Comparing and Adapting
- hodginsjustin
- Sep 15, 2017
- 2 min read
The more I read on becoming a teacher, the more I am welcomed to challenge my views and re-asses my knowledge. Growing up, I can recall being taught in a very straightforward fashion, with few of my teachers being adaptive experts. Granted, this was the accepted style of teaching at the time. However, after reading the first chapter of To Teach The Journey, In Comics by William Ayers, it reinforced my personal perceptions about how one is to learn how to teach. From what I can gather from the readings, the consensus among the three of them is that teaching is anything but a static experience, and as a result those that are learning to teach should be dynamic and adaptable. More specifically, if one is to be adaptive, they should engage themselves and their learners in a cycle of inquiry and testing to further not only their own practice but also their own learning. Thus, it becomes important that the teachers that are learning to teach be engaged in these cycles of inquiry and analysis to get accustomed to how they themselves will be guiding their future practice.
Comparing this strategy to what I thought learning to teach would be like, a stark contrast is presented. I was originally under the impression that you repeatedly develop a specific approach to teaching a subject, and eventually become an expert in your own specific approach such that you can repeat it. Thus, observing a teacher would be a matter of discovering the nuances that they employ in their approaches and emulating them in a way you best feel comfortable. This way, you would be a novice learner who has a similar skillset to the teachers you worked alongside. However, upon reading these documents, it becomes far clearer that teachers using modern approaches will rarely have a “sure-fire method” that absolutely works for all students, all the time. That would be, in theory, what a robot could teach with. Instead, they use the collaborative inquiry method to become adaptive experts, learning slowly but surely how to engage and encourage the new generation of students as the demographics and needs change. Thus, learning to be a teacher involves being a part of this cycle and in turn, developing your own practice, only becoming an expert in understanding how the needs change and how to make your next inquiry an informed one.
At this point, I have three questions in regards to the assigned readings.
How do we blend the old-fashioned method in with the new ones? While the number of adaptive experts in the field are increasing, there are still people who used other methods to teach. I’m curious as to how we can still see eye-to-eye with them and manage to create inquiry/analysis cycles.
Second, I’m curious as to how we can effectively convey to students that we too are learning as teachers, without creating an insecure environment.
Finally, my last question relates to how we will see the impact of our inquiries in practicum, as we are not in the classroom full time. Will we be able to see fruit on the initiatives that we may undertake during our CSL/practicum time?
