.
My goal is to unpack the concept of teaching for you, offering some different angles through which we can think about it.
I’ll start that task here and continue it in Parts 2 and 3.
Introduction
We begin at the beginning, with a simple question.
One to which I know you will already have an answer, predicated on your own beliefs, experiences and learning.
All I want to do here is present you with a range of possible answers about what teaching may be.
My aim is not to place a stake in the ground and attach a board to it that reads: This is teaching and may no more be said.
Rather, I would like to unpack the question by providing a series of different answers.
This, I hope, will serve two ends.
First, it will point to the many facets that go to make up teaching.
Facets that are of greater or lesser importance depending on where you work and how you view the profession.
Second, it will intimate that teaching is, in many senses, a highly personal job.
Aside from the core, unarguable facts that teaching concerns the transmission of knowledge and the facilitation of learning, there are many different paths down which an answer to the question ‘What is teaching all about?’ can lead.
Now let me lead you down some of them.
A General Answer to the Question
In general, we can say, without much controversy, that teaching concerns learning, knowledge and understanding.
The former is constructed through the development of the latter.
The teacher’s role is to help their learners to learn. In doing this they broaden and deepen both their knowledge and understanding.
This is a process that has existed for thousands of years.
Upon which, it could be argued, much of human civilisation is built.
Yet, in our current situation, in the twenty-first century, teaching has both a general and a bureaucratic meaning.
I say bureaucratic because a significant proportion of the teaching that takes place in the world today is a direct function of decisions made by states.
Education is seen as a public good, provided to citizens and subjects in most countries under the auspices of the state.
Of course, much formal education exists outside of this context as well.
But even then, such as in privately funded schools or schools supported by charities independent of state control, a degree of bureaucracy remains.
We could describe this in another way.
Teaching is now a profession, highly regarded and possessed of its own body of knowledge concerning what that profession entails and how one may come to be skilled at it.
There are two aspects to the general answer then.
First, teaching is an ancient tradition intimately tied up with the transmission of culture, including the attendant knowledge that goes to make up some or all of that culture.
Second, teaching is a modern profession interwoven with the organisations and individuals who provide and control the means for it to take place.
Teaching is both a familiar activity arising out of human beings’ desire to communicate and to pass on information and skills and a less familiar activity (to those outside or entering the profession) concerned with the formalisation of that process for the benefit of individuals and wider society.
Thinking in this way helps us to see that everyone entering the profession does so with extensive prior experience of teaching and learning, but that this may have come largely while in the role of learner and may not fall neatly into one or other of the above categories, instead straddling them both.
Training to teach therefore involves, to no small extent, a critical reflection on the existing assumptions we have about what teaching means and what constitutes learning.
To not do this risks failing to take account of the fact that our previous experiences of teaching and learning may not constitute experiences of what these two things can be when at their best.
A brief example will illustrate.
Research (Hattie, Visible Learning; Black et al Assessment for Learning: Putting it into Practice) suggests that feedback is far more effective than grades in helping learners to make progress.
Feedback means telling learners what they have done well and what they need to do to improve.
Put this way the point is obvious.
However, if our own experience of teaching and learning is heavily bound up with the giving and receiving of grades without or in lieu of feedback, we might struggle to break the conceptual habit this will have unconsciously formed unless we reflect on it directly.
Certain elements of effective teaching run counter to received wisdom.
They may contradict some of your past experiences.
Their implementation rests, in part, on us looking critically at our existing understanding of what, in general, teaching is.
Teaching is Communication
So let me put a proposition to you:
Teaching is communication. Nothing more and nothing less.
What are your thoughts?
Do you agree?
Why?
The clearest criticism of the proposition is that it is so general as to be relatively useless in analytical terms.
It is a platitude voicing something self-evident.
But what would it mean to view teaching primarily through the lens of communication?
First, we would need to define the term more precisely.
By communication I mean the interactions that take place between teachers and learners, as well as those that take place between learners.
These interactions include speaking, listening, reading and writing, as well as non-verbal communication, visual communication independent of body language (such as a diagram) and the pieces of meaning that can be read into all the above (to give a literary metaphor, the subtext).
This delineation increases the utility of the proposition.
Now we are thinking about how teaching, at root, rests on the communication, in all its forms, that happens in the classroom as well as, at times, outside of it (consider, for example, the teacher sat in the staff room marking learners’ work – here communication is taking place without the learner being on hand).
It follows that, if we tentatively accept the proposition, the quality of teaching, and by extension learning, will connect directly to the quality of communication that takes place between teacher and learner or between different learners.
But what do we mean by quality?
Again, we can develop the specifics of a broad concept.
Quality of communication encompasses the manner in which the teacher conveys information, the types of questions they ask, the relevance and utility of the feedback they give, the manner in which they talk to learners, the body language through which they convey (or fail to convey) authority, openness, support, enthusiasm and professionalism, the dialogue that takes place between learners, including the extent to which this is critical, creative, focussed and based on the topic of study, and the expectations the teacher exudes both implicitly and explicitly every time they interact with an individual learner, a group or the whole class.
Now the proposition starts to take on a more nuanced, deeper meaning.
Teaching is communication.
Communication encompasses the interactions outlined above.
The quality of those interactions can vary.
Higher quality interactions, with quality at least loosely defined, are preferred in all cases.
Thinking about teaching in this way helps us to attend closely to how we communicate and what we communicate, as well as to how learners communicate and the content of their communication.
It causes us to think about the information that is continually passing between us and our learners, as well as that which passes between pairs, groups or the whole class during our teaching.
We can then start to consider how to ensure the information we convey – written, verbal or visual – is suited to our ends, and how we can use the information learners convey to teach better lessons (for example, by asking more accurate questions or by adapting our planning to meet the needs of the pupils in front of us).
You and the Learners
Some would argue that here we have come to the crux of what teaching is really about: the relationship between you and your learners.
As with the idea of teaching as communication, this aspect of the job fits closely with the point we made earlier about teaching being a human endeavour with a long and ancient history.
An endeavour that originates, perhaps, in the passing on of knowledge from one generation to the next to increase the chances of survival.
(This is an evolutionary argument.)
Of course, in the modern world the division of labour permits that formal schooling is conducted by experts, leaving family members free to work and enhancing, generally, the likelihood that children and young adults will learn more and become better educated than would otherwise be the case.
This means that as teaching professionals we do not have any prior attachment to the learners we teach – differentiating the job from the imagined familial genesis outlined above.
The consequence of this is simple.
Teaching is about building and maintaining good relationships with our learners.
Doing this helps overcome the lack of attachment, therefore enabling us to fulfil a role that nature might otherwise dictate as being reserved for parents and kin.
Often, part of the relationship building is done for us.
The culture in which we live values education and believes in showing respect to others, particularly those in positions of authority who have the express intention of helping us, leading to a situation where learners arrive predisposed to view teachers positively.
However, this is not always the case.
Particularly in secondary settings.
And, we might also note, that even with a strong starting point we still must put effort into developing and sustaining relationships.
As you may remember from your own school days, supply teachers frequently get a hard time of it from the learners they are asked to teach.
This is often because they have no prior relationship with them.
Why would they?
Their job is to cover lessons at short notice, when people are sick or away on leave.
They have had no chance to get to know the learners in question – to develop any sense of rapport.
As likely as not it will be the first time they have seen them.
Even getting to grips with names will prove tricky.
Compare this to a different scenario.
A teacher at school, college or university with whom you had a good relationship.
They knew your name.
They knew a little bit about you.
They knew where you were at with your work and what you needed to do to improve.
Importantly, you probably knew what to expect from them; and this ability to predict and anticipate allowed you to enjoy their lessons more, to look forward to them and to get more work done.
From this angle, teaching is driven by the positive relationships teachers establish with their learners.
If no such relationships can be cultivated, the rest of the task will be extremely hard to achieve – for everybody.
