Lessons from a Teacher

Just this week, I came across an article on Edutopia, a website I follow that posts all things education and advocates for various theoretical and practical changes to our education system, where its author Ben Johnson suggests we find a new name for the title teacher. Specifically, Johnson lands on the term learning engineer as a way to incorporate the myriad jobs asked of today’s teacher and to shift our focus towards more of a student-centered environment rather than the didactic model of the past.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I do agree we ask way more of teachers today than we did 22 years ago when I began teaching. AND, having a master’s degree in Experiential Education, a field of pedagogy most educators have never heard of, places me on the constructivist end of the teaching and learning spectrum. However, I do pause at this idea that we need to change what we call ourselves.

Even though our profession may not garner the respect it deserves, I am proud when I tell people I’m a teacher. That is not always the case for many of my younger colleagues, but I probably relate differently to the term, not because I come from a long line of teachers (I don’t), but because I had the honor of being taught by so many accomplished, thoughtful, life-changing people who convinced me this was a profession worth joining. And in the 80s when I attended elementary school, A Nation at Risk had yet to enter the psyche of Americans, and we did not yet believe the narrative that public schools are failing or that our teachers are falling behind. You see, I remember gathering in the library of my elementary school to watch on a rather small tube television as Christa McAulliffe, the first teacher in space, launched into the skies on the Challenger shuttle only to witness its tragic explosion more than a minute later. While I’m sure I’ve superimposed my later understanding of that moment onto my memories of it, I know we all believed in the significance of that feat for NASA, for schoolchildren, and for our nation. We didn’t get out of reading class for an hour because another Space Shuttle was launching; we got out of class because a teacher was launching into space and that was history. In those minutes leading up to the launch, the teaching profession had been elevated, respected, revered, and young children across the country were paying attention.

I fiercely believe that words have power, so I understand the urge to coin a new moniker for what we do in hopes of changing how others perceive our work. By calling us “learning engineers,” people might recognize the kind of knowledge and expertise necessary to excel at teaching, but we also risk insulting the intelligence of those very people who choose to discredit the job no matter its name. Rather than calling us something else, why not reclaim the term? Why can’t we remind people what makes this profession so foundational and so essential to our communities, to our society, and to our country?

Part of what Johnson alludes to in his essay also speaks to some primary issues with the art and act of teaching itself. In changing the terminology for teaching, he attempts to double-down on a century-old idea that classrooms should be altars to student-centered learning, a concept exalted by John Dewey and other progressivist educators at the turn of the last century . Believe me when I say I have worshiped at those same altars, and I do regret the decades of traditional schooling where teachers believed their job was to stand at a chalkboard, lecture while students took notes, and pontificate about the knowledge worth knowing. We could talk all day about the power invested in a teacher’s position when she gets to hold court at the front of a classroom, and why it’s been so challenging to give up that power; I agree we needed new structures to break down that dynamic so children saw themselves as responsible for their learning and active participants in creating it. Yet, I find it interesting that when educators finally embraced student-directed learning, we also began to question the value of a teacher in the equation of learning, giving our society permission to wonder if students really even needed a teacher at all!

More and more school districts are turning to online education programs, some perhaps with the intent of retaining crucial funding, but probably more so to tap into the prevailing theory that learning can and should happen via whatever avenue the student feels is best. I recognize that every student is an individual with individual needs and desires and challenges, so I don’t begrudge the expansion of these programs per se. I just wonder whether our students might still need some direction, some advice, some feedback (all face-to-face) from a teacher.

I earned my master’s degree through a self-directed program at Prescott College. Even at the alternative high school where I taught students for whom traditional schooling didn’t work, colleagues questioned the validity of a program where I directed my own course of study. Really, they would be correct to wonder whether I learned everything necessary to do my job well, but what most missed (and even I downplayed) was the fact I had an adviser, a facilitator, a sounding board, an expert to whom I could pitch my questions and confusions with the expectation that he would direct me, push me, and, ultimately, TEACH me. While a select few might be able to teach themselves computer programming by watching a Khan Academy video or learn how to connect the ideas of a literary work to the pressures and beliefs of its historical time period by logging into Shmoop, most of us need someone wiser and more experienced than us to show the way.

I read Ian Leslie’s book Curious last summer, mostly because I was curious to learn what makes us want to know more. Is our curiosity innate, either we have it or we don’t? Or can curiosity be developed, nurtured, and, thus, taught? Leslie seems to land on the argument that curiosity can only flourish when we already possess some kind of knowledge about the world around us, knowledge that typically comes to us in some form of direct instruction. Have you ever noticed that when you learn a tidbit of information, the definition of a word for instance, that you inevitably see that piece of information everywhere? You read an article that uses the word. A colleague inserts that word into a sentence. A meme appears in your news feed that plays on the meaning on that word. From my own experience, just last week I was reading the Pulitzer-prize winning book The Overstory, which taught me in a beautiful narrative the fact that trees communicate with one another via unseen networks in the ground and through chemical secretions in the air. Honestly, learning this fact astonished me. Yet, even more astonishing was this concept being mentioned off-hand in an episode of Amazon’s Sneaky Pete. I see these flashes of recognition in my students all the time. They’ll learn about an author they’d never heard of, say Kurt Vonnegut, or a blues musician like Robert Johnson, and then discover these people exist in the ether around them, happily sharing their encounters with me as they recognize bits of cultural knowledge in other spheres of their lives. At that point, they become hooked, they’re curious to learn more!

Those moments that build their curiosity often come from me telling them about something, not from their own discovery. As a teacher, one who lectures, instructs, facilitates, and even engineers learning opportunities, I have the power to create curiosity in my students. Research tells us that a teacher can have a measurable impact on student learning well into the future, yet I sometimes fall into the trap of feeling like I don’t have much influence over my students. Perhaps that’s the case because I have bought into this idea that teachers are supposed to engineer environments where students create their own knowledge, rather than teaching them about what there is to learn. I hope we can reclaim the title teacher so that each of us recognizes the power we have, that we matter, that it matters that we teach, not just engineer learning for students. I want my students to take ownership of their learning, to see themselves and their discovery as the central focus of a school. But in the process of transforming education, please don’t discredit what we teachers do to get them to that place where they can learn.