Changing Pedagogy vs. Teacher Identity

Those who watch my Twitter stream closely may understand that I cycle through two very different approaches to the night - either I stay awake "working" through the dark hours, fighting my way, or I hide as I did as kid, still mostly awake, just waiting for dawn when sleep can come...

Anyway, that's not the point...

But awake one late night I watched The Story of Louis Pasteur on Turner Classic Movies. And in that movie I realized something - that it took Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister forty years to convince the world's doctors to wash their hands. This seems - to us, as it did to Pasteur and Lister - a tiny thing with huge results, patients stopped dying at a 50% rate from infections, but it was massive because it threatened the entire self-image of the doctors. In order for the doctors to make this change - in order for them to stop killing half their patients - they had to admit that they were not quite the "healers" they imagined themselves to be. And the doctors of the 19th Century couldn't quite get there...

Joseph Lister explains the whole germ-infection thing...

Today, education is caught in the trap which suffocated medicine 150 years ago. Pedagogy and the structure of schooling does not change because so many of those who practice and lead it refuse to confront their egos and their self-images - and this ranges from the teacher who still uses worksheets and grades compliance to Arne Duncan, Michael Gove, and even Barack Obama.

And the result is... we are "killing" kids - both figuratively and literally.

Educators get caught in an awful "Anti-Virtuous" Cycle. So many did well in traditional schools for very traditional reasons. They were born to wealth and privilege, or they were born to educationally successful families. And/or, they simply are the kind of student "school" - that culture of compliance and passivity - enables.

Then, because "school" worked for them, they stayed in school - many teachers have never been anywhere else since heading off to nursery school/preschool: Primary, Secondary, University, Graduate School, Working in School, it is all they know, and they only know the schools they have succeeded in.

Thus, they mimic the teachers who honored them, and then... surprise, surprise... the kids who succeed in their classrooms, in their school buildings, are the kids most like them. This is powerful reinforcement, it ensures these educators that their life's successes are not the accidents of privilege but are because of their inherent superiority.

"It worked for me..."

So when we challenge the old pedagogies and old school structures we attack the entire self-image of these educators. We not only challenge their life's work as "educators" - we are in fact saying that often they are doing as much damage as good - but we are also challenging their entire identity and self-worth.

That's a big deal...

And it is a horribly destructive deal, just as the self-image of those ancient doctors was so destructive.

So we need to decide... who is more important in education? The kids or the recalcitrant teachers?

Because if we are going to move from replicators to design thinkers, we must move our focus from the needs of those who work in schools to the needs of those for whom schools exist. And beyond that, if we are to succeed where we have not, we must begin to see and understand that "user experience" of school from the perspective of those students for whom it is not working.

That's "design think." When Ford Motor Company decided to become truly competitive in the United States they really began to look at the choices made by all those who did not buy their cars. They focused on their "users," their customers, and they tossed out virtually every old management structure. Compare a 1995 Escort and a 2012 Focus, and you'll see the difference. They knew they had to win back all those who had walked away from their products... and we, in education, must win back all of those who - quite logically - walk away from our "product," literally and figuratively, every day. Just as General Motors spent years in denial, pretending they built cars people wanted, our schools live in denial, claiming that "there's something wrong" with all those kids who won't bother to pick up the passive parcels of knowledge we dump on their mental doorstep. Because we are so often part of that one third that waited for those parcels back in our day, we never stop to imagine why anyone wouldn't grab it.

So, here's the beginning... I am not going to pick on teachers or the teaching profession because I believe it to be the most important job in the world. But I am going to say that teachers must learn every day, from brain research, from observation, from great practitioners. And that learning must change their practice every day, otherwise, they are simply not demonstrating their learning.

And I will say that teacher excuses, "I don't have the time," "I'm busy," "I don't get paid enough for this," "We tried this before and it didn't work," can only be used by teachers who consistently accept those excuses from their students.

great teachers do not wait to do the right things

I understand - even if I don't really - that it is very hard to be told that you've been doing a "not very good" job. I don't really understand because people have told me that pretty much all my life. So, its ok... my goal is to keep changing every day so I do it better. But if you've never heard that before, I'm going to imagine that it's devastating. Maybe almost as devastating as it is to be student in a school which pays no attention to how you learn and what you need.

"Scientists are now discovering massive structural changes in the adolescent brain through extensive functional MRI scans, changes that apparently shake the internal mechanisms of a teenage brain to its roots. If this is true – and all the signs suggest that it is – these must be seen as essential evolutionary adaptations that ensure the survival of the human race by forcing teenagers to break away from their parents and teachers. “Get off my back,” adolescents down the ages have pleaded. “Leave me alone. Give me space.” Adolescence is about growing up and no longer thinking like a child. It’s about ceasing to be a clone. Sitting still (if only for part of the time!) may be an appropriate learning environment for the pre-pubescent child, but it is largely inappropriate for adolescents, whose biological pre-dispositions, we now know, urge them to find out things for themselves.

"And here is the crux of the present advanced world’s dilemma. Little more than 100 years ago, American psychologists started to define this rebelliousness of adolescence as a disease, an aberration that made teenagers a threat to themselves. Psychologists and educational bureaucrats alike concluded that something had to be done to prevent teenagers from threatening the carefully controlled world that teachers had created.

"Educational administrators saw only one answer to this problem: put adolescents into school for longer and longer, and give them so much studying to do that they wouldn’t have the time or energy to question what an adult society was actually doing to them.

"We’re still doing this today. Policymakers, with little background in the neurological processes, expected that, by the age of 22 or 23, the next generation of young people would have been “broken in” to the currently defined way of doing things. Their thinking resembled that of horse breeders who, until very recently, thought it necessary to break in a young foal after it had run relatively wild for two years. Now horse breeders carefully study the temperament of every foal, and then define unique training programs that build upon what each can do naturally. Human adolescents crave and deserve no less. Deep down, there stirs within them the urge to climb the mountains of the mind and see what possibilities lie before them; they are innately “big picture” thinkers and frequently upset older generations by questioning the compromised lives so many of us lead. That is their nature; it is what their brains have evolved to do. It is the apparently unreasonable dreams of adolescence that, years later, drive the progress of what we are proud to call our civilization. It has always been so." - Education Canada

- Ira Socol

Ordinary People

"We realized that we needed a guitarist," Sir Paul McCartney was saying in a documentary on George Harrison I watched this morning, "I mean John and I had guitars and we played them but neither of us could play anything like a solo or that."

In Harrison's recollection, "John had this guitar but he only had four strings on it, so we had to show him what a guitar really was."

Interview with Martin Scorsese

The most brilliant transformative musical geniuses of the second half of the 20th century, yes, but ordinary people, flawed people, people who clearly understood their limitations. I can pretty much sing every song John Lennon wrote, I know what he meant to me, to much of the world. But it is also true that he often seemed to barely be able to play a musical instrument, that he was pretty much a bastard to his son Julian, and that, I'm quite sure he was very ordinary at many many things.

America has a hero problem, and it is crippling this nation. Americans seem to need to believe in saintly, otherworldly perfection from those who impact them positively. They make all those perceived as "transformative" into, quite literally, larger than life Olympic gods, whether George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, or Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and Elvis Presley.

The monument to Ireland's lead revolutionaries - the martyrs of 1916 - is much smaller
- perhaps more human-scaled - than those which celebrate America's revolutionary generation.

When I have stood, to demonstrate contrast, at what are possibly the most politically sacred places in Ireland, at the General Post Office on O'Connell Street where the Irish Republic was first proclaimed, or in the gravel at Kilmainham where the heroes of the Easter Rising were shot by the government of America's then best friend David Lloyd George, or at the Free Derry Corner with its 14 names carved into a tiny cenotaph, I have thought of how Americans memorialize such events, how monumentally, how superhumanly.

Dublin's GPO, Ireland's "Independence Hall," remains
an open Post Office, there are a few pictures of the
Easter Rising by the south door.

 

And there is the problem. Americans wait for superhumans to arrive and offer deliverance. Americans cannot, because of the way they construct heroes, imagine that they are capable of creating change themselves.

So, the American media wonders daily how the Occupy Wall Street movement can exist without defined leaders. Apple fan boys have nightmares about not being granted "the next Steve Jobs." And educators pay vast fees to hear speakers and scour YouTube's TED lectures hunting for the next John Dewey.

It occurs to no one, as they "wait for superman," that "superman" is "us." And perhaps that waiting explains why, in the US, the only "revolutionary" changes have been led by the elites. America's transformative revolutionaries aren't Michael Collins and Bobby Sands, ordinary people who rose to a moment and are remembered as complex humans, but rather a pantheon of birthright privilege and power, George Washington, Jefferson Davis, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt. And you wonder why the US has changed - politically - so much less than most nations over the past two centuries.

So, it is time to stop waiting. It is time to understand that the real change begins, and ends, with ordinary people, not superhumans depicted in stone as giants. The real change comes from fed up pub patrons (Stonewall), from quiet engineers (Tim Berners-Lee), from anonymous guys working for a phone company (the transistor, the microprocessor), from a woman willing to get arrested for equal treatment on a bus (Rosa Parks), perhaps from a few hippie types who wanted to challenge Wall Street, or perhaps from you in your classroom.

Heroism is humans engaging their divinity, in my personal and perhaps skewed concept of God. And heroism is not superhuman but essentially human. It is part of who we are, part of who we are all born to be, it may be the very best of us, but it is not - in any way - limited to those with the best luck of birth.
 

Heroism is deciding that you will do the things you need to do
to make school better for kids @doosting

There aren't born leaders. So stop looking. True leaders rise from the ranks when we need them. Often, more often than not, they slip barely noticed, back into the ranks when that moment has passed. For they are the real heroes, the people without agendas beyond human progress, social justice, and the essential emotion of empathy for humanity.

When I visit schools, I usually tell people that I have a really easy job, I'm a "provocateur," which is great work when I can get it. It's the Thomas Paine role behind the American Revolution, the Padraic Pearse role in the Irish independence movement. I might pass along ideas, I might even frame ideas in new ways, I might bring new eyes to the scene, but the real work, the real heroism, lies in those teachers, principals, librarians, aides, et al who do the work - who take the risks to change things for kids.

And simply put, it is us, it is us, who will do this. Revolutions led by people in power can be "good" - see FDR's New Deal, but they will not be fundamentally transformative. That can only come when ordinary people realize that all of us have the capacity to do extraordinary things.

We need fewer monumental statues in the United States, and a lot more belief in our ability to change the world.

- Ira Socol