Teaching in A Secondary School

Robert Griffin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136473296
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This collection of original essays is designed for undergraduate and graduate courses in methods of teaching. While speaking to all the topics covered in traditional methods textbooks, the author also reflects on his own experiences as a student and teacher. He adopts a unique conversational and reflective style that integrates concerns for the well-being of teachers and their professional development, as well as for the role of students in the learning process. Engaging and informed, this book will be a resource for practicing teachers and those in training.

1	Teaching as Work

I understand that when asked by an interviewer what life is about, Sigmund Freud replied simply, “Work and Love.” I don't think this book has anything to say about love, but it most certainly deals with work. Teaching, after all, is work. It is the work I do, and I assume it is the work you do or contemplate doing. When looked upon as work and when viewed from your side, through your eyes – rather than, say, from the vantage point of society or schools or students or the profession as a whole – it is clear that teaching must take its place as but one element in the totality of your life, which among other things includes love, as well as family and friendship and civic involvement. Because teaching is, or will be, just a piece of your life, even though perhaps a big and important piece, it needs to fit into and support all that you are and all that you do. It is important to say this because those of us in education often lose sight of ourselves and the whole of our lives amid the concerns for students, schools, lesson plans, and teaching methods that preoccupy this field. It is from this frame, then, that I set out some ideas about teaching as a way to work: a concern for the quality of your life, and my own.

To begin, I consider the prospects and possibilities in teaching from the perspective of a larger construct or ideal: an authentic life. An authentic life is living your own life. It is being fully the person you are. An authentic life is an independent life, a self-determined life. It is an examined life, a life grounded in an understanding of your nature, how you are placed in the world, and clear purposes and priorities. An authentic life is living honestly, in alignment with your highest ideals, with integrity. It is living responsibly and productively, making your beliefs and values and goals your own and realizing them through your actions in the various dimensions of your life. An authentic life is exemplary in a particular way: it models the manifestation of the finest version of one's self in the world. Last, an authentic life is characterized by a sense of profound satisfaction – happiness – in both the public and personal dimensions of your existence.

You can read over the sentences in this last paragraph to see what they mean to you. Put them into your own words. Extend what I have written, take it further. The point is that we need to view teaching from the context of the meaning and purpose of our individual lives. For each of us, teaching is not “out there.” It isn't a concept or process or series of events somewhere. Instead, it is what we are doing with our lives, no less than that. I know the particular cut I am taking on all of this, this notion of an authentic life, may seem abstract and removed, but I will try to flesh out this notion some here, and I hope this idea comes to have greater reality for you as you read through the rest of the essays. It is an orientation that pervades the book. Basically, I am proposing that we teach as a way to get closer – I am not saying we should expect to get all the way there – to living an authentic life.¹

Authenticity involves two central elements: The first is self-transformation. The process of individual self-transformation contrasts with simply looking inside and “finding” yourself and then being whatever that is. Self-transformation is approaching the possibility that lies not within you but rather above you: the human being you can become. The various aspects of your life, including teaching, serve your effort to surpass yourself, go beyond what you are at the moment. They contribute to shaping you into a higher quality and truer version of yourself. Other terms that could be used to refer to this process are self-creation or self-formation. Whatever term you use to describe this phenomenon, what is important is getting a sense of this idea of expanding and realizing one's self over time.²

The second element is self-expression: in every area of your life – again, including teaching – being seen and heard and felt as the person you have become. Things are different because you have lived. The world is changed as only you could have changed it because your actions emanated from the unique human being that you are. Under this precept, your project in life, to call it that, is to express who you are at your best. It is to be yourself at your finest. The ideal is that these expressions, these actions, these creations, that define you in the world and alter situations and affect others will also contribute to your own self-transformation, and that this resultant self-development – yet another name for it – will provide you an even more elevated base from which to generate subsequent self-expressions. It is in this way that the two processes of self-transformation and self-expression are interrelated and complementary. All of this boils down to my affirmation that two key parts of a life well lived are concurrently (a) developing yourself into a closer approximation of the person you are in your most evolved, most complete, most natural form; and (b) expressing through your words and actions the core of your being.

With that said, what follows? It follows that I bring all of myself (my self) to the work of teaching. Teaching is something I do. I am not the embodiment of a role in an institutional process. I am not simply carrying out functions effectively or not according to some external standards. Rather, I am fashioning a life and living well or not by my own standards. For me, teaching has to be judged not only by the outcomes it achieves with students, but also by its effect on the quality and integrity of my own life. I hear teaching applauded as selfless service. I don't do anything selflessly. On the contrary, I seek to teach self-fully, full of self, grounded in who I am and what my life means. My life is not in service to anyone. If I am in service it is to a vision of what I can become and create in the time that I have on this earth. I am trying to conduct myself in a way I can be proud of. I am seeking to live with honor. Indeed, I care deeply about the students I teach, and I hope that what I do as a teacher benefits them. When I teach I will teach with all I have in me. But that is different from feeling that my needs are subordinate to students’, that I am simply there for them, that I am somehow sacrificial in relation to them. How often I was told when I first became a teacher, “Remember, the students are the ones who count in the classroom, not you. Their needs come first.” I have come to see that it doesn't have to be dichotomized that way. The students and I can both count. My needs and their needs can both matter. I can teach well and still hold to the view that nobody is more important than I am. I affirm this because I see teachers giving to students in a way that drains them. These teachers don't replenish themselves or enlarge themselves and they end up with little if anything of value to give to their students. Some are giving to students to the point that for all practical purposes they are giving away their own lives.

I invite you to take your life seriously. Take your dignity as a human being seriously. If you go into teaching, or if you are a teacher now, don't allow your work to be trivialized. This society has the tendency to trivialize and denigrate the work of teaching. It is subtle, hidden a bit, but it is there. People are sincere when they talk about how crucial teaching is to the future of our society, how we need to pay teachers more and respect them more, and there is the call for more talented people to be recruited into the profession. We have the “best teacher” awards and those testimonials about “How my high school math teacher made a big difference in my life.” Also, I do think that the status – if not the pay – of the profession is higher than it was 10 years ago. Still, however, amid all of that there is the diminution of teaching. I sense a hint of patronization in the accolades we give teachers. I hear the message that people consider it just a bit quaint, perhaps even childlike, to give your life to working in classrooms. Perhaps I am overly sensitive, but I sometimes feel the awards we hand out to teachers are like the medals we give to a Boy Scout. We mean it and all, but it isn't for real work you understand, because, well, if you can't do, you teach, we all know that. It could be that because such a large percentage of teachers have been women, teaching is still viewed as not being a man's work, if you know what I mean. Besides, teaching can't be real work like running a hardware store or selling insurance because a common perception holds that in crucial ways the school setting isn't real. Have you noticed that when people speak of the real world, they mean the world outside of school? “Wait until you get out in the real world,” they say to students, meaning the arena where the legitimate, truly challenging, business goes on. How can somebody do real work in a place that isn't a part of the real world?

Also, although we don't acknowledge it much, there is the custodial function of teaching, that is, keeping youths somewhere while their parents work, or out of the job market, or simply off the streets. Who can have respect or give much energy to doing something akin to baby-sitting? Then too, there are the students who trivialize teachers’ work by their silliness and lack of respect for the schooling enterprise. And while all this is going on, the teaching profession is trivializing itself with its tendency to focus on strategies, processes, methods – the how of teaching – at the expense of a concern for fundamental purposes and outcomes. Teaching too often comes to be seen, even by those in the field, as this gimmick followed by that fad. Finally, the phenomena I mentioned previously – the pitch to selfless service and the view of students as being all-important – have the effect of diminishing the importance of the person who teaches.

Although it isn't always easy given this culture's, and in many cases our own, ambivalence about the worth of teaching, the challenge to you is to take teaching seriously. Teach because it is your work, integral to your life, a way to express and develop yourself. Don't get into teaching to have something to “fall back on,” as they say. My view as an educator is that I don't want colleagues who see the profession as a safety net. Fall back (or into, whatever the metaphor) on something else. Don't go too far in teaching if you find you can't bring passion to your work. Martha Graham, the legendary modern dance choreographer, was asked if she had passion for dance. She replied that if she didn't have passion for dance, she'd be doing whatever she did have passion for. We have no less right or obligation to apply that criterion to our own lives; Martha Graham was no more important than you or I are. Without passion, teaching is just sterile technique: step-step-together.

In many ways you teach what you are. Your teaching reflects your sense of life and the level of growth you have achieved as an individual. Right now you are in the process of defining your life. Attend to what you are, dream of what you want to become, and take action to get there. Work on yourself. There is no special time in the future to begin the process. You begin now. How do you do this? Given a commitment to becoming the kind of person who can live and work in this way, how do you go about it? You learn to enhance and express yourself in the same way you learn to do anything else, through practice. You practice right now and every moment of your life, day after day, year after year. You always live in a laboratory of sorts. The laboratory consists of yourself and your current circumstance, whatever it is. Thus, you always have the opportunity to experiment with ways of becoming more powerful and more fully yourself and productively communicating your uniqueness to the world. You are blessed with a mind and you can use it to think hard about which way to go in your life. You can decide what is best and right to do. You can do whatever you have chosen to do and see what results from it and learn from that. If whatever you do works for you, you can add that thought or action to your repertoire. If it doesn't, you can try something else and see how that goes. What you'll need to carry out this experimentation with yourself, however, is a willingness to be accountable for your life. Also, you will have to be willful enough to actually do what you decide to do and stick with it when things get tough; otherwise, you won't know whether something will work for you or not. In a word, you'll need character.

You get where you are going in life in small steps usually; although there are times when things shift dramatically, when change isn't incremental. Perhaps you can help yourself walk down your road with a more resolute stride, to put it that way, by making a commitment to take your life more seriously than perhaps you have been, and to live with more awareness and a greater commitment to make something worthwhile in your own eyes out of yourself, and to do what it takes to be happy. It may seem ironic to say in a book about a helping profession, but more than anything, I think you need to make a commitment to your own well-being. Think about it: What is right in front of you that holds promise for uplifting you? It might be eating well, or reading that quality book, or making the tough choice that you know needs to be made, or giving up the sterile pleasure that is getting in your way, or dropping the dead activity. It might be identifying a concrete way to let people know you exist, to make others feel your presence in the world. Whatever it is, you have to start actually doing it.

I invite you to begin the process of sculpting an authentic life now. And see if you can have a good time doing it. The other night I was watching a British-produced documentary on the American playwright David Mamet. The interviewer asked Mamet to describe the characters in his great play, “American Buffalo.” Mamet replied: “They aren't dead. They have a good time. Things are important to them. They believe life is to be enjoyed.” I think it is worth a few minutes right now to think about those attributes in relation to yourself. Life will be over soon enough. It would be a shame to have missed the fun. And going back to the first paragraph of this essay, remember that while it would be a shame to haved missed the good times, it would be a tragedy to have missed love. No success in work, no development of yourself, no material rewards, can cover for a life without love. Let's both of us keep that in mind as I write and you read the pages ahead.

2	The Self-Surpassing Classroom

Imagine this secondary classroom: There stands an earnest and upbeat adult in front of seated adolescents – chalk in hand, book in hand, paper in hand, it varies – and that adult is talking. I am not saying anything about the content or quality of the talk, whether it is profound talk or uninformed talk or helpful talk or useless talk, just that that is what is occurring, the teacher is talking. After talking a while, the teacher asks the students something and they respond tersely, which prompts the teacher to go into a brief “lecture-ette” or demonstration intended to correct or extend the student response, fill in a knowledge gap, or cover for the silence. In the process, the teacher may actually wind up answering the original inquiry herself. This pattern repeats and eventually the teacher says something like, “For the rest of the hour read pages 45-56 [answer questions 1 to 5, do problems 1 through 10, etc.] for tomorrow.” Some students do it, some don't, some start talking to friends, some stare straight ahead, the class ends, and the students are gone in a flash.

Now picture this: The class begins, albeit a bit late. The teacher announces the activity for today: this group, that worksheet, this experiment, these problems, that video. Tomorrow comes, and its another announcement, another activity. The next day another, and the next day another, and another the day after that, and then another, and another, and another . . . and it's June. Some of this string of activities interest the students, but in truth many of them are pretty deadly. Teachers more charming, ingratiating, and entertaining than the rest of us can make things more palatible than would otherwise be the case, but from my experience observing in the back of numerous classrooms over the past two decades, very few teachers avoid testing students’ forbearance. Well, and mine too. In fact, I think I understand the theory of relativity better after having sat through a lot of these kinds of classes both as a student and now. That is, two minutes – which should be but a snippet of time – is not always two minutes. The last two minutes, for example, waiting for the class to end – between 8:48 and 8:50 a.m. – is only matched in endlessness by a dreadfully slow rendition of the national anthem before a ballgame I want to watch (“Ohhhhhh saaaaay caaaann yoooooou. . . . . . seeeeeee”).

I must admit I am getting impatient with tedious lectures, question-and-answer recitation sessions (not a real exploration of anything, just a retrieval of facts), uninformed discussions, worksheets, and students mechanically writing out problems in the text or answering questions at the end of the chapter. Perhaps it is just the classrooms I happen to have observed, and these kinds of activities don't go on as much as I think they do. And I am not just pointing the finger at others. I have done my share of this kind of thing. Sometimes it is tough to think of anything else to do; the students don't seem to care one way or the other; and whatever one's overall view about what should be happening, it appears to be the only viable alternative. The point I want to make here, however, is not about how good or bad all this is (although it is often pretty bad, there's no doubt in my mind about that), or to imply that there isn't any good teaching going on in our schools – there is. My point has to do with who is doing and who is reacting to the doing in classrooms – including, in many cases, classrooms where what most would agree is good teaching is occurring. Characteristically, it is the teacher who is the doer, the active one, in secondary classrooms. Which, if you think about it, is one reason why teachers are usually far more invested in today's lesson than students are. The class is more engaging for the teacher because human beings are inherently doers, and planning and implementing instruction is doing. You and I, almost everybody, are most ourselves and most satisfied when we are creating, fixing, figuring out, and assessing something in order to reach some goal that has meaning to us. When we teach, that is how we are functioning a good amount of the time. Furthermore, most teachers find they get a lot out of their own classes, which is to be expected, too, because people learn and grow best when they try to understand new material, give it meaning, and make use of it in some way – and that is what is going on when we plan and teach classes. Of course the problem is that for the most part students aren't involved in the way teachers are, with the result that students don't learn much that matters and are probably getting bored to boot.

As deeply concerned about students as they are, I find it ironic that teachers have a marked tendency to train the camera on themselves, both figuratively and literally. Watch a video recording of a classroom in action and notice whom the camera follows around. Almost always it is the teacher. The focus is on how the teacher conducts the class – as if the students were an orchestra under the control of the maistro's baton. Notice how this contrasts with a tape of an athletic contest. In sports, the camera zeroes in on the athletes, not the coach. In sports the attention is on how the players play the game. The game doesn't consist of three hours of the coach walking the sidelines. The players are the ones who count. Visit a classroom and most likely you'll find that the central, most visable, vital, salient, active (as opposed to reactive)...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. TEACHING AS WORK
• 2. THE SELF-SURPASSING CLASSROOM
• 3. OUR VALUES MATTER
• 4. A FOCUS ON STUDENTING
• 5. GETTING STUDENTS TO THINK FOR THEMSELVES
• 6. WHAT IS A GOOD STUDENT LIKE?
• 7. THE IMPORTANCE OF LANGUAGE
• 8. WHAT CAN A GOOD STUDENT DO?
• 9. TEACHING VALUES: THE EARLY YEARS
• 10. WHAT CAN GET IN THE WAY OF BEING A GOOD STUDENT?
• 11. CURRICULUM
• 12. BECOMING A GOOD STUDENT IN SCHOOL
• 13. DISCUSSIONS, LECTURES, AND TEXTBOOKS
• 14. MOTIVATION
• 15. STYLE COUNTS
• 16. ADVICE TO A STUDENT ON ACHIEVING IN SCHOOL
• 17. TEACHING VALUES: THE LATER YEARS
• 18. THOUGHTS ON DISCIPLINE
• 19. HELPING STUDENTS BECOME MORE EFFECTIVE IN SCHOOL
• 20. EVALUATION
• 21. PLANNING
• 22. TEACHING AND YOU
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ENDNOTES
• INDEX