“Group of 6″ Cracks Top 25
Posted: June 22nd, 2012 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 2 Comments »
From the July/August issue of the Atlantic:
Best Ideas for 2012:
Our Annual Guide to Modest Proposals That Can Change The World
“Teacher Boot Camp” is the second idea listed.
The only way the brain learns to handle unpredictable environments is to practice. Before student teachers enter classes, Boston’s Match Teacher Residency program puts them through 100 hours of drills with students and adults acting like slouching, fiddling, back-talking kids. The brain learns to respond to routine misbehavior, so it can focus on the harder work of teaching.
Thanks Amanda Ripley.
So what is our practice like?
Here’s an interview by Breakthrough Collaborative with MTR alum Anjali:
Group of Six (is) where you take turns planning mini 6-minute lesson chunks to deliver to five peers who pretend to be misbehaving students. Your coaches give you tons of feedback on this, from the strength of your voice to your radar in catching misbehavior. During this period, your improvement in authoritative presence is phenomenal. Trust me, that’s not something you can learn out of a book!
Again, the purpose here is to free up a teacher to focus on the stuff that matters — the ideas, content, student questions and responses, the learning — by making response to “small stuff” feel more automatic. I.e., free the brain to process what a kid is asking, or what teacher is explaining, instead of trying to decide if you should say something to the kid you’ve already reminded twice to sit up, or to raise her hand, or whatever.
Simple stuff. This 3-minute video shows an example. This is Veronica, a trainee, handling things reasonably well after lots of practice.
(I realize I need to put up the “before” video too — so you can see what it looks like when it goes awry. Many of you, dear readers, probably recall your own boneheaded responses to small student stuff when you were rookie teachers….)
What you saw:
@ 0:19 student called out, gave them a demerit
@ 0:26 student was slouching, utilized proximity to correct
@ 0:39 asked for all students to write, narrated the positive
@ 1:07 scanned and noticed student was slouching, utilized non-verbal cue to correct
@ 1:14 noticed student mildly hit another student, gave them a demerit
Again, this is not big deal stuff. Our view is that it just adds up. In a big way.
If a rookie teacher processes 3 or 4 very mild student provocations every minute, that’s about 200 small decisions to make while teaching each hour-long lesson. Meanwhile, the veteran teacher processes them automatically.
The quicker you get to automaticity, the easier it is to worry about bigger teacher challenges. Things like: making ideas and knowledge come alive; involving even the reluctant kids; posing better questions, etc.
I agree this is a lovely way to train people — desensitizing to all those little things and giving them a quick, automatic response.
Procedurally, though:
How are the demerits recorded?
What’s the response if there’s a negative response to the demerit or an immediate continuation of the behavior?
A friend used to offer up “volunteer service” hours to his school year students when he taught future teachers during the summers. He’d aim to get at least 5 or 6 (middle school and up) kids in for an hour each week and have each of the teachers practice lessons on them.
The kids were excellent at acting like…kids and they ate it up when they were asked to critique the lessons as well. Turns out they were pretty good at it.
Yep. We do same thing – actually pay the kids. Yes, they like when we pull back the curtain, and of course kids have good evaluative sense of teachers.
1. Demerits in the types of charters who hire our teacher residents: typically recorded on a scrap of paper then entered into a schoolwide database. A few iphone apps now allow you to enter them that way.
In more traditional schools, a teacher typically isn’t rowing in unison with other teachers in the grade….various consequences for the same infraction. So a demerit-giving teacher typically runs her “own” detention or whatever.
2. If escalation, there’s a ladder.
Typically a warning might be followed with a demerit.
A demerit with a second demerit.
Further stuff might be a trip to principal’s office.
All this stuff would additionally create follow-up teacher conversation with kid, possibly phone call with parent.
And again: a more skilled teacher can make judgments more easily on how to handle persistent behavior, partly b/c the kids (correctly) perceive the teacher as strong by her presence/bearing and many other small things — therefore don’t see “making a judgment call” as equal to “likely to be showing weakness,” the way they more typically do with rookie teachers.