It’s 6 pm. Tuesday night. Church directors board meeting. One of the members walks in, drops his
computer bag and unceremoniously lowers himself into a chair, exhaling
something between a huff and a sigh.
“What’s wrong?” someone asks.
“I’m tired of my students wanting me to
entertain them,” he replies.
There are a lot of things I could’ve said in response. But did I really want to get into a
discussion regarding student engagement after a long day of work where that
very thought occupies much of what I do for a living? No. Hence this blog.
I am
committed, however, to sharing this installment with my friend, the exasperated
teacher, because in fairness: 1) he’s an excellent teacher and 2) I think he’ll
agree with much of what I’m about to say.
The
thing is, he’s right. He should be tired
of trying to entertain students to keep them engaged. Trying to entertain students is a losing
proposition. It only happens for the
likes of Robin William and Sidney Poitier in movies because, well, it’s Hollywood
and I hate to break it to you, but Hollywood isn’t real.
Here’s
another way of looking at it. Check out
this YouTube piece of
the very entertaining Walter Lewis, university Physics professor. He says that
he spends hours rehearsing for each class; in fact, he runs through each
lecture three times before trying it out on his students. At first glance, you’d think, Who wouldn’t want a teacher like this? Surely students would learn given his highly
entertaining/engaging manner? As it
turns out, not so much.
“…what
[happens] as the semester [progresses]? Attendance at his physics lectures
[falls] 40% by the end of the term and an average of 10% of students
[fail] Mechanics and 14% [fail] E&M” (http://fnoschese.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/pt-pseudoteaching-mit-physics/).
The above blogger coins the
word pseudoteaching to describe what
Professor Lewis and others like him do.
“Pseudoteaching is something you realize
you’re doing after you’ve attempted a lesson which from the outset looks like
it should result in student learning, but upon further reflection, you realize
that the very lesson itself was flawed and involved minimal learning”
(fnoschese.wordpress.com).
My spin on pseudo-teaching is teacher as entertainer. Entertaining teachers are engaging, but not
all engagement equals learning. Teacher as entertainer engages students
emotionally on some level, I suppose, but it’s mostly passive on the part of
the students.
I think Tony Danza’s A&E
reality TV show Teach makes the point
even more strongly. In it, 60-yr-old actor
Tony Danza – mostly known for his 80’s TV show, Who’s the Boss? – lives out his life-long dream of becoming a high
school English teacher. Give him credit;
he has regular meetings with his principal, instructional coach and other
colleagues. In his debriefs, he’s quite
self-aware. In fact, he spends a fair bit of time in tears because, in his
words, “I had no idea teaching was so hard.”
But at the end of the day, he approaches his students like
an actor approaches an audience; a single spotlight is on Tony the teacher-performer
who is on centre stage of his very own Philadelphia educational theatre.
During a particular cut-away,
a student astutely says, “We don’t want him to change. We don’t want him to become like some of our other
strict teachers. That wouldn’t be
good.” You could argue that that’s just
a slacker student not wanting to do any work.
True as that may be, I’m hearing something else: students liked Tony.
They connected with him. That, in and of
itself, is not nearly enough, but it’s a powerful start. You can’t deny the regularity of sentiments
like:
We like Mr. So-and-so. He’s funny or
Ms. Insert-name-here is
cool. She tells great stories.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s much learning
going. In one of the first schools I
taught, students often said that all you’d have to do in Mr. _______’s class
was ask him about last night’s hockey game and you could kiss 45 minutes
good-bye.
I fear I’m being redundant.
I’m simply trying to make this point:
I don’t think we can deny that it’s good to be funny, entertaining
and/or likeable. It’s good to connect
with students about things they’re interested in – sports, music, fashion, and
so on. But these things don’t guarantee
that learning will ensue. I would argue
that, to use a farming metaphor, you till the soil when you make personal
connections with students. And that’s
really important. But there is still
more hard work of learning and teaching to be done; it comes through planting,
watering – insert more agricultural
tropes here – and harvesting.
If connecting with kids on a personal level is tilling,
engaging students socially, physically and intellectually is the rest of the
process – the really hard work of learning and teaching. I could go on and on, but I won’t. If you’re interested, check out the work of
Robert Marzano and our very own Canadian critical thinking people at http://www.tc2.ca/ but to name a few. Or, simpler yet, google “student engagement”.
No comments:
Post a Comment