Contradictions are interesting. I see faces grimace or erupt in surprise when life contradicts their expectations. I see their eyes become furtive with side looks of uncertainty. And in response I hear them say “That is not my business. I need to stay in my lane.” I wonder if their looks and words express a fear of a wild world or an understanding of the safety of their prescribed lane. Life is not simple. Much like driving on a multi-lane, urban belt line highway when so many other drivers speed past us and swerve dramatically from one lane to another, being mindful of the lanes in our daily lives is important. We, all teachers, have a lane in this world that we need to value because it is a powerful lane.
What do we know?
We cause children to learn and, in their learning, to think and to ask questions and to inform their lives by what they learn. This is our lane. Many of us consider our teaching license to be our lane – “I teach 1st grade” or “I teach Algebra” or “… art.” However, a license only defines a subject or the grade level of children we teach. In truth, we teach children to learn, to think and to ask questions, and to apply what they learn to their living using the curriculum we are licensed to teach. We are pedagogues, first and foremost. If not, we teachers are only cloners of children in our own content knowledge images.
Teachers are masters of their teaching strategies. Our contracts narrow the subjects we teach; our pedagogy expands how we teach and cause children to learn. We are masters in using direct instruction to create knowledge, and inquiry and problem-based instruction to create context and personalization of each child’s understanding and application of knowledge. We use Bloom’s description of analysis and evaluation to teach children to dissect knowledge and better know its critical attributes. And we use Bloom’s final goal of synthesis to show children how to use their learning to create their own thinking pathways forward.
This is our lane. We teach children to think. Someday I would love to hear a colleague recognized as a wonderful pedagogue rather than a wonderful middle school teacher. We are teachers not teachers of.
What should we know about this? Teaching strategies are increasingly important.
I am mindful of a teacher’s lane these days when politics try to curtail what we teach and to define the outcomes of our public education. I read, more than is healthy to read, how political leaders and their followers display small-mindedness in calling out or suing or firing educators who do not follow their script. I see teachers at all levels, PK-12 and higher, under explicit and implicit attack personally and institutionally in attempts to narrow the scope and effects of teaching and learning. And it is appalling and it is wrong.
What they do not or cannot understand is that our professional lane is not to teach a particular point of view but to teach all children to understand point of view, to think about and evaluate point of view, and to establish their own informed point of view. We use teaching strategies based upon pure inquiry not biased inquiry. Life and its events will shape a child’s thinking and perspective. Our mission is met when children know how to apply thinking skills not in ensuring the prescribed results of their thinking. Those who would constrain public teaching try to constrain public thinking.
The Big Duh!
Public education has been and continues to be America’s best invention for building an informed citizenry. Our national Forefathers created Bill of Rights’ guardrails and due processes to protect freedoms of speech, assembly, and press. These are essential for a thinking populace. Further, they made public education a function of the states not the federal government. I appreciate this lane they created for public educators and encourage all teachers to value and pursue the wonderful opportunity the teaching lane gives us to cause all children to learn and think. Thinking children are our future’s hedge against the small-minded.