The Exceptional Teacher: Transforming Traditional Teaching Through Thoughtful Practice / Edition 1

by Elizabeth Aaronsohn

Overview

In The Exceptional Teacher, veteran K-12 teacher Elizabeth Aaronsohn examines three important questions: What do our teachers really want our children to get out of school? How do their own schooling experiences inhibit them from achieving these goals? How can a teacher education program give beginning teachers a framework for thinking differently about the whole process of teaching?

The Exceptional Teacher offers the guidance that teacher educators need to help their students become teachers who are knowledgeable and skillful practitioners, while also developing the ability to be reflective, imaginative, courageous, and flexible in the classroom— a model for the students they are instructing. In this inspiring book, Aaronsohn shows that becoming an exceptional teacher can be a difficult but rewarding journey. She explains that success begins in understanding one's self and societal and cultural experiences. Based on qualitative research from student writings and workshops, the author offers practical advice to help begining teachers move beyond their own internalized assumptions, and become educators who will transform their classrooms.

Aaronsohn encourages teachers to develop the practice of honest reflection on their attitudes, thinking, and practices, and especially to develop the capacity to assume the perspective of another person. These practices can be nurtured through the process of in-depth writing, which helps to make meaning of experiences and brings teachers to a new level of consciousnesses about themselves, the world, and the mission of teaching.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780787965761
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	11/14/2003
Edition description:	First
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.34(w) x 9.39(h) x 0.89(d)

About the Author

Elizabeth Aaronsohn is an associate professor of teacher education at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Connecticut. She has taught eight years each at three levels: high school English; college English, speech, and women’s studies; and early elementary school. She is the author of Going Against the Grain: Supporting the Student-Centered Teacher.

Read an Excerpt

The Exceptional Teacher

Transforming Traditional Teaching Through Thoughtful Practice

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By Elizabeth Aaronsohn

John Wiley & Sons

ISBN: 0-7879-6576-6

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Chapter One

The Grading Game: Reading the Teacher Instead of the Text

I define traditional teaching as teaching in which the focus is on the content, about which the teacher is understood to be an expert, and which must be "covered" in such a way that students will be able to show that they have acquired a certain body of knowledge. Student activity is that of watching and listening to the teacher. Students speak when called on in response to teacher questions. Student conversation with other students is generally unauthorized. Product, not process, is the focus of this form of instruction. For me, the most heartbreaking problem with traditional teaching is that it interferes with authentic learning, even while students are socialized to believe that they are learning. Over the long term, I maintain, the habits of dependency and submission to authority that students develop in traditional classrooms undermine the chance for genuine democracy in our society.

I call this set of habits teacher-pleasing, and I begin with an analysis of teacher-pleasing as my theoretical framework. The chapters that follow examine the step-by-step processes I have developed over time for encouraging teacher education students to become aware of the effects of teacher-pleasing and for helping them overcomeit, at least for the time that they are with me. My hope, of course, is that once they realize what has gone on for them, they will decide to transform their own practice, as university students, as citizens, and as teachers.

"I wasn't really taught or expected to think or analyze-just memorize."

Children in school learn well, and very early, that grades are the teachers' ultimate power over them. So they do what they have to do to get what they need. That orientation is very different from, and I believe inferior to, an orientation toward authentic learning, which I define as an intense desire to follow leads, discover connections, and explore how something works-all activities that characterize the way very young children naturally learn when they are on their own, or before that natural creative process gets reduced to school learning.

Because the work they do in traditional classrooms is usually not of their own choosing, either in content or in process, it is easy for students to disengage from it and learn (against their nature) to be satisfied-because the teacher usually is-with skimming the surface of any topic, as the textbooks do. Traditional teachers are (or at least seem to students to be) concerned with right answers, proper grammar, and correct form rather than full development of original ideas, both in classroom "discussion" and in student writing. Even by the time they are in graduate classes, students have rarely had the chance to be heard talking through their ideas, perceptions, or misperceptions. As a result, they stop trying and just give the teacher what they think she or he wants.

That kind of manipulation is a basically dishonest occupation. But I think it is ultimately what we encourage children to do, for their own survival in school. At least, that is what most of the students I encounter in my teacher education courses indicate in their writing that they learned to do:

I saw school as something to be survived and I did whatever was necessary to ensure that I got out of school with a diploma ASAP.

In high school, I rarely read the entire book, and I tended to listen carefully to what the teacher commented on and then studied only that for the tests. (It worked pretty well.)

I always played the system.... I didn't have to do the reading, because the teacher "spoon-fed" it.

The extent to which that behavior becomes a habit into adulthood has grave ramifications for learning, for teaching, and for democracy:

I found that the only way I could get the attention and the respect of older people, or express any sort of opinion at all, was if I took the consensus adult opinion as my own, whether I agreed with it or not, ... to massage their egos.

I learned to change my opinions to suit others, to avoid the humiliation of being left out. Today I find myself giving in to the majority opinion rather than concentrating on divergent thinking.

When I taught English composition at state and community colleges in the early and mid-1980s, I first realized that a number of students saw divergent ideas as un-American. My encouraging them to try out possible ways of seeing that didn't match the "right answers" they had been given seemed to threaten their entire worldview. The same was true of writing. It has been very hard for students to feel right about using "I" in their writing, or to talk about their own life experiences in an academic setting.

Carefully maintaining an academic distance and saying everything right can cause a student to forget what he or she meant to say in the first place:

Writing a sentence was like assembling something on the production line, entitled "what the teacher wants to see." It didn't matter what I wrote; it only mattered how I wrote it. Thus, writing was a very cold, logical, distant activity.

The sanctions against speaking in one's own voice, and the rewards for learning "proper" ways, are clear, but the person disappears, and so does meaningful learning:

I hate academic writing, though I have spent countless hours in the past two years cultivating just that. And what for? I don't know.... I do know that it has not been without sacrifice that I can now knock out a dry and colorless execution of ivory-tower points without a tremendous effort. And people will read it and be very impressed.

I know that experience of trying to explain something while having my grammar adjusted several times along the way. Knocks the wind out of what you have to say, doesn't it?

But what happens if teachers try, in their high school classes particularly, not to do that to students? For one thing, a cooperating teacher politely tells a university supervisor of student teachers, "We have to train them to write this way; it's what they'll get in college." And when I say, "No! It's not so! I teach college writing, and that's not what I've been looking for!" I am told, "Well, that's just you." But I know that not many-or any-college professors want to be reading defensive, distancing, safe, self-protectively obfuscating papers that essentially say nothing, as long as they are grammatically correct.

Teacher-Pleasing and Student Dependency

In order to go to the core of what learning could be, instead of what most of my postsecondary students over many years have reported it to have been for them, it seems to me that teachers and teacher educators have to begin by clarifying our goals. For several years I have done an activity in teacher education classes and staff development workshops. I ask participants to freewrite and then brainstorm. I ask them, "What do we want the children we teach to be like when they're adults?" Each time, when they report, we cover the board or several pieces of chart paper with some thirty to fifty words that they have generated. The list always includes "independent," "honest," "caring," "being problem solvers," "compassionate," "lifelong learners," and "responsible." In some sessions, a student will offer "courageous," but usually not, so I suggest it. When everyone's thoughts are on the board, I ask, "So how does schooling help them get there?"

That question often puts them into conflict with their own schooling and their own teaching. When they're stumped, I ask them to back up: "Well, then, how did you yourselves acquire these characteristics?" Some reflect that they acquired almost all of them after their schooling was completed. Most say, essentially, "I'm not there yet." Even practicing teachers are stunned by the realization that although they have successfully reached their undergraduate goal of having finished college and obtained a job, there are undeveloped parts of themselves that they have not yet worked on, or thought about, and which were never addressed in their own schooling.

Then I ask them to notice the list. I ask, "Where's being able to recite random bits of factual information?" Sometimes "knowledgeable" makes it to the list. When I ask for what that means, groups quickly offer their insight as to how useless merely acquiring and reciting are, compared with being able to use, connect, and apply understanding of relevant pieces of information.

And then I ask, "Where's 'obedient?'" They're surprised. It's never there. Some insist that it is implied in the others. Some want to add it; they say, "Even as adults you have to obey-your boss, the rules, laws." So a conversation begins about moral development and about what freedom and citizenship involve in a democracy. We look at the difference between those socialized behaviors with citizens in a community allowed to function together, on the one hand, and citizen's blind obedience, on the other hand.

The impulse of some teachers and preteachers, every semester, to protect their right to demand the absolute obedience of children-as was required of them as children-frightens me, because these are teachers, or people beginning a program to become teachers. How is it that we call ourselves preparing students to live in a democracy, if so many teachers and preteachers accept the inevitability of their own essential powerlessness within their careers and within the larger society? Is democracy not about having a genuine voice? In fact, it has to a great extent been my own fear for the demise of democracy in America that has led me to begin our sessions together by generating this list of long-range goals.

Most conscientious teachers will say we want our students to be responsible, eager, self-directed young people. When we think about their social behaviors, we want them to be considerate of each other as well as of us-what we generally call respect. Most basically, however, teachers seem satisfied if students "do their work," "learn the material," and "do not interfere" with the learning of others or with the teacher's agenda.

But to what end? We might even go so far as to say that we want them to think for themselves: to consider, imagine, connect, reflect, consult, explore, create, and actively engage in constructing their own knowledge, even to take intellectual risks. So we are frustrated to find ourselves year after year involved with students, even "the best" students, who, although hardworking, quick, and eager to give right answers, are often not active, original, or complex thinkers. And how do they treat each other, even as they may be fawning to us? In part of our minds, teachers wonder, Is he or she saying what I want to hear? Am I being manipulated?

That's "the best." What about the others? "Unmotivated"? Is it, in fact, something innate in the children themselves, or is it something inherent in what we've always called "teaching"? In teacher education students' reactions to my classes, they reveal, and reflect on, their own deep socialization to dependency:

At first I could only think about what you expected. It's what I'm used to.

And this, from a successful student in her thirties:

This was so hard for me at first, trying to ... stop trying to figure out what it was that the teacher wanted me to learn, to know.... The concept of pleasing the teacher, the parent, or whatever authority figure you choose is deeply ingrained in me.

Habits That Interfere with Genuine Learning

The premise of this book is that the structures that characterize traditional teaching, from elementary school through graduate school, undermine the very characteristics we wish our students to develop. The full development of our students, therefore, has to begin with teachers' and professors' rethinking of our own practices. And that has to begin with personal reflection on our own schooling.

For the most part, we were the successful ones. Most of us consider ourselves to be the model for what we want our students to be like. We want them to be as excited about learning as we remember ourselves to have been. We may even be inclined to say, "I made it through traditional schooling. Those who didn't make it were the ones who just didn't want to learn, and that's the case for our students who aren't making it now."

The outcomes of traditional schooling experiences are especially apparent to me as I work with undergraduate and graduate students in teacher education courses at a university. Though most of the students say they went to "good" schools, when I invite them to read for meaning most have no idea of what that is about. Few have the habit of reading in any way other than the collecting of "tidbits" of information. Most have always waited for the teacher to tell them what it all means.

Within traditional structures, students are not expected to be risk takers intellectually; they're expected to "learn" what we have defined as "important" to know. That learning consists of committing fragments of "right answers" to short-term memory. Students overwhelmingly report that such information is soon lost, making room for the next batch of facts to memorize for the next test. It is not available for later connecting or reinterpreting thought. This definition of learning lasts through college, even graduate school, unless a course taught nontraditionally interrupts and causes them to call into question that whole arrangement. But the work of uncovering is not easy, because there is first so much embedded habit and expectancy to undo:

This was probably one of the hardest courses I have ever taken. It was such an internal type of learning. I have never taken a class where my thought patterns were changed, or where I actually grew as a person. It would have been easier to me if I were given tests and quizzes.

In traditionally structured classrooms such as the ones in which the task is to locate right answers and be ready to recite them verbatim, the real task is to produce a product, not to engage in a meaningful process. The result is that students have not developed-or have lost those they had in very early childhood-the skills and habits of figuring out, exploring, wondering, and asking. Even in adulthood, but certainly in the late adolescence of conventional undergraduate years, many students remain reluctant to speak in class, made fearful from years of experience of saying the wrong thing and being humiliated by the teacher, or by fellow students, or seeing that happen to others:

Many students do know the answer to many of the questions posed by the teacher in class, but it comes down to the idea ... that children/students tend to be afraid to answer a question for fear of being wrong and looking stupid. I still am.

Continues...

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Excerpted from The Exceptional Teacher by Elizabeth Aaronsohn Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents

Preface.

Introduction.

The Author.

1. The Grading Game: Reading the Teacher Instead of the Text.

2. Breaking the Conditioning.

3. Seeing the Possibilities of a Different Paradigm.

4. Falling into the Role of Traditional Teaching, and Climbing Out of It.

5. Justice, Mutual Respect, and Caring Instead of Control.

6. Moving from Right Answers to Multiple Perspectives.

7. Reserved Seats for Musical Chairs.

8. The Reluctance of High School Teachers to Use Cooperative Learning.

9. The Pressure of Tradition.

10. The Courage and Freedom to Color Outside the Lines.

11. What Would Success Look Like?

Appendix.

References.

Index.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"The most important knowledge base of Teacher Education is the teacher. The next most important knowledge is that there are options other than the ones we may have been raised with. We have choices, and we have the obligation to use those choices responsibly for children."
— Elizabeth Aaronsohn

"This book, full of wonderful strategies and inspirations on becoming the kind of teacher we all strive to be, gives me hope for the future of teaching. Aarohnson writes with honesty and authority on how to become a truly effective educator."
— William A. Howe, president, National Association for Multicultural Education

"At a time when teacher education has come under sharp attack, this book offers an exciting and challenging blueprint for preparing the teachers we need for the schools our children deserve. Anyone willing to think outside the box and challenge their own assumptions about teacher education should read this book— parents, future and current teachers, school administrators and other educational change agents."
— Mara Sapon-Shevin, Professor of Inclusive Education, Teaching and Leadership Programs, Syracuse University

"Using inspiring stories from her own classroom, heartfelt student responses, and current educational research, Liz Aaronsohn challenges readers to prepare a new generation of teachers who dare to know themselves, love their students, question the system, and rock the boat. If we heed her advice, we will all— teachers, students, and teacher educators— be better as a result."
— Sonia Nieto, University of Massachusetts, Amherst