The Foundations of Teaching for Learning programme is designed for teachers and educators of all abilities and backgrounds; from those who are new to the classroom and looking for development, to experienced teachers ready to reboot their skills for modern education. With dynamic lessons taught by established and respected professionals from across the Commonwealth, this eight course programme will see you develop and strengthen your skills in teaching, professionalism, assessment, and more. As you carry on through the programme, you will find yourself strengthening not only your professional skills, but your connection with colleagues across the globe. A professional development opportunity not to be missed. This introductory course considers the three domains of being a teacher: Professional Knowledge and Understanding; Professional Practice; and Professional Values, Relationships and Engagement. Enhance your course by joining the Commonwealth teaching community on our website, Facebook and Twitter.
Lecture 4: Being a Professional
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Foundations of Teaching for Learning: Introduction
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Being a Teacher: A Professional Privilege
This first week gives an introduction to the course and asks what it is to be a teacher. This is a chance for you to reflect on you own identity and aspirations as a teacher and gain an informed understanding of the world, or worlds, of childhood. You will build on and extend your existing knowledge as a teacher. We will discuss the ways in which teaching can be defined as a profession and what it means to be a professional teacher.
Rencontrer les enseignants
Professor John MacBeathProfessor Emeritus
University of Cambridge, UK
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Being and becoming a professional. Well, what is a profession?
What are the hallmarks of a profession? Here are four which emphasize ethical
standards, special knowledge, special skills,
the importance of research and continuing learning to a high level and being
prepared to apply this knowledge and to exercise those skills in the interests of
others. In the interests of others, that's what
brought you into teaching, a service to young people and to
colleagues and to parents and to the wider community.
Teaching is also described as a personal and emotional engagement, because
teaching, in many respects is different from almost any other job,
because, as Crosswell and Elliot suggest in this slide, it is a passion, teachers
are passionate, or the best teachers are passionate about their work.
They go further than that, because it's not just what happens in the classroom,
they invest time on their own time outside the classroom.
They have the focus of individual needs of their students and they carry a
responsibility to engage their students not only in knowledge, but in changing
attitudes and developing values. And teachers maintain and continue to
maintain their professional knowledge and their engagement with the wider
community. But what actually helps teachers to
develop and grow? What nurtures a profession?
And what are the kind of things that actually deter teachers from going on or
investing energy in their teaching. Well, an English researcher from
Cambridge who went on then to teach at the National College, talked about toxins and
nutrients. Nutrients, the things that actually help
you to grow professionally, and the toxins, the things that actually poison
that professionalism. Here are seven of the toxins that Jeff
Southworth found in his research, when he talked to teachers and asked them, what
was it that actually makes you feel less professional in your work, that actually
decreases your motivation in the classroom,
and you will see there, ideas being rejected or stolen, carping criticism,
being ignored, being judged all the time, being told what to do too much, being
over-directed, not being listened to. And that's not just by your students, but
not being listened to by others in positions of authority.
And conversely, what are the things that actually support, inspire and nurture
teachers, the nutrients, being valued, being
encouraged, being noticed, trusted, being listened to and being respected.
What is true for you? These may resonate with you,
these may be very similar to the kind of things that you experience in your
context. But there may be other things, you might
want to have a different kind of list. There may be different things that
actually motivate you and inspire you to go on teaching and they may be some
things, that you find a constant challenge, everyday.
And the question's of how you go on and overcome those.
Well, something that has been described by a researcher, a Canadian researcher,
Barnett, who talks about the dilemma space,
and what he says that relative, relative to other professions, teachers still have
to wrestle for status and respect and while they're often expected to be
smart and entrepreneurial, they're also expected to be compliant and conforming.
And a Cambridge professor, Charles Hampden Turner, takes that notion of the
dilemma space and he suggests that there are two
dimensions in which we begin to understand that.
On the one hand, as you see in this slide, the vertical axis which is
measurable performance and the horizontal axis which is creative learning and
development, and he says that if you spend too much
time worrying about or prioritizing measurable performance, then you may be a
bit of a dinosaur. But on the other hand, if you totally
ignore the importance of assessing performance, you may be a bit of an
ostrich sticking your head in the sand. And then, if you give all the time there
is to creative learning and development and simply ignore that other dimension of
having some form of assessment and accountability, you're probably due for
extinction, and so he depicts the unicorn.
But, if you are able to combine these two elements, these two axes,
the importance of being able to gauge and assess
and measure children's performance, as well
as being creative in your learning and creative in their development, then he
depicts this as the eagle. But there are some who fall right in the
middle, who never quite know how to resolve the dilemma and he portrays this
as the push me-pull you, and if you've every read any of the books
about Doctor Doolittle, you know that one of his famous creatures was the push me-
pull you, two heads facing in different directions.
Have a look at that and just think where on that chart or on those two dimensions you
might place yourself or perhaps even some of your colleagues or others that you
know of and where would you like to be? In all of this dilemma space, there is
something that's constantly nagging away at us,
the tyranny of the urgent as Charles Hummel describes it,
and he asks the question to teachers, have you ever wished for a 30 hour day?
Because there's always so many things that seem to be left undone, the trail of
unfinished tasks. But when we stop to evaluate them, think
about our teaching, we realize that the dilemma actually goes
much deeper simply and the amount of time that we have, as we go back and we review
the day and the week and the year, we recognize that we are driven often by
other people's demands, by things that really aren't our own
priorities, but that are other people's priorities.
Have a look at this matrix. It is two dimensions.
On the one hand, the vertical axis talks about importance
and the horizontal axis talks about the urgent and the not urgent.
This gives us four quadrants, and if you were to think about your own
teaching and about children's learning, what would you say is really not
important or not urgent? Bottom left.
Well, perhaps we shouldn't be doing that and what about the things that are
urgent, the constant pressures? But they're not important, what do you do
about that? And then, top left,
think about the important but not urgent. These are the things that you consider,
that you have to do or that you have to engage young people with,
but it's a longer term investment. It's something that you don't have to do
right now. Now, that leaves the space for the
important and the urgent. But how much of your teaching and how
much of children's learning needs to fall into that quadrant?
Perhaps most of what we do in teaching ought to be important but not urgent,
a much longer term investment. Well, this matrix may be quite useful for
you to use on an ongoing basis, when you're thinking about what you're
doing in the classroom, what you're doing in your planning,
what you're doing in your evaluating. But having come to the end of the fourth
presentation perhaps, now is the time for you to go
back and to look again at all of the four presentations, and some of the work that
you've done in between, and some of the things that you may have gathered and put
into a portfolio, some of the tasks and activities that
you're undertaking. And finally then to engage in the quiz
and the quiz has eight questions. Eight statements, each of which asks for
a correct response out of the four. And so, before you undertake the quiz,
which you should really only do once, to get right,
it's important that you review what you think, what you know, what you are now
reassessing in your teaching and learning before you undertake the quiz so that you
can be quite happy that on all of the eight questions you've actually got it
right. In addition to the quiz, there are other
activities you might want to undertake, such as discussion with your colleagues
about some of the things you have been doing over the course of this first week
and the four presentations that you've had.
And one of the things you might use is the matrix, the importance and the urgent
matrix. If you were to raise these questions with
your colleagues in your own school, what would they say?
About the important and the urgent? About the urgent and not important?
And about the things that are important but not urgent?
The long-term investment in children's learning and in the development of the
school as a learning organization? That could prove to be a very useful and
stimulating conversation to have as a profession with your fellow
professionals. And then, having had that conversation
with your colleagues, it would be useful for you and an important contribution to
the course, to be able to write maybe, 400-500 words on what came out of that
discussion with your colleagues. What you've learned, and what you've
learned by testing these ideas together with other professionals.
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