Skillful Teaching

Last week, I was in Massachusetts attending several days of training through Research for Better Teaching on how to teach their "Studying Skillful Teaching" course.  One of their instructors taught a class of about forty teachers, and my teaching partner and I observed, then debriefed the lessons afterward.  I'd been through the training before and I've taught the class for several years at my high school; my teaching partner will be teaching the class with me for the first time in the fall.

Throughout the week, I was struck, again, about how important it is for teachers to maintain their "learning chops" if they want to do a good job in the classroom.  Ann, the instructor leading the training, always modeled a learning frame of mind when teaching the class.  "Modeled" isn't quite the right word there, since it implies a not-quite-real thing.  Ann really lives the learning frame of mind, and tries to make it explicit to the teachers she works with.

One day, it was apparent that a number of the teachers taking the course had not really understood an idea about formative assessment that Ann had presented earlier in the day.  During the debriefing at the end of the day, Ann and the rest of us observing looked at the responses on the exit slips and tried to come up with reasons for the misunderstanding.  A couple of us wanted to go right to solutions and how to fix the mistake, but as a group we persevered in looking at the teachers' work to really try to understand the misconceptions they had.  We thought about what the teachers who did show understanding might need, and we talked about the context of the next day, in which time for reteaching would be tight.  In the end, because we spent time digging into the errors and trying to match the reteaching strategies to the students, to the constraints of the day, and to the flow of the content, Ann was able to really address the mistakes, and the responses of the teachers the next day showed improvement.

I mention this example because it really illustrated for me the teacher-as-learner frame of mind.  At no point in the discussion did any of us put on our "expert faces" and say "this is how you should teach this".  Rather, we asked lots of questions and listened to each other thinking out loud.  As a result, the analysis of student work, exploration of alternatives, and collaborative synthesis of a reteaching strategy produced a much more powerful and effective lesson the next day.

As I teach my classes, I try to put myself into a learner frame of mind, and examples like this inspire me to keep working at it.  So thanks to Ann, Jon, Ganae, Karen, and Nancy, and to all the teachers who participated in the course last week.  I appreciate the chance to hear from all of you; your questions, challenges, and insights help me deepen my thinking about what it means to be a skillful teacher, and my students will be better for it.