Teacher Brains How We Make Them

In this episode I talk about how we make our teacher brains through our attention to our teaching.  Hope you find it interesting.  

From the episode:

If we understand that our teaching is the medium and the medium is the message, what might our teaching tell us about what is good, what is worthwhile in ourselves, in ourselves as teachers?  How might we embrace a kind of teaching that makes for a good story, makes us better teachers, better human beings?  What kind of teaching brain do we purposefully want to make for ourselves through our teaching?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi everybody, this is Johnny. Thanks for listening. Today I want to consider this question. How are our teacher brains shaped by the way we go about our teaching? Two things spur this question. The first, the New York Times has an intense article about the continuing decline in test scores for school kids. This is across populations, even schools serving well off communities are doing poorly. A theme in the article, and in readers' comments, is that this is so much about screens. Think about your own classroom and how much you are expected to plug kids in to the set electronic curriculum packages your district is bought into. A teacher friend shared that after two weeks of state testing on Chromebooks, they needed to follow with some days of IREDI assessment, IREDI being a daily consuming Chromebook curriculum that kids must use as part of the school's curriculum. The Times article suggests that the proliferation of screens has shaped how kids give their attention to most anything. Kids don't read anymore. They don't read whole books. Their teachers have stepped away from requiring long reading assignments. The incessant screenness of their daily experience has trained them to avoid texts. Hold on to this. The second thought I had a good visit with my son Ben. He's quite thoughtful and reads lots of whole books. He shared with me a book that he is rereading, The Shallows, What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. It came out ten years ago, before social media really messed with our brains and well before AI offered our brains off ramps to owning our thinking. Ben and I had a good talk about the medium is the message, the idea that apart from the substance of whatever messages we are getting from a medium, a book, a newspaper, a podcast, email, YouTube, the medium itself shapes how we pay attention. Think about books again. How many of us skim most texts these days, rarely lingering on some text to think about it more deeply? Do this come about from our constant flipping through bits of text on the internet? How many of us have less patience now for whole movies when we can jump through dozens of video clips online for constant little bursts of amusement? How do we shape our perception of the world having had the means of our attention shaped by the media we wrap around ourselves? I want to bring this to our teaching. I will start by suggesting that our teaching is a medium. It conveys material for students to learn. The manner of teaching shaped by the tools we use to make our teaching is the message. What is the story you are telling through your teaching? Sometimes it's not a great story. You know this when you are teaching a curriculum that distills what's interesting and important in your subject into shallow bits of knowledge to be systematically poured into kids' heads. You know this when the substance of the curriculum makes no room for the interests and experiences of you or your students. Abstractions removed from what matters in the lives you are living. The stories you tell in these cases are not great. They diminish you in the worth you should be giving to your students. Let's go to the opposite. Sometimes the story your teaching carries is a great story. Think about the messages, the story being conveyed when you teach a sweet curriculum, a curriculum that takes you and your students deeply richly into the wonders of a subject. A curriculum that does not simply contain what is worth knowing, but is expansive, opening up your interest, your students' interest, to know more, to explore, to build an abiding care for the subject. You know this as well. We have all had that good teacher whose teaching brought us to that good place in our learning. Hold on to this and think about the messages this kind of teaching sets out for you about meaningful teaching, for your students about meaningful learning. How do you carry this story forward through your teaching? Now I want to take us to a different place. As much as we might think about the medium is the message that our teaching is the story, we need to also think about how that medium, our teaching, shapes who we are. As I shared at the start, technologies, as media, have shaped how we interact with text, shaping attention and persistence. I want to think about how our teaching as a medium shapes who we are as teachers. I will start with an irony. Our teaching is supposed to be about shaping learners' minds, building in them good ways of thinking and understanding. Hold on to this. Now do something we do not do often enough. Hold up your teaching to a mirror. Think about your everyday teaching. How does your teaching shape your mind, building good ways of thinking and understanding? What grooves do you make in your scheme of teaching as you go about the everyday act of teaching your students? How is your brain shaped by your teaching? How are you being made by your teaching? I set this out as both something cautionary and something aspirational. The grind of some kinds of curriculum may shape us over time to be that uninspiring, fill kids' heads up with stuff teacher. We become the medium. Our thinking about teaching falls into a groove, both familiar and convenient, and we become that teacher, having trained ourselves to be so through the medium of shallow teaching. I believe most of us are aware while this is happening, stepping up to teach how we are expected to teach but feels like wearing a scratchy wool coat while doing so. We wear it not happily, grateful when we can steal time to teach in the good ways we want, but we have to remember that we are shaped by what we wear. How much of your teaching becomes over time an unsaid accepted way you go about your teaching? I share this not just to make us feel bad about what might happen to our teaching over time. Let's turn this around and own this. If we understand that our teaching is the medium and the medium is the message, what might our teaching tell us about what is good, what is worthwhile in ourselves, in ourselves as teachers? How might we embrace a kind of teaching that makes for a good story, makes us better teachers, better human beings? What kind of teaching brain do we purposefully want to make for ourselves through our teaching? That's a lot to hold on to, and I know I am asking a lot. As I continue to do, I am pushing us to be the drivers of our teaching. I know the reality of school. Schools mean well, schools determine curriculum. The curriculum determines our teaching, but only to the extent that we allow it to. Every day we are not just delivering lessons, we are rehearsing again and again ways of thinking, ways of being, ways of being a teacher. We need to take care that the story of our teaching is not simply written for us through the curriculum, pacing guides, the tacit quiet acceptance by our peers of the teaching everyone is supposed to do. Our teaching tells a story. The story as we live it makes us who we are. In the everyday moments of our teaching we are writing our story. Those moments make our teaching, and over time make us. We are the authors of our teaching, authors of ourselves as teachers. Knowing this, how do we want to write our story? Thanks for listening. Comments are welcome.