Chapter 2
The Teaching of Teaching—United States
I'm always ready to learn, though I don't always like to be taught.
—Winston Churchill
ON EXITING A CENTER FOR INSPIRED TEACHING INSTITUTE, SOME OF the teacher participants said that the Institute instructors really didn't teach them anything; they had figured out for themselves how to be great teachers. Perfect! Aleta Margolis thought it was the best compliment she ever received. Now the teachers were owning it: now they knew that figuring out for themselves was exactly how to get students empowered and involved in learning. Aleta explains,
Now the teacher understands that it's not about the instructor or pleasing the teacher or even having a smart teacher. It's about the tenth grader saying, I'm so smart, because I figured out how to do it by myself and I spend all my time in school thinking and figuring out things and building on what I did yesterday. I have no idea what my teacher really does, but I know he is important because he helps me get there. It's not about my teacher; it's about me, the learner.
For Aleta, that's what Inspired Teaching is all about. The Center for Inspired Teaching aims to help teachers figure out how to encourage students to enter complicated situations and devise solutions, how to think about and anticipate problems, how to turn challenges into opportunities, how to celebrate creativity and different ways of thinking. Those skills aren't high on the usual school priority list. When Aleta discusses the achievement gap affecting today's students and schools, she is convinced that it is preceded by a creativity gap.
A New Generation Needs New Ways to Learn
The role of the Center for Inspired Teaching is to help teachers learn how to encourage and mentor students to think creatively, anticipate obstacles, and devise solutions for complicated problems. Its underlying philosophy about children, and all people, is that they are inherently curious and each one deserves to be valued. Everyone is born intellectually curious and eager to learn. The school's job should be to fuel that curiosity, not to dampen it; never to extinguish it. If you want to fuel kids' curiosity and you want to channel that curiosity into learning, you have to teach in a very different way from what is being done now. The Center is grounded in a child- and teacher-centered philosophy, as opposed to one that teaches simply curriculum adherence and survival skills to get teachers through the school year. And though Aleta's program does indeed find it necessary to include some survival skills (what teacher doesn't need some?), survival is considered a secondary skill set, not the primary one.
Aleta well understands the tough accountability challenges that teachers and school districts face, not only in the United States but around the world. Everyone agrees that professional development and teacher training is important, but what's really important is getting it right. It's not about giving a new teacher a bag of tricks to survive, or a random workshop here and there that is disconnected from the realities of the classroom. It's about helping teachers develop the mind-set and the practices that are going to sustain them for a long time in the classroom. It's about internalizing teaching as a profession. Aleta feels that teaching actually is like rocket science. It's challenging, it's stimulating, and, like rocket science, it can be learned. She understands that teachers don't just wake up one morning and figure out how to teach. They can learn how to do it, and possessing that knowledge inspires them to grow as professionals.
The traditional school model dictates that the teacher knows everything, the teacher provides the information and the correct answers, and the child's job is to absorb it all. Inspired Teaching sees a different picture. They see the child coming to class with ideas and experience, questions and knowledge. They see a teacher with exceptional skills for building, refining, focusing, expanding, and directing the knowledge the child already possesses. In fact, the picture hardly displays the teacher at all, because the Center believes that a great teacher is as close to invisible as possible. Just occasionally the teacher is asking a question, and the question might be something like “Why did you do it that way?” or “What have you learned so far?” “Have you tried that one?” “Now what do you think?” The teacher is asking challenging questions so the students articulate and synthesize their learning and get coaxed to the next level, especially when they seem to be taking the easy way out. When these children run home to tell their parents that they built their own bridge, they solved the mathematical problem required to do it, and now—finally—the bridge works, they do not say that their teacher taught them how to do it, or that they did it with their teacher; actually they never mention their teacher at all.
Since somebody's getting paid to teach in every classroom in the country and somebody's being paid to train all those teachers, every teacher either gives or receives some sort of training. So it's possible to change the entire system by just changing what we ask teachers to do, how we ask them to do it, and how we equip them for the change. If you are a smart, thoughtful person you didn't go into teaching to read a script, or to become a traffic cop in the halls, or become the enforcer of a rules-and-reward system. You became a teacher because you thought science was fascinating, because you thought language was fascinating, because you thought kids' brains were fascinating. It's not about getting the right teachers—the schools are full of them. It's about having them do the right things when they're in the classroom.
Aleta knows that education reformers often like to point to a few exceptionally effective teachers and bemoan the fact that there aren't more of them. As a result, many school systems find themselves stuck in a cycle of trying to hire more great teachers and trying to fire all the bad teachers, without rethinking what they ask teachers to do and how they train them to do it. This approach certainly doesn't appear to be leading to positive change for students. And here is the crux of the issue—it's not the teachers who aren't exceptional—it's the way they are teaching that makes them unexceptional. The role of the Center for Inspired Teaching is to help everyone in the education chain, including students, become exceptional at changemaking. This would create such a profound and sustainable impact that cities and school districts wouldn't have to tear down their school systems and build new ones. They wouldn't end up creating economic suicide by getting caught in the cycle of firing and then hiring teachers as a way of improving student performance. They wouldn't be moving the deck chairs on a sinking ship, thinking that people won't notice how bad the deck slants if the chairs are constantly being rearranged. If teachers are partners in reform instead of targets of reform, that adjustment in itself will create a more sustainable system.
Some people come to us saying I love teaching and I'm good at it, and I want to be even better. On the other end of the spectrum, some people come to us at the end of their rope, saying I'm ready to quit, I can't take it anymore, I used to love kids and now find that I hate my job. But I heard from my colleague that if I take this Inspired Teaching course, it might change how I feel, it might change what I do. I want to give it a shot.
It's no wonder that teachers and school districts are attracted to the tenets of Inspired Teaching; it's a clear instructional approach and belief system that shifts the teaching model from rote memorization to creative learning, and from giving information to instigating thought. There's a very clear technique to being an excellent teacher, and once people learn it they know that they are going to do things very differently from then on. They know they are going to enjoy their job more. They are going to work harder, but they're also going to be more motivated and know how to motivate their kids better.
Even though planning more complex, engaging lessons may make the teacher's job harder, at the same time it becomes easier because discipline problems decrease. Teachers become less worried about kids being bored and not wanting to learn because kids actually want to do the lesson. Though it seemed obvious to many for quite some time, finally, the education system is coming to recognize that teachers are important as a leverage point for systemic change. Inspired Teaching takes the concept to the next level of sophistication, investing in teachers as change agents and at the same time evolving the focus of that change from teachers to teaching.
Just recently, every U.S. state but one adopted common core standards for teaching content that children are required to learn in schools. To make sure that addressing standardized content doesn't make people adhere to the adage “teaching for the test and forgetting the rest,” the Baltimore school system approached the Center to see if it could focus the Inspired Teaching methodology on building teacher capacity to incorporate the core standards into an instructional practice that fosters children's long-term understanding of the content in a meaningful way.
The two-year program would train all of the two hundred middle school math teachers in the city, the ones who deal with children at the critical age when they tend to move from an inquiry experience in elementary school to having to learn by rote. It's a unique moment in a child's life and in the teacher's as well. In an early meeting with the district's chief academic officer, Aleta remembers her saying, “After you partner with the teachers to teach differently, I want the kids to be able to walk in the auditorium and roll a ball down the sloped aisle and be able to predict the speed of the ball and the force with which it will hit the stage. I don't want them to tell me just the formula, but explain to me why.” Aleta remembers thinking that their two approaches to learning meshed completely and wondered if this person was really running a school district: “How many other academic officers like her are out there? How many Baltimores can we pair up with?”
Simultaneous to scaling Inspired Teaching's philosophy to an urban school district in a nearby state, Aleta has opened a school of her own in downtown Washington D.C. as part of her strategy to create wide-scale change. It's basically a demonstration site to entice and interest visiting teachers, school administrators, and education officials to see what Inspired Teaching looks like. The Inspired Teaching Demonstration School is a public charter school (subject to all the accountability and financial standards as all D.C. public schools) where master Inspired Teachers train fellows-in-residence who are studying to become D.C. public school teachers. One of the requirements for fellows-in-residence is that they commit to being changemakers; in other words, they are teachers who choose to do a different kind of teaching, and who invite people to change their way of teaching as well. At the end of the year the residents graduate from the program, become teachers, and are certified by the D.C. system. The idea is to create a virtuous cycle that continuously populates the D.C. educational system with enough inspired teachers to shift the new teaching paradigm from the distinct and separate to the norm.
Ben Frazell, a teacher who graduated from the Inspired Teaching Institute a few years ago, is now the second-grade teacher at the Inspired Teaching Demonstration School. He illustrates the changemaking capabilities of the Center's influence on the profession.
What I enjoyed most about teaching literacy to adults who were studying for their high school GED [graduate equivalent degree] was connecting with them as equals and finding humor and joy in our time together. I decided to become an elementary school teacher because I had met many adults who had negative experiences in their own educational background so I looked forward to providing an environment of joy, challenge, and emotional support for students that would help them develop a love for learning.
When I went into the classroom, I attempted to bring that same joy with me. While I was able to have many great moments and rewarding experiences, too often I felt that education had become focused on control and conformity, both for teachers and students. I had heard that many teachers left the profession within five years, and I sometimes wondered if I would fall into that statistic. When I attended the Inspired Teaching Institute, I felt completely renewed and refreshed. Here was a philosophy where the children came first, creativity and intellect of teachers were celebrated, and the children's development was viewed in terms far larger and more significant than test scores. As I have worked with Inspired Teaching in various capacities and now as a Master Teacher at the Inspired Teaching School, I finally feel like I am fulfilled, supported, and treated as a professional. And I love working with wonderfully curious and creative students.
If Aleta gets an opportunity to influence the people who train teachers along with the people who create the expectations for teachers, then she will have gone a long way toward her goal. She knows that if a school could look different and teachers could teach differently, then students could learn more effectively, productively, and happily. But she also knows that down the road, to put structures in place that make Inspired Teaching the norm, she will have to help school districts rethink the way they evaluate teachers. This would truly enable change on a massive scale to take place. If all goes according to Aleta's vision, maybe in the future teaching and learning will be more about how well students can solve real-world problems, rather than how well behaved they are and how long they can sit in their seats.