PU #240 - TEACHING THEMSELVES: On The Lessons Within The Lessons
Getting students to teach each other is always a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they are not expert teachers, formally qualified in appropriate pedagogies for teaching the assigned material. On the other hand, they should actually be the most expert people in the room when it comes to effective teaching. After all, they sit through six lessons a day, five days a week, and experience, first-hand, what does and doesn’t work in the classroom.
The theory behind getting them to teach each other is the idea that if you properly understand something, you should be able to explain it to a child. So therefore to teach the other children in their class, the students themselves need to know the material they have been assigned to teach inside and out. They need to know how best to break down its complexities and where the likely misconceptions and confusions will be. If the student lessons don’t go well, so the idea goes, then it becomes clear that they do not understand the material. Hence it is a win/win: either the lesson is a success and everybody learns something new, or it is a disaster, and we all learn that there is more work to do before moving on.
As an anarchist educator, getting students to teach their own lessons is also an opportunity to give students some autonomy and power in the classroom to do things for themselves. To learn independence and take control. Reminding them that my own power is mere illusion and, most importantly, that they do not need a teacher to give them new knowledge. The knowledge is there for the taking if they break free of the learned helplessness of the teacher/student model and recognise their own resourcefulness and ability to research and make discoveries.
Sadly, giving students the reigns to teach leaves many of the class uneasy. They doubt the quality of information they receive from their peers and usually await confirmation from me, preferring the familiar hierarchy. Likewise, some of the student-teachers worry that they only reason I am making them teach each other is because I am lazy and just want to give myself a few lessons off. They treat the activity with suspicion and doubt their own ability to pull it off.
Even more sadly is how quickly the opportunity for something radical and different to be done in the classroom is missed for mere replication. I tell students they can deliver the material in whatever way they think will be most effective. drawing on their experiences as students. What works best? What never works? What could be better than any lesson they’ve previously had that they now have the chance to try? But frequently the lessons take the form of lectures with very basic quizzes at the end to check for understanding, or they involve activities which are fun but teach very little. Big questions are asked, but they forget to care about the answers they are given. I give them the power to reward and sanction their students, hoping they will use that power responsibly, and see quickly how power corrupts. Friends’ names fill the board in the reward column and old grudges are reawakened by the names quickly doomed for sanction.
In a current course I am teaching however, all this is a lesson in itself. Soon we will be covering Philosophy of Education as a topic and these lessons I have assigned for my students to teach on a completely different topic (Philosophy of Art) are serving a dual purpose. While four groups are responsible to teach four different theories of art to their peers across four different lessons, the lessons they produce are also case studies for analysis later: what makes a “good” lesson in school? Why is the lesson you plan not always they lesson you teach? What does it mean to “learn” and how do you know when it is happening?
This is the second batch of lessons this particular cohort have produced since September. Their last set, on theories around Self, proved to be an assortment of car-crashes. But each car crash provided new food for thought and this time around each group was determined to keep their car on the road.
Interestingly, the “car crash” lessons were all hugely important topics for the eventual assessment task the students had to complete at the end of the unit. Poor though the lessons were, the students all did very well in the final assessment. Once they realised I was not going to mop up the mess and teach them the same stuff again “properly”, and we had done a lengthy post-mortem on what went wrong with the lessons, they realised it was their own responsibility to learn what their teachers had failed to teach them. And learn it they did. Quite independently.
More interestingly, the reason the lessons were “car crashes” is because in each case the student teachers failed to properly think about the most effective way of delivering their complicated ideas and checking for student understanding. Dry lectures were given, with little thoughtful discrimination made between what was necessary and relevant and what was not from the resources they had been assigned. Key ideas were skipped in places and tangents brought to the foreground. Elsewhere contrasting ideas were presented as if they were all arguing for the same thing. It was clear the student teachers had not spent the requisite time to understand the ideas they were charged with teaching before planning how to teach it. In fact, groups split up tasks before knowing what their subject matter was all about, and then proceeded to learn the information they would teach in this disconnected way: one student “doing the bit of the lesson evaluating the argument” and therefore not bothering to read the actual argument itself first. That was, after all, another student’s job.
The reason this was interesting is because in round 2, none of these recent lessons have made the same mistakes. Each group ensured they knew their material well and planned well-chosen activities to introduce the ideas to their classes. However, this time a new set of problems emerged: putting the beautifully planned and well-considered lesson into practice. Lesson after lesson my students learnt what every trainee teacher discovers in their first weeks on the job: things take more or less time in reality than you anticipate in the planning, and human beings — with their weird and wonderful autonomous minds and choices — ask questions, get stuck, or mess around in ways you cannot possibly predict.
Teaching is an activity which requires constant reaction and adaptation. We can plan as much as possible, but need to also be responsive to what is actually going on in the room. You might be really proud of that interactive quiz you made online, and it may have taken a long time to produce the resource, but if students are slower to grasp the initial concepts than you had planned for, is it actually a useful or necessary activity worth wasting precious minutes for as they get out their devices and log on to school WiFi? Are you making them do the task because it is useful, or because of the sunk costs fallacy: you put so much work into it you can’t imagine not using it?
Teaching is also an activity in which your own actions in the room can affect the room itself! You might be the person who takes the conversation on its tangent or antagonises a student into misbehaviour. The plan might be perfect, but your response in the moment to something said as a result of that plan might throw a grenade into the mix and blow up everything that comes after.
Lesson after lesson, student teachers encountered these difficulties. The lessons they had planned this second time were not car crashes, but occasionally at times the roads became treacherous and they might have lost a wing mirror or clipped the curb. Occasionally a responsible driver had the wheel grabbed recklessly by another member of their group and had to fight hard to steer the vehicle back on course. A few tyres popped along the way. But most got to their destinations, or at least near enough for their class to walk the rest of the way by themselves.
Most important, however, was the reflection afterwards. As I said, I give the students the power to reward and sanction their classes. I never question the rewards given, but when a sanction is given I ask the student teacher the following question: does the student deserve the sanction because of something they did, or did they do what they did because you, as the teacher, failed to do something before it got to that point to stop them? If you had behaved differently, would your student have behaved in the same way?
The question made the student-teachers realise their own role in managing the behaviour in their classroom and in all cases they ultimately decided that the sanction was unnecessary; they shared blame for the incident with the offending student. It was a mutual mistake and unfair to blame the student entirely.
Most rewarding for me in all this has been the realisation across the two sets of lessons from my students of the work that goes into a lesson.
“I didn’t realise how hard teaching was, sir!” Said one student.
“It always seemed so easy before.” Said another. “But I see now how wrong I was.”
And my favourite feedback of all: “I can see now how difficult it must be to teach someone like me, sir.” Said seriously by a student who struggles with their own impulse control after finding the lesson they had spent hours of homework preparing for repeatedly interrupted and undermined by a fellow student with similar issues. “I just wanted to scream at him the whole time to just shut up. How do you manage not to just explode?”
It made me consider how little the art of teaching is understood by most of us, despite the vast majority of us spending years of our life being educated in schools. How hard can it be? You’re an expert in your subject and you pass that information on to kids in the most interesting way possible, right? Those who can, they do something else. Teaching is for those who can’t do anything else.
When we look at the teaching retention crisis in the UK there are a whole bunch of factors. Poor financial compensation for the number of hours actually worked each week and squeezed budgets making so many roles in schools more and more exploitative. Threats to pensions and diminishing benefits. But the least talked about factor is the simple fact that the job itself — being a teacher — is taken for granted by all of us. For we have all sat, bored, in classrooms and wondered why this person was droning on when we could be somewhere else. We have all had to teach ourselves something our professional teacher failed to teach us. And the good teachers we experience — well they make it look easy. Effortless. So easy that surely anyone could do it?
The idea that teaching is a skilled profession demanding a wide-range of high level capabilities intellectually, emotionally, and administratively is just something seldom discussed with the students who are the profession’s only hope to be the teachers of tomorrow. Certainly something very few of them get to experience firsthand.
And — for the anarchist within me, and the critic of the current education system — the systemic barriers to success in the classroom for all and structural questions around what the best way to learn even is (and does it even need to involve schools and teachers in the first place?) can only really be broached once you have experienced firsthand the obstacles and disconnects between teaching as an ideal and teaching in practice. If the first time it is experienced is in your first months and tears of teacher training, then it’s little wonder so many tap out on the profession.
I also love doing these activities with my students because it is a reminder that the ostensible lesson taught inside a classroom can be an abject failure, but this does not necessarily mean that no learning has taken place. While four consecutive lessons on Philosophy of Self were car crashes, and four later lessons on Philosophy of Art were only marginally successful, all eight sessions in the classroom were outstanding lessons in the Philosophy of Education, hopefully reminding my students that education is always about far more than meeting the arbitrary learning objectives of a particular fifty minute period in a classroom.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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