A Framework for Professional Learning: Bruce Bearisto at TEDxWestVancouverED

well here we are the end of a day that been pretty exciting pretty unusual pretty challenging we've heard some dramatic things some moving things some challenging things we've seen some opportunities and now it comes time to ask the big questions so what and now what does this mean anything is this sound and fury or does it mean something well the excitement of today be overwhelmed by the tyranny of the urgent and the lore of the familiar on Monday will it fade into memory that's completely up to you that's your job you now become TEDx West Vancouver you're the future if there is one of this experience no pressure on you you see I think Craig thought I would summarize but I don't have any such intention each of us heard a different thing today everything resonated with your own unique experience now you need to figure out what to do with that I do have some advice don't try to do it alone find a friend do it in a group you know there's a growing awareness that the best way for teachers to learn as individuals and to innovate and make a difference is to work in groups professional learning communities or whatever other term you want to apply them the collaborative work of people together or their teachers or others is the most important that effective way to get things done and the most important way to make sure that opportunities like this do not get lost it's always easier to persist and to dream and to do something when you work with other people the topic of those conversations is allowable to be teaching and learning in some form so I want to start my remarks by asking you a question what's teaching surely you can answer this question most of you are teachers shouldn't take you very long do you have an elevator pitch I don't and I've thought about this a lot people ask me we're a teacher so what makes you a teacher how come you're a teacher is prove it well I have a card in my wallet you know I have a degree I ever credentials yeah but what's teaching see when you thought about teaching a lot of people say well anybody can teach like if you understand something you explain it to everybody else and that you have taught them and their story but of course that's not teaching that's telling teaching isn't telling well then what is it today I'm going to share with you what I call a professional framework which I hope can help you to answer that question this framework isn't the holy grail of teaching frameworks it's just an idea that I use and I didn't invent it I have adopted it from a long history of experience with the critical thinking consortium and there's a piece of it that I don't have a chance to explain to you that I got after thinking about what Daniel pink has to say about motivation how that might apply in education but I'm going to talk about a part of it today the reason I'm going to do that is not because I want you to use it or to adopt it or to think that it's just a fantastic model it's because I want to illustrate why it's important to have a model you can get your own if you google around teaching framework on the internet you'll find a gazillion models right Danielson has a model that ASCD promotes pretty heavily the Ontario College of Teachers are the thing that's even called a teaching teacher learning framework so if you can find something that works for you use it and if you want to take what I've got feel free if you want to modify it modify it but what's important is that you have a conceptual model so as you have a way of explaining to others what you're doing and why you're doing it that way so you can think about it more clearly and so you can communicate with others better so that when you work in a collaborative group your conversations don't pass each other like ships in the night we use a lot of words that we don't define engage teach achieve until we give them concrete definition and share the underlying assumptions we may not be communicating at all so let's take a look here it is and all of its glory I haven't got time to explain although I am gonna take 36 minutes I didn't explain that too very good but even that wouldn't eat me the time so what I'm going to do is concentrate on the foundational piece the cornerstones I'm going to call them of pedagogy of a teacher's practice now these are familiar words here but I'm gonna take the time to briefly talk about them because I just explained the importance of being explicit with your meanings relationships we all know this is the cornerstone on the starting point you have to form an appropriate relationship with students or anything else you do accounts for not now sometimes this is easy in fact it's a pure delight but sometimes it's hard some students don't come easily to relationship they withdraw they're reluctant perhaps they don't find school easy or perhaps they have a very specific learning challenge or perhaps they're shy it's as perhaps that's their personality you have to reach out actively my door is open is an excuse for not doing something you have to reach out actively and establish those relationships some kids are not withdraw and some kids are oppositional some kids are flat-out obnoxious some people's behavior is completely unacceptable you have to make relationships with them too you have to look past the behavior to the person and reach out to the human being and find a way to relate to them as an adult to a youth as a teacher to a student to create a safe supportive and caring environment where learning is possible this is a great big job it's terribly sophisticated you will never be good enough at it and you'll never finish learning how to do it and much of what we've heard today caused me to rethink and consider all sorts of things about the relationships how they are formed what they mean and what to do when they go wrong next cornerstone is resources now you might think immediately have buildings and so on of computers and dictionaries but those things are largely beyond your control except of course the way you set up your classroom which carries within it all sorts of messages but I'm thinking particularly here of social and intellectual resources teaching involves giving students social and intellectual resources you cannot assume that students come to your room ready-made and fully competent they have to learn how to get along with each other learn how to collaborate they have to learn to get over their differences how to disagree agreeably you have to create the culture of your classroom by first imparting the skills that are necessary to create that culture and you need to give students intellectual resources so that they can be successful in their learning this may include simple things like setting a goal making a plan it may include more complex things like maintaining an open mind making a valid decision it may involve critical thinking there is a long host of intellectual capacities that don't find their way into the curriculum in any explicit way but that are completely essential to a student's success you are the one responsible for helping them to develop those you can't assume they should have come with them or their parents are going to do it the third quadrant is instruction now when we talk about teaching this is where everybody's mind goes immediately and that's fine there's a lot in this quadrant everything from the you know the strategic level of curriculum development and unit planning down to the tactical level of day-to-day practice asking good open-ended questions knowing how to respond when things happen in your classroom using graphic organizers organizing a class discussion you'll never get that mastered either and but the more tricks of the trade that you learn the greater your repertoire the better it is but instruction is not teaching anymore than teaching is telling instruction is a piece of teaching it means nothing if the other three quadrants aren't full so by all means spend lots of time talking about that but don't get lost in instruction the fourth quadrant is guidance now the first thing that we have to know when we go into a classroom is that we are an adult with children there is an enormous imbalance of power and you carry all the responsibility you are in loco parentis and the first kind of guidance that you have to give is social-emotional it's supportive and encouraging but you also have to give intellectual guidance feedback and this should be continuous and embedded in your instruction it's not sending home an interim now and then it's all the time it's the way that you interact and the reason that you interact with students is to give the feedback to figure out what they're thinking and why they're thinking it and how they're thinking it and provides some adult guidance and feedback that will help them to continue to progress to a better so these are the four cornerstones I think of an answer to the question what does a teacher do at least those are my cornerstones now you'll notice that there are some things not here some things that affect learning what about all of a student's personal characteristics their family life the community in the culture they live in those are all important with the focus of this model is what you do what you do as an agent of learning - for and with your students many other things impact this and you need to be aware of them but the reason you're aware of them is so you can adjust your behavior to take account of them teaching is like sailing in some way you set out with a plan and some skills and a boat and you want to get somewhere as soon as you set out the wind changes in the currents change and now you have to adjust you have to have different tack and tactic well that's what teachers do you don't know what to do till you meet the students you don't know what to do next until you've done the first thing you continuously adjust to your understanding of all those other important circumstances in order to get to where you need to get to you'll also find that the word student is not on here anywhere that might offend you at first but this is about you it's about what you do student is embedded in every one of these corners all of these things are being done with students so how would we know if we were succeeding at this thing that we begin to clarify in our own mind is teaching so that we can think more clearly about it and so that we can talk to other people more incisively about it how would we know when we had accomplished it surviving till June without major calamity getting many presents at Christmas what tells you that you are teaching how do you know when you are succeeding well the answer that we like to give to that ICM one click off the answer that we like to give to that is of course achievement if the students learn doing well I'm teaching well that's nice that's important but let's not imagine that kids learn because you taught kids learn for lots of reasons some kids learn brilliantly if you just don't get in their way and then to imagine that you're a great teacher because you had the good fortune of meeting of them is a little no it feels good but it's slightly delusional on the other hand some kids do not achieve but you may have worked brilliantly and and heroically and done actually a wonderful job can you be satisfied that they haven't learned can you say well I taught but they didn't learn you know probably one of the stupidest things I've ever heard is you can take a horse to water but you can't make it drink there's no place for that kind of thinking and what we do so achievement is the indicator that we have been successful but it's it's fraught with difficulty and in fact there's another problem because if Minh is how you know that you're teaching then you're liable to teach to the achievement teach to the test to narrow your objectives to those few countable and demonstrable outcomes which are the thin edge of indicators of the richness of the achievement that we really intend in the middle of the 90s UNESCO looked forward to what children would need to know to thrive in this world and actually to save us from the directions that we're heading and they described new directions for education in terms of four pillars learning to know learning to do learning to be and learning to live together these became known as 21st century learning objectives because that was the title of their report and they have subsequently been morphed and changed by many people and they show up here as the seven seas or in British Columbia now as the five competencies communication and collaboration critical thinking and creative thinking personal and social responsibility even if we define achievement in these very broad and expanded ways which we must we can't really aim for that we have to go upstream from what we hope for because we plant our seeds before this tree flowers so what's upstream from achievement well of course it's learning so our job is to enhance learning so that achievement will follow naturally an achievement doesn't either celebrator acknowledge the full extent of the learning so learning allows us to have the broad target of the big idea but I'm gonna suggest you in my particular frame or thought I don't like to think of learning as the target either I think we have to go a little further upstream from learning now what's upstream from learning what's the necessary precursor to learning it is engagement so for me if I have to answer the question what does it mean to teach if I want to reflect on the meaning of the day if I want to formulate a plan for making they real for giving it consequence by working together with others I'm going to use a framework of what what I mean and what I do and where I can act that has these four cornerstones and aims for the goal of engaging students but engagement needs to be properly understood engagement is not diligent compliance with requirements dutiful completion of tasks to make teachers and parents proud so that they will tell you you are good we like that but it is not engagement its obedience the Canadian educational Association and looking at this issue has labeled that institutional engagement and it has its merits but it's not the goal the goal is intellectual engagement a more genuine internally driven emotional and intellectual commitment to your learning so it allows people to begin to take the driver's seat to take responsibility and to exercise direction over what they're learning this is what we're aiming for so collectively these foundations and that end purpose begin to define for me what I think teaching means and if I were reflecting on today as I will do and as I have been doing during the day I would use this framework to help me maintain a balanced perspective so I didn't get lost in any one quadrant I have to absolutely learn new methods of instruction how do I use a computer for this what's inquiry driven that I also have to think and rethink and constantly hone my ability to form relationships especially the difficult ones I have to learn how to give guidance in a continuous way that can actually be heard and experienced as helpful carrying forward carrying advice as opposed to judgment disguised as kindness and I have to learn how to give the intellectual and social tools to students that they need and to figure out what they are this is very complex work and much of what has been said today gives me many things to think about and it's been this within this framework that I would plan for the future and that I hope that you will plan for the future so that TEDx West Vancouver isn't just a distant memory that echoes into nothing now that's my framework but I'm gonna reiterate that's not the holy grail of frameworks what I'm trying to illustrate is that a framework has value it allows you to retain balance it allows you to remember that Gestalt what we do it allows you to express the complexity of the teaching act in ways that perhaps others can hear and respond to so that you can form communities and partnerships with colleagues and with parents unless we can give voice to what we do unless we can explain it in some reasonably simple compact yet elegant way our ability to connect and to converse is severely limited so please if you don't like this one make up another one but have one maybe you sit down first to negotiate one with people before you set out on the journey of imagining an activity that might flow out of the day now when I showed you this at first there was another layer and I don't have time to talk about it but I'm just gonna mention it this is what you do these are our arenas of action as teachers a way of thinking about how we can have the impact we want to have but ultimately the impact we want to have is way beyond our control it depends upon student response and student response is up to students you can't make somebody think you can't compel or coerce or lure someone into engagement they have to come to engagement you facilitate you encourage you nurture you acknowledge but you cannot make engagement happen so Student Response is the next layer and it's completely beyond our control what are the elements of Student Response that are liable to result in engagement is the subject of layer 2 and I don't have time to talk about it but I'm just going to show it to you and again invite you to think of your own for me again building on Daniel Pink's a notion that motivation arises from purpose mastery and autonomy and using the Canadian Education Association research I'm going to suggest to you that number one students have to see what they're doing as purposeful and significant in their lives they have to find a personal form of connection to this learning that it is either significant in itself or will allow them to do something that is significant the second layer is self-regulation now we talked about self-regulation in BC quite a bit today but our in BC now but we've condensed it down to sensory integration and actually self-regulation is a much bigger issue it deals with your medica of capacities in the forethought and the performance and the afterthought phases of an action cycle students need to develop that ability to carry out their own learning by being managers of it and the third thing is agency there has to be the reality and the perception of an ability to affect the way that their learning is going to go to make certain decisions about what and how they will learn within the constraints of the curriculum of course which is a legally binding document and defines our purposes and also within the realities of classroom life I think those three things are reliable to lead to engagement but none of them can be directly created they are student response as to what you can actually do which is are the cornerstones in the bottom so as we end today I'm going to strongly encourage you not to let this die to find a partner and a friend they need not be here today to talk about what you heard to think about it reflect upon it and as you reflect upon its meaning and plan for a consequence use an intentional overt conceptual framework so that you can begin in your own mind and in talking to others to give understandable meaning to the complex task of teaching which is what we're here for thank you very much thank

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 5,298

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxWestVancouverED, tedx talk, English, tedx, Guidance, ted talks, ted, Instruction, tedx talks, ted talk, Relationships, ted x, Canada

Id: gjA0z6ubzII

Length: 19min 4sec (1144 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 02 2013