A New Old Way of Teaching

Below is a transcript of the keynote speech I gave at the MITA IV conference held at the American School of Milan on February 2nd 2019 and that I gave in revised form at the IB Global Conference in Abu Dhabi, on October 25th 2019.

 A New Old Way of Teaching

A refrain we hear over and over again, in the pages of magazines, on websites and blogs, in newspapers, is that teaching must reinvent itself for the 21st century.

We hear how our students will be taking on jobs that don’t even exist yet. That we need to focus on skills, not information. That with the ever-increasing pace of technological change, any teaching that doesn’t reinvent itself will die and be left in the dust. A lot of people have made and continue to make, a lot of money from leveraging this situation. By perpetuating the notion of a crisis in education.

We know there’s some truth in this. I’m not looking to deny the need for teaching to rethink what it can and should be. I also won’t deny that if we can’t manage to rethink teaching it will increasingly fail to support, nurture, and prepare our students for their adult lives. But what I am questioning is just where we might look for the answers to this challenge. We can look at our existing practices, we can look to technology too, but I would like to suggest there are other places that we often overlook.

This particularly struck me after a conversation with my dad. My dad is a jeweller and a goldsmith having learned his trade, as an apprentice, some 50 years ago and having practised this same trade for all of the intervening years. From time to time, my dad takes on apprentices, and we were talking about some difficulties he was having in training his current apprentice. There was some aspect of goldsmithing that the apprentice was struggling with and my dad couldn’t figure out how to teach this to him. This isn’t something we’d talked about before, but I realised, as obvious as this is, that we were talking about teaching.

As very different as our aims were, and as different as our jobs are there didn’t seem to any reason why some of the ways I work with my students couldn’t be of use to him. Nor was there any reason why I couldn’t take things he does, and use them with my students.

I would like to suggest that there are a whole host of places to which we can turn to draw upon techniques, ideas, and approaches that can benefit us as classroom teachers. By doing so we can also let go of that very traditional notion of the teacher that so many of us feel uncomfortable with, but forced to occupy.

I want us to see that we can look outward, to other professions, activities, and endeavours as well as backward to historical or cultural traditions beyond our own. I want us to ask how our classroom would change if we worked the way a sports coach works when coaching a team, or the way a chef works when teaching a new cook? How are things different if we think of our students and our classrooms in this way?

What if we engaged with the teaching traditions of oral learning in Hindu culture or the midrash style of debate and argument of a Jewish yeshiva? What does that bring to teaching and learning in our schools?

There’s so much we can draw upon if we explore and if we experiment.

I would like to take 3 examples and just pick a single aspect within those that might be interesting to explore when thinking about all that teaching can be. It was the idea of apprenticeship that first brought this to mind, so I’ll begin there.

Apprenticeship

There are a lot of things about the idea of apprenticeship that I think could be valuable to us. Firstly, an apprenticeship is part of a wider involvement in the student’s life. It is something that runs for a protracted period - traditionally 7 years, but now more likely 2 to 5. The apprentice becomes part of a trade tradition, as well as part of a working community. It is also a way of teaching that is strongly connected to movement, activity, and physical engagement. It involves observing, emulating and practising.

When the apprentice nears the end of their training they were, traditionally, expected to demonstrate their mastery of all that they had learnt - whether this was carpentry, smithing, joinery, metalwork, by way of a masterpiece.

A masterpiece was a piece of work that showed the apprentice’s mastery of their craft. If accepted by the master craftsman, the masterpiece would give the apprentice admission to the world they had been training to join.

Think of how different it would be to work with students in this way. To teach them in a way that shows they are part of a long academic heritage of other students, professionals, practitioners. That they are learning in an embodied way that emphasises emulation and observation. I like very much, too, laying out the culmination of this process in the production of a masterpiece.

What would a masterpiece mean in your subject? What could students produce to show you their mastery of all that you’ve taught them in history, geography, biology? What is a masterpiece for economics or physics?

The room left for creativity here is crucial - the craftsman never tells the apprentice precisely what he must make to demonstrate his skill, but only that he must make something. Something that shows that he has not just learnt, not just progressed, but that he has mastered his craft.

An exam is not a masterpiece.

But the masterpiece is not contrary to an exam, it is not pointless or impossible when there are still exams that must be sat. A student who can produce such a piece, and can demonstrate their mastery, is also a student who can impress in an exam.

What is important, I think, is how the relationship between teacher and student changes when we think of the young people sat in our classroom as apprentices in the tradition we represent. That’s where the real change comes - not so much in what is done in the classroom, but in the relationship, it is done within. Giving students a sense of belonging to a tradition and a discipline, bringing them on board, not as students at a disadvantage to the more knowledgable teacher, but as equals who are simply at an earlier stage of the same journey that we ourselves followed.

Another tradition that looks to rethink relationships, and hopes to gives us the time and space in which to think them anew is Confucianism.

​Confucianism 

Confucian philosophy sets a great store in the role and value of rites and rituals. For Confucius, a ritual is a practice with clear and defined rules that are followed precisely, repeatedly, and with careful thought and attention. Rituals can concern all kinds of aspects of day to day life but the value here is not in the ritual itself, but in what the ritual does.

Think of the ritual of carefully preparing tea with tea leaves. Heating the water, preparing the pot, measuring leaves, carefully steeping them, timing them, and finally sitting and drinking the tea. There are quicker ways to get a cup of tea but it’s the ritual here that matters. Not in itself, but because of the pause, the break, that it offers. Making the tea takes us outside of the normal flow of our lives, if only for a few moments.

Confucius believed that the real value of the ritual is what this does to us. Observing the ritual creates a new space. A space that is different to and outside of our day to day lives. Whatever we are and whoever we are, we can be something and someone different in the ritual space.

The classroom can be this kind of space for our students. A space that is outside their normal world. It can be a space in which students can try, and fail, and test things out, a space in which they can act in new ways, be new people - a place of reinvention. A student might struggle to be kind and thoughtful in their day to day life, around their friends and family, in the playground - but the ritual breaks the flow of normal life and creates a special place, an alternate reality in which they can try these skills and develop these qualities without the baggage that comes from their normal life.

Confucius thinks of the ritual space as an as-if space.

In the ritual space, we can behave as-if. As-if we were thoughtful and kind. As-if we were good listeners. As-if we were good students. We make the behaviour explicit, we play at it. We work at it. These are roles we are playing and by taking on the roles, even for a short time, we can learn to make them part of ourselves.

Confucius knows that when we leave the ritual space things are likely to go back to normal, but he emphasises that by acting as-if we were that sort of person, we will become that sort of person. If you wish you were more patient don’t focus on making yourself more patient - that won’t work - instead, Confucius says, to become more patient you must do the things a patient person would do. In acting as-if we eventually become that very thing. For our students, there is no better way to become a great philosophy student, or chemistry student, than by doing the things a great student would do.

For us, as teachers, the rituals of our spaces can be anything. So long as they are clear, carefully observed, and practised they can form a break in the students’ day to day life and create an as-if space in which they can work, practice, and play at being what they would like to become.

In my philosophy classroom students come into the room, I greet each of them in turn, I ask how each is doing, we all sit together, tea is made, passed around, and once everyone is settled, with a cup in hand, we pause. Then we begin. We have made an as-if space. My students can now act as-if they were philosophers, and by acting that is what they will become. Of course, it is a kind of play - but by playing, we grow.  All we need do is teach our students the rituals of our space, and play the roles with them.

My final example comes from the daily lives of monks living in the Zen monastery.

 The Zen Monastery

Whilst there are a great deal of fascinating aspects to life in the Zen monastery it is a rather mundane aspect of their lives that I’d like to look at more closely.

In the monastery, the jobs that need doing, such as cooking, gardening, maintaining the shrine, tending to the Zen Master, are allocated by the Master once a term and are given at short notice. The Master will draw up a list of who will be taking which job and, one evening, you may find out you are to be the new cook and the next morning, cook you are. When the new cook takes on his role there is no handover, no mentoring or guidance. He simply starts the job.

The cook has no gas or electricity, he must fetch the water himself, and he has no money for ingredients. Everything used in the kitchen is donated or gathered from the garden. If you are looking to feed a community of monks, there are much easier ways to do things. But in the monastery, the difficulty is the point. It is not efficient, it is not convenient. Nor should it be. This isn’t meant in an ascetic fashion, that the monks deny themselves of so much in order not to be distracted from their spiritual devotion. Although there is an aspect of that. It is much more a teaching principle.

If the goal was to teach the monk how to be the cook there are easier, more efficient, more convenient ways, but that is precisely the point of the monastery. The monk is not there to learn how to be the cook, rather he is there to learn how to be the kind of person who can figure it out - in his own way - through ingenuity, creativity, and persistence.

There can be little greater motivation in learning how to rapidly grasp the finer points of Zen cuisine, than finding yourself in the job with 30 hungry monks due for lunch and no one to show you the ropes.

It is the challenge that makes creativity possible.

It is the chance to fail that makes possible the chance to succeed.

As with the monks, so with our students. We are soft, we make things easy, we strive for efficiency and convenience. We remove obstacles. We give every opportunity, every conceivable form of help and support. But in doing so, we remove the challenge, and we remove the possibility of failure.

The Zen Master would say, therein lies the problem. Don’t look for efficient, convenient ways. Don’t look to lay a smooth path for students to tread. Foster inconvenience, deliberately make processes inefficient. This may be hard for us, but we must hold our nerve - this friction will engage students, it will require them to think meaningfully. Crucially, these difficulties provide space and scope for spontaneity and creativity.

The monk, when he learns he will be the new cook, is provided with the requirements, but not the how or the why.  Those are learnt by facing the challenges that are given.

After a term in the job, the monk then spends a term without a job and the final ingenious twist is here. Knowing that in the following term he’ll again find himself with a job, any job, what does he do in that term off? He does all he can to learn and prepare, for whatever job may come. He observes everything, he asks questions of everyone he can, he listens, he takes note, he studies everything. He is learning though no one is teaching him. In Zen, this is thought of as Teaching without Teaching.

Every time we take work and difficulty out of the hands of our students and handle it ourselves, we are taking away their opportunities to learn. We have to remember that it is the person doing the work that is the person doing the learning.

The Zen Master would urge us to try and cultivate an environment in which we can teach without teaching.

My message then is this: we need to build a toolboxSome of those tools may be expensive, and shiny, and new. Some may be old and well used. Some may be borrowed, some may come from unusual places, and some may be things that aren’t tools at all, but are being put to good use regardless.

We need to resist those that tell us they have a single tool that can tackle every task. We need to take time to stock up, to check, and maintain our tools. We need to scout around and see what others - in classrooms, in workshops, in history, are using and we mustn’t be coy about giving their tools a try.

Suitably equipped, we can grow a way of teaching that is both timeless and timely.