Let’s talk about American Football.  For those of you still reading, let’s focus on what the professionals call “The Quarterback Problem”.

How would you choose an NFL quarterback?  They’re the most pivotal player on the field and it really pays to get the selection right.  Not only do quarterbacks earn up to $10 million a year but they can also make or break a season for an entire team.  With so many jobs and so much money on the line, developing a surefire way of determining success is vital.  

Guess what?  There isn’t a surefire way.  Dan Shonka (awesome name) has vast experience in the field, works very hard and analyses statistics and DVDs of players.  His job with an NFL team relies upon him making good decisions about which quarterbacks to choose.  A lot of money is on the line.  People’s careers.  People’s livelihoods.  If there was a surefire way of choosing a quarterback, someone with Dan’s experience would have worked it out.  

He can’t do it.

IQ tests don’t work.  Video analysis doesn’t work.  Analysing college level performance doesn’t work.  You cannot predict performance in this case.  The only way that you can tell if someone is going to be a good NFL quarterback is to let them have a go at being an NFL quarterback.

The same is true for teaching.  The only way to work out if someone is going to be a good teacher is to let them have a go at teaching.  This problem is even more dire than the quarterback problem: There’s no such thing as “college level teaching” before you get to “NFL level teaching”.  Teachers can arrive at their first job without having taught before.  Practicum (a supervised simulation) is a good start, but it’s not the same thing as being a teacher responsible for a class.  

There have been some attempts to bridge the gap, and they’re welcome because they address the issue.  Lifting the quality of initial teacher education is always a good idea.  I’d ask Mr Pyne how he plans to implement the recommendations made to him.  For example:

“Higher education providers select the best candidates into teaching using sophisticated approaches that ensure initial teacher education students possess the required academic skills and personal characteristics to become a successful teacher”.  

Sounds promising right?  “Sophisticated approaches”?  Everyone can agree with that.  The problem, however is that there’s no evidence that having a teaching degree, passing a test or looking good in a qualitative survey on “personal characteristics” affects your capacity to be a good teacher.  None.  Nil.  Nada.

Depressing, huh?  Despair not; some of the recommendations of the TEMAG report are actually pretty sensible.  They are focused on rigour.  They target ineffective tertiary practice and the lack of coordination between schools and universities.  More power to them.  I’d disagree with the focus on entry criteria and say that raising the bar for entry into the profession is a fool’s errand and will be a textbook case of managerialism.

Choosing teachers will always be always be too hard to reduce to quantifiables.  Some have suggested you have to try out four people to find one good teacher.  This is simply because the job is unquantifiable.  I hope this makes you appreciate the good teachers in your life even more.  In the mean time, I suppose we can hope that Pyne will fix the problems in pre-service teacher education.

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”.

What should you learn at school?

I teach boys.  They are quite happy to use a computer to finish a task, but they will focus on the “finish” bit.  It’s a race to see how quickly they can get it done and get back to their networked COD game which I will quickly find out about and break up (they ALWAYS try).

Capable?  Yes, but only idiosyncratically.  For “digital natives”, they have remarkably low adaptability to online instruction.  They LOVE it when I lecture them (delivery content in a didactic fashion).  They say it feels like “learning”.  I find this disturbing.  I record lessons for flipped delivery but they don’t watch them unless they “have” to.

On the other hand, I’ve got students who are able to think like this.  They’re the ones who immerse themselves in learning and see tasks as opportunities to develop skills rather than short-term prison sentences to be served as quickly as possible.

I got very cross with a senior class earlier this year.  A performance assessment was completed poorly.  They had tried to cram.  This is impossible with a skills based assessment (ever tried to cram for a language assessment?  A maths assessment?)  There were no facts that could be remembered and regurgitated (“drill and grill”).  Their skills were on show and they all fell short because they didn’t develop their skills. You need to practise if you want to get better.

As an analogy (and to introduce some vulnerability/authenticity) I told them that I was very unfit.  I took them down to the school oval and asked them what would happen if I ran around it 20 times right now.  I asked “would I be fit after doing that?”.  They answered “No, you’d be dead!”  (This excited some of them).  I then asked them how I could become fit.  They answered “by doing a little every day”. They know the theory of skill development intuitively. They are reluctant to commit to it.

The fluencies presented here require an attitude shift.  There is no such thing as a set point at which a student could be called “fluent”.  Stop work, pens down.  Congratulations, you’ve achieved fluency. Some students long for this moment. They see it as the pinnacle of learning. The payoff. the end of the third act. The win. The story arc of education exists, but it's a little longer than a 3 year bachelor's degree. It lasts as long as you do.

Student attitudes need to change from matriculation (what number do I need to pass?) to skill development (I am better at this today than I was yesterday).  This is a tough sell to students and parents. Any ideas?

Are teachers useless?

We are now resource, technology and information abundant.   Everything is available.   The scarcity model is dead.  Anyone trying to make a pay wall actually pay knows this to be true.  If I can find it for free, why would I pay?  More to the point, if I can teach myself, why do I have to listen to a teacher?

I was at high school before the World Wide Web was a thing.   I was good at not listening to teachers.  I was so good I could do it without the help of the Internet.  I made it into an art form.  I can daydream with the best of them.  

I can also spot a teacher who doesn’t know what they’re doing.  Some of my teachers were bad at teaching.  They were bad at it all by themselves, without the Internet.  Some were great at teaching.  I would have asked them for help before going to Google because of their skill.  Engaging with them was a delight.

The Web has nothing to do with the relevance of teachers.  Some of them were irrelevant before 1994.   Has the Internet made the others (the good ones) irrelevant?

Think back to a teacher who really made an impact on you.  Chances are their impact was personal.  It wasn’t their understanding of their subject; it was their understanding of you that made the difference.   You connected with them.  They took time to address your needs.  They made the world a better place because of what they did and said. 

Have you noticed that we haven’t become any smarter or wiser since 1994?  A googolplex of information might be available, but Silvio Berlusconi is still at large, obesity rates are through the roof and owling is still a thing.  We don’t need teachers to give us the facts.  They’re readily available.  We need teachers to help us make sense of them.  Mathematics needn’t be scary.  Sentence construction can be a creative delight.  Subatomic particle physics is endlessly fascinating[1].

Did your teachers simply give you endless content and then test you on it?  Or did they help you make sense of the world through the subject they were teaching?

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[1] Note:  The value “endless” can only be known if the value “fascinating” is unknown.  And vice-versa.

I have all the answers.

You know Sisyphus as the guy condemned to push a boulder up a hill for all eternity. Just as he gets it to the top, it rolls back down the hill. He returns to the bottom and starts again.  He does this forever.  

Insanity is repeating the same thing over and over and expecting different results.  I can't claim to have coined that gem.  Neither can Einstein or Rita Mae Brown, for that matter.  

I think about the USA and their military solutions.  I think about Australian politicians squandering the diminishing returns of voter trust on hollow rhetoric.  I think about my two-year-old son's tantrums.  Of these three examples, I expect that my son will grow out of his self-defeating behaviour very soon.

This all brings us rather neatly to the topic of peer coaching.  Peer coaching is very simple.  It's about perspective.  The challenges that you face might not be of any substance.  The way you're doing things might be the issue.  The solutions you've come up with might actually be the biggest problem.  A peer coach can think for you (we come up with solutions for others far easier than for ourselves), be objective for you (our regular colleagues often reinforce our limitations) and hold you accountable (it becomes real if you say it out loud and someone else is listening).

Why was Sisyphus pushing that rock?  He was being punished.  For hubris.  The one thing sure to get in the way of effective peer coaching is hubris.  We already have the answers.  Often before we know the questions.

The Listening Deficit

I'm being lectured as I write this. The content of the lecture is how we can relate to our students in an authentic way. The speaker is relating to me in an archaic way and he seems unaware of the irony. He’s not a bad guy; I actually admire him as a teacher and as a peer-educator. There’s just something wrong about the way teachers present material to each other in a formal setting.  Professional development has always meant lots of talking. There’s ample evidence to suggest this has never worked.

   

When I listen, I am at my most helpful. When I speak, my content is linear and my aim narrow. There’s a very high chance of minimal impact. Why do we favour the one over the other? There is a great emphasis on groups and talking, open plan offices and brainstorming. None of it works.  Where is the emphasis on listening and being quiet?    

Let’s take an example from a recent encounter. A colleague was talking and I was listening. She was expressing frustration at how long it took to find key phrases in online text. Because I was quiet, I was able to suggest ctrl-F as a solution. Because this was her story and not mine, I was able to provide input that had more meaning for her than it did for me. By the way, ctrl-F might not be as well-used as you might think.

Perhaps the issue is narrative. Given a chance to present to colleagues, we tend to construct a narrative to share. Sometimes these are interesting. Mostly they lack impact and are soon forgotten. Either way, in a room with 100 people, there are 100 narratives. Why is the presenters’ narrative the most salient, useful or worthy of sharing?  

Should we abandon the presentation idea for professional development?  What else would you do on those days? Personally, I’d abandon both the presentation and the day. Professional development that works requires a different approach. It requires money, time, planning and thought. Filling a day with presentations is cheaper, takes less time, requires minimal planning and short-term thinking.  

As usual, the easy option has become the orthodoxy.

My goal is work out a way of selling "listening". It's going to be tough, because the medium might be at odds with the message. Any ideas?