Archimedes and Pterodactyls
Raymond Devenney, United States
Raymond Devenney retired from the District of Columbia Public Schools after teaching ESL there for 21 years. He has authored articles about ESL writing, vocabulary instruction, and content-based teaching. His current interests include language test item writing and teacher development. Since retiring, he has done teacher training in Morocco, Rwanda, and Panama.
E-mail: raymonddevenney@gmail.com
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Abstract
Introduction
The first epiphany
The second epiphany
Final reflections and conclusion
The article describes two epiphany moments in the author’s 40-year teaching career. The first caused the writer to reflect upon and change his underlying beliefs about learning and his approach to ESL teaching; the second led to a new understanding of his role as a member of a teaching staff.
Archimedes’ exclamation in the bathtub (“Eureka!”); Amazing Grace author John Newton’s comment on his transformation from slaver to abolitionist (“It will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders.”); Einstein’s stunning insight about the theory of relativity on a streetcar in Bern ("A storm broke loose in my mind."); and Robert J. Oppenheimer’s quote from the Bhagavad Gita upon seeing his handiwork explode at Los Alamos ("Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.") are examples of classic epiphany moments.
While not as epic or profound as the dramatic realizations of these historical figures, I have had two epiphany moments in my teaching career. The first came relatively early in my professional life. My model of good teaching was based on my experience with Mr. Mac, a German language teacher I had for two years in high school. (Though a topic for another reflection, this teacher changed my life.) He was absolutely brilliant; had a photographic memory, which enabled him to learn languages in a savant-like way; and was the warmest and kindest person I ever met in a school. He was entertaining beyond belief to high schoolers more accustomed to drones in classrooms than gifted storytellers. He embodied the notion in teaching parlance that motivating students and making classes fun led to learning and language acquisition. I became a teacher for two reasons: (1) I wanted to prove to every teacher I ever had that anyone, even me, could do what they did – and do it better- and (2) I wanted to be like Mr. Mac.
I stumbled into my ESL teaching career in 1978, as often happened with ESL teachers of that era, while applying for a mid-year opening in another field, teaching U.S. History and Government. The director of the school offered me the Social Studies job and asked at the end of the interview if I would also be willing to teach some ESL classes. I told him I would love to teach ESL, even though I had no experience with it. By the next day, the end of my first afternoon as an ESL teacher, I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
Students and supervisors loved my classes. My students reported that I was dynamic and nice to them. I explained things well and made both history and ESL classes fun. My classes were lively and interesting. I was praised for my energy and ability to motivate pupils. In my own mind, I was channeling Mr. Mac. After a couple of successful years at the school, I was rewarded one spring afternoon with a ticket to attend a teaching conference being held at the convention center across the street from the school. I had been a teacher long enough to realize a day off is a good thing, even if it required that I sit in on educational sessions in exchange for my (very) mini-vacation.
As I was both a social studies and English teacher, I decided to attend a workshop on writing and reading across the curriculum. I don’t know what I was expecting; it seemed patently obvious to me that students had to read and write in all subjects across the curriculum. To be honest, I was probably thinking more of free coffee and pastry than I was on the educational implications of WRAC.
Within minutes of entering the session, I realized there was something fundamentally different in the approach to teaching and learning I was seeing in this seminar from what I was doing in my classes: student work and student learning, not the teacher, were at the center of the lesson. Then I was struck with a (Sir Isaac) Newtonesque, aha-moment (“Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground?”), my own epiphany moment. The problem with my teaching was everything I was doing RIGHT, not what I was doing wrong. I was at the center of my classes, and student learning should be. Mr. Mac had had it wrong, and so did I.
I have spent the next thirty-five years of my career trying to get it right, trying to put student work and student learning at the heart of everything I do in a classroom. In short, you don’t get paid to teach; you get paid to get students to learn. I had not really understood that distinction when I began my teaching career. I do now.
My second epiphany moment did not come as dramatically as the first, but it has come into its full manifestation during my volunteer experience in the Panama Teacher Match Program in the summer of 2017. Again, the origins of this enduring understanding trace back to a bygone era, back even before the era in which I began teaching. When I started, the teacher in the classroom was king, or queen as the case may be. The classroom was our kingdom, and we were the absolute rulers within that domain. The doors of our rooms were like castle fortifications. No one was allowed to enter. The only observations of teaching were the passing glances of assistant principals checking to see if there was order in your realm. If a passing check by the principal showed the absence of chaos, the supervisor continued his or her rounds, checking in on the state of order in the next classroom. A good teacher was one a vice-principal never had to interrupt with a personal visit into the room to admonish the floundering teacher to get his or her class under control, or, even worse, the administrator taking over the disciplinary responsibilities from the struggling (usually novice) teacher with no hope of regaining control in the moment by threatening students with punishments in line with the principal’s mood or philosophy of education.
I was a principal favorite, even (especially) when I taught in difficult circumstances. As a substitute teacher, my preferred strategy of classroom management was to tell the kids (usually boys and always in the back) they didn’t have to do the work I was about to give the class. They could talk among themselves or do whatever they wanted as long as it did not create the kind of noise or chaos that would bring the assistant principal to the room. Having a vested interest in avoiding contact with assistant principals with whom they had had a long history of unpleasant interactions usually propelled the disinterested and disobedient to accept and abide by the terms of my offer. When pressed by their incoming pals about how the sub was, the boys from the back usually said, “All right” and recommended to friends of their ilk that they could get the same non-work deal from the sub they had been given if they asked for it, which they did and which I gave.
As I spent more time in classes, I got better and better at keeping classes under control, without having to offer non-participation agreements. I was good at being on my own; I enjoyed it. To be honest, I sought out challenging teaching because it was where I worked best. I had a skill set that fit.
This sense of individualism was fostered even further by what I was figuring out by making classes student-centered. I also pushed myself intellectually by returning to school to get my Master’s in ESL. I had real insights and good instincts as a teacher, and after graduate school these were rigorously grounded in theory about language teaching and language learning. Here’s the irony: the more I learned, the better I got as a teacher. The better I got, the less I needed others and the more I was able to work alone.
I had a supervisor when I was a graduate teaching assistant during my M.A. program. He told me I was probably the best individual teacher on the staff, but I wasn’t a good teacher. Everything I did was for myself and for only the students in my classes. I didn’t cooperate with other teachers, and my work did not carry over to students in other classes. He said I had a lot to offer, but I chose not to offer it.
I probably said to myself something along the lines of I can live with that. I know I didn’t change, except that I did try to interact more with others at the first position I took after leaving graduate school. But the changes were superficial; I still was an individual who prided himself on being able to succeed in difficult teaching circumstances. I had the kind of authority as a teacher Lisa Delpit described in her work: I had authority as a teacher in classes because I had personal authority, not because I was a teacher expecting to be recognized as authority because of my role. I became increasingly self-reliant in everything I did from lesson planning, to creating materials, to curriculum development, to managing behavior and special learning needs, to talking with parents about their children.
When asked to take on a leadership or team role, I found ways to avoid it. I worked around the edge of cooperation and teamwork. I would work with individuals in whom I recognized the kind of individual teaching talent I admired, but I did little beyond that. I continued on alone, as I always had, because I did not need others. To be honest, I preferred being on my own to working as a part of a group, small or large. As my career wound to its close, I did come to enjoy working with student teachers. I also became interested and involved in item writing for standardized ESL tests. Item writing was intensely reviewed by peers and test team leaders, but it was essentially a solitary, problem-solving exercise. I put lots of time and energy into item writing because I enjoyed it.
As I was retiring, the climate of education was changing. Teamwork was emerging as the guiding principle for faculty interaction and curriculum development. Departments were empowered to make joint decisions, and meetings took on new significance. Schoolwide strategies, rituals, and routines were created. Peers paired up to observe each other’s classes and used protocols give feedback to each other about their teaching. While I supported these changes in teaching practice, I participated with varying degrees of engagement and enthusiasm. As was true when I was a graduate teaching assistant, I had more to offer than I was giving.
And then I was gone, retired. If there were a continuum of teamwork for teaching practice, I started my career on the far left, little or no teamwork; I ended my career with a shift that took me to the middle. I never approached the right side of the scale with full participation as a leading, contributing member of a team.
One significant reflection arose out of my work in a regional teacher training center in Morocco. I came to believe that modeling practices and giving teacher trainees new information without changing their underlying beliefs about teaching and learning was unproductive. People teach the way they were taught, not the way you teach them to teach. As I reached the end of my year-long stint in Morocco, I wanted to hit the reset button and start again knowing what I learned by making a fundamental mistake about what I should have been doing.
In Rwanda, I taught language classes for adults, and each class contained a large number of teachers. I began by trying to model the kind of interactive learning I used in classes and stressed the point over and over that the only way to develop as a teacher was to challenge and change the things you had believed about teaching and learning. I was also open and direct about why I was doing things the way I did, and my beliefs about teaching and learning were transparent. The message was received; teachers began to change the ways they had taught for years.
When I arrived in Panama as a participant in the Panama Teacher Match Program, I made a decision after observing teaching in my first school. The message I wanted to deliver about changing teaching practice had to be grounded in two things: (1) changing the way teachers viewed teaching and learning and (2) not just working with individual teachers. The logic behind the second part was simple. If I work with one or two teachers, who were probably already very good educators to begin with, the students in their classes will have one kind of day at school. The students not in these classes would have a fundamentally different day in school. Working with individuals would actually promote inequality; I would not contribute to maintaining or fostering inequality in schooling in the U.S. or anywhere else. I would work with everyone, or I would work with no one.
This decision directly led to my second epiphany moment. My logic only made sense if departments worked together and individual teachers formed a unified team. The future of teaching, not just in Panama but everywhere in the world I argued, is teamwork: an accepted set of schoolwide norms; a commitment to a collegial and professional culture at school; common strategies, rituals and routines in all classes; joint lesson and goal planning; a common lesson plan template; one schoolwide assessment model to measure annual student progress; a commitment to observe and give colleagues feedback about teaching; the use of agreed upon frameworks for expanding language teaching and learning; and cooperative and strategic grouping within classes to promote student engagement and reduce off-task behavior.
With the Panamanian teachers, I became a vocal advocate for the kinds of teaching practice I had not accepted in my own career. I spoke openly of my own experience of being a rugged individualist throughout my career. And precisely because of where I came from as a teacher, I wanted to make clear to the Panamanians that I had gotten it wrong. I am a dinosaur. At best, I evolved into a pterodactyl in my career, but I never fully evolved into becoming a bird, taking flight and surviving as the climate around me changed. My approach to teaching, while it may have ruled the world for a long time, as the dinosaurs did, was doomed to extinction. The future, the next evolutionary stage of teaching, is teamwork in schools.
I am struck by the words of Martin Luther King as I reflect on my second epiphany: “I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop… I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we … will get to the Promised Land.”
As teachers, that promised land for us and our students is teamwork in all that we do in school.
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