The secret to good teaching

Sometimes people ask me “what’s your secret?”.  I assume they’re talking about teaching and not the other thing.  I get good results from my students without too much stress.  I know other teachers who achieve the same thing (I’m married to one).  Sometimes people ask her “what’s your secret?”

When confronted with complexity, we find reductive aphorisms comforting and attractive.  I know schools that swear that positive psychology or choice theory or connectivism or inquiry learning or constructivism or peer mentoring is the key to quality education.

They’re all valuable.  Where they go wrong it to believe their own press and rely on a reductive theory when faced with complexity.

Teaching is complex.  What’s wrong with trusting teachers to come up with their own strategies?  As a profession, we’re moving away from teacher autonomy.

I suspect that it’s because you can’t sell teacher autonomy and it’s tough to create a metric for it.  You can sell a school with pictures of kids using technology, but the fundamental experience that the student has will be shaped by how the teacher approaches using that technology.  

It’s also because it’s very easy to sell the opposite of teacher autonomy.

The transfer of understanding is still a mystery which stubbornly refuses to be reduced to a simple arrows and boxes diagram.  There are some knowns, but the role of the teacher is to respond to the ineffable irreducibility that is the mind of a child or adolescent.

One of my most successful Year 12 classes (A level in the UK, Seniors in the US) was an expression of this mystery.  In an attempt to understand their success, I asked the students to describe what made the difference.  For all students it was the teacher-student relationship, but the responses of two of them were in conflict.

When asked why he were successful (both students scored in the top 10% of their external examination cohort) Matt said that I helped him at every stage of the process: I broke down the task for him and helped him understand little by little.  So far so good.  Sounds like good teaching, right?

Nikhil’s response was different.  He said that I gave him a broad task and when he asked for help I didn't give it.  I instead directed him to resources and said “you can do it”.  Sounds like lazy teaching to me, but the student indicated that this sense of being thrown into the deep end made the difference.

I confess that I wasn't following a plan.  I was simply using my experience and expertise to respond to student needs as they arose.  Could it be that employing good teachers and then letting them use their instinct might be key to successful learning?

As the profession begins to drown in new managerialism, the mind space for creativity and innovation (outcomes of true autonomy) becomes smaller.  More paperwork won’t make you more accountable, it’ll just make you do more paperwork and less of something else.

Does Teaching Kill Creativity?

What do you want from your school?  If your school was a restaurant, would it be Aria, or would it be McDonald's?

My wife and I are fans of Aria.  The degustation menu is an experience like no other.  A group of passionate people, led by a visionary, have worked very hard to create something truly mind-blowing.

At Aria, freedom to innovate results in a sublime experience.  At McDonald’s standardisation rules.

If Matt Moran was a teacher, I suspect that he’d have left the profession long ago.  Standardisation dulls creativity.  It feels safe, but it kills initiative.  Programs that attempt to raise standards simply add paperwork.  The requirements are mind-numbing.  Do you want a teacher with a numb mind?

In Alan Moore’s 2011 book, No Straight Lines, he describes the outcome of this way of thinking on education.

“Government edicts describe in several educational courses not just the scope of the learning but the minute-by-minute, blow-by-blow instructions as to exactly how lessons are to be run.  If anyone is good at their job, are they going to want to work like that?”

If you stood behind Matt Moran, telling him how to cook, he would be pretty cranky (he’s a big guy, so I wouldn't try it).  If you do it to teachers, they become discouraged and move their creative efforts elsewhere.  Matt Moran, Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay are all excellent cooks.  Their excellence is derived from their individuality and creativity.  Would you tell them how to cook?  Would you tell them to comply to a bewildering set of criteria that have little to do with their day to day work and have been shown to have no substantive benefit to the desired outcome?

Let teachers teach.  Provide them with resources and get out of their way.  Train them meaningfully and give opportunity to improve if there are problems.  

Incidentally, in preparation for this post, I typed “Why teachers” into Google.  Before I could type “quit”, Google suggested the word “drink”.