Humanising Language Teaching
Year 2; Issue 1; January 2000

"Telling teaching and the dilemma of doing"

Donald Freeman

Vivian Paley is a preschool teacher who began audio taping her kindergarten classes as a way of 'listening to what children say.' (Paley 1986a). Her efforts launched her into two decades of writing about what went on among the learners in her classrooms. She says of this endeavor:

The classroom has all the elements of theater, and the observant, self-examining teacher will not need a drama critic to uncover character, plot, and meaning. We are, all of us, the actors trying to find the meaning of the scenes in which we find ourselves. (1986b, 131)

What is telling teaching?

I begin with Vivian Paley's comments because they frame what I would like this column to be about. Like an anthropologist, Paley devotes considerable energy and talent to understanding her own students as they go about learning. She uses the twin processes of observation, or trying to truly see what is happening, and self-examination, or what we might call reflection. She thus embarks on studying both the outer and the inner worlds of her work as a teacher. This process is what I would call telling teaching. The work combines careful, disciplined examination of what is happening in among students as they learn, with self-examination and reflection on why that learning is unfolding as it is and how one's teaching fits into the puzzle. To tell teaching, then, is to examine what is going on in one's classroom, to question why it happens as it does, and to assess how one's teaching is suiting that learning.

Why does it matter?

In this last phrase, 'how one's teaching is suiting that learning,' there is a clear statement of value and belief. Caleb Gattegno (1976), the instigator of the Silent Way, used to write and talk about how teaching needed to be subordinated to learning. Like Maria Montessori, who pioneered work in child-centered elementary education with her philosophy of 'following the child,' Gattegno advocated for the primacy of learning over teaching. Between teaching and learning, learning is the more powerful and comprehensive process of the two. Learning can be present without teaching; but, as Earl Stevick asked in Teaching languages: A Way and Ways, can you say you have taught if someone has not learned? As teachers, we tend to forget, or at least overlook, this commonplace when we are in the classroom. We can fall into the false and untenable logic that what we are doing as teachers is somehow causing our students to learn. This process of telling teaching can be an invaluable corrective to that illusion; it can recenter the process of teaching on learning and what learners are doing.

There is a second, and perhaps more political, reason for why telling teaching matters. Teaching centers on activity, on doing things with students that may lead to learning. But because the common perception is that teaching causes learning, teachers are constantly caught in the dilemma of whether what they are doing is the 'right' thing, whether there might be something 'better' that could be more effective, enjoyable, etc. Psychologist Eleanor Duckworth has spent her professional life 'understanding children's understandings'. In her essay, "The virtues of not knowing", Duckworth (1987) speaks about this dilemma of doing. She writes that "in most classrooms, it is the quick right answer that is appreciated. Knowledge of the answer ahead of time is, on the whole, more valued than ways of figuring it out." (p. 64). In concluding, she makes the observation that, "What you do about what you don't know is, in the final analysis, what determines what you will ultimately know." (1987; p. 68).