The+Teaching-Learning+Relationship

I was asked by Casey Barnes what characteristics were essential to a good teacher. I gave a verbal answer, but here I would like to consider this more indepth and to change what I said a little.

1. Maturity. Teachers must possess the two most important types of maturity that Juanita Price and I identified: emotional maturity and ethical maturity (http://juanitaprice.blogspot.com). This means that teachers must be able to make choices about how they express their emotions, particularly the emotions they have that reflect personal hurt. Also, teachers must be unselfish, which means being willing to make personal sacrifices for the well-being of their students.

The ethics of teaching include understanding how authority works in teaching and making choices that acknowledge that reality. Teaching is a funny sort of field because it requires one person (the teacher) to do something that affects the other person (the student) and yet the student has the authority. Students choose whether or not to learn. So part of the ethics of teaching include respecting that authority.

How do you respect the authority of the student?

First, we need to learn who the student is so we can connect the curriculum to the student. Secondly, we need to care about the whole student which means taking time to be aware of the student's life. Thirdly, we need to recognize that human beings are learning beings and trust people to learn. This means that we don't have to use institutional authority to make people learn (which actually isn't possible). Instead, we have to create intrinsically interesting learning options (which can only be done if we know our students), we have to scaffold the learning where necessary so students feel supported in their learning, and we have to make sure that the learning experiences we create have tangible utility in the lives of students and that we communicate this to them.

2. Client-centered therapy-stance towards students. Carl Rogers created client-centered therapy and the stance he believed therapists should take was characterized by:


 * //Listen// and //try to understand// how things are from the client's point of view.
 * //Check that understanding// with the client if unsure.
 * Treat the client with the //utmost respect and regard//.
 * There is also a mandate for the therapist to be "congruent", or "transparent" - which means being //self-aware, self-accepting, and having no mask between oneself and the client//. The therapist knows themselves and is willing to be known. ([|http://world.std.com/~mbr2/cct.html).]

Teachers and counselors are in the business of helping people change their minds. Rogers identifies the emotional climate that makes this possible.

3. Intellectual curiosity. Juanita Price said "The example you set is your authority to speak; no example, no authority." We cannot ask students to learn unless we provide the example by being learners ourselves. This means being excited about knowledge and being willing to share that excitement. The world is full of amazing things to learn and learning is a fun and interesting thing to do.

4. Instructional engineer. One of the ways we get into trouble as teachers is when we assume that a student can pick up critical pieces of information solely by osmosis. We often project our own learning styles on others, so if we figured out something on our own without being told it, then we figure our students don't need to be told that thing.

In fact, we need to be willing to think through any thing that we want to teach in terms of all the information and abilities that contribute to the task so that we can figure out whether the student has enough foundation to accomplish the task successfully.

This is one of the hardest parts of teaching: to be able to identify exactly where a student is having a problem even when you have never had a student have the same problem, and then to create a way to solve that problem--a new explanation, a new way of breaking down the whole thing, or whatever. In order to do this, you have to be a kid watcher--you have to observe and listen very carefully to find out what the student understands (schemas) and where the understanding breaks down.

The reason I think of this as engineering is that it is thinking about a system that you are creating. The courses I teach are a system. Over time I change the system as I watch people interact with it. For example, a lot of people have had a hard time doing online courses, so recently I broke up each week's work into five one-hour segments. That is a structural decision that has helped students be more successful in completing the course in general. Beyond the engineering is the relationship that I have with each student which helps me to help each student individually. But thinking through the system, whether it is the classroom environment, the structure of a lesson, the structure of an assignment, or the structure of a whole course, is a critical piece of work because it is through developing the system that you can either add or remove barriers to learning.

I believe that when we undertake the job of teaching that we are obligated to do so, which means that if our students fail to learn, then we have failed to teach and we haven't done our job. Engineering is a way of looking at the teaching job in order to figure out what needs to be done to ensure that every student can master the material. Part of this involves using principles of UDL to ensure that students have access to the types of materials from which they can best learn. Part of this involves breaking down the items that need to be learned into the types of learning (need link here) so that the teacher can figure out the most efficient approach to the learning. Part of this involves analyzing tasks in minute detail to ensure that all the steps in learning are available (but then also using wisdom to make sure no one has to learn things that they are capable of figuring out all by themselves). In other words, as teachers, we want to be sure there is information available on all aspects of what we are teaching and that the information is easily findable for students, but, different from behaviorist philosophies, we believe teachers can figure out which students need the additional information and which students don't. Finally, part of engineering is to basically reverse engineer students' schemes. Reverse engineering means taking a product and figuring out how it was made. When a student creates a product, we can use the principles of reverse engineering to figure out the schemas the student has about that topic or process or skill. Reverse engineering is a form of assessment. The nice thing about it is that it uses actual authentic productions of the student instead of artificial tests.

5. Creativity. The ability and desire to approach problems with interest and the potential to generate new perspectives.