A REFERENCE: THE PROFESSIONAL TEACHER
(a work in progress) by Del Turner (copyright 2007)
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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

·        The Nature of a Professionalism

·        Leadership Within the Teaching Profession

·        Questionable Professionalism

·        Full Spectrum Teaching

·        An Authentic Interpretation of the World

·        The Shifting Curriculum

·        Making the Classroom Work

·        The Lesson

·        What to Teach       

·        Measuring Outcomes

·        Instructional Basics

THE NATURE OF CLASSROOM INTERACTIONS

·        How and Why Students Participate

·        The Roles of the Student and Roles of the Teacher

·        The Importance of Signaling Role Changes

·        Building Motivation into Lessons: Intrinsic and Extrinsic rewards

 

THE SHIFTING CURRICULUM

·        Preparing Students for Today and Tomorrow

·         

·         

 

IDEALIZING SUBJECT MATTER

·        The Skills, Concepts, and the Content

·        An Overview of Each Subject: Language, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, and the Graphic and Dramatic Arts

·        What Most Students Learn vs. What the Ability Extremes Might Learn

        

PLANNING A UNIT OF INSTRUCTION

·        Identifying Resources Available

·        Setting Skills and Content Goals for All Students

·        Setting Skills and Content Goals for the Academic Extremes

·        Setting Roles for the Students and the Teacher

·        A Model Unit of Instruction

ASSESSING OUTCOMES

·        Sharing of What has been Learned

·        On-going Assessment of Student Products

·        Logical Assessment vs. Contrived Instruments

·         

      

INTRODUCTION 


THE NATURE OF PROFESSIONALISM

Regardless of whether you are an engineer, a doctor, or a teacher; professional behaviour is strictly about the relationship between the client or task and quality of effort applied by the professional. In teaching, professional behaviour concerns itself with preparing children for life in a today or a tomorrow. That the today and tomorrow are defined by society as a whole, and not by teachers themselves, is the social contract teachers accept when they enter into the profession.

This does not mean that teachers in the public school system are merely civil servants carrying out the dictates of politicians and government appointees even if they do implement policies and curriculum developed in co-operation with their employers. As professionals in a workplace, they are charged with the responsibility of using their professional knowledge in efficient and creative ways, and have the obligation to collaborate with other professionals to solve problems of that workplace.  That the collaborative decision-making of the workplace must supersede contradictory influences from outside the building is a given if the unit called a school is to succeed.
 

As professionals, teachers also have the obligation to demonstrate the integrity of a professional, that is, they must assure that what they are doing as teachers represents the best that science can offer. For instance, if what is being done does not work, than they must say so, putting aside anecdotal evidence in favour of real world measurement.
 

If there is a need for improvements in the way things are done, the professional must bring forth solid evidence to support the change, and must not let the enthusiasm of the moment override arguments being made. For instance, if a reduction of class size is thought to improve learning outcomes, then the case must be substantiated: learning must improve. If a class size reduction does not improve learning, yet does make life easier for the teacher, then professionals should make the case, not as a learning condition, but as a working condition. Another example might be reading improvement so often touted as happening one way or another depending upon your school of thought. The truth is that most children learn to read quite fluently, but that as teachers we have been unable to find a way to have the bottom twenty percent do so regardless of what method has been employed. Professional teachers should be honest enough to say so.
 

This book is about applying the professional ethic to the public school teaching task. It is a book for professional teachers.

 

LEADERSHIP WITHIN THE TEACHING PROFESSION

The view that leadership is the responsibility of those in “positions of authority” continues to the detriment of the teaching profession. The truth is that, as a professional, each teacher has an obligation to lead, not only their students, but colleagues and parents around them. The unique contribution that each teacher inherently brings to the school enterprise must not be replaced with subservience to others if what they bring will enhance the professional task at hand. As in the medical profession, in the final analysis, the professional teacher in fully responsible for the needs of the client they have agreed to serve.
 

The established routine of a school might not be working for this student or that one, yet the routine often supersedes the common sense of a teacher because the teacher steps aside, abandons the opportunity to lead in favour of the status quo. Leadership in a profession requires the courage to step out and follow the professional judgment deemed most appropriate to the problem at hand, and this applies to every professional whether an employee of a self employed consultant.

Often public schools are driven by “fashions of the day”, and professional teachers tend to subordinate their professional common sense for fear of being “out of step” with the majority view. It is not easy to buck a trend, a fashion, but this is what courage is all about. Talk to any old timer on staff, and you will find that they have lived through dozens of ways to “improve reading” over their careers, and still do so, because no one to date has been willing to accept that there might not be a way to get the resistant 20% of reluctant readers to read well. Leadership in this case requires the courage to seriously assess whether things are really being changed by the new method underway. If it is not working, have the courage to say so, in public, to the parents. Much of the “special education” programs underway in schools would do a lot more for the “handicapped” students if proper assessment of outcomes could replace the scuttlebutt arising out of a routine that exists for no other reason than the idea that “something is being done”.
 

The point is that the classroom teacher has as much (maybe more) responsibility to assume instructional leadership than that of the “specialist”, the “administrator” and the “school trustees”. This does not mean that the administrator or other designated group leaders in a building should be relegated to mere “administrivia” as the saying goes, but that their leadership should be rooted in the classroom teachers with whom they work. If the teachers say that reading is a problem in the school, then leadership outside the classroom level must facilitate the classroom leadership to respond to this priority. I recall sitting through a grand plan being proposed by a school principal, whereby no member of the staff contributed one word during the meeting. The tragedy was that the principal thought he was leading. It has often been said that if leaders finds themselves out in front with nobody there with them, they had best step aside to let the crowd go their own way. Leadership is not “selling” an idea through workshops, but it is cultivating an idea that arises out of the task at hand and is owned by those being led. Leadership is part of being a professional and must be incorporated into the behaviours of every teacher.

 

QUESTIONABLE PROFESSIONALISM

That recent innovations in teaching, particularly in North America, have introduced methods having origins in questionable research needs some understanding before examining the act of teaching itself. Most such research has arisen outside the teaching profession, and has led to what might be called a “clinical approach” to problems teachers face in the classroom. Abandoning common sense and research carried out by members of their own profession, teachers now often turn to “specialist” outside the classroom who clinically “diagnose” what they call “learning disorders”. The “disorders” have been supplied by the psychiatric community who use lists of behaviours to “identify” the child said to be disordered. The three most common disorders so identified are: hyperactivity disorder, attention deficit disorder and dyslexia, although fetal alcohol syndrome disorder is now running a close fourth.

It is not that the children identified do not have behaviours interfering with their schooling, but that the disorders themselves are rooted in suspect research, with “cures” which are even more suspect. Dyslexia (inability to process print) is a case in point. I recall a colleague, who upon hearing a child had dyslexia, took the boy into his office, taught him how to read, and thereby “cured” the dyslexia. The cure for dyslexia is to teach the child to read by helping him around the confusion about print and language he has acquired at or after birth. It is not a “clinical” thing, but a teaching thing.

An even worse case of psychiatric misdirection is that of “hyperactivity disorder” which often involves medical intervention and medication. Hyperactivity is when a person is abnormally and easily excitable or exuberant. Strong emotional reactions, impulsive behavior, and sometimes a short span of attention are typical of a hyperactive person. The causes of which can be many fold: an overactive thyroid gland, or even puberty can cause it. Children who are conflicted mentally, or are having problems at home can be hyperactive. Problems with hearing or vision, lead poisoning, atypical depression, mania, anxiety, sleep deprivation and a range of psychiatric illnesses are all some of the potential causes.

A child suffering from such a disorder would unlikely be able to focus on school work, nor watch television for hours on end. The test is easy: if the child can focus on television at home for hours on end, and cannot focus on lessons in class, he does not have hyperactivity disorder: the answer to the problem is in the realm of teaching and not medication. All of this means that teachers need to take a second look any time an outside expert tries to apply the clinical approach to what very well might be a teaching problem belonging in the context of what they do in the classroom.

The real question professional teachers have had when dealing with this tendency to abandon teaching in favour of medication, is to define alternative classroom responses that are more effective and more acceptable than the pseudo medical ones so prolific at the moment. This is one of the issues this book hopes to define.

 

FULL SPECTRUM TEACHING

Understandably, children entering school do not all come with the same knowledge or abilities, but vary greatly in their readiness to take part in learning. The causes are many, and mostly outside the control of the school and the teacher. There is little that can be done about poverty, dysfunctional homes, the physical and mental handicaps of birth, and the child quite superior in any of the attributes which make school easy for them. These are the givens that must be accommodated in the school and classroom. The proposal here is that the teacher must be ready to provide lessons that meet the full spectrum of needs they find.

 Historically, teachers have tried and still try to use a variety of ways to accommodate the spectrum of needs they find. At one time, the assumption was that little could be done, and that the teacher was to teach to the “middle of the spectrum” with those at the extremes falling wherever they may, depending upon their learning attributes. There were the “dunces” at one end, and the “smart ones” at the other end¸ both struggling with what the teacher offered, but well aware of a societal view that that was the way the world worked. This view was so universally held, that students were arrayed according to their ability in rows of desks, and many left school in their early teens because they were not expected to find further schooling useful to them.

 But the world has changed. We know a lot more about the differences we find in children, and we know a lot more about what works and what doesn’t work, mostly due to educational researches which have taken place over the last five or six decades. Regrettably, much of what we have learned has not become firmly established in our classrooms, maybe because the political culture impacting schools with one fad after another, maybe because teachers have very few success models at their work site, or maybe because of the perception that outer events doom any attempt to do so. It really doesn’t matter what the cause. What does matter is that there are ways teachers can change what they do and what the students do so as to return teaching to its former rewarding ways where the profession is in the hands of teachers and not under clinicians.

 

AN AUTHENTIC INTERPRETATION OF THE WORLD

Another requirement of the teaching profession is that there must be an authentic interpretation of the world, an interpretation that is not a matter of indoctrination. The obligation of the teacher, regardless of the age of the students, is to prepare the student for the real world no matter how distorted the machinations of the society of the moment may be. For instance, the professional teacher describes politics, but does not indulge in politics; teaches students how to make decisions, but does not make decisions for them; mentors the development of scientific thought but does not indoctrinate students about outcomes; and develops an enthusiasm for literature and the arts without biasing their preferences. The object of professional teaching is to produce self-learning and independently thinking people, not to replicate the thought processes of the teacher. This means that the professional teacher must understand and use particular frames of reference consistent with the subject under study.
 

Reading, writing and arithmetic are skills, as are the methods of science, and so is putting social data to a real-world test, producing the right musical note, and mixing a desired colour from artist’s pallet. These skills are required in order to deal with problems and the interests people want to follow. That skills should be taught in the context of use is a given.

For instance, some time ago it was noted that most remedial reading classes were populated with boys, yet, in Japan and Germany where the reader material was written by men, the opposite was true, and girls had difficulty with reading. Is it possible that the interests of the learner have a lot to do with learning to read? It was noted, too, that girls mature earlier than boys, and can focus on tasks earlier, while most boys are not likely ready to read until at least age seven. Does this mean “early identification” of a “reading disorder” in a boy might actually undermine his interest in school? These two anecdotes should give reason to professional teachers to rethink how and when reading is taught.

When an enthusiastic teacher in a Grade 2 classroom carries her thoughts about how human race is impacting the environment, is she doing the right thing by the subject of science? The truth is that such lessons are usually nothing more than indoctrination and not science at all. The age of the children suggests that they should study change through actual observation of change, say, by recording their observations of a tree in the school yard over the four seasons. How does the tree change, and how do the living and non-living things around the tree change if at all?

The context in which skills are taught does count, and as professional teachers there is a responsibility to see that the context of learning skills is authentic to the needs of the child. In the book, we will deal with the nature of the tasks put in front of children, but first we will examine in general terms how classroom management might allow ideals to be met.

THE SHIFTING CURRICULUM

Existing public school curricula are always being assaulted by contemporary events and by the fashions arising out of the social milieu, which is as it should be. That professionals have a duty to hold on to their objectivity regarding curriculum change is usually understood by teachers, but their voices are not always heard.
 

MAKING THE CLASSROOM WORK

Under what conditions do children thrive in classrooms, and what underlying organizational procedures are necessary to see that such conditions are in place? Jerome Bruner, the cognitive psychologist, did a lot of work about what made children thrive in classrooms. In his book, Toward a Theory of Instruction, he talked about how certain factors motivated children to take part with others in learning. His research showed that “reciprocity”, shared learning, had a lot to do with participation in lessons. What this means is that if lessons are organized so as to allow such sharing, things work better for the teacher and the children.

The anecdote about how the interests of boys have an impact on their reading success, suggests that the interests of children are also very important to learning, and research supports this idea. This does not mean that men must write books for boys and women write books for girls, but it does mean that whoever the teacher may be, they must take into account the fact that interests of boys and girls likely differ. Research tells us that similar differences between the sexes exist in other subject areas, too.

Bruner has a lot to say about “curiosity”, too.  He points out that it is the most predictable form of motivation, and it is predictability the teacher needs if lessons are to be effective. Curiosity is an “intrinsic motive”, that is, it holds its rewards within itself and doesn’t depend on outside rewards. Curiosity is aroused when “our attention is attracted to something that is unclear, unfinished or uncertain”. Whatever it is that initiates curiosity, we attend to until it becomes “clear, finished or certain”. In our exploration of teaching we will try to develop lessons that use this powerful motive, not the least of which is the age old technique of story telling.

But more than the content and the skills being taught and learned must be considered when preparing to have a class of students truly take part in lessons. There is the general demeanor of the teacher who anticipates the disruptive child by a smile and a show of interest in such a child as an individual. The teacher also has an obligation to serve as a learner model with which students can identify. But there is also the knowledge of how groups of people come together on a task, and the key routines that signal to students the role they are to play in the lesson underway. We will be starting with some insight into how classroom routines that enhance learning and teaching might be done.

THE LESSON

Teachers are assigned groups of students in classes, and in recent years in North America, these classes have been sized according to some belief that certain age groups, and certain subjects can only be managed if kept within size limits. That the critical factor is not class size, but how teachers organize for instruction has apparently been politically and practically abandoned. Several decades back, many aspersions were cast upon the idea of forming permanent groups, because of the stigma which came with naming the traditional three primary reading groups in derogatory ways. The criticism was justified: the slower learning readers did not need to be labeled "crows", and those leading achievement did not need the appellation of "blue birds" even if the attempt to adjust instruction to meet the varying needs of the students was better than no adjustment at all.

It was eventually said that instruction should be "individualized", that the teacher should devise ways of varying instruction for each and every child. But, of course, such an ideal was just that, an ideal. That instructional organizational theories lacked touch with reality likely did more to undermine instruction in the primary grades than any other factor on the scene at the time.

HOW TO TEACH

The other persisting factor entering into the instruction of reading was the use of controlled vocabulary in readers. Those belonging to the "phonics school" felt direct teaching of the "code" was the panacea, while those favouring the "whole word" philosophy rejected direct code teaching in favour of "discovering" the code in the context of the narrative. The debate continues today with "research" supporting both "methods" equally, to suggest to most teachers that an eclectic approach responding to the needs of the child might be the pragmatic route to follow.

Then there was the phenomena known as "New Math": rote learning of arithmetic procedures was rejected to favour an understanding of the number system itself. One did not have children recite procedure, but have them reason out the steps in terms of the decimal nature of our system.

 

The social sciences also underwent an examination in decades past. "reciting dates" was not real history it was discovered, in fact it was important to have students discover the relationships between events in history, the processes revealed by the impact of man on the landscape in geography, and even the nature of humans and their social constructs.

Science teaching was also to be improved by having students experience the causes and effects found in nature and in the man-made world. Students were to "do science" as opposed to "reading about" science.

But it wasn't just the lesson and the subject methods that have been under severe review over the decades, but the content of subjects, too. What started out as a grand examination of science methods was abandoned in favour of "environmentalism", and what was to be a new way of having students think about society, became tainted with a wide assortment if political "isms" which really needed to be preceded with knowledge before they could be seriously acted upon by any child let alone an adult. Instead, children still learning to read were indoctrinated with whatever the fad the teachers or the parents might have at the moment.

Now, it isn't that all the efforts of the researchers and the teachers have been in vain over the past five decades, but that what has been learned has not been carried into classrooms.

MEASURING OUTCOMES

The reluctance to measure teaching outcomes damages not only the ability of the profession in the eyes of those families and students they serve, but, more importantly reduces feedback the teacher and the profession need. All professionals make judgments about the progress of a project, and so do classroom teachers. Regrettably, the many factors affecting teaching outcomes do not easily lend themselves to measurement; however, this should not be an excuse to avoid doing so. Yes, heavy-handed testing of little children might rob them of their self concept, and, yes, the public interpretation of results of written tests might distort the intended message of the professional, but there are ways to do these things and remain true to the professionalism of teachers. It is not enough to publicly argue against measurement when no useful alternative is offered. More knowledge about assessment is needed by teachers to benefit of both society and the teachers themselves. Appropriate ways to assess learning outcomes exist, and vary according to the intent, and teachers need to become more cognizant of what is possible.

INSTRUCTIONAL BASICS

The Idealized Classroom
Let's consider a class of students (say) age 12 years, and see how all the needs found there might be met both socially and academically. First of all, there should be no fixed grouping of students according to ability, yet there may be times when a task appropriate for one group might bring on such an academically matched group. The tasks themselves should decide when and how groups are formed. Applying these ideas to a unit of instruction, the teacher would need to first layout a Topic Plan which in a Language Arts unit might be the reading of a novel.


 The Primary Classroom (Grades K to 3)
 

The Intermediate classroom (Grades 4 to 7))

 

The Junior Secondary Classroom (Grades 8 to 10)

 

The Senior Secondary Classroom (Grades 11 to 12)

 

 

CHAPTER ONE

THE NATURE OF CLASSROOM INTERACTIONS

Much has been written about the routines of the classroom, and without a doubt much will continue to be written about something every teacher has to learn to do. The old fashioned “sit down and shut up” approach still has advocates, and usually gets the teacher and the students through the curriculum with even what all parents want “good grades”. However, although order and marks appear to be what education is all about, the professional teacher knows better, and wants better because creativity and true thinking are not products of such classrooms. Only a few students will reach out past such heavy-handed routines, but most will not.

Regardless of the age group, there is research supporting routines that provide all students with the opportunity to participate fully in their education. Consider the kinds of activities possible in a classroom:

There might even be other task arrangements in a class, but assuming that these six cover most occasions, the teacher would need to establish routines that allow successful management implied by each of them.

 

Four distinct signals might be used to get things underway:

AS A CLASS
This signal says that the whole class is under the leadership of one person. That one person is usually the teacher who may be outlining a task, or giving information. This signal implies that only one person holds the floor at one time.

WITH THE TEACHER
This signal might apply to an individual or a group who are meeting with the teacher for anything from remedial help to an outline of an enrichment task

ON YOUR OWN
This signal tells the student that each student is expected to deal with the task in front of him on his own. It might be a reading task, a task from any other subject area, or even a test
.

IN A SMALL GROUP
This signal defines a “small group” as having from five to eight people who are focusing on the same task. The group may merely be sharing information, or they may actually be meeting to work on a task. A leader (not a chairperson) is the arbitrator of events, and a recorder may also be needed if the results of the group tasks are to be carried forward.
 

SOMETHING EXTRA
If most tasks are expected to be within the ken of most students, then there must be tasks needed for those who excel and tasks for those who need extra support. Something Extra can be the name for a class routine meeting both of these needs. Enrichment needs of the class might best be met be providing optional tasks that extend the content and/or skills out past what most students can handle. However, care must be taken to see that such options see the light of day in the context of the on-going classroom else motivation will be low.

If we take these signals as something we can use to expedite learning, then how the signals themselves are conveyed to the learner is important. In the following chapter we will examine an application of the signals to a unit of instruction.

 

  CHAPTER TWO

 

If participation of students in their learning requires a flexible organization in the classroom