Can good teaching be taught?
I've been teaching for over 20 years, and I've loved it. One of my biggest frustrations over the years, though, has been this notion that good teaching can't be taught. There's this notion that you have to be born a teacher, which is ridiculous. Certainly talent has a role in the profession, as it does in any profession, but there's a whole lot that can be taught.Here's a few ideas that can be taught:- Relationships are important. Students learn best from people they trust, and you can do things in a school and in a classroom that develop trust between students and their peers, and staff.- Formative assessment is critical to growth. Formative assessment is assessment for the purpose of growth and learning, not for the purpose of grading. It's written and verbal feedback.- When conflict arises, restorative approaches are more effective than punitive approaches. Restorative approaches look at what happened, why it happened, what harm was caused, and what can be done to address the actual harm that was caused. Restorative approaches are not weak if they are done well.- Classroom management is important, but if you go at it by being too controlling you won't be a good teacher. A healthy amount of interaction is more effective than a silent classroom where everyone is afraid to talk.- There's no place for zeroes in a grade book. A zero doesn't represent a student's learning, and it throws off all other measures of learning.I could go on, but the bigger point is that there are many techniques and ideas that can be taught and modeled in the school and in the classroom. I think many student teachers get pulled into old, ineffective ways of teaching because of how it's modeled to them. They're taught many good approaches to teaching, but their ed school teachers just lecture at them. They're told to use well-researched, effective techniques, but then they're paired up with a mentor teacher who only uses an old-school lecture style, an overly strict approach to grading and assessment, and a punitive approach to discipline.