No Longer a Teacher

Per­cep­tive read­ers of this blog (er, maybe using the plural there is pre­sump­tu­ous) will notice that the tagline has changed. Though I will still have a bent towards tech­nol­ogy and gifted edu­ca­tion here, because both of those are pas­sions of mine, I decided the change was in order for two reasons.

First, from the start my posts have often ranged beyond those two top­ics into other areas of edu­ca­tion, and I always felt awk­ward writ­ing out­side of my declared focus area. The new tag more accu­rately reflects what I write about and why.

Sec­ond, I have begun to real­ize that teach­ers can no longer afford to be just teach­ers.

Before we can be teach­ers, though, we must first add two other titles to our resumes: learner and designer.

Learner

Any teacher today who believes that learn­ing ended after grad­u­ate school needs to take another look at the pro­fes­sion and the world. The pace of change is accel­er­at­ing. The stu­dents who sit in our classes are need­ier and more diverse than ever. Infor­ma­tion and knowl­edge are grow­ing expo­nen­tially, far faster than any­one can pos­si­bly keep up.

As a teacher, I was asked daily to teach things to my stu­dents that I knew lit­tle or noth­ing about before I had to teach it. As an admin­is­tra­tor, I’m asked to run pro­grams about which I know far less than I need to. New ideas about how to teach appear in jour­nals and blogs every day. Sci­en­tists have learned an enor­mous amount in just the last ten years about how the brain learns.

If I am not before any­thing else a learner, if I do not ded­i­cate myself to always get­ting bet­ter at what I do and how I do it, I have already lost before I even start. I can’t afford to rest on “it was per­fectly fine last year.”

Con­sider this: the pri­mary thing we want stu­dents to get bet­ter at is not mul­ti­pli­ca­tion or gram­mar. It is learn­ing. If we’re not learn­ing experts our­selves, how can we pos­si­bly expect to teach some­one else how to do it well?

Designer

We can’t leap from being a learner to being a teacher, though. That’s like leap­ing from “I want to build a house” to buy­ing lum­ber and a ham­mer and start­ing to nail things together. We might get a work­able struc­ture out of it in the end, but it’s going to take far too long and cost far too much.

In the mid­dle is of course a design process. For years, teach­ers have left the design to oth­ers. We use cur­ric­ula designed by cur­ricu­lum experts, text­books designed by pub­lish­ing com­pa­nies, class­rooms designed by archi­tects, and pro­ce­dures designed by admin­is­tra­tors (or per­haps worse, committees).

I don’t believe this is prac­ti­cal any longer. All of those design­ers know their par­tic­u­lar fields. But few of them really focus on stu­dents, and none of them know our par­tic­u­lar stu­dents. Teach­ers have to have the understanding—and the guts—to take charge of the design process.

So much of what we do with kids is avail­able for us to mold to meet their needs. I’m not sug­gest­ing we throw out every­thing and begin com­pletely from scratch. Although that might be rea­son­able if you are start­ing a new school, for exam­ple, it isn’t prac­ti­cal for most of us. Instead, I look at every­thing I have been given as a work-​​in-​​progress rather than a fin­ished prod­uct. The cur­ricu­lum is a frame­work, the text­book is a resource, the class­room is an open space. Before any teach­ing can take place, the envi­ron­ment, the mate­ri­als, the lessons, the con­tent must be thought­fully and delib­er­ately designed with a par­tic­u­lar group of stu­dents in mind.

Stu­dents stand out­side our class­rooms, wait­ing to enter a place where their unique qual­i­ties are cel­e­brated and where the teacher has taken the time to cre­ate some­thing that fits them, that works well, and that leads to bet­ter under­stand­ing. Only The Teacher, with her new alter egos, The Learner and The Designer, has the power to make that all happen.