Learning how to teach

I’ve been chuckling today about Simon’s post on what he learned about teaching from his teachers: it seems that he mainly learned from their mistakes, poor time-keeping and general fecklessness, especially with kiwi fruits. Catching up with his post alongside Amanda’s thoughts about whether we can teach someone how to teach and Jeremy’s reflections on our great recent PSA Teaching and Learning Network conference has made me think about the role of the community of other teachers in developing our practice and craft.

I think in retrospect that I started learning how to teach before I learned to walk. This is admittedly partly because (I’m told) I was embarrassingly old before I started walking – though walking is now one of my favourite things, so don’t judge me! But, in seriousness, it’s mostly because both my parents were teachers. In fact, since my very earliest years, pretty much everyone I have ever loved has been a teacher. (If you are reading this and thinking, ‘Oh no, I don’t have the relationship with Cathy that I thought I did!’ don’t worry, I probably think of you as a teacher.) I was watching and absorbing good teaching as I learned how to talk, to be a human, to live/love, to communicate and tell stories, to make people laugh, to be a member of a family. So much so, that a lot of what I do that seems to work feels instinctive. Like most of the things that feel instinctive, though, it is learned – but learned so deeply, so long ago, that it has been deeply embedded in who I think I am for as long as I can remember.

Me and lots of other teachers (pictured and not pictured) at the Teaching and Learning Network conference in Durham in September

And that’s really what I think good teacher education is: the process through which we become a member of a community, as Lave and Wenger have influentially argued. And just because I started early, doesn’t mean that I didn’t need to get (much, I hope!) better over time, with practice, with more conscious reflection and with feedback as I moved from peripheral participation to more confident self-regulated practice to now teaching others how to teach as one of my primary roles. As Amanda rightly suggests, learning how to teach can happen through formal teacher education, in which practice, feedback and introduction to the scholarly literature is central. It also happens through formal processes of mentoring and peer observation. It happens more informally through discussing and solving problems together, as we did at the Teaching and Learning Network conference, as we do on this blog, as well as in countless seminars, panels, workshops, reading and writing articles, and – maybe most importantly – in casual conversations as part of a community. Including those conversations about the things that went wrong.

In common with Simon, lots of things went wrong with the teaching I received in HE (though nothing involving fruit, that I can recall) and I’ll come back to this in a later post. But I’ll finish by telling you something that went right in my own teacher education at UCL. I was in a group of new and eager Teaching Assistants, figuring things out during our first year in the classroom. One of our number had a student who was bringing food and eating it in class. He was embarrassed and confused about the rights and wrongs of the situation, and wanted to know, what should he do? I remember waiting rapt for the ‘right answer’ from our tutor. I wonder if, for a moment, he was tempted to tell us the correct answer or what he would do? But, instead, he said to us: ‘Listen. What you need to ask yourself is: what sorts of relationships do I want in this classroom?’

What you need to ask yourself is: what sorts of relationships do I want in this classroom?

This was genuinely a moment that changed my practice forever. I think we are all tempted to desire, and to give, the ‘right answer’, the ‘top tip’ or the killer bit of advice. But this question made me stop and realise that learning how to teach is a question of never-ending practice, constant reflection and a determination to return to first principles and values in order to solve difficult problems in ways that are contextual and can’t be addressed with technofixes. This isn’t something we can’t do on our own – we have to look to our relationships with our colleagues, peers, community.

So, I’m glad that Jeremy found a good vibe at the Teaching and Learning Network: those are the kinds of relationships we want in our classroom.