Pedagogy Learning Journal

My Executive Self – Hubris Ready for the Fall
CEO to Unemployed
January 10th, 2007


My Reasons for Undertaking Teacher Training
S. J. Stoneham 06.03.07

After Week 1 (9th March, 2007)

I have already been teaching for a long time. My teaching began as a University Tutor in Sydney University English faculty in 1975. I relied on my intuition and my appreciation of all the fine teachers who had taught me. I wanted to set the world of teaching on fire. I had not applied for the Tutorship but was rung by Professor Wilkes unsolicited. He thought I would be a good teacher.

Perhaps Professor Wilkes had noticed my intellectual curiosity and my passion to see an idea through to its conclusion. I was certainly not the best student in my honours Year.

When my Tutorship ended its limited tenure after four years, an Associate Professor asked me if I would like to teach at Ascham. I fell into the job, and at the age of 27, I found myself teaching girls from the ages of 12 to 18. I both prospered and failed. I was torn apart by a Year 11 class, and walked out of one class in despair. I was left to work out my own solutions, and within a short time, I was rarely thrown off task by a fractious class and had gained a leading reputation as one of the best teachers at the school.

Promoted early to Head of Department (aged 34); Deputy Head (35) and Acting Headmaster (35), I had achieved recognition because I could win the hearts and minds of students and could organise systems. I had done all this through the personality skills I had been born with and through intuition…and chance.

One of my most difficult jobs was to accredit a new developing independent school – and I was in charge of the Board of Studies inspection process year in year out. No one had taught me to program, though I realise that the Dalton plan from Ascham had been a useful hands-on model.

In 1984 I went on teacher exchange to Milton Academy in Boston – where classes were just four per week with no more than 15 students seated around a huge wooden oval table. Faculty meetings were based on staff reading latest books and presenting teaching plans. I have never encountered such enlightened faculty meetings subsequently. Faculty meetings in schools mostly focus on “administrivia”.

I taught at Sydney Grammar School – where one was expected to succeed as a teacher or be removed. There was no such thing as failure – at least in public. I taught at Marlborough College in the UK, helping the English to bring in outcomes education and portfolio assessment. I was offered the Head of English role there, but took instead a Director of Curriculum/Deputy Principalship at a performing arts school in Surrey. There I created a timetable through a computer program that interwove a dance program and an academic program over six days. Once again, I learnt to do this self-taught.

Returning to Australia in 1996, I became a Principal/Director of a Business College for international students, and learnt to cope through the usual self-instruction. A year and a half later I was Dean of Studies at Cranbrook, putting this famous (infamous of late) school through accreditation and organising professional development and staff appraisal. While at Cranbrook, finding myself in charge of an acceleration program, I did some “educational” study for the first time with Dr Miraca Gross, and gained a High Distinction in the demanding Certificate of Gifted Education (UNSW). I enrolled to work with Dr Gross on a PhD in that area (probably the area Gardner flirts with as “sexual” intelligence) but realised I had no time to do justice to the longitudinal survey I had chosen. But at UNSW I discovered the pleasure of being a university student – something I had not felt as an undergraduate.

At Emanuel School, battling to save a school that was losing students and facing bankruptcy, I found myself setting academic policy, and engaged in implementing a laptop computer student program. I was considered an expert by all, yet my expertise was founded on shaky ground. With the arrival of the NSW Institute of Teachers, even though I was technically “accredited” as a teacher, my feet of clay in terms of teacher training became a worry to me – though, it seemed not to worry others. Ironically, I had been in charge of new teacher induction for over a decade and was trusted by experienced teachers to carry out their appraisals using a model I had developed.

And then came the pièce de résistance in the set of circumstances leading me to teacher training. In January 2007, I took over as the CEO of a group of colleges training overseas students. After three days at the helm, my college closed through insolvency and I was without a job.

In one sense, this was a good time to do some study. My experience in education was begging me to evaluate what I had been doing instinctively. At the same time I started up my educational consultancy company, and amazingly gained some work – in teacher appraisal at a top boys’ school in Perth.

From early readings (Costa and Kallick) I realised that experience had shown me owning 15 of the 16 “Habits of the Mind" that made for success – all through good luck rather than intention. Perhaps, I still had work to do on “managing impulsivity” (habit 3). With Hattie, my teaching experience had taught me that teachers can make a difference and that teacher feedback on student effort was the crucial differentiating factor. But Margaret Wheatley’s article on the culture of blame and aggression that dominated organizations and thus too schools was the article that pinpointed the reason I had chosen to undertake teacher training. I was at a stage in my career where I realised that I wanted “humility, curiosity and a willingness to listen”. The more I was acknowledged as successful, the more I felt lacking expertise – the more uncertain about what it was I could do successfully. Fate had humbled me with my three days as a Chief Executive Office before becoming unemployed in my fifties – formidable, as the French would say.

I come to my Graduate Diploma of Education at Notre Dame with a willingness to listen to others, a curiosity to test ideas, and a profound sense of humility. I have sat in the Notre Dame chapel on my own already on several occasions. I am a small cog in the bigger scheme of things.

If I have a talent for teaching it is in my contagious enthusiasm. I have been able to bring out the beautiful simplicity that lurks beneath complex ideas, but then also to show a simple idea in all its complexity – like a jazz chord with subtle tensions and nuance. John Hattie (2003) talks about this as teachers “who can identify essential representations of their subject” – but I hate his word “representations”. It obfuscates.

I like to give students the sense that I know they can achieve. Benjamin Zander in The Art of Possibility (Penguin Books Australia 2002) talks of “giving them all an A” before they have even begun. This strategy is part of a self-fulfilling prophecy – and they can all be smart, because as Costa and Kallick say, “Intelliegence can be taught and learned”. In my Week 2 reading for this course on behaviourist approaches from Fetherston’s book Becoming an Effective Teacher, I discovered that Bandura coins this “self-efficacy”. Self-efficacy is the premise that students’ “ability to learn is…partly a result of what they come to believe about their own learning” (p. 116). I have always told my students that if someone else can do something, then their attitude should be that they can do it – a “can do” mentality.

After Week 2 (19th March, 2007)

In my reading of Chapters 5-7 from the Fetherston text, I realise that my teaching combines aspects of behaviourist, cognitive and constructionist approaches. This is not surprising as real world experience usually comes at a problem from a multi-strategy attack. I realise that my last sentence implied that teaching was a “problem”. Furthermore, the verb “attack” implied teaching as a battle zone. In one sense, the teacher is faced with overwhelming odds at times. He has to feel good about his own teaching. He has to maintain stamina on a daily basis and deal with personal challenges from students – because essentially teaching and learning involves the interaction between real, individual people and that involves challenge and sometimes even ambush. One has to be a strong individual to be an effective teacher.

On the subject of individual strength, the lecturer for this course, Tony McArthur, asked his students to watch films about teachers in schools and to comment on those teachers’ particular weaknesses or temptations expressed through the films. While I did not watch these films (naughty student), though certainly I had seen The Devil’s Playground when it was first made, I could relate these weaknesses or temptations to my own career as a teacher. I was tempted by professional rivalry. I wanted to be the best teacher and I wanted students to say that. My admiration for the skill of another teacher was impaired by my jealousy and fear that perhaps he/she was a better teacher. Ego is always a problem. I like to “perform” in class and to be the star of the classroom. I realise that this can inhibit the more outgoing students by setting the classroom agenda too centrally and thus controlling knowledge and their stardom. A clever student’s comment off my agenda for the lesson could be irritating to me rather than seen as an opportunity to explore a relevant but unplanned aspect of the lesson’s topic. I have tried to be less egocentric in my teaching. The goal must be to have the students shine more brightly than the teacher.

After reading Fetherston, I realise that I am a behaviourist in that I initially began a Diploma of Education at Armidale in 1978 when behaviourism was the given approach. My “can do” approach seeks to modify unsuccessful student behaviour on tasks and change it to successful student behaviour on these tasks. This is true whether the class be a group of academic strugglers or a gifted accelerated class. The goal is the same though the strategies will flex depending on the context. Demystifying a complex task by breaking it down to do-able smaller tasks models successful behaviour and through modelling encourages adoption of a successful method by the students. Rewards are given through teacher praise and good marks on frequent tasks: with the assumption that these tasks allow demonstration of mastery of learning. The frequency of “homework” is crucial because of Behaviourism’s view of “the importance of practice” (Fetherston p.118). My academic programming per Unit of Work is meticulous and electronic. My teaching programs are written in essay style so as to model essay writing and e-mailed to the students to provide a map of where to and a study resource after the fact.

I am a cognitivist in that I break-down big tasks into smaller achievable tasks more readily dealt with by working memory, and constantly make connections to other information already in the students’ long-term memory (Fetherston p.131). I use personal anecdote to grab attention and strive for innovative ways to introduce concepts – thus making an impression and fast-tracking memory retention. I prize the development of meta-cognition in students dealing with umbrella concepts asking students to think about not only their opinions but why the opinions of other students differ. Scaffolding is crucial and is designed into a structured learning environment where focus is not quickly lost. Having introduced a student laptop computer program in my last school, I have seen the importance of computers in meta-cognition since they allow organization of data and efficient later retrieval. Mind-mapping software helps linkage of new information to information already assimilated.

I cannot help but be a constructivist teaching the current NSW English syllabuses where post-modernist theory reigns. The English syllabus understands a text as a medium whereby meaning is constructed in tandem between a composer and a responder. This is the very stuff of a constructivist approach to knowledge, where knowledge is not absolute but relative to context. Meaning is either the construct of the individual learner responding to the stimulus presented by the teacher (à la Piaget) or the construct of groups of learners bouncing ideas off one another (à la Vygotsky). However, Radical Constuctivism seems like nihilism and of little use in the classroom because of its tendency to complete relativism. I also remain wary of group work for all the reasons that Fetherston highlights (from p. 162). It can take an inordinate amount of time. It can endanger class focus and cause behaviour management challenges. Groups can tend to homogenise ideas, inhibiting innovative individual outside-the-square thinking by individuals who are badgered along a middle way by a group's democracy and perhaps medocrity. Schools at their worst often seek the individual student to fit in even in thinking and can quash individual eccentricity. Great ideas come from individual eccentricity.

Most refreshing was to read the report “from the Educational Excellence network to its Education Policy Committee and the American People” (August 1996) where Finn and Ravitch resurrect the “Instructivist” approach. This report talks of the prominence of constructivist dogma in teaching where the notion of a “teacher-directed” lesson is something of a dirty word. They quote surveys where the teacher-directed approach was proven to be a more effective method when intelligently driven. It is refreshing to read a statement “that the teacher knows something that the children need to learn” (p. 6). I never dreamt of becoming a wonderful “facilitator” as a career option – the word is too much like “facile”. The great teachers I met certainly knew something I wanted to know and they could show me directly and quickly. But more of this later. Finn and Ravitch talk of the need for a “balanced approach” – the multi-strategy approach to teaching I talk about earlier. In this Graduate Diploma of Education, there are a group of superb teachers. The instructivist approach dominates as a teaching style, varied by behaviourist, cognitivist and constructivist approaches – a balanced approach.

Thoughts on Howard Gardner based on two downloaded articles from Tony McArthur’s Blog site

Gardner’s is an idealistic and charitable approach to humankind. It attacks the mean-minded classification by psychometric tests of people into a human hierarchy based on general intelligence. Gardner claims that the Multiple Intelligence theory is based empirically on the study of gifted individuals and stroke victims, but the flexibility of his definition of intelligence allows a dangerous proliferation of new intelligences as time goes by. It seems very like pseudo-science.

Gardner himself is worried about the misconceptions surrounding his theory and is perturbed by the interchange of “leaning styles” with “multiple intelligence”. These are not the same things. He is uncertain as to the theory of Multiple Intelligences educational application, and he has been an observer of educators as they have tried to put his theory into action in schools.

In his 1998 Scientific American article, Gardner lists the intelligences as:

1. linguistic;
2. logical-mathematical;
3. musical;
4. spatial;
5. bodily-kinesthetic;
6. interpersonal;
7. interpersonal;
8. naturalist;
9. existential….the two last being added later.

His definition of an intelligence is “a psychological potential to process information so as to solve problems or to fashion products that are valued in at least one cultural context” (p.3). The cultural context part makes us think of Vygotsky.

It is a charitable thing to allow schools to see “that children are smart in different kinds of ways” (p. 6), and it is almost utopian in that the implication of his theory is to ask schools to find different ways of reaching students who are not already responding to conventional teaching strategies (that horrible term “pedagogy”). It is little wonder that Gardner is the favourite of Special Education units in schools.

It is interesting that in this Scientific American article Gardner is worried about his theory being used for values-based ends and social engineering (p. 8). That people could be said to have an emotional intelligence does not mean that schools should develop individuals who care for one another….but as I write this, I realise the oddness of this statement. Schools are funded by governments and these governments have a social basis. The fundamental social principle is that individuals should care for one another – a desired end.