I communicate regularly with my students teachers, and I know my middle school and high school students much better than their teachers do. And the more I think about education and learning, the more I see relationships as the key to what really matters. If I think about all the movies I have seen about "great teaching" both fictional and those "based on a true story", while the actual teaching going on in them varies enormously, what they all have in common is a teacher that builds caring strong relationships with their pupils, from "To Sir With Love", "Up The Down Staircase" of the 60s, to more recent movies such as "Mr. Holland's Opus" and "Dangerous Minds." But of course that portrayal could just be the license of the writers and directors.
But I would say I have found the same in my experience as a teacher and now a tutor. I worked with teachers with many different pedagogical approaches. If you have read my previous columns, you will see it's clear I have strong beliefs about which are more effective. However, the most consistent thing that I noticed of teachers that appeared to me as more effective was that those teachers all had strong relationships with their students. The students knew their teacher expected them to learn, and was there to help them succeed in doing so.
It was really much for this reason that I decided to move to elementary school after teaching middle and high school for 17 years. It is really difficult to build those relationships when every hour you have a new group of students. I often asked other teachers to keep an eye an a specific student in the hopes that one of us could connect with them. And I consequently worried that there where students that had no one to advocate for them and that someone would slip through the cracks. With elementary school kids I had the same ones all day long. It is also a reason I have never liked "regrouping" with other teachers - I never saw the trade off as worth the loss in knowing my students fully.
One anecdote. At one place I taught, we were using the Reading Recovery program for our struggling first and second grade readers. Reading Recovery is a strongly researched based program giving intensive support to the lowest readers in the first and second grades, based on some of the best research of learning to read, with a strong research record of its own, and all the practitioners of it have to be credentialed teachers who have gone through an intensive training in the model. One year I taught third grade and my struggling readers did not qualify. So instead we used instruction assistants, who had a rudimentary training in more traditional phonics approaches to work with them. I would argue that third graders who are still struggling with reading are probably more difficult candidates, as they have a longer history of failure to overcome.
Yet, in decidedly non-random and small sample that this consisted of, my instructional assistant succeeded with every one she worked with. The same cannot be said of the Reading Recovery program that had about a two-thirds success rate with our students. I attribute it to the strong relationship she built with each of them-letting them know that she believed they each would and could learn to read.
This, maybe, is what worries me most about many of the past educational reforms. They make those relationships more difficult. Scripted curriculum, larger classes and school consolidation, use of technology for instruction, and worst of all, the tactics of fear-trying to scare teachers and students into doing a better job. Each if these, in a different way, makes it slightly more difficult for teachers and students to develop strong relationships.
I will be following the implementation of the Common Core Standards as they are designed to foster more teacher and student engagement and allow teachers the opportunity to develop their own units of study that incorporate the required standards.
I have been offered a job to teach an all on-line teacher education course. I haven't made a decision yet, but I am curious to know to what degree this mode allows for and interferes with such relationships.
If you or any one you know teaches on-line, or for that matter, if you have taken on-line classes, I would be interested in hearing about your experience. What kinds of relationships does on-line learning foster?
Debra
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