This past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend EduCon in Philadelphia, PA. Principal – and friend – Chris Lehmann asked me to participate in the opening panel. Traditionally, the first panel has a set of big picture thinkers around a specific theme. This year, it was human-centered education, appropriate given the ascent of artificial intelligence, social media, and deeper polarization.
Later that night, I started to think about the workshops I’d like to attend the next day. For anyone who has seen me do a presentation at a conference, you may know that I also participate in the conference as well. When I was a full-time classroom teacher, I took advantage of the opportunity to learn from and listen to others. Now that I’m no longer in the classroom, I still want to get a sense of how teachers think about learning and sharing their practices. Yes, my research interests center social science, but I’m also finding the nexus between teacher practice and research.
As it stands, researchers rarely attend the professional development sessions of the teachers they study except when they’re presenting. But that’s another discussion.
For EduCon specifically, I’ve attended the gatherings frequently. Only recently did I finally get why I kept coming back. After re-learning the history of EduCon, participants returned because, for them/us, it was a sort of pedagogical home. In too many of our schooling places, we have an abundance of compliance measures, tiers of bureaucracy, and petty arguments that don’t have real effects on student learning. What if, for a few days, we could create space, specifically a school, where we could develop that vision for a school or, at worst, make better problems? (That’s Chris Lehmann’s phrasing, by the way.)
Policy Considerations for Pedagogical Homes
From a policy standpoint, pundits have argued for decades about the best way to train teachers. We have everything between highly-routinized schools churning out pedagogues, residency programs that focus on cohort experiences, and so-called traditional schools of ed. I say “so-called” because everyone’s experiences vary widely even in that latter model.
Yet, the point I rarely see brought up (unless I do) is what happens once the teacher meets the school building. In this, policymakers put too much blame on schools of education and not enough on what happens when a new teacher has to negotiate what they’ve learned with the culture of the school and system. The teacher may have learned a plethora of pedagogical strategies, but ends up getting hired at a place that’s antagonistic to student inquiry and focuses more on rote pedagogy.
What’s the course of action here? The answer is more complicated than the narrative allows.
For those of us who’ve taught more than two years, we start to consider teaching our profession, not just an interim job. From there, we probably need a few places to refill our cups. There’s a difference between a “pedagogical home” versus a conference, for example. Larger conferences, for example, intend on breadth over depth. They serve as a larger umbrella under a given topic (math, social studies, the future, etc.) rather than an explicit set of shared values.
By pedagogical home, I mean the balance between depth and breadth.
To build a pedagogical home, it means to construct a place temporarily suspended from the normal rigors of schooling. We’re still in times where the numbers game insists that principals and superintendents compete with each other. That dynamic creates an isolation among schools where even teachers next door to each other don’t share best practices sustainably. This also means principals have less resources dedicated to sending teachers out to professional development, instead focusing on teachers only teaching themselves within a building.
But, respectfully, that gets tiresome, too. Fresh thinking requires fresh air, and usually, we go outside to accomplish that. To this day, I still have a small but important set of pedagogical homes, many of which I’ve written about on this platform. For some, it’s that once-a-month PD in the district with colleagues of similar discipline. For others, it’s that city or statewide convening focused on a particular concern. We also have examples of teachers building their professional sustenance in the form of Edcamps, unconferences, and meetups.
And for many of us, there’s always EduColor.
On my way back from EduCon on the Amtrak, I reviewed the dozens of interviews I’ve done with NYC public school teachers and thought about how often teachers ask to control more of their own development. Many of us could use a space to either reimagine their work or see examples of alternative approaches to education. Some veterans could even use a space to be in dialogue with other educators with similar interests in students and communities.
This way of thinking about continuous learning isn’t new, but it’s sorely missing. Centering the human work elevates us all.
Jose, who has 10 more interviews to go …
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JV: It’s only a few months ago that my wife and I were on the Amtrak from NYC to Philadelphia. (Resonance!) But your essay is what speaks to me and of my now retired from former teaching life. I once thought that the staff-room was a place to learn from others – my peers – a sharing of strategies, triumphs (and in a few memorable cases I was right about that – but not overall. There was a reluctance – which became more apparent the longer I taught – to hand over their own secrets of successful teaching – of units of work – novels, drama and poetry – as if they might lose something – some private secret they had themselves all alone figured out. It was not at all collegial – but individual. I relished subject specific (I taught English and History) seminar days – enjoying participating in brain-storming, in developing together outlines for teaching particular units at different age levels (in Australia secondary school is six years from age 12, 13 to age 18. I recall car journeys of up-to-two or three hours with colleagues as we drove across northern NSW to attend English teaching professional meetings – those hours filled with discussion of our classes – the students – our teaching ideas and practice. And later working and teaching in the big city (Sydney) I became a state-wide examiner (marking matriculation English Literature exams) – and as a marker – later a senior marker recognising that this was one of the very best in-servicing places I had ever been – as we discussed then implemented the kinds of answers we were rewarding in our marking – stories of fellow markers and their school contexts. Eventually I took a position as an Education Officer – which meant becoming an expert (don’t laugh – it was something which as a generalist I had to do – all my 30 colleagues in that Dept of Ed. setting were indeed experts – in writing -script etc, in Drama, in primary schooling, in community languages – Lao, Viet-namese, Turkish, Arabic, Italian, etc) – in policy writing – my expertise grew from my interest in culturally diverse Australian literature “addressing” the country’s immigrant/refugee basis – cultural diversity – the experience of EAL (ESL) was not an isolating experience – rather one shared by a sizeable proportion of the population – and then delivering sessions at conferences, in-school development days – researching and writing and so forth – realising that I was not an expert but might have some ideas to share – to validate what others were already thinking, too. At one of my schools when my wife and I moved away from the big city my colleagues told me that the Head teacher had taken their shared ideas and published under his own name without due acknowledgement. He was known – behind his back, naturally, as Bully. But to be with colleagues who share their experiences and successes with those around them – what a joy that is. My many years in Japan were rich and rewarding in that sense of being with others doing their very best to open up doorways for their students in the learning of English – not as formulae of subject-verb-object and tense etc – but as a culturally rich entrée into the rest of the world – for personal or national benefit. (And not only to those countries of native English/anglophone nature – but most of the rest of the world for which English was another significant language.) I know José that your subject domain is mathematics – I think people actually speak mathematics as a kind of lingua franca whether the spoken languages are the same or not – a scientist mate out of India taught me decades ago that some of the most important mathematical concepts (such as “zero”) come from his country. But what I get from your writing on this site is always a sense of you teaching the whole person. I thought – similarly – that though I was “teaching” a novel or a play – what in fact I was teaching was a way of seeing oneself in that poem or in the character in the novel or dramatic play with which one might identify oneself – to find growth – to being the better person. A sharing of stories – my own – of course – as the model – as the basis – for them to do likewise. I admire your passion for teaching the whole person – not just the subject – as I said above – and for your concern for the students – and for the teachers, too – doing their best while enduring anti-educational strictures and critiques imposed upon them by non-educational politicians and bureaucracies. Thank-you.
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Thanks for this. FWIW, yes, I’m known for math, but I probably should have taught social studies given my interest in the world and culture. It might be why I ended up in sociology and education for my doctoral studies. Still. Thanks again!
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