Feedback Discussion in PL Course

Freewriting 4 –

Well, it is already Tuesday morning and I am up early ready to reflect on my last meeting at K.

As soon as I arrived, two teachers waited for me and extremely politely apologised for their rude behaviour last time. They admitted that although the materials are interesting, they allowed themselves to disconnect and to make lots of noise. The remarked that they were aware of my frustration towards the end of the lesson. Of course I thanked them but told them that I had already decided to make the lessons far more practical and more active. I explained that I am well aware of the difficulty in coming to a four hour lesson, straight after an exhausting day at school.

Before I began, another of their colleagues from school asked to have a few words with all of the participants. From her look I could see that it wasn’t going to be pleasant. In the end we had the discussion she was waiting for before the break and didn’t open the meeting with it.

The first hour or so of the meeting I did differently – I involved the teachers more and lowered my expectations for the material we would cover. There was a friendly, interested atmposphere in the room. Another thing I did was to tell them my expectations more explicitly: “I expect you to take this rubric as an example and go back to school with it. Find a group of teachers and experience building something similar, for your own students, according to your own needs…”

The discussion that teacher wanted to lead was that the course is boring, that she (and all the others, of course) is interested in practical easy solutions to the problems that she faces in the everyday classroom. Theory doesn’t interest her, she wants to learn very simply and quickly what to do in class that will change her students’ attitude and achievement levels in writing.

Of course there are no simple answers and recipes in teaching writing. Writing, in itself, is a complex process. She spoke the whole time in “the royal we” and I was happy that at least a few others took the opportunity to tell her that they see it differently.

“I haven’t received anything I can take back to my classroom in all the meetings we’ve had” she remarked. Others talked about the value of the course, what they have learned, what they HAVE done in their classrooms and the following results.

I explained that maybe I should have given a “try this in your classroom this week” list at the end of each session. I gave several examples of practices which could (and should) already have been tried in the classroom). I understand that my underlying understanding that the teachers are intelligent and motivated and will certainly sift through the experiences, simulations, models and activities, in order to decide what is suitable for their own classrooms. In reality, at least one of the participants was waiting all this time for me to hand out a recipe book or maybe a hand-full of worksheets. I don’t work that way…

Another issue that needs thinking here is what happens when a teacher holds such narrow understandings of learning?

2 thoughts on “Feedback Discussion in PL Course

  1. It took me years of continual disappointment to realize that there were an awful lot of teachers out there who were very far from being good learners. They may follow instructions well, but they have no interest in examining uncharted territory.

    Over a decade ago a friend wrote a book that used subject matter (the subject will remain anonymous to protect the innocent) to teach the use of Word. He built a whole slew of templates in Word (these were on the diskette that came with the book), with each designed to be used in a particular chapter of the subject matter. In hishtalmut after hishtalmut he tried to make it clear that teachers could amend or change any of the templates to make them usable with any other topic they might want to teach. In a couple of years of these hishtalmuyot no teacher ever used the templates in any way other than the way described in the book.

    Apparently teachers want recipes. If we provide them with them, they’ll be happy. If we ask them to build something on their own, they’ll complain that we’re not teaching them like we’re supposed to.

    And of course there’s no getting away from the distressing question of whether teachers of this sort can help pupils explore, and make sense of, their world.

  2. Hi Yankel,

    Thanks for your response.

    The question is how far are we prepared to go to accomodate the wishes of the vocal teachers who insist of pulling the level of interaction and learning lower?
    I know I have a red line I’m not prepared to pass.

    I wish the motivated teachers who do bring their learning into their classrooms and back would be more vocal.

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