Leading From The Heart

by Tracy Rosen, teaching & consulting since 1996, blogging about it here since 2007. All views are my own and you should take them with a grain of salt, I do.

Month: January 2010

  • Is lecture a 4-letter word? Following up a year later

    Today I received a comment from Miss Teacha on a post I published almost a year ago called Is ‘lecture’ a 4-letter word? She continues our love-hate relationship conversation about lecture. I started to write my reply as a comment and then decided to post it as its own post. So here it is.

    Thanks for following up on this conversation, Miss Teacha! I think the mark of a successful lecture is when you need to calm the class down, when you need to redirect their energy. Lecture is not merely a content delivery system, though it can be and often has the reputation of being solely that.

    I no longer teach economics. The required course for Grade 11 has been changed to Contemporary World Issues beginning this year. It’s a course based on themes rather than specific content and I am in the middle of a section on the themes of tension and conflict using information from different areas of the world – Monks protesting in Burma; Seal Hunters in Nunavut, the Maritime provinces, and Quebec; living in the Gaza strip; living in Sri Lanka… *** (see below)

    There is SO much content that if I lectured it all they would never get to the juicy stuff of developing their own definitions of tension and conflict or debating different intervention strategies. So I give them articles, music, video to read, listen to, view, and talk about in small groups. They check their understanding with me during group and class discussions – sometimes I point them to the computers for background research and sometimes I give them the background (and sometimes I even let them know that I don’t know the background very well and we research it together).

    When I give them the background it may be done as a whole class exercise, where I stop activity and give background to the entire class, or to individual groups, depending on the need. If only 1 group isn’t getting something, why make others who do get it stop what they are doing?

    I am finding that this kind of lecture is effective because the students see the need for it. The lecture happens because they have asked for it and not because a) it’s easier for me or b) it’s what I think they should learn. They often interrupt in order to ask questions and link what I am saying to their articles or videos or songs or however it is they are gathering their information.

    So, again, lecture does not have to be a 4-letter word. Thanks to Miss Teach for following up on this conversation.

    ***I am lucky that this unit (we call them Learning Evaluation Situations (LES) in Quebec) has been developed for the course by a Quebec English schools support centre. It is the only teaching material for this course that has been made available to us in English so far, beyond the curricular guidelines (basically the competencies (like standards) and their descriptors). Apparently there is a textbook that is being published in sections but I have yet to see it.

  • Who tells you how to teach?

    This post was inspired by this passage from Teachers Should be Seen and not Heard by Anthony Mullen in EdWeek, Jan. 7, 2010.


    “What do you think?” the senator asked….

    …”I’m thinking about the current health care debate, “I said. “And I am wondering if I will be asked to sit on a national committee charged with the task of creating a core curriculum of medical procedures to be used in hospital emergency rooms.”

    The strange little man cocks his head and, suddenly, the fly on the wall has everyone’s attention.

    “I realize that most people would think I am unqualified to sit on such a committee because I am not a doctor, I have never worked in an emergency room, and I have never treated a single patient. So what? Today I have listened to people who are not teachers, have never worked in a classroom, and have never taught a single student tell me how to teach.”

    In Quebec it is the provincial government’s Ministry of Education, Leisure, and Sports (MELS) who tells us how to teach, via the consultants who work for the Quebec English Schools Network (LEARN) via the consultants who work for our school boards, via our principals, via our department heads. At least that is how it is supposed to go, in the government’s perfect world, I guess.

    I, more often than not, go straight to the source. I read my curriculum, The Quebec Education Program (QEP aka ‘The Brick’), which offers philosophy, nothing tangible, then I create the tangible – the daily activities, from data-collection to project to evaluation and back again. Sometimes I do so on my own, sometimes with other teachers. I definitely spend a lot of time doing my own research into how/what/why to teach the students in my care. Some of what I use has been provided by other teachers who do the same. Some of it I found on my own, rarely via consultants though it does happen at times. Whatever it is I do my first and foremost truth is to my students, then I am true to the curriculum.

    There are consultants available to me. Why don’t I use them? I consulted for a year. I had to get back into the classroom, as I often say, because I missed the daily energy of contact with students. But there was more to my decision to leave consulting than that. I felt that I was losing my credibility as a teacher. Who was I to consult with teachers on how to deal with the kids in their classrooms when I was no longer in the classroom? The nature of the students I teach changes every year. The further I was away from the classroom the less right I felt about consulting on the subject.

    Does this mean there is no room for the consultant? No. But we need to look at how consulting happens. Too often consultants have never been teachers. They have never had to negotiate the many layers of teaching in a classroom – from pedagogy, to behaviour, to technology, to management, to learning disabilities, to multiple subject matters, to headaches, sore stomachs, teen girls at their time of the month, the farts, the dress code, the Internet not working, the why do I have to sit there?s, the exam stress, the I don’t know how to read but I think no one knows so I will continue to be a pain in the ass so no one ever finds outs. I’ll stop there.

    What if teachers consulted with each other? If part of our workload was about learning and sharing about something specific, either in content or in process – say history or using laptops in the classroom? Something that relates to what we mainly teach. How much more satisfying and meaningful would my job be if I could teach a bit less and have time to research and share with my colleagues?

    How do you think that would work? I’d be interested in seeing what different people think about this, from consultants to administrators to teachers. If you are a consultant does it make you angry to read what I wrote? If you are a teacher would you want to be scheduled to research and share? If you are an administrator do you trust your teachers to research and share? Is anyone already doing all of that?

  • holding emotion

    I’ve written about this before. Yesterday I felt stressed – nervous, anxious, slightly on edge – and not because of me. We are starting an exam period (what a lovely way to come back from a 2 week vacation…not) and yesterday was the first of them. The exam began with some argument about what to do, how it didn’t make sense, how there was no way that they could finish in 2 hours.

    It is especially during these kinds of situations that I realize part of my job is to manage emotion and in doing so, hold it.

    I could have snapped back but I kept my voice low and calm. I moved from student to student, tried to connect with them individually, to let them know I see their stress, their frustration – the exam was a French one, a compulsory course that many students have a huge brick wall up about – and that they needed to plow on despite that.

    Slowly, the room became still, with just a spattering of complaint toward the end of the period, when students became worried about finishing on time.

    I was in bed by 7:30 last night though!