HLT Magazine (January 2000)

Humanising Language Teaching
Year 2; Issue 1; January 2000

"Telling teaching and the dilemma of doing"

Donald Freeman

Page 2 of 2

There are many political factors and social norms that underlie this drive for right answers in teaching, which I am calling the dilemma of doing. Joe McDonald (1992) is a teacher-researcher who now works with a U.S. national school reform project, the Coalition of Essential Schools. McDonald describes this norm as a "conspiracy of certainty" (p. 2) in which questioning, doubting, speculating, or wondering about teaching are viewed as signs of weakness or inability to do the job on the part of the teacher. After all, the reasoning goes, neither administrators nor students, let alone their parents, want teachers who 'don't know what they are doing.' So the speculation and questioning that is at the heart of generating knowledge in other fields and professions somehow doesn't fit in classroom teaching. This social norm in schools can create an attitude of conservatism among teachers that there is little to be gained in taking risks, asking questions, and focusing on what you don't know.

The dilemma of doing is compounded by the fact that acting on not-knowing is essentially private affair. Listen to the second-person, private affirmation in what Duckworth says: 'what you do about what you don't know determines what you will ultimately know.' Teachers see what they are doing, what goes on in their classrooms, but they rarely tell it publicly. What they do say publicly about teaching is usually expressed in genres that have limited social impact. The narratives which teachers use are often labeled negatively as 'war stories' or 'gossip,' or they may be categorized as opinion or self-interested positioning. This is the second reason why telling teaching matters: If teachers tell their work as they see and do it, if they talk about the fundamental dilemma that teaching does not cause learning and yet teachers must act as if it does, teachers will be taking a critical step towards exposing the basic nature of the work.

In this column, I would like to explore what telling teaching means and why it matters to the status and professionalization of teachers. I want to examine some of the techniques and procedures that can serve readers who are teachers in observing and examining the outer and inner worlds of their work in their classrooms. And I hope to include accounts from readers who are engaging in the process. I see the column as a way to open up to public comment and professional examination this dilemma of doing which I believe is central in teachers' work. And if we are successful, we will be contributing to what we know about teaching by 'doing something' about what we don't know.

Donald Freeman

References:

In these columns, I plan to treat references somewhat differently from conventional academic writing. Rather than simply footnoting ideas, after each column I will include a small number of full references that I think are particularly pertinent to the topic, useful and therefore worth reading if you want to go further with the ideas I have written about. I will also briefly annotate the references I include.

Duckworth, Eleanor. 1987. "The virtues of not knowing". In The having of wonderful ideas and other essays on teaching and learning. New York: Teachers College Press.

A great collection of short essays on teaching and learning. Duckworth, who worked closely with Jean Piaget, is a veteran constructivist. She writes with great clarity and knowledge of classrooms and children. Well worth reading and discussing with colleagues.

Gattegno, Caleb. 1976. The commonsense of teaching foreign languages. New York: Educational Solutions.

The first five chapters are the classic exposition of Gattegno's ideas about the subordination of teaching to learning. The book may be hard to get a hold of, but it is worth it.

McDonald, Joseph. 1992. Teaching: Making sense of an uncertain craft. New York: Teachers College Press.

McDonald was a high school teacher for many years before getting involved in education reform in the U.S. This book is a readable, teacher-based account of how he got involved in working with colleagues to tell teaching.

Paley, Vivian. 1986a. "On listening to what children say." Harvard Educational Review, 56 (2), pp. 122-131.

In this article, Paley describes how she became involved in 'listening' to children in her classroom by audio-taping and transcribing what they said. It is great account on how to get started in observing learning. It serves as a very readable, methodological introduction for her books listed below.

Paley, Vivian. 1986b. Mollie is three: Growing up in school. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Any of Paley's work is well worth reading. She writes with wonderful fluency and energy about her students and what they do. Her other books include, among others: Wally's Stories (1981), The boy who would be a helicopter (1990), and White teacher (reprinted 1989), all from Harvard University Press.

Earl Stevick's Teaching languages: A Way and Ways (Boston: Heinle and Heinle/ITP. 1980) is a classic in humanizing language teaching. Although it continues to be available, copies can be difficult to locate. Stevick has refashioned and extended his thinking in his 1998 book Working with teaching methods: What's at stake? (Boston: Heinle and Heinle/ITP), which I highly recommend. In What's at stake?, Stevick brings together some of his earlier work on memory with his examination of teaching, learning, and 'humanistic' teaching methods.