Meh in the classroom is when a teacher does not know how good or bad their teaching is but just keeps teaching the same way day after day. Children know meh when they see it. They know it long before a teacher is aware of stale teaching practices and behaviors. It takes courage and effort for a teacher to inspect her teaching. And inspection requires professional assistance.
What do we know?
Classroom teaching is a black box profession. Teachers deliver hundreds of lessons without much feedback on whether their teaching practices and behaviors really work to cause children to learn. Their principal evaluates their teaching minimally in compliance with state and contractual requirements and provides formal feedback every three years. State assessments purposefully disconnect from statements about instructional quality. We make inferences only about state report cards and daily classroom teaching.
Even then, self-criticism is not easy. The curricular calendar and classroom dynamics work against a teacher’s understanding of the effectiveness of daily teaching. Grade level and subject area teaching assignments have an annual curriculum that always is more than a teacher can teach in a school year. Even with good planning, school life interferes with emergency drills, special observances, and assemblies, and unplanned “we need to talk with kids about this” topics. No teacher teaches a complete unit of planned instruction without school interruptions.
Also, children are complex learners. Teaching always is within the contextual interplay between children’s socio-emotional lives with their ability to focus on what they are being taught. Seldom is a lesson taught without a teacher’s need to consider or respond to extra-learning needs of students. For example, this month, October, traditionally includes homecoming activities in secondary schools. The rich schedule of pep assemblies, school decorations, homecoming dance, and girls’ and boys’ athletic events associated with homecoming create multiple instructional road bumps.
Lastly, even though teachers are colleagues with fellow teachers, they seldom to never see other teachers teach. While all PK-3 teachers are reinforcing their reading instruction with phonics-based strategies, they never see how the teacher next door is doing it. And the 8th grade math teacher trying to bolster flagging student math achievement never sees how the 7th grade math teacher filled in the math scaffold the year before.
Black box classrooms work against the improvement of teaching.
What does effective teaching look like?
The easy answer is that effective teaching causes children to learn what they are taught. There should be a tight correlation between planned teaching and measured learning assessments. But effective teacher practices and behaviors are more than that assumed correlation. I have known teachers who could plan and deliver a well-planned lesson that should have produced strong learning results. However, the teacher’s unawareness of student needs during the lesson or unawareness of her own speech, posture, language, facial expressions, and lack of connection with children in the classroom doomed the possibility that a well-planned lesson would cause good learning. As teachers make a proverbial “1,000 decisions per hour in their classroom, those decisions cover a myriad of practices and behaviors.
If good planning is not a consistent cause of good learning, then what is? Our teacher preparation programs point us back to the state’s approved professional standards for teachers. These standards were embedded in our license preparation courses with the hope that, at the end of a prep program, a licensed teacher would be imbued with these qualities.
In my work, I asked veteran teachers if they could recite the ten Wisconsin Teacher Standards from memory. Or at least talk about the ten standards. These interviews included veteran teachers with long records of their students achieving high scores on standardized tests as well as rookie teachers. Few teachers could recite the WI standards, though most knew some of the concepts of the standards. Fingertip knowledge of professional standards is not necessarily a correlation with effective teaching.
As another measure, I asked veterans and rookies about the preparation standards of their license. For example, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the Council for Exceptional Children offer strong supportive guidance for the preparation and continuing professional development of math and special education teachers. Teachers have vague recall of the standards of that preparation and their connections with national organizations diminish over time.
In the absence of other information, we fall back on the end of chapter quizzes, unit tests, and state report card assessments to provide some data of teaching effect. However, these data may or may not correlate with good teaching. Test results also reflect what a child learned previously from another teacher, what they learned on their own out of school, what they infer but did not clearly learn from your teaching, and a lot of good guessing in their test taking.
Effective teaching is a process of connecting teaching practices and behaviors with desired learning outcomes.
Effective teaching is not a mystery. We know what it is when we see it. Effective teaching also is not an accident. We know how to produce the practices and behaviors of effectiveness. If not a mystery or an accident, then effective teaching is a qualitative state of our professional work we can focus on and improve. Also, the state of our professional work is not a constant quality but a variable that ebbs and flows across a career. Most teachers self-recognize when their teaching is superb, and they feel wonderful about it. They may also feel it when it is meh. However, when it is meh, they usually are unsure about how to change it. This is when professional inspection is needed.
Self-criticism, that is a teacher taking steps to inspect, criticize, and improve her own teaching, got much easier with technology. It starts with recording one’s own teaching and all it takes is courage and a smartphone.
- Begin by telling all students you are going to make audio and visual recordings of yourself while you teach. They will be heard and seen in your recordings, but you will not use the recordings to grade or evaluate them. Also, tell them that you will ask other teachers to listen to and watch the recordings for the purpose of improving your teaching. Your recording is not about students. Not surprisingly, students will quickly forget the presence of your smartphone.
- Focus on segments of teaching practices and behaviors. Consider the first ten minutes of a class period. How do you greet students each day? How do you connect this day of learning with prior days – how do you introduce and give context for the lesson? What are your speech patterns? How do you stand – does your posture promote positive enthusiasm? What facial expressions express your interest in their learning this day’s lesson? How do you respond to the initial class period needs of all students?
- Record your explicit instruction. This is the heart of your lesson plan and where lesson planning and lesson teaching connect. Do you connect new learning with prior learning? Do you pre-teach new vocabulary, conceptual terms, and new skill sets? Do you model correct understanding and performance of what students are to learn? Do you check for student understanding during not just after your instruction? How do you respond to student questions? How do you address wandering or distracting student behaviors?
- There are so many aspects of classroom teaching you can focus on for self-inspection. Recording an entire class period us necessary occasionally, but only for a global view. Instead, focus on discrete episodes in your classroom work.
- Listen to and watch your recordings at a suitable time and place when and where you can give your recordings your undivided attention. If you are making the effort to record, also give the effort to view and critique.
Self-criticism is a required professional development disposition. Too often teachers believe that criticism is always negative and defeating. It is not! Self-criticism finds successes and challenges. When you watch Smile and clap hands when in self-approval. Also, take notes -write down – practices and behaviors you want to change.
- Label your practices and behaviors professionally. Refer to your training and the terms used in lesson planning. I professionally use Madeline Hunter’s Lesson Design and the terms and definitions she used to teach effective instruction. Describe your instructional Purpose. Consider your Objectives in “the learner will …” terms. Be critical of your Explicit Instruction and how it incrementally develops what students are to learn. Replay your Modeling of new instruction to assure fidelity to the Objectives. Replay your Formative Assessments to assure that all students were ready for the next part of the lesson. Labeling across lessons ensures that you are comparing and contrasting practices and behaviors properly.
Be bold. After you have listened to and watched recordings, ask a fellow teacher, a teacher you respect and trust, to listen and watch with you. Explain the purpose and process in your self-inspection and let that professional comment on successes and challenges. Do not be surprised if your colleague has difficulty with labeling and defining as the practice of self-inspection may be new to them as well as to you. Make this a collegial venture.
And do it again. “Again” means
- Make a second and third recording to find recurring practices and behaviors. Incidentals that do not repeat are hard to change, so do not focus there. Focus on repetitive practices and behaviors.
- Take enough time to self-inspect, understand the successes and challenges you saw,
- Plan to change explicit practices and behaviors you saw. Change for improvement is a planned process. Being explicit improves your ability to notice change. Lack of specificity can also be chance.
- Make follow-up recordings to see the effectiveness of new practices and behaviors.
- Ask your colleague to view follow-up recordings to confirm your observations.
The Big Duh!
First, a teaching career is supposed to last many years. A successful teaching career is causing all children assigned to you to learn what you taught. The feeling that your teaching is successful helps to sustain a lengthy career. Second, over the years, your teaching practices and behaviors will change given experience and school district priorities. The reality of professional improvement, however, does not change. While a public may criticize education, the educational system only addresses programmatic improvement not classroom teaching improvements. Last, teachers are on their own if they want to improve their professional practices and behaviors. So, pull up your socks and create your own self-inspection. Your career and your students deserve your doing this.