Who teaches the teachers?
The old adage:
Those that can, do, and those that can’t, teach, …
seems wholly off the mark. In my experience, the phrase:
If you can’t teach it to a layman, you don’t really know it…
is much more accurate. Teaching is hard. All parts of it. The lecture/dictation part, as well as the part where you adjust/facilitate/care enough about the learning of the specific student so that learning happens (The difference between speaking and teaching is whether or not learning takes place).
Here are some random thoughts on teaching, what bad teachers do, what good teachers do, and how they can stay ahead of the curve.
Not All Teachers Teach Well
It doesn’t take long in one’s professional student career to realize that not everyone was ‘cut out to be a teacher’. At first, it may just seem like laziness. But there always seem to be teachers that get better results out of the same crop of kids. Teachers that don’t necessarily put in more effort either.
In high school teaching, the name of the game is discipline, fear, and good classroom management (read: don’t sit the troublesome kids together).
At university level, things change, and content and delivery is king. Sure, answering questions, especially during office hours, is crucial, but what makes or break a university-level professor is the quality of the lecture. Which usually means the quality of the material and how well its being delivered and tested on.
Teachers Shouldn’t Forget What It Was Like Being A Beginner
When I taught at Fort Lewis College, it became clear quite soon that ‘teaching’ wasn’t taught, nor was it nearly as meticulously analyzed like with high school teaching. There weren’t mini-workshops on dealing with troubled kids, or motivating the bored yet gifted ones. Students had more personal responsibility and we didn’t need to hold their hand anymore.
So you learned with experience, and like with anything, feedback. But if you already know the material backwards and forwards, it can’t be hard to take a step back and objectively assess your own teaching.
A certain Analytical Chemistry professor of mine was guilty of this. Moments of genius came regularly to him, and dealing with concentrations of even parts per trillion was second-nature. Analytical described his personality more than his course. But sometimes his own knowledge shot him in the foot as a teacher: he couldn’t put himself in the shoes of a total beginner. He couldn’t see why this stuff was difficult for basically the entire class. The result of the first exam was that the average was a 34%.
Good Teachers Go To Teaching Conferences and Read Teaching Papers
I was exposed to the world of meta-analysis of science teaching when I went to my first American Chemical Society conference in San Diego, California.
I attended all your normal chemistry lectures. Even a pretty sweet one on a novel therapeutic for a schizophrenic drug. And of course, the ones I went to that inspired my interest for pharmaceutical ADME and Lipinski’s Rule of Five. Just by drawing a molecule, on the back of the napkin, you could make some rough, but surprisingly accurate, guesses as to whether it would “work” (as in be safe and effective) as a pill.
But the talks that really fascinated me focused on Chemistry Education. These weren’t highschool-level workshops done during teacher meetings. These talks were in-depth, evidence-based, and immediately applicable.
This is where I was first exposed to the ‘Flipped Classroom’ idea. Watching the lectures recorded and available on line was homework. And in-class time was spent working on ‘homework’ aka problem sets and test-practice questions.
So Who Teaches The Teachers?
Like any good scientist, teachers need to have a system in place to remove themselves (and the inherent biases they bring) from the equation. In order to get feedback and not bias it.
End of the class/semester/year review/anonymous feedback sessions are a definite step in the right direction but your students may only have good/bad things to say, without giving any clear direction.
Teachers, ultimately, need to teach themselves how to teach. Not through experience but through trial and error. Through research and development. A good teacher tries that Flipped Classroom idea. Would have a clearly-outlined way of evaluating how it worked (was it positive or negative). And would accept the results regardless of the outcome, never attaching themselves to heavily to any one method (because it could easily turn out to be a dud!)
Learn a Language Enough to Teach It – Perma-Beginner Mode
To teach a subject you have to learn it. And you need to know it deep enough to be able to teach it in many different ways and to many different levels. So you need to learn it really well.
But you can’t ever forget what it was like to be a beginner.
By far the easiest way to do this is to learn a language and then teach it. If you speak with natives, you’ll never shed the feeling of being a beginner in comparison. You’ll know it on a level perhaps in some ways even more nuanced than a native speaker. You’ll have an objectivity unknown to someone who has known the language since before they could remember.
Teaching a Language – Those That Know It From Learning And Those That Know It From Acquiring
A big part of the ACA Method, as it uniquely applies to teaching Spanish (ACASpanish.com), as well as how it more generally applies to teaching English here, is the idea of Gringo Lessons + Native Speakers.
Gringo Lessons – A Teacher that has learned the language
Native Speakers – A Teacher that has acquired the language
Without going too deep into the difference between learning/acquisition (that’s an entire article of itself, and forms a huge part of Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, the real backbone of the ACA Method), suffice it to say that learning a language gives you the ability to say, “Oh that was subjunctive tense!” and other such nonsense while acquiring a language gives you the ability to just be right all the time (it’s another matter, of course, with the written language…)
So then where do Gringo Lessons come into play as being useful?
Having traversed the road before, a second-language learner of Spanish may be meta-aware of the pitfalls and traps, and of a more effective and quicker path to Mastery. Having a plan or methodology to the madness.
A native speaker can’t necessarily tell you why a certain verb tense is the way it is, or why a certain word has a feminine gender even if it using a masculine article (looking at you ‘el tema’). A native speaker probably doesn’t have an action plan to get you to a basic level of speaking ability, because they had the relaxed pace of years of linguistic silence before uttering complete phrases. A second language learner of Spanish permanently and probably painfully knows what it is like to be a beginning speaker. The perfect Spanish Coach to get you to speaking Mastery quickly and effectively.
