2 What Is Teaching?

Nicholas had never really planned to become a teacher. Indeed, he still didn’t think of himself as one, although all that he did anymore was teach. Nicholas had gotten his education in technology and begun to work for a school, running its technology program. But then, the school had called on Nicholas to teach technology to the students. And before long, he was teaching other subjects, first by filling in for teachers in their absences, and then on his own assignments. Along the way, with the school’s tuition assistance, Nicholas picked up some teaching courses and his teaching certificate. Yet he still didn’t think of himself as a teacher, as much as a curious learner and willing guide. 

Definition

We all think we know what it means to teach. Yet you may find that you have an image of teaching more so than a reasonably precise definition. When you think of teaching, don’t you picture an authoritative figure standing before a class of students, speaking and motioning to gain and hold their attention? If you, like so many others of us, associate teaching with lecturing, pontificating, or otherwise prompting students to learn, then you’re not that far off the track. Teaching, though, need not involve a precise technique such as lecturing to silent but attentive students, while presenting a slide show. Teaching, more broadly and precisely, involves arranging stimuli to help students learn. The stimuli may indeed be a lecture or slide show, but it could instead be a reading, worksheet, problem set, and group project, leading to an exam. Most broadly and precisely, to teach is to influence students in ways that impart the knowledge, skills, and ethics that are the goals of instruction. 

Stimuli

We have much more to define, to better grasp what it means to teach. Yet pause for a moment to think again about the stimuli that teachers arrange to promote learning. As the prior paragraph suggests, teachers commonly use a marvelously wide range of stimuli to induce students to learn, from reading assignments and videos to lectures, note taking, slide shows, worksheets, group work, outlining, rehearsal, and review, and beyond to the quizzes, tests, and exams themselves, which also influence learning. The type, quality, quantity, and arrangement of the stimuli are all important. You can tell because teachers spend so much time developing and implementing them. Yet notice, too, that teaching involves stimuli arranged both before and after the student learns. That is, the teacher presents the instruction, then spurs the student to perform such as on a problem set or exam, and then follows up with consequences either reinforcing or correcting the student’s performance. Teaching, in other words, involves carefully arranging both prior or antecedent stimuli and subsequent consequences or reinforcement, whether positive or negative (corrective). Teaching thus shapes or influences student behavior more so than magically imparting knowledge. Teaching’s ultimate focus is on the learner, not the stimuli. 

Learning

Teaching obviously bears a close relationship to learning, if teaching means to influence students to learn. We need, then, to also define learning. We tend to think of learning as acquiring knowledge, which is fine, but only to a point. Such a limited definition presents teachers with several problems. First, knowledge isn’t exactly a commodity to transfer from teacher to student, like installing a downloadable app. Second, if we conceive of learning as knowledge acquisition, we can’t exactly see when a student acquires it. We need instead to see the student be able to do something after learning. Teachers also need students to acquire certain specific knowledge, not just whatever they pick up along the way. The knowledge-acquisition model of learning is also too limited in not addressing the acquisition of skills and ethics. Teachers often need to impart more than knowledge. They also need students to acquire certain abilities and attitudes. Thus, think of learning instead as a persistent change in behavior in the direction of instructional goals. A student has learned when you can observe them doing what you set about to teach them.

Freedom

Defining teaching as influencing behavior in the direction of instructional goals, and defining learning as persistent behavior according to those instructional goals, highlights the strongly normative quality of teaching. Teachers are do-gooders at the deepest level. Teaching frees students from a sort of slavery, while elevating students into freedom toward the good. When a student learns, the student enters into the truth of the thing learned, embodying it rather than having to think of it and choose it. Learning involves automatizing the thing learned, which means the student no longer needs to consider and choose it over something else. And when the thing learned is true, insofar as teachers do not deliberately deceive but instead teach true things, the learner enters into the truth and thus moves toward the good. Teachers free students of the contingencies of the thing learned. Learning is making natural to the student the truth that the student learns, freeing the student from the constraint or slavery of choice and the negative consequence of failing in making the right discernment and choice. The student becomes good, becomes moral, by learning the truth and thus aligning behavior to the patterns that truth produces. Teaching frees the student from both the choice and the consequence of violating the pattern that the right choice represents. Value your teaching. You are freeing students from the slavery of choice, while helping students embody good.

Theories

You may have already discerned two or three strains of teaching theory in the above discussion. You need not know teaching and learning theories to be a sound instructor. But recognizing the interplay of instructional theories and patterns in your teaching may help you spot some alternative approaches to your instruction that you can deploy to induce greater learning. A later chapter addresses in greater detail how to deploy varying teaching approaches. Those theories or approaches include behaviorism or behavioral psychology, for instance, focusing on altering the stimuli to promote improvements in student behavior. If your teaching keeps getting the same unsatisfactory results, then change what you’re doing to induce the students to do better. Normative learning theory focuses on the enduring intellectual and moral values instruction should hope to produce. Similarly, humanism as a learning theory focuses on the freedom and autonomy that learning should produce. Cognitivism or cognitive psychology addresses the mental structures, schema, or frameworks students should be building through attention, memory, and problem solving. Experiential learning focuses on placing the instruction in its broader utilitarian context. Social learning theory focuses on modeling behavior for students to observe, adopt, and imitate. These are just a few of several more learning theories in use in America’s classrooms. Put more tools in your toolbox, and get accustomed to frequently pulling them out and putting them to good use. 

Terminology

Don’t let the wonkiness of the prior paragraph, with its technical education terminology, put you off. A profession develops and deploys a specialized body of knowledge around the practice in which the professionals engage. Teaching has its own specialized body of knowledge. Schools of education have whole libraries devoted to the education profession. That body of specialized knowledge has its own vocabulary. You may hear keen educators using helpful terms like pedagogy, androgogy, differentiated instruction, adaptive learning, blended learning, personalized learning, learning objectives, synchronous versus asynchronous instruction, flipped classrooms, engagement, taxonomies, benchmarks, formative and summative assessment, criterion-based assessment, normative assessment, fluency, shaping, association, retrieval practice, prototyping, mnemonics, heuristics, metacognition, cognitive load, fixed versus growth mindset, mapping, anchoring, and the zone of proximal development. To be an effective teacher, you don’t need to know all the terminology. But the terminology can give you clues to better discernment and thus to better teaching. 

Teachers

Your teaching can improve as you get a fuller and deeper view of what it means to teach. Your teaching can also improve as you get a fuller and deeper view of what it means to be a teacher. In a sense, we’re all teachers. At one time or another, we all go about with the intention of influencing others’ behavior toward our own perceived goal or a goal set by another. We teach in the home, neighborhood, community, church, and workplace. We teach our children, siblings, friends, co-workers, customers, clients, and patients, and sometimes even our spouse and parents. We teach how to dress, read, reason, recite, write, draw, paint, cook, clean, shop, sew, sing, dance, drive, dig, garden, hammer, saw, drill, and build. We teach the practical and impractical, beautiful and humorous, profound and sublime. We also teach without deliberately assuming the teaching role, intuitively and implicitly in all kinds of settings. Teaching is among the most human, humble, servant-like, and profound of social activities. 

Mindset

Teaching is thus more like an open mindset or attitude than a distinct, discrete, and defined role. We tend to think of a teacher as a star on a stage, in front of rapt students. Yet that’s not always a helpful concept. The focus of teaching shouldn’t be on the teacher but instead on the student. Teaching involves the influence on the student, not the impression and quality of the teacher’s performance. Ask a perceptive teacher how class just went, and the best answer is probably I don’t know. The teacher may feel fine or, conversely, may feel poorly about the teacher’s own performance. The teacher may have felt upbeat and in the flow or, on the other hand, may have felt down and out of sorts. But the true measure of how class just went lies in the persistent change in student behavior that the class just influenced or did not influence. And the evidence of that change may only show up gradually, later, after the student has rehearsed or not rehearsed the knowledge, skills, and attitudes the teacher’s instruction sought to convey. 

Imitation

Teaching almost inevitably produces its own imitation. If the instructor does not care about the instruction’s subject, then neither do the students. If instead the instructor cares passionately about both students and the subject, and the instructor has the discernment to place the instructor, students, and subject in the right relationship to one another, then students should prosper in their learning. At its most authentic, teaching involves opening oneself to the subject’s call and, in doing so, inducing students to do likewise. Stronger teachers do not cover subjects so much as uncover them, showing students how deep and profound is the subject’s call. Effective teachers draw subjects out of their hiding so that students can welcome the subjects into their own souls, as the teacher has already done, in proper order and arrangement. Teaching is thus exhibiting a sort of inspired and courageous vulnerability, for students to imitate as their own becoming. Embrace both the courage and vulnerability that effective teaching requires. 

Learners

We are also all learners, not just teachers but also students. As a teacher, we should find it especially important to remain students of our teaching craft. The teacher who stops learning more about students and instruction may need to retire. If students imitate the approach, stance, and attitude of their admired instructors, then our own approach as teachers should be to model learning. We should avoid in ourselves the fixed and static mindset that we would decry in students, and instead exhibit the growth mindset that we know students must adopt to learn at their full capacity. Don’t see yourself as a finished product, capable of nothing further in your teaching and fearing failure in the attempt. If you do so, then students may do so, too. Instead, keep an open mind for enhancing your instruction through greater discernment of its possibilities. See both you and students as continually capable of so much more, if you could only uncover and discover it. Teaching and learning go hand in hand, not just between teacher and student but also within the teacher who is also a student. 

Reflection

How do you define teaching? How do you define learning? What teaching and learning theories do you see influencing your understanding of what it means to teach and learn? Can you move between teaching theories, to differentiate and sensitize your instruction? Are you comfortable with teaching terminology in a way that provides you continual teaching insights? Do you see the normative side of teaching, that you are helping students become more free, moral, and good? Are you consistently modeling a growth mindset about your own teaching, for students to imitate in their own learning? Where else do you teach, beyond your classroom or other formal teaching role? Who teaches you, outside of any classroom or other formal instructional role? Do you see sound teaching models inside or outside of the classroom, whose practices and attitudes you might imitate? 

Key Points

• Teaching influences students to move toward instructional goals.

• Teachers arrange stimuli to induce students to move toward goals.

• Learning involves a persistent change in behavior toward goals.

• Teaching and learning free students from the constraint of choice.

• Knowing alternative teaching theories can increase your discernment.

• Knowing teaching terminology can enhance your teaching skill.

• We are all teachers in one setting or another, influencing behavior.

• Students tend to imitate a teacher’s attitude toward the subject.

• Teachers should retain the learner’s mindset they expect of students.

• Teachers need to recognize and remember that they are learners, too.

Read Chapter 3.