Welcome. In this video, we're going to talk about what kind of teacher you want to be. Please read this short excerpt from Gallagher and Lee's chapter entitled Reflection and Writing and Teaching, before you watch the video. The title of Chapter 1 of Linda Rief's book, Read Write Teach, is grounding our choices and our beliefs. I think a goal of most teachers, whether consciously expressed or not, is to teach as close as possible to what we believe and value. But there's no real blueprint for teachers on how to do that, and the day-by-day demands on teachers make it hard to step back and examine what we're doing, why we're doing it that way. As Gallagher and Lee pointed out, as teachers, we need to step back from our practice and consider carefully how and why we are doing what we are doing. We are surrounded by cultural, institutional, and personal scripts that frame the way we see things, including ourselves. By reflecting on what we do and believe, what emerges is a recognition that our sense of ourselves as teachers is never natural or inevitable, it is always storied and therefore, potentially re-storied. But in order to re-story our teaching lives, we must first cover or uncover the scripts we have been handled. I think what they're saying here essentially is that, how we became the teacher that we are, or how we become the teacher we're going to be if we haven't got there yet, is a combination of so many factors. Some of them we may be aware of and some of them we may not. But again, we have choices, just like students have choices in writing, we have choices in teaching, what we do, how we do it. Much of the time, we're not able to step back because we just don't have the time to step back and say, "Okay, why am I doing it this way? Or what might be the consequence of doing it another way?" In this video, I'm going to ask you to do a series of practice writings, just a few minutes of freewriting in response to a few questions that I'll be asking. Now, you don't have to stop the video and write immediately, because all of these questions that I'm going to mention are also listed individually in the discussion prompt that's posted separately. But I wanted to go through them first here and just provide a little additional context. Once you've reached the end of this video, then go to the discussion prompt exercise, and you'll see all the questions and you can jot down your thoughts. You won't post these thoughts anywhere at this point, but I believe that you'll find them useful when you complete a peer review writing at the end of the module. The first question, under what kind of teacher, involves rules of learning. Donald Murray talked about rules of writing that he needed to unlearn. Here I'm going to ask you to take a few minutes and list all the rules of teaching that you may have learned over the years. Now, these do not need to be only rules that you want to unlearn, but they may be any rules, good or bad, that you have become or that have become part of your understanding of what is necessary to be a good teacher. As Gallagher and Lee explained, these might include, lay down the law early, never let them see you sweat, always write the day's lesson on the board at the beginning of class, never use a red pen, begin where they are, make learning fun, jot down the ideas as they come to you. Gallagher and Lee want to see, this activity helps us call to conscious awareness, ideas about teaching that maybe only half articulated, or that we have come to take for granted. But in reflecting on these rules, the trick is not to take them for granted, but instead to ask ourselves, are these rules useful? Do they make teaching easier? Do I agree with all of them? Do ever break them in my own teaching? Have I seen others break them, and with what consequences? How and why was I taught these rules, or did I learn them without direct instruction? The point is to explore our own values, beliefs, and assumptions about teaching in order to clarify them, by way of either justification or alteration. One of the rules of teaching that I had when I started was, don't let students know that you don't know an answer or the answer. At least when I started, I felt that I needed to be the expert 100 percent of the time, and If I didn't have an answer, that didn't mean that I would be yes, but I would find a way to skip around the issue so that it didn't appear that I didn't know the answer. I have long since overcome that rule, and my teaching that better when I did. What most teachers find when they take the time to reflect on the rules they live by as teachers, is that none or almost none of the rules is hard and fast. Most of us can think of times when for one reason or another, we broke one of our own rules. Maybe a particular class needed to see us get mad before they would respond. Maybe your particular students needed to stop thinking that learning could always be fun and just had to buckle down and do the work. Maybe we couldn't immediately answer a question on the spot. In any case, the rules we live by as teachers, most often turn out not to be rules at all, but rather general guidelines that usually, but not always serve us well. But because teaching is messy, unpredictable work that involves messy, unpredictable human beings, we cannot rely on the rules. The second question I'm going to ask you to think about is, in the phrase, this I believe about teaching. What are your core beliefs about teaching? What key value shape your teaching life? When you get to it, when you start doing this, I'll ask you to take a few minutes and make a list of some of those things. Then what kind of teacher do you want to be? Imagine that a former student came back to visit you five or 10 years after being in your class, what sort of things would you be very pleased to hear that students say when she described her memory of you as a teacher? Again, when you get to that point to where you are jotting down answers, I'll ask you to take a few minutes and write down a few on your list here. The next is two or three things I know for sure about writing. In her memoir, two or three things I know for sure, Dorothy Allison uses the phrase in her title to frame some of the most important ideas in her book. As Gallagher and Lee explain, statements like this one are her attempt to salvage some clarity from the Jambo. Through writing, she is trying to figure out what she really does know for sure. When you're doing this, I'll ask you to take a few minutes and list some of the things that you know for sure about writing. These could be things you know about the act of writing, it's painful, it takes a long time, it relieves tension, it's unnecessary evil, whatever. Or things that you know about yourself as a writer, maybe you hate writing, you love writing, you're a good creative writer, but you're terrified by other kinds of writing. Don't worry if in writing these things down, you find out that you might not be quite as sure about them as you thought you were when you started. These questions are all laid out in the discussion prompt exercise. Please go there next and make your lists. I'm being intentionally vague about how many minutes I'm asking you to spend on any one question or how long your list might be, try to get at least a couple items on every list. But whether you spend two minutes, five minutes, or more on any one question, I'll leave that up to you. You won't be sharing these lists with anyone, but you do have an assignment at the end of the module. What you discover in doing this exercise, I think, will help you a lot when you get to that final assignment.
