Principles of Teaching

1. Principles of Teaching Anne M. Phelan Faculty of Education University of British Columbia 2010

2. INTENTIONS and BEGINNINGS • Framing the challenge: • What is teaching? • Conceptualizing the practice • What kind of “knowledge” does good teaching require? • Reflecting on the promise and the difficulty: A conversation about the course

3. From the teacher candidate’s viewpoint: • An introduction to teaching and the ‘role’ of the teacher • An experience of inquiry • An understanding of the relationship between teaching and inquiry

4. ‘TEACHING’ AND ‘TEACHER’ • As cultural object • As event or transaction • As a personal history of experience and associations

5. Experience can be questionedThe question of our pastTelling the truthDeconstructing myths

6. Conceptions of Teaching and Teachers • What are some present day understandings of teaching and teachers? • What are some historically significant understandings of teaching and teachers? • What understandings do you hold about teaching and teachers?

7. An Autobiographical Reflection • Describe a time when you felt least like a teacher? • Write, Share, Identify Themes

8. Themes & Issues: What characterizes teaching for us?

9. What does teaching mean for: • A teacher-on-call? • An elementary school teacher? • A teacher at the beginning of the 20th century? • A teacher dancing in Winnipeg?

10. A teacher-on-call • “[’C]ause you’re just there for the day, and they know that, and they treat you like they know you’re not going to be there tomorrow. It’s nice that there’s no responsibility, no work after work, you just leave. I love the freedom.” Jill, Teacher-on-call

11. An elementary school teacher • “I can’t help but feel in many instances there is this sort of paternalistic, watchful, big brother eye that’s sort of looking down on us and wanting to make sure we’re doing the right thing as prescribed by the Ministry. … I can’t help but feel that the hen’s in the proverbial henhouse, and the wolf is constantly at the door, just…making sure that the ladies are doing what they’remeant to be doing!”

12. The suicide note ofMabel Jones “There are are a few people who would like to see me out of the way, so I am trying to please them…I know this is a coward’s way of doing things, but what they said about me almost broke my heart. They are not true. Forgive me, please. Say it was an accident.”

13. A Secondary Teacher in Winnipeg • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1J-Nf6PUMs • http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20100419/winnipeg_teachers_100419/

14. Class Discussions • What does teaching mean to: • Paulo Friere? • Women teachers in 1800’s • Teacher Candidates 2010 • Professionalization or Proletarianization? • Role or Identity? • Gender • Virtue and Character • Educator or School Teacher?

15. Teaching as Inquiry • What is teaching? • What kind of “knowledge” does good teaching require?

16. A student teacher in a university teacher education program is asked how[s]he is doing at school. [S]he reports to be doing pretty well: [s]he maintains good discipline, is using several teaching methods, is trying various types of classroom organization, has made a number of tests for the pupils, has a good rapport with his mentor teacher. When asked to mention some problematic points, [s]he answers that he is experiencing difficulties in relating to individual pupils. Managing the class as a group is okay, but initiating more personal contacts is hard…. That is also what his mentor teacher has [said]…some fellow students…confirm [the] difficulties. The teacher of the course then asks the group what one could possibly do about a problem like this. Thereupon students start giving advice: [s]he could try walking through the class, plan…lessons in such a way that [s]he has occasions to start up little conversations with individual pupils, give more individual assignment…look into the current research literature for directions. The student in question listens politely, but with a blank expression, indicating skepticism and resistance. [S]he does not show any sign of recognition. At last [s]he comments that [s]he has heard all this before, but does not quite know what to do with this information because, “Somehow, in my case, these things just don’t seem to work out” (Kessels & Korthagen, 1996: 17).

17. Questions • What does this teacher candidate need? • What is it that teacher educators can offer?

18. One View • Knowledge as Episteme • Conceptual knowledge • Propositional • General • Abstract • Theoretical • Knowledge of social skills, models of communication, theories of learning • Problem of transfer: the failure of practice or the incompleteness of theory

19. A Question • Why is “relating to individual students” important? • More effective lessons? • Better student assessment? • Greater student achievement? • Teaching as instrumental--poiesis/production

20. “The principles are the easy part!”

21. A Second View • Practical wisdom (phronesis) • An amalgam of knowledge, virtue, and reason that enables people to decide what they should do • Discernment speaks to a teacher’s capacity to see the significance of a situation, to imagine various possibilities for action, and to judge how [s]he ought to act on that occasion. • Perceptual understanding

22. “It doesn’t seem to work in my case….” • What is a particular case? • What is there to be perceived? • What feature of the experience is [s]he aware of? • What particulars of the situation does [s]he judge relevant? • Reactions, feelings, thoughts….

23. Returning to the Teacher Candidate’s Question • Why is “relating to individual students” important? • Because it is only in the context of a relationship that I can help the child flourish • And what this means I can only answer in the particular • Teaching as ethical action--praxis/action

24. Moral Complexity of Practice • …[s]he had to decide what to do to focus on worthwhile achievement…to decide how to communicate the idea that respect for evidence, clarity and ‘elegance’ matters…to choose in individual cases, whether to permit free, creative activity in place of required tasks…to decide whether to nurture sensitivity at certain points instead of encouraging cognitive action…how much to allow for personal idiosyncrasy…or should adjust the demands of the clock or the schedule to the rhythm of a child’s inner timer…multiple small uncertainties about whom to call on, whom to discipline, whom to reward…to give reasons…to persuade others that [s]he is making sense…. (Maxine Greene)

25. Teaching as Inquiry • Practice is "a space in which questions arise about what is good or bad, what is worth doing and what not, what has meaning and importance … and what is trivial and secondary" (Taylor, 1989, 28). • Good judgment…is not a matter of objective knowledge or of subjective opinion, but a result of intersubjectivity; becoming a good judge depends largely on one’s capacity to consider other viewpoints of the same experience (Coulter & Wiens, 2002, p. 17).

26. Educating for Discernment • Experience (Contrived and Real) • Deliberation (Public Dialogue) • Reflexivity (Two-in-One Dialogue)

27. Emotional Work…a fall from someone else's certainties

28. At the heart of teaching ….3 R’s • Teaching is centrally about the relationships between students and teachers in which teachers agree to share responsibility to help the young learn the knowledge, attitudes, and dispositions that will help them lead good and worthwhile lives now and in the future. • Our purpose… to welcome children and youth into the world so they can join and renew that world.

29. Beginning Again… • Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and .. save it from that ruin which, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we ... prepare [children] in advance for the task of renewing a common world. Hannah Arendt

30. The Promise and the Difficulty: • A Conversation about a Course….

31. Thank you!

32. IMAGES

33. MEDIA • On August 12, the first day back at school for Quebec children, Sarah Dougherty of The Gazette, reported the following story of Melanie Bertrand, a beginning teacher: • “Thrown into a tough secondary school during her teacher training, Melanie Bertrand started questioning her career choice. “There were fights, the cops were constantly there—it was mind-boggling,” Bertrand said. “The kids, they didn’t want to be there.” Bertrand had a starkly different experience at another school, which convinced her to stay the course. “You don’t have to discipline these kids, they actually ask for more work,” she said of her stint at the tony, private Lower Canada College in N.D.G. Bertrand is weighing job offers in both the public and private sectors as she gets set to start her teaching career this fall. Since the early 1990’s, Quebec universities with teacher-training programs have added courses in classroom management and beefed up in-class training. Despite this, some experienced teachers say their young colleagues need still more training in dealing with the growing number of disruptive and special needs students…. Bertrand wishes she had even more training in classroom management. “We were never taught to deal with the students, the unruly and unmanageable ones,” she says.” (Montreal Gazette, Aug. 12)