In my blog about Changing the Pedagogy of the Middle East, I tried to express my great frustration at the efforts being made to improve our teaching and learning in the region.
I dislike the way that some educators bring to the region a ‘fashionable pedagogy’ that is not even supported by evidence in the west. Take the example of learning styles. Does it really take me to remind these educators that learning style has no foundation in research. And it would probably be better to teach by actively encouraging children to work at the ‘styles’ they don’t have, rather than to feed them with the one (allegedly) they have already got. That would better prepare them for life where, brutally, simply, wonderfully, we have to learn in different contexts in different ways.
I could go on but, then, this will not be a blog but a rant.
I also dislike the disdain with which some western educators treat the lesson founded on direct teaching. Again, wake up! The western research base in support of direct teaching is immense. The issue is, don’t use it all the time. Equally, for goodness sake, don’t look down on it and don’t leave it out.
OK, OK. Stop the rant before it runs on. What do I like?
Well, it is going to take time and collective effort, among people who work in Middle Eastern classrooms, to articulate the improvements that suit our region (and with its varied contexts). So my vehicle for discussion is going to be “baby steps”.
Baby Step 1. It is better to recognise that our first goal is not to turn the Teacher into the Guide. It is to turn the teacher into an Adaptive Teacher.
What I mean by this is simply that there is a common (and lazy) western rhetoric that the future of knowledge is such that it will consistently become redundant, so that learning how to learn is more important than what to learn. I prefer to believe that we need both the how and the what. As it happens, so did the Greeks.
Some people, concentrating on the ‘how’, think that, in this century, Teachers will stop being transmitters of knowledge (and advances in communication technologies add to that argument) and ought to become Guides. So, they argue, learn to be a Guide.
No.
For me, the next step for many teachers is to learn to be Adaptive Teachers. If you teach a lesson in the ‘4T’ mode (teacher, talk, text, test), the clever thing is to give your students what is called “Opportunity to Respond” or OTR. It can be five minutes in a 45 minute lesson. It can be all 45 minutes. At this point, I don’t mind. Just get it in there!
Once it is there, you have the prior conditions for more and better Feedback. The Teacher can look to see, what did the OTR show me that the children learned? All, some, none? Different responses for different children?
The Feedback is the prior condition for Adaptive Teaching. A teacher can learn how to use that OTR output to adapt their program, to address the achievements and the progress they see. It takes time but the conditions are in place.
Therefore…
Baby Step 2: Give students the Opportunity to Respond, and remember that early OTRs give you an early chance to adapt your teaching.
The door is open for anyone else out there to suggest their own baby steps. I am going to try to add more and more. There is bags of scope and we don’t need to get it all right, first time.
