I turn wood on a lathe.  A sharp edge on a steel tool is required to ensure clean cuts expose the beauty of the wood and the shapes I design.  As a rule, I sharpen a chisel or gouge after 15 to 20 minutes of use.  The contrast between using a sharp or dull chisel is apparent when I stand back and examine my work.  Dull tools leave torn and ragged wood fibers, uneven edges, and the appearance of sloppy craftsmanship.  Products I will not display.  Who would choose to use tools that are not sharp?

How does this apply to causing learning?

Professionally speaking, sharp tools also cause better results.  A professional tool is a strategy or methodology used to cause a positive response or to eliminate an unwanted outcome.  Some professional tools are hardened steel, but most are mental or dispositional or best practices for doing the work.  Prospective teachers in their teacher preparation programs learn a variety of pedagogical strategies for causing children to learn content, skills, and ways of considering their world.  They take methods classes and use student teaching to practice and learn to apply the strategies of teaching.  This is an introduction to the tools of their profession.

A teaching tool is the philosophical construct used to design units and lessons of instruction.  Sharply cut designs engage children with questions and problems and ideas that get into each child’s head at the start of a unit or lesson.  Good designs cause children to want to know what comes next.  Every lesson in a unit needs to fit into this pre-conceived pathway along which the teacher uses other specific teaching tools to shape student knowledge, skills, and dispositions for learning. 

Teaching tools include strategies for introducing and engaging children in a daily lesson, leading a discussion with insightful questions, using positive reinforcement to strengthen learning outcomes, or reflection and reteaching to correct or strengthen lesson outcomes.  Drill down on any of these, the use of positive reinforcement for example, for the explicit words, phrases, body language, and context for giving a child reinforcing positive messages.  Each teacher will find their personal use of specific words, a way of saying those words, and a way of looking at a child when saying the words that causes the most positive reinforcement for that child.  This is a sharp tool.  Conversely, using the dull tool of a casual comment leaves a child unsure of the strength of their learning, uncertain that their learning matters, and more likely to disengage.

While there are general pedagogical tools used by all teachers, there also are grade level and subject area tools that are required across the 4K-12 continuum.  Down on your knees physical proximity to a young student works wonders but not so much with a high schooler.  Shared glee with a kindergarten child is not only contagious but an essential tool shaping their young ownership of their learning.  Inquiry and problem-based learning strategies are strong tools for social studies teachers.  Sharply honed lessons with timely propositions, strategic access to resources, time outs for “tell me what you know and what you need to know next”, and opportunities for differentiated presentation of results hook children into being avid learners at all ages. 

Specific tools are used by teachers of children with special education and gifted educational needs.  Some exceptional needs children need tasks and ideas broken down into smaller tasks and ideas with special consideration for sequencing and pacing and reinforcement.  Others require more room for creativity than the classroom and teaching skills and mentoring that push the teacher as much as the student.

And, the universe of teaching tools is constantly being added to and modified, even though we think good teaching practices are timeless.

How often does an educator stand back to inspect the effects of her teaching tools – the sharpness of her teaching practices?  Inspection is a meta-self-analysis of a teaching practice and the individual tools a teacher uses to shape student learning.  It requires taking lessons apart after they are taught for tool inspection.  “What did I say and what did I do?  And, how did students respond?”. 

Once examined, how often do we resharpen our teaching tools?  Sharpening is focusing on the “What did I say and what did I do” that could be reworded to provoke a clearer meaning, a more specific direction, a more illustrative modeling, or a leave a student with a better understanding.  Sharpening is changing unit and lesson designs to ensure that the next time the lesson is taught, the teacher will use these sharper tools.

The children we teach are our products.  Sharp teaching tools cause children to be successful learners and achieve educational outcomes we can be proud of displaying.  Just as in wood turning, dull teaching tools cause dull products.  How often do we inspect – not often enough.

Why is thus?

• Every teacher is the product of a teacher-as-student academic preparation program.   The teacher-as-student learns the content knowledge and skills to be taught and the pedagogical tools of teaching.  Colleges and post-baccalaureate teacher prep agencies provide the prospective teacher with an initial toolbox of teaching skills.  Learned and practiced in student teaching, these are the tools a teacher brings to her first classroom.  This academic and sheltered preparation is intended to be adequate for her to be a successful teacher of children.

• The first year on the job is a test drive of teaching skills.  Just like a new car owner test drives a vehicle that has passed assembly line inspections yet needs to be road tested to create confidence and assurance, a first-year teacher tests her tools against the realities of school and a classroom of children.  Absent mentor observation and coaching, the test driver also is test assessor.  Yikes!  It is hard to make critical self-assessments while trying to steer a test drive.

• We assume that continuous practice keeps teaching tools sharp.  However, the school year is a constantly moving conveyor belt of units and lessons.  The school calendar does not stop for an inspection of tools, or the effects caused by teaching tools.  A teaching tool literally is used and placed back in the teacher’s toolbox for a next use without dedicated inspection or consideration of its sharpness.  The pace of schooling creates its own obstruction to tool inspection and sharpening.  The calendar presents little to no time to do so.   

• Each child and class of children is like a new specie of wood to be turned on a lathe.  A teaching strategy that worked well in causing one child or one class to learn may not be as efficient or effective with other children.  Tools are constantly being modified rather than remaining constant, hence sharpening a tool is sharpening a constantly changing tool.

• Teacher evaluation systems take a broad view of teaching effectiveness and efficiency.  Pedagogical skill is less than 25%, perhaps 10%, of the evaluation process.  Wisconsin’s Effective Educator system looks at planning and preparation, learning environment, instruction, and professional responsibilities.  Inspection of effective teaching tools is smothered by non-instructional concerns.  Combine a flaccid EE with the statutory fiat prohibiting the use of student achievement scores on state mandated assessments to describe a teacher’s effectiveness and the sharpness of teaching tools falls out of evaluation conversations.

What to do

When facing obfuscation, don’t go there.  Obfuscation is all the reasons we tell ourselves or others that the status is okay or even very good.  Or, it is the reasons we accept for why we cannot change.  Instead, make new declarations for improvement of teaching tools at the school site level.

Principals need to declare that the conscientious use of universal learning designs is prioritized by all teachers.  If adopting UDL, declare that a teacher’s application of UDL will be part of the teacher’s professional development and professional evaluation.  Tools that are embedded in UDL need constant professional discussion, demonstration, refinement, and critical examination.  Walk the talk of engagement, representation, and action/expression.

Use lesson studies.  Record teachers’ classroom teaching and establish collegial, non-evaluative study groups to provide the teacher with feedback on what they see in the recordings.  When every teacher records and every teacher provide feedback, every teacher grows sharper teaching practices.

In the sequence of professional development make learning new teaching tools, refining teaching tools, sharing knowledge and experience of teaching tools, and evaluating the effectiveness of teaching tools in causing student learning an essential part of the school culture.  Important things in school a given time in the calendar; give discussion and examination of teaching important.

Don’t abide teaching that is chronically not sharp.  I have known some great people, really kind and caring people, people who will do everything asked of them at school, who could not teach a coherent lesson.  They did not have nor did they work at acquiring sharp teaching skills.  Help them find their way to another profession.

The Big Duh!

Teaching children is the most important profession in the world.  It also is incredibly hard.  And, teaching is impossibly hard without efficient and effective teaching skills.  We no longer can assume that skills learned in a baccalaureate program are sharp enough to last a career.  Professional development of our pedagogy needs to be a way of life for every teacher.  If it isn’t sharp, sharpen it.  If it can’t be sharpened, find a new tool.  If professional work isn’t sharp, find a new professional.