Wednesday, August 14, 2013

What's Missing from Teacher Training

Let's say you've just hired a shiny new group of instructors for your technical college. The newbies are excellent: top certification in their field, years of doing the work that they're just about to teach, and maybe, if you are lucky, actual teaching experience as an adjunct for you or another college. Congratulations. You've done a good job. Now, what do they need to know in the next couple of weeks?

Well, they need to know how to write a syllabus; they need to know the competencies and objectives of their classes and how to find them; they need to know their way around the school; they need to know internal software and processes; they need to know their colleagues. And, in addition to other "need to knows", they will need to know brain-based education theory (Bloom's Taxonomy is always helpful) just as soon as the HR paperwork is filed.

All that is well and good and important. But one bit of new teacher training (a crucial one in my humble opinion) is often overlooked on most need-to-know lists: the new instructors need to know the theater of teaching. What do I mean by that? I mean the new teachers need to know how to be effective communicators on the stage we call the classroom.

What, you might ask, does theater have to do with the technical college classroom? Sounds a little too liberal arty. And, the androgogg might say, doesn't this go against popular education training? Aren't we trying to move away from the "sage on the stage" and move toward a student-centered classroom? Certainly, but that doesn't dismiss the effectiveness and communicating power of gesture, voice, posture, pace, listening and response: the basics of stagecraft. Preparation, rehearsal, direction, performance, evaluation: all this and more are needed for effective teaching.

I'll admit my theater bias comes from training and performance on the stage in high school, college, and in a little over 20-years of community theater work. But, I also have no doubt that stage training prepared me for my current role in the classroom. Don't take my word for it. Think back to your own experience as a student: what kind of teacher was able to really hold your attention? What kind of teacher excited you, inspired you, made you want to jump up and begin your lab work? It was probably not the teacher (and we've all had these) who read in a sleepy monotone from yellowing 4x6 cards. I would bet your best teachers had a presence that you were not quite able to define: they had either a natural stage presence or one that was backed by training.

Teaching is a performance art whether that "performance" is a lecture, demonstration or discussion. Those who deny that statement are probably not teachers (or at least not very effective ones). An effective teacher is first of all an effective communicator and the basics of effective communications were first developed and refined on the stage. Any instructor, I believe, with even a rudimentary sense and practice of stagecraft, will outshine others who dismiss theatrics as being somehow beneath them.

A master teacher, one who has practiced the theatrics of teaching, possesses an honest, clear, dynamic, individual style that communicates both content and credibility. A master teacher makes each moment in the classroom look easy, effortless, even though that moment has taken hundreds of hours of practice and preparation. Somehow, someway, we need to include a heavy dose of the theater of teaching when we are training our new instructors (a refresher course for old hands wouldn't hurt either).




Thursday, August 8, 2013

Putting Your Billions Where Your Priorities Are

A recent weekend Wall Street Journal featured an essay from Amanda Ripley's new book, "The Smartest Kids in the World -- and How They Got That Way" (2013). Some of the world's smartest kids are trained in South Korea's hagwans-- think of them as tutoring labs on steroids. The WSJ story featured a rather satisfied looking Kim Ki-Hoon, "a rock-star" teaching entrepreneur, called the "Four-Million Dollar Teacher" because of his hagwan business revenue. I really don't have salary-envy. I give him credit for successfully and profitably creating an education business model that works. What worried me in the Ripley essay was the resulting comparison between South Korea and the US.

"In 2012, (Korean) parents spent more than $17-billion on (online hagwan) services. This is more than the $15-billion spent by Americans on video games that year, according to the NPD Group, a research firm."

Gulp. OK, let's try to put this in perspective. Granted American parents may be putting in a lot of time and dollars in their child's education which is not included in this statistic, granted putting money into an effort does not always guarantee success, granted out children have more interests than just school, granted South Korean students many also be buying video games (though I'm not sure when they are going to play them since they have long, long school days in addition to night and weekend hagwan duties), granted Kim Ki-Hoon's hagwans may be a little pricey and each unit of hagwan is more expensive than a single Call to Duty purchase. Granted, granted, granted.

Still. It's a basic concept of economics that when given a free choice, consumers spend their (usually) limited budget on those things that are most important to them. In South Korea, parent's choose their child's education: a $17-billion investment by those parents is hard to ignore. Those parents obviously feel that putting that kind of investment into a generation's education is worth it. So far, according to Ripley, the effort seems to be working:

"Thanks in part to such tutoring services, South Korea has dramatically improved its education system over the past several decades and now routinely outperforms the U.S. Sixty years ago, most South Koreans were illiterate; today, South Korean 15-year-olds rank No. 2 in the work in reading, behind Shanghai. The country now has a 93% high school graduation rate, compared with 77% in the U.S."

I could make some smart comment about spending our billions on high-tech athletic fields rather than in the classroom, but I don't have the heart. This link takes you to the rest of the essay (it's a short read) or buy the book, so, if you are interested, you can read up on where some of the smartest kids is in the world are -- and the parents who helped them along the way.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324635904578639780253571520.html?mod=e2tw