My Learning Journey: Only a Sith Deals in Absolutes

One of the things I had to do for my teacher training was present a "learning journey" at the end of the programme which reflected on how my year of being a student teacher made me a better teacher. I'm reproducing the text of that presentation here:

So, this is mainly going to be about the development of my professional disposition as a teacher. Before I begin, I'd like to mention the behavioural science paper “Why the Unskilled Are Unaware: Further Explorations of (Absent) Self-Insight Among the Incompetent” which notes that people are typically overly optimistic when evaluating the quality of their performance on social and intellectual tasks. In particular, poor performers grossly overestimate their performances because their incompetence deprives them of the skills needed to recognize their deficits. I bring this up because I'm a “lifer”, I went from school to university to this programme, and I assumed that I would not be in for any surprises at all. Boy, was I wrong about that.

So, like the paper mentions, I was overly optimistic about what I thought being a teacher was, because my idea of what a teacher was was a Jedi, from Star Wars, taking in young Padawan learners and honing their craft to use the Force. My first significant moment then, came from the first week of Edcursec classes about lesson plans, and curriculum documents, and that's when I realized that being a teacher is way more like being an office worker or low-level administrator than I ever imagined [show lesson plans made]. You have to be comfortable dealing with paperwork, and that really changed how I look at teaching. I used to think that a teacher's role was predominantly inside a classroom, but it's more preparing for the classroom. This only really struck me when I was on practicum and scripting and, even sometimes, rehearsing lessons.

My first practicum school was Lynfield College which is where I actually went to school, so that was deja vu. Until that point, I hadn't really talked to kids since I was a kid so I had to relearn how to establish relationships. LC has this line in their code of conduct for student teachers about professional distance, and I went way overboard with this. One student saw my ring and asked if I was married or a bachelor, and I told that student “I am an English teacher”. The students learn about you as you learn about them and so over time I did try and learn everyone's name with crazy mnemonics. I also got ATs who had taught me and I really changed my outlook on how they were as teachers. I used to think that teachers had noisy classrooms because they were too nice. Now I know better; now I know that there's an element of chemistry in student-teacher relationships that's necessary for a productive classroom. I'm also more culturally responsive to New Zealand's sports culture- I think kiwis all lose their mind over nothing when it comes to rugby- but I'm much nicer about that now in the classroom and I pretend like I support anyone playing against Australia.

One of the things I did at Lynfield which has a BYOD policy was to improve my skills with e-learning, and that was often by just telling students to switch off their devices. There was an OECD report published recently which shows research which notes that there is no correlation between devices and improved achievement, and I was always seeing students use their tablets to play games or be on Facebook. In my opinion, no one over thirty-five can responsibly conceptualize what a 14-year-old will use a tablet for in a classroom. Students hated that I wouldn't let them use tablets, but it wasn't so bad after a couple of days. It dawned on me how much we shouldn't be using devices constantly.

I also learned that teachers need a level of attention to detail that I didn't think was possible. Ngaire Hoben asked me a quite-cutting question, she asked “did you ever find anything in school hard?” and no I didn't so it was difficult for me to comprehend some students' lack of savvy study skills. One of my handouts for Media Studies had a checklist on how to answer the question, and my AT very sternly told me to put boxes next to the items on the checklist and I thought it would be a massive hassle to re-copy thirty papers but I did, and man, did those boxes come in handy. Students love ticking things off.

My second practicum school was Avondale College and it was definitely there that I really came alive and kicked ass as a teacher. English is a really tough subject to contextualize transference because it's often hard to see how knowing film language is going to come in handy in your job. In my first practicum my attitude was just “you're here for an hour, I'm here for an hour, let's just get do this one hour together”. Now I'm much better at explaining metacognition and how academic qualifications signals to employers that you have the ability to think in certain ways. I think the real problem with my attitude in first practicum was just too narrow. My attitude in a classroom now is simply “you're here. I'm here. Let's do this- together”.

So, I suppose that this all comes down to whether or not I think I'm ready to be a full-time teacher, but only a Sith deals in absolutes. All I will say is that this is the most ready I'm ever going to be. May the force be with you.