Last Friday night, CBS
aired a special documentary called TEACH,
following the classrooms of four teachers through some triumphs and through
some struggles. There has been some controversy surrounding the film (it was
made by some of the same people involved with Waiting for Superman, which has its own controversy surrounding it;
some felt there should have been more of a variety of content areas and teacher
ages represented in the film; some felt it was an advertisement for Khan
Academy; etc.), but I won’t be delving into those areas. In fact, as a
disclaimer to this post, I’ll let you know right now: I loved it. I thought it
was a genuine depiction of the realities of teaching – the pressures we face,
the obstacles we have to strive to overcome, however insurmountable. And this
post details what I loved most about the piece: teacher reflection and growth.
[SPOILER ALERT: If you
haven’t seen TEACH yet and you’re
planning on it, you may want to postpone reading this post! TEACH just became available on iTunes, I
believe, so you can check it out there.]
The four teachers depicted
in the documentary were real teachers. And real teachers make mistakes. (Yes,
let’s admit it. We do make mistakes from time to time.) And these teachers made
mistakes. But the great, inspiring take-away was that these four teachers,
often with the help of a mentor, reflected on their practices and on their
mistakes, grew from the experience, changed some things around, and ended up
with some great results for their students.
Keeping the Class
Student-Centered
One of the teachers in the
film was a high school AP history teacher. Much loved by his students, who
seemingly clamored to enroll in his class, he learned the hard way (during a
class that was being observed by his graduate school education professor, no
less!) that his class was too teacher-centered. Numerous times throughout the
lesson (which was largely lecture-based) he asked the class some variation of
the question, “Does everyone get this?” Each time, he was met by crickets. And
each time, he proceeded along with the content of his lesson, presumably taking
his students’ silence for a “Yes, we get this.” It’s easy to fall into this
trap, especially when we feel we have to keep moving on with our lesson. But we
should never take a class’ silence for understanding (nor should we take one student’s “Yes” as the answer for
“Does everyone get this?”). In
working with his graduate school professor, this teacher realized his lessons
needed to be more student-centered in order to get them more involved and to
aid in checking for understanding. Soon, he was having his students work in
groups to brainstorm, problem solve, and create. A plethora of voices filled
the air of his classroom, and you could see
the learning taking place.
The 360 Degree
Classroom
A secondary math teacher
shown in the film struggled with a range of student abilities present in her
class. Even more so, she struggled with not being able to easily watch her
students in action, to observe them doing math in the moment. Working with the
assistant principal, she took on the challenge of trying out a 360 degree
classroom. Whiteboards were installed across all four of the walls of the
classroom. Students were handed a marker and an eraser as they entered the
room. And, (presumably after a whole class mini-lesson) students left their
desks behind as they each found a place at one of the four wall-length white
boards. The teacher left the front of the room behind, and stood directly in
the middle of the room, where she could pivot and turn, watching her students
work through a math problem. This helped her identify to whom she needed to go first
with support, and who was progressing along independently. Once again, the
learning was visible and the students engaged.
Tapping Into
High-Interest
A third teacher portrayed
in the film was an elementary teacher struggling with reading instruction. Some
of his students were grade levels behind where they needed to be. It was even
harder to motivate some of these students not only due to their low reading
skills, but because these difficulties had made them dislike reading so much.
During a post-observation conference with his principal, she simply asked him,
“When you were a kid, what would make you want to read?” In the next segment of
the film, we hear this teacher asking his students what their hobbies are, what
their lives are like, what they want to be when they grow up. And we then see
him scouring through books in the library, later bringing a stack of books into
the classroom. Standing amongst his students, holding up book after book and
quickly describing it (“Who has trouble with their friends? Who wants to be a
chef when they grow up?”), he is pelted with excited shrieks and raised hands.
Everyone was thrilled to begin reading these high-interest books. It was
certainly one huge step in the right direction.
The Flipped Classroom
The fourth teacher shown
in TEACH was a math teacher (if
memory serves, middle school or upper elementary) from Idaho, which is piloting
the use of Khan Academy in some of its classrooms statewide. Khan Academy is a
tool for flipping your classroom – instead of conducting the lesson in front of
all your students, students access the material from the (free!) Khan Academy
resources online. The class time is now freed up for small group work,
intervention groups, etc. But it may not be as easy as it seems, as this
teacher at first experienced. By the end of her first month with the program,
she was ready to give up. She missed her place at the front of the room, she
wasn’t sure what her role was now, and students were not improving their math
skills. I wish she had had someone in her building or district who could have
coached her through this (as we see in the above stories). But, luckily, she
did reach out to a Khan Academy mentor, who helped her to look at her student
data from the program the night before the next class, so she could see in
advance who was struggling and she could plan to meet with certain groups of
students to intervene. Her relief to understand the benefits of the program
better was evident, and her class began to soar. Some students were even
accessing Khan Academy when it wasn’t assigned, just to do some extra work on
their own!
The amount of honest
reflection, the help from a mentor, the willingness to try something new, the
ability to grow as a professional: these are the qualities that most impressed
me about the teachers in TEACH and
the qualities that most impress me about all good teachers. I’m thrilled to be
working as an instructional coach because it gives me the opportunity to help
teachers do the hard work of the reflective practitioner.
