Is the Talk About Teaching or Learning?
Or are these inseparable, and this a false dichotomy?
I’ve been reading Kim Scott again—or at least listening—and this time it’s her Just Work. It’s more excellent than I expected, and I was already a fan of Radical Candor. It’s inspiring a lot of reflection, and I’m looking forward to finishing it tomorrow and putting up a short review on my Goodreads. But what I’ll blog about this week is a take on a particular aphorism from Radical Candor:
Radical Candor is measured not at the speaker's mouth, but at the listener's ear; it's not what you say, it's how the other person hears it.
Source: Podcast Season 3, Episode 4: Gauge the Feedback You’re Giving & Getting
I’ve spent the last year and a half as an instructional coach, yet the majority of my time has not been spent in one-to-one coaching, but in a sort of team coaching at the Professional Learning Community (PLC) level. For example, this school year I’m working with around a dozen teacher teams that meet weekly to consider planning, teaching and learning. The teams could be as small as one teacher, one administrator, and myself, or as large as three or four teachers, two or three support staff, and at least one leader.
We’ve tried quite a few approaches to management of these team meetings—this teacher collaborative discourse. I’ve got a lot of admiration for the work of Solution Tree around protocols, processes, and cultural aspects of PLCs at work—how a school itself is a Professional Learning Community; that it’s a nonsense to call something a “PLC meeting.”
After the first year of instructional coaching, we brainstormed some opportunities for improvement with the coaches’ involvement in PLCs. We revisited lots of the Solution Tree resources, listened to Anthony Muhammad, Mike Mattos, and the like, and worked with leadership both at the district and school levels to refine our approach to this teacher collaborative time. One goal was to increase awareness and use of the four PLC questions:
Popularized by Rick DuFour, the four critical questions of a PLC include:
What do we want all students to know and be able to do?
How will we know if they learn it?
How will we respond when some students do not learn?
How will we extend the learning for students who are already proficient?
Source: Personalize Learning and Build Agency By Using the 4 PLC Questions
Another related objective was to maximize opportunities to review actual artifacts of student learning during collaborative time—during these “PLCs”. In order to do so, we rearranged and revisited our meeting agendas, had some site-level PL for teacher leaders, and looked at the PLC meeting sequence throughout the year as a sort of scope & sequence with different meetings having different purposes or agenda items.
Since I’m in a dozen plus teacher collaborative meetings every week, I have lots of opportunities to observe educator discourse and dialogue. As Adam Lefstein has put it: “talk about teaching is asynchronous with the practice of teaching” (Lefstein et al., 2020). There are so many opportunities or invitations to speak more about interpretations of what happened in classrooms rather than realities of what happened; this strikes me as somewhat related to Jim Knight’s push for the first step of coaching being “getting a clear picture of reality.”
There are so many unclear pictures of reality in teacher collaborative discourse. Thus, revisiting Kim Scott’s aphorism above: “Radical Candor is measured not at the speaker's mouth, but at the listener's ear,” I sketched out a similar frame about teaching and learning discourse:
Immediately, I reflected on this phrasing and would now refine it to say: “Education is measured not at the teaching, but at the learning.” Again, with so many invitations to speak more about the teaching than the learning, it does not surprise me that lots of teacher collaborative discourse focuses on teaching (it strikes me now that it’s not called “learning collaborative discourse,” but that seems an intriguing frame).
I encounter this teaching-centric discourse most often in dialogue or debate about use of instructional materials or curricula. Many times the case is made for teacher autonomy, or the experience of the teacher—the demands of planning, the exercise (or not) of creativity, the ability to respond or improvise, the management of learners and the learning environment—is centered rather than the learning of the student or the achievement of the learner. One might be started at how little the actual work, or artifacts of student learning, are discussed in teacher collaborative discourse.
This inspires a few questions for me:
Perhaps I’ll frame some future research around the questions: How much of teacher collaborative discourse is about teaching? How much of teacher collaborative discourse is about learning? How do we know? Does this proposed ‘ratio’ of teaching-centered and student-centered talk present any indication of student achievement or the efficacy of the teacher team or the teacher collaborative discourse? I’m curious to know what you think! Drop a comment or send me your thoughts.