Teacher Talk: Teachers Building a Professional Community by Talking to
Other Teachers About Teaching by William Ayers
Eight teachers settle into child-sized chairs in room 201 of the Gwendolyn
Brooks Academy, a struggling public school on Chicago's near west side, as
Carla Jordan, the host teacher, begins to pull the meeting together. "Has
everyone got a snack?" she asks. "There are more donuts and apples on the side
table. Cider... Coffee... Everyone OK?" She pauses and smiles, arms open and
welcoming. "OK", she continues. "Why don't we bring our chairs forward, a
little closer together, and let's make this more of a circle." She gestures
with her hands as chair-legs scrape linoleum until a little halfhearted ring
forms up. "Good. Let's begin."
Carla welcomes her colleagues to her second-grade classroom and reminds them
that they have only forty minutes together today and that five minutes are
already gone. "The house rules allow for two minutes of complaining," she
laughs, "but I'm dispensing with that so we can plunge right into the heart of
things. You can complain on your own time." Everyone laughs as Robert
Thompson, a sixth grade teacher and the group comedian, pulls a mock frown and
says, "I've been waiting two weeks for a chance to offer a major whine, and now
you're bottling me up." "Tell it to your therapist," Carla jokes.
Carla Jordan sets a small portable oven timer for ten minutes, places it on a
nearby desk, and begins presenting a portrait of her classroom--her environment
for learning--and the rhythm and routine of her day. This is the eleventh
meeting for this group of teachers, and they are by now comfortable with each
other and familiar with the format: they always meet in a group member's
classroom; the host teacher provides a modest (or elaborate) snack, and chairs
the meeting; after a two-minute period allowed for gossip and complaint, the
host teacher spends ten minutes describing the classroom, emphasizing the
choices she or he has made and the thinking behind each decision; the group
then talks back to the presenting teacher for eight minutes, expanding on some
points, seeking clarification, critically reflecting, describing practices to
amplify or intensify aspects of the environment; gears shift, and during the
next ten minutes the host teacher presents a student to the
group through the lens of that student's work; the group then talks back to
the presenting teacher offering critical advice for future work with the
student; the final two minutes are devoted to calendar, future meetings,
details, business. Forty minutes. Out the door.
Carla Jordan has been teaching for four years, neither a novice nor quite yet
a veteran. Of the eight teachers gathered here, two are first-year teachers,
five have been teaching from between four and ten years, and Robert has been
teaching eighteen years. Each teacher has hosted at least one Teacher Talk;
this is Carla's second round, and she highlights changes since the last meeting
in her room. "I took seriously the suggestions about the importance of
displaying student work as you can see," she says, " gesturing towards a wall
displaying student papers, a clothesline stretched across the back of the room
hung with paintings, and a large table under a banner that trumpets, "Our
Museum of Culture." The reading area bristles with book reports, the place is
alive with child-made art, and one large space is decorated with the results of
an ongoing graphing, charting, mapping project. The room looks denser, more
vibrant and dynamic, busier and more interesting. It's
made a difference I think in the pride and effort that goes into their work,"
Carla says. Everyone is impressed.
"I've been wondering," says Veronica Adams, a fourth-grade teacher who has
consistently and increasingly argued for a stronger emphasis on pushing
children to write across the curriculum, "in my own classroom about making
visible the process of writing. I mean, why not display, for example, three
drafts of the same paper? That might underline the point I make to the
kids--how writing requires an idea, some effort and editing, and then
rewriting." One teacher thinks out loud about the importance of not
intimidating beginning writers, allowing them to simply write, and another
argues for the different demands made of fourth graders and second graders.
Carla takes notes on the conversation and then, when the time is up, pulls
out a fat file folder and says, "Let me tell you about Rodney." At the last
meeting she had described a challenging child, and today she has decided to
provide some balance. This kid works hard and adds some zest and fun to her
day. The group admires the creativity and intensity of Rodney's writing, the
colorful paintings and meticulous maps he has drawn of the classroom and the
school building. There are a few suggestions of ways to stretch the work with
Rodney before the session comes to an end.
Teaching demands thoughtfulness. There simply is no way to become an
outstanding teacher through adherence to routine, formula, habit, convention,
or standardized ways of speaking and acting. Thoughtfulness requires time and
focus and wide-awakeness--a willingness to look at the conditions of our
teaching lives, to consider alternatives and different possibilities, to
challenge received wisdom and the taken for granted, and to link our conduct
with our consciousness... to think what we are doing.
It can be overwhelming to try to think what you are doing in a classroom of
30 students, embedded in a school of several hundred (or thousand), situated in
a town or city of several thousand (or million). Each of your students has her
or his own needs, skills, capacities, hopes, and dreams. The school has its
own goals and plans to attend to, and society makes its own demands as well.
Although there is always more to learn and more to know as a teacher, the
heart of teaching is a passionate regard for students. With it, mistakes and
obstacles will be met and overcome; without it, no amount of technical skill
will ever fully compensate. The work of teaching involves struggling to see
each student in as full and dynamic a way as possible, and simultaneously to
create environments that nurture and challenge the wide range of students who
are actually there in our classrooms.
Teachers need opportunities to collectively engage serious questions of
immediacy and urgency from their classrooms: What are my teaching goals? How
do they fit the visions/standards of the larger community? What is going on in
our classrooms? What does it mean for the teacher? How are the kids
experiencing it? How can we learn from one another?
It is important that teachers fight the atomization, isolation, and
alienation endemic in teaching. Teachers typically find themselves alone in
classrooms with too many children and too little time. When teachers talk to
other teachers, it is usually a brief encounter at lunch or during a break, and
the talk is rarely about the content and conduct of their work. The isolation
is sometimes defended as a precious and guarded autonomy, but it can easily
turn to disconnection and burnout.
The most successful teacher development projects do not rely on university
people, curriculum specialists, gurus, or outsiders of any kind. Rather, they
are teacher-run, small, informal, and personal. They are teachers talking to
teachers about teaching. Teacher Talk.
These networks are promising because they require no special expertise or
equipment or package. They are built on the needs, experiences, and collective
wisdom of teachers themselves. They are close to the realities of classroom
life and promise, therefore, no pie in the sky. And yet, by focusing on
teachers' own concerns collectively and publicly, they assume that good
teachers are always in search of better teaching practice. They allow for
scrutiny, self-reflection, criticism, and support in the difficult task of
becoming outstanding teachers.
The focus of Teacher Talk is curriculum, instruction, and evaluation--the
content and conduct of teaching. This is itself remarkable. School staff
meetings are so dominated by procedure and organization (announcements of
regulations, reports of committees) that a visitor to such a meeting would have
no idea what the enterprise is about. By contrast, Teacher Talk is only about
students and teaching.
Teacher Talk is an initiative for and by teachers and is based on a simple
principle: teaching is intellectual and ethical work, and it requires a
thoughtful, caring person to do it well. Teacher Talk is the beginning of a
professional conversation, a reflective dialogue focused on the lives of
particular students and the opportunities for student success in our
classrooms. It points to important aspects of the teaching enterprise that
teachers can control in significant ways; observing and understanding students
as learners, and creating environments for learning that nurture and challenge
the wide range of students in any classroom.
The message of Teacher Talk is that the people with the problems are also the
people with the solutions, and that only the self-activity of teachers can, in
the end, improve teaching in any fundamental or sustained way. Teacher Talk
unlocks the tacit knowledge of teachers, makes that knowledge public and
shared, and therefore subject to deliberate and thoughtful change. Teacher
Talk is a form of voluntary peer staff development and can be conceived as
teacher action research, formal teacher reflection, sustained appreciative
inquiry.
We hear a lot these days about accountability. Teacher Talk strives for
lateral accountability--peer accountability--rather than the sort and punish
top-down accountability that has been a proven failure for too long. Teacher
Talk aims at professional development leading to whole-school change. It is
not a model of nibbling around the margins of the school through pulling out a
few like-minded teachers. Teacher Talk is a potential activity for every
teacher.
Teacher Talk is more than talk--it is a way for teachers to collaborate, to
support each other, to push each other as teachers. In short, Teacher Talk
aims to build a professional community.
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About the Author: William Ayers is Professor of Education and Senior
University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and author of To
Teach (Teachers' College Press) and A Kind and Just Parent
http://aryakinan.blogspot.com
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