The BEST Teachers…

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Straight from John Hattie’s Visible Learning

When students were asked about their best teachers, the common attributes were teachers who built relationships with students (Batten & Girling-Butcher, 1981), teachers who helped students to have different and better strategies or processes to learn the subject (Pehkonen, 1992), and teachers who demonstrated a willingness to explain material and help students with their work (Sizemore, 1981).

In my humble opinion those are very LEARNER focused behaviors. When we focus on learners, our teaching becomes a solution, not an activity we perform every day. To help students learn, we must change our solutions.

While working on my laptop last night, my wife was channel hopping (she does that a lot). Stopping on the movie The Blind Side when the character playing Michael Oher was being tutored by character being played by Kathy Bates caused me to stop working and watch for a bit. During the scene I was watching, the actor playing Michael Oher looked at his tutor and said: “I don’t get it.” She replied: “YET, you don’t get it YET.”

So, I continued watching a bit even closing my laptop to save the battery. During another tutoring session, the tutor was working with Michael to find a topic for a paper he had to write. It was a very important paper as his future college scholarship rested on him getting a B or better on the single assignment. Kathy Bates’ character (sorry, I can’t remember her name in the movie) exhausted her ideas to motivate Michael, so she encouraged his father to step in. With a new approach and new ideas, they came up with a great topic to write about. The tutor never gave up and continued to find a new approach that would get through to help Michael learn.

Learning = (Teaching + Creativity) x Different Approach

Every Teacher MUST Answer This Question

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In a recent conversation with several teachers, I asked the question: “Does teaching exist in the absence of learning?” This is the most essential question any teacher can ask of themselves. The answer, Yes, No, or somewhere in between, sets the boundaries of a teacher’s effectiveness.

This is a question that many wrestle with as they have experienced students who were very difficult to teach or who were very resistant to learning. How can we make a student learn if they don’t want to? Perhaps the better question one can ask of themselves is: “What power do I have in motivating the most challenging student to learn?” How much power one believes they have is their level of self-efficacy. Webster tells us that self-efficacy is a person’s belief of their power or capacity to produce a desired effect; effectiveness. Fancy psychological research found self-efficacy as the foundation of human motivation and accomplishments. Unless people believe they can produce desired effects by their actions, they have little incentive to act or persevere in the face of difficulties.

Yep, that’s us. We are working with our colleagues to increase teacher effectiveness in the face of difficulties and motivation is certainly key. That, perhaps, is a rather large understatement! Can we motivate teachers to become more effective if they don’t believe that they can be?

I once heard a story about a swim coach who “taught” a group of children to swim; however, try as she might, one student just couldn’t learn and had to be saved by a lifeguard on the last day of class. Did that swim coach teach that child to swim? Can everyone learn to swim? Maybe there are great reasons why the child didn’t learn to swim. Perhaps he didn’t take baby swim class when he was 9 months old like other children and he is just too far behind to learn. Maybe he has a disability that doesn’t allow him to make the proper connections in his mind to control his limbs as well as other children. I don’t know, but to me it is clear that the student didn’t learn to swim.

So, if he didn’t learn to swim, was he taught to swim? Did teaching occur?

Well, to me the big question hinges on the definition of teaching. Is teaching simply providing all of the necessary information on a subject? Being a formal student for half of my lifetime has taught me at least one thing…that there are some very knowledgeable teachers/professors in this world who can’t teach worth a darn. Knowing your material doesn’t mean that you can teach it.

If you’ve read this far, you’ve likely figured out where I stand on the subject. For the most part, I believe that teaching does not exist without learning.  I get it, there are some students that you just can’t reach.  I will say that if you never give up and always try new strategies and tactics, at the end of the day you’ll earn my respect.  I’m not quite Yoda when he said: “Do. Or do not. There is no try.”  Trying is important.

Do you believe that all students can learn? Search deep within yourself. If you truly believe this mantra, then you must also believe that you haven’t finished teaching if a student hasn’t learned enough…yet.

You Choose to be Who You Want to Be

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One of my favorite movies of all time is the little known animated movie, The Iron Giant.  It is a wonderful story that is worth watching again and again.  In the movie, a giant robot from space crash lands in a remote area of the U.S. in 1957.  The crash has slightly damaged the robot as is evident by the slight dent in his head and loss of memory.  Discovered first by a nine year old boy named Hogarth, the robot is hidden for a while in a junk yard.  Over the course of several days, the duo spends time playing, reading comics and exploring the woods.  During their time together, Hogarth shares many of life’s lessons with the robot.  One lesson, about making choices, is learned when Hogarth introduces the concept of Superman to the Iron Giant.  The robot immediately relates to the superhero’s abilities and using those abilities for good.

Of course, crisis comes their way as a CIA investigator is in the area to investigate the “meteor” that was seen in the sky days ago.  Upon finding the giant robot, panic ensues and a local military contingent begins firing on the robot.  Since Hogarth is with the giant robot at the time, the robot runs away only to see that the boy was knocked out (or worse) due to their fleeing from the military.  Seeing the potential death of his friend, the robot begins to behave in a way that was obviously the purpose of his designers.  The dent suddenly is “popped out” on his head and guns, lasers and missiles are fired from the Iron Giant as he fights against the military.

Soon, Hogarth wakes and gets the Iron Giant to stop firing his weapons.  The CIA agent still wants the robot destroyed, so in his panic he sends a message to an offshore naval ship to launch a nuclear missile at the robot’s location, which at the time happens to be in the town square.  Realizing that the missile will kill many people, the Iron Giant launches himself to meet the missile in the stratosphere and save the town.  As he approaches the missile, the Iron Giant recalls what Hogarth taught him and replays Hogarth’s voice in his head…“You choose who you want to be.”  The Iron Giant then whispers, just before directly impacting the missile, “I’m Superman.”

Obviously, the Iron Giant was designed to be a killing machine; however, he chose to be a savior.  What a great message for all of us.  Regardless of our life’s experiences and troubles, we can still choose to be who we want to be.  And, in the case of the Iron Giant, he had a great teacher in Hogarth who helped him to understand that tenet.

I am a believer that it is the little choices in our lives that matter.  Making the right decision each and every day, even when the right decision requires additional work, is what makes all of the bigger decisions easier.  Philosopher William James said it best.  “All of life is but a mass of small choices—practical, emotional and intellectual—systematically organized for our greatness or grief.  We must never forget that it’s not only our big dreams that shape reality…the small choices bear us irresistibly toward our destiny.”

Our power is in our choices…our little choices…that we make each and every day.  Remember that we are not defined by a college degree or a position.  We are a composite of our choices, which is what defines us…and, what defines how we are viewed by others.