This post will be part of an on-going series in the processes involved in becoming a teacher. As a teacher educator over the past 12 or so years, this series will be a sequence of observations and evidence-based practices regarding the process of becoming a teacher and some of the key learnings in that process. My hope in this series, is to provide my students a more considered response to the questions I most often receive and a more structured narrative that supports most of what I lecture about. As many of my students might have realised, my live lectures are mostly unstructured. I speak from the heart about my experience, passion and research regarding the art of learning and teaching. This series supports those rambling lectures with a more structured and research-supported piece of narrative writing that adds depth to those lectures.
The first post in the series is possibly the most un-intuitive: what I call the imperative process of unlearning. One of the first things I tell pre-service teachers is that much of the process of their university education in learning to be a teacher is to first un-learn everything they think they know about teaching. Many of them look at me as if I have three heads, but I persevere. I implore them to think about their 13 years of formal education, what they liked, what they disliked, what they found effective, what they found ineffective and then put it out of their mind. This is easier said than done, but, in my opinion, one of the first things they have to accept if they are going to be impactful teachers of the future.
Far too many pre-service teachers, because they’ve been school students and watched teachers work for 13 years, think they understand the nature of teachers’ work and are therefore prepared for the rigours of the classroom; if only it were that simple. In no other profession I can think of, does the neophyte have so much observatory time to base their practice on. Sure, we’ve all walked into a bank or into a doctor’s office and watched those people work, but I can’t think of another profession where an individual has spent approximately 15,000 hours watching someone else work. Think about this: from kindergarten through to year 12, a student has spent approximately 6hrs a day, 5 days/wk for 40wks per year watching a teacher work. Thus, it stands to reason that when they enter my lecture theatre on their first day of their freshman year of university in a teacher education program that they come with a wealth of knowledge on what it means to be a teacher: this is a problem.
The first and easiest challenge to rectify is that what is seen in the classroom is the manifestation of the work that occurs outside the classroom. Students come to understand this very quickly. However, the slower-burn learning and what many students, unfortunately, never figure out is the other part of the problem: that the experience they had in school isn’t the same experience that most students have. I’ve written previously about the number of students who go on to tertiary education and don’t finish (70% of the population). If one were to take from that those who were so enamoured by their schooling that they want to go into teaching themselves, we have a self-selecting population of people who had positive schooling experiences who want to be teachers – a minute subset of the overall population. What happens when a small self-selecting subset of the population of mostly good students with mostly positive schooling experiences become teachers and base their own practice on that experience…. Disaster!
The problem is not that we don’t want smart teachers who were good in school, the problem is that if they base their practice on their own experience they won’t reach the majority of students, which creates a cyclical approach where students get left behind by teachers who cannot understand their experiences of school. Thus, what we need are smart pre-service teacher who recognise that their own experience of school and their likes and dislikes do not and should not manifest in their own practice – they need to unlearn their schooling experience.
The un-learning process of what non-educators think teachers do is an important part of becoming a successful teacher. However, it is also understanding that the most important aspect of the process of teaching is not relaying content to passive learners, but rather making that content relevant to those learners: in other words, making it purposeful in the context of the student’s life. One of the best ways I’ve gotten students to understand this is when they have a practical student-teacher experience in a school in a very different area to the one they grew up in. For universal context: the Sydney-based student from the northern beaches goes out to south-western Sydney, to a school with a high EAL/D (English as an additional language or dialect), low SES (socioeconomic status) for 5-10 weeks and comes back with a whole new perspective on what school is and how different it is to their own context. Or the white, middle-class pre-service teacher from Long Island, New York, being sent to a mostly black neighbourhood in Brooklyn to teach. It gives you a whole new perspective on teaching and what it means to teach and to be a teacher of students whose experiences do not resonate with your experiences.
These aren’t even the most extreme examples. I run service-learning trips to Tenali India, (check out our project here) and have previously run these trips to Kenya (check it out here), where we bring students from Sydney to volunteer at schools in disadvantaged parts of the world so that they can experience the educational process in a different context – it’s all about those students un-learning their own experiences and gaining an appreciation for what it means to be a teacher. These experiences reinforce the need to learn the art and science of teaching and how teaching as a profession necessitates a body of knowledge that can be adapted and adaptable to given circumstances.
If maximising the potential of every student is your goal, as it is mine, then the process of learning to be a teacher should be predicated on the idea of un-learning what we think we know about learning and teaching in a school context and what is means to be a teacher. Only then can we focus on evidence-based practices that bring about real results.
Maximising Student Potential 
Well considered piece dr sean. the idea that we have watched teachers do their work, usually pretty poorly, for so many hours, it is impossible to unpick that learning and really be discerning, deliberate, creative and consider a divergent approach to what we have seen. in fact its almost impossible. it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle of mediocrity. the fact that you are challenging your students to ‘de-school’ and ‘un-school’ is fantastic and absolutely essential. it is also incredibly hard for your/our students. who else is asked to forget everything they know about their perceptions of a profession so that they can be at the forefront of change to that system. understanding that the system is in dire need of a new approach is an important starting point. as your mate and mine Sugata Mitra says, ‘the system isn’t broken, it’s just obsolete’ or as Sir Ken used to say ‘It’s no longer fit for purpose’. Our teachers need to be encouraged to think divergently, to challenge the status quo, to learn about the history of education, to explore progressive approaches to education locally and internationally and to become political in order to want to change the system that has served them so well. as Peter Hutton says in his TED talk ‘What if students controlled their own learning?’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMxqEkg3wQ0, schools really only productively serve the high achieving 30% and they are the ones who become teachers and the merry-go-round of the self-supporting education system continues. looking forward to your next instalment.
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