A famous and brilliant passage of writing about effective teaching is called, ‘Imagine Three Teachers’.
Written in 1991 by cognitive scientists Scardamalia and Bereiter, the passage is a thought experiment that compares three classroom teachers: Teacher A, Teacher B and Teacher C.
The strength of the passage is that the Teachers appear at first glance to be working the same way when asking groups of children in their classes to produce a media presentation. But they are not.
The authors introduce the teachers:
Teacher A’s goal is to get the students to produce work; this is accomplished by supervising and overseeing the quantity and quality of the work done by the students. The focus is on activities, which could be anything from old-style workbook activities to the trendiest of space-age projects.
Teacher B assumes responsibility for what the students are learning as they carry out their activities. Teacher C does this as well, but with the added objective of continually turning more of the learning process over to the students.
Notice the distinctions. Teacher A focuses on activities. Teacher B focuses on learning but assumes most of the responsibility. Teacher C is doing the same as Teacher B but is trying to turn more over to the students.
The authors explain more of the tangible differences between A and B:
Teacher A’s focus is entirely on the production process and its products —whether the students are engaged, whether everyone is getting fair treatment, and whether they are turning out good pieces of work. Teacher B attends to all of this as well, but Teacher B is also attending to what the students are learning from the experience and is taking steps to ensure that the students are processing content and not just dealing with show.
Teacher C is different again:
To see a difference between Teachers B and C, however, you might need to go back into the history of the media production project. What brought it about in the first place? Was it conceived from the start as a learning activity, or did it emerge from the students’ own knowledge building efforts? In one striking example of a Teacher C classroom, the students had been studying cockroaches and had learned so much from their reading and observation that they wanted to share it with the rest of the school; the production of a video came about to achieve that purpose (Lamon et al., 1997).
The importance of this passage has always been to convey to teachers the key learnings from Cognitive Science, namely that classrooms work better (a) when the focus is on learning, and (b) when teachers skilfully engage the students in taking control of that learning. Activity is not enough. Learning is key. Engagement is massively important.
But, what happens when a virus forces Teachers, A, B and C to work from home?
The answer is that at first we see a lot of Teacher A behaviour. Send assignments home, check they are being scheduled. Check that the assignments are returned. Check they are marked. Send the next lot.
The expert teachers will want to move quickly on to Teacher B behaviour. They will be trying to see into the students’ work at home and focus on learning. Of course, this needs a much more dynamic interaction with teachers scanning, feedback, monitoring, and coming up with interim explanations and quick checks on understanding. To be a Teacher B, these experts are going to need to learn fast how to be fluent and natural in the use of online transactional tools (especially chat, conference and screen sharing).
Where are the teachers who have got to Teacher C behaviour? It is a mistake to think that Teacher C behaviour simply means finding some motivating topics and getting the children researching them for themselves. The real Teacher C at home will have all the focus and talent of Teacher B plus the ability to seize opportunities that deepen the learning.
We don’t yet have enough living examples of Teacher C working from home, with their students at a distance.
Once we get more experience and visibility, we will be able to examine and analyse what is most effective. I am starting with questions about:
- how to use flipped learning – I can see it being very helpful from time to time, where a research task emerges promisingly from other engaging work the students have started. But not all the time, surely, because we know that inquiry methods do not in general have the efficacy of direct instruction.
- how to group students – I wonder how many teachers are using an old classroom trick I was shown, whereby you give to a group of students a common task but tell them you will award everyone the same mark based on the lowest score that anyone achieves on the coming test. This encourages children to teach and practise tests with each other, thereby multiplying the instruction that is going on. I suspect this might create a lot more student-to-student communication between homes. Gold dust.
- how feedback can be multiplied – we have all seen in our lifetime that increasing classroom feedback in all three ways (teacher to student, student to teacher, student to student), and making the exchanges constant in the classroom, boosts teacher effectiveness. But how do we make that the norm when children are working separately and at a distance?
- how differentiation is managed dynamically – it is one thing to send out a different assignment, or to send further explanation and back-up, but how are teachers at a distance learning to adapt the learning experiences once under way?
- how reflection and plenaries are used – a good plenary has been a staple for our Teacher C in class. They fuel the search for that serendipitous moment and activity. How now?
It is a bad sign if our teachers get sidetracked into producing masses of Powerpoint presentations and daily schedules. There is a new pedagogy to be built.
The Art of the Teacher should not be in amateur, local publishing but in creating the best cognitive transaction they can. It is going to be a fascinating time while we see the new pedagogy emerge.
