As You Like It: Holding the Floor

The New York Times article “Building a Better Teacher” by Elizabeth Green is spreading through the teaching grapevine like a brush fire. In two days at least five people have forwarded it to me, and I’ve done the same, sending it to all the teachers in my life. It tackles the question: Is a good teacher born or made? – a conundrum that has bedeviled the teaching profession for years.

What makes a good teacher? There have been many quests for the one essential trait and they have all come up empty-handed. Among the factors that do not predict whether a teacher will succeed: a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and having passed the teacher-certification exam on the first try. When Bill Gates announced recently that his foundation was investing millions in a project to improve teaching quality in the United States, he added a rueful caveat. “Unfortunately, it seems the field doesn’t have a clear view of what characterizes good teaching,” Gates said. “I’m personally very curious.”

So am I. I’ve always thought that a good teacher was a combination of passion and skill, but the debate rages on. Thanks to Doug Lemov, a successful teacher, principal, charter-school founder and now consultant, the spotlight has now turned onto how teachers are trained. Most of us attended schools that had a similar teacher curriculum. Like Gaul it was divided into three parts: academic subjects that we would be teaching, the history and philosophy of education, and “methods” courses that supposedly taught us classroom management, or how to get a roomful of kids to listen to you. But as Green pointed out:

Education-school professors often have little contact with actual schools. A 2006 report found that 12 percent of education-school faculty members never taught in elementary or secondary schools themselves. Even some methods professors have never set foot in a classroom or have not done so recently.

I was lucky. I already had a degree in English and American literature so I could concentrate on studying methods for a year and student-teach for six months. Since I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to teach middle or high school I was allowed to do three months in each. However, though my middle school teacher was a brilliant mentor, my high school teacher was a lifer who couldn’t wait to retire. She gave me her three “problem” classes and basically checked out.

Despite a year and a half of preparation, I began my first year as a high school English teacher in a state of shock. No one had prepared me for the sheer amount of energy I needed to get through a day, never mind the workload. I went through that first year in a constant panic, usually feeling like a failure. I could have used the practical teaching methods that Lemov developed later on, especially the one known as “getting and holding the floor,” because if you can’t keep a class’ attention it doesn’t matter how great your passion or how brilliant your lesson plan, no one will hear it.

Lemov developed his methods taxonomy after years of observing classes.

Originally Lemov had pushed for data-driven programs that would diagnose individual students’ strengths and weaknesses, but as he went from school to school he was getting the feeling that there was something deeper he wasn’t reaching. When it came to actual teaching schools and teachers floundered.

Lemov thought about fields like sports and realized that when coaches spoke to their players they used very specific instructions. It made him wonder if, perhaps, no such vocabulary existed to discuss teaching. He wondered if, though many educators felt that to be a good teacher you had to be born with a special talent, perhaps it could be learned. He decided that he would visit the most successful teachers that he could find and compare the way that they managed their classrooms.

When Doug Lemov conducted his search for those magical ingredients he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise. “Stand still when you’re giving directions,” a teacher at a Boston school told him. In other words, don’t do two things at once. Lemov tried it, and suddenly, he had to ask students to take out their homework only once. It was the tiniest decision, but what was teaching if not a series of bite-size moves just like that?

As a result of his research, Lemov has come out with his own vocabulary for teachers. His training includes practical methods such as: cold calling (students are not allowed to raise their hands but are unexpectedly called upon forcing them to pay attention), the use of specific instructions such as, “Put your pencils down and look up,” rather than the more fuzzy, “Pay attention!” and the use of hand gestures to communicate things like: “Eyes on me,” or “Settle down,” so as not to interrupt the lesson flow with unnecessary words.

My favorite is called “mixing joy and structure,” where you add fun and laughter to the class. That is the heart and soul of a classroom — where passion and skill meet. Because you can be brilliant and you can capture the floor and even hold it, but if you don’t bequeath your joy of learning to your students, you might as well stay home.

Short URL: https://www.thecantoncitizen.com/?p=1876

Posted by Joan Florek Schottenfeld on Apr 8 2010. Filed under As You Like It, Opinion. Both comments and pings are currently closed.