Restoring Meaning to Teaching
Introduction
By drawing on the stories, experiences, and feelings of teachers, we gain insight into the complex nature of teaching today. We read teacher stories about the challenges, dilemmas, and successes of teaching. We hear of their frustrations and their joys; we see their smiles and their frowns. They talk about their difficult students and their easy ones, their good days and their bad ones. They describe unimportant and irrelevant workshops–-and others that led to some critical insight or skill. They speak about reforms and new curricula that might hold promise, but are pushing them to the limit with more paperwork and demands on their time. They are excited about some changes and overwhelmed by others. We see, however, that most teachers keep searching for what works despite the many challenges they face. Through this paper, we offer encouragement and guidance in that search.
We, the authors, are also educators who have felt overwhelmed and frustrated and have tried many educational solutions, but we, like you, have also had successes and felt satisfaction. Concern about effective teaching has driven our current work as researchers. We believe that there are ways to search for answers and insights to rejuvenate your practice that are often overlooked. In this paper, we share ideas that come from a research project that involved more than 75 teachers in five states. We invite you to carefully consider what we have learned and how it might help you find more satisfaction and joy in your teaching.
The teachers, whose words are quoted in italics in this paper, participated in study groups of 12-18 teachers that we supported as part of a research project. The teachers met with a facilitator every two to three weeks to have conversations about teaching and learning. They learned from and with each other as they explored their beliefs and assumptions about teaching, tried new approaches in their classrooms, read articles, wrote in their journals, and visited each other’s classrooms. These were ordinary teachers from typical rural, suburban, and urban schools in the Southwest who set aside a few hours a month for group meetings after school, during early release time, or on weekends.
People have lots of reasons-–some philosophical, some practical-–for becoming teachers. Most of us, beginning and experienced teachers alike, envision and aspire to be the ideal teacher who is a nurturer, guide, facilitator, or maybe a performer. But on those frustrating days that come all too frequently in the real world–as real teachers in real schools with real children–many practicing teachers feel more like survivors, lion tamers, or control freaks, and they wonder what happened.
Do you ever ask yourself why you stay in teaching? As we began our work with the teachers, we heard that question in their voices.1
"We are on information overload–we never have enough time. The chore of being a teacher is overtaking the joy of teaching."
We know that it is difficult to be a teacher these days. Expectations are higher, but time, tools, and resources remain scarce. Teachers’ frustrations are real-–we see it in their faces and hear it in their voices. We wonder if you, like so many teachers today, have found that the sense of purpose and promise with which you first entered this profession is draining away in the daily flood of tests, trainings, curriculum committees, evaluations, paperwork, troublesome parents, and troubled children?
A sense of purpose in your work is not something that someone else can give to you, but we think that you can find it again for yourself with persistence and support. Our experience working with teachers suggests that they hope to increase their successes and satisfaction but are unsure how to turn their hopes into reality. They stay in the profession because of the promise of having positive interactions with kids that lead to learning. A sixth-grade teacher, Carrie,2 said,
"The main thing I try to do is focus on the positives that I have as a teacher. I vent about the negatives but don’t dwell in them. If I were to get sucked into the negatives, I’d end up as a greeter at Wal-Mart instead of an educator. Luckily, a small token from just one student can make it worthwhile–when I see the discovery in their eyes. What other job offers that?"
Some days, however, the negatives in the job blind teachers from looking for the light in the students’ eyes. Through our work, we see a dilemma in teaching that causes the frustration and despair experienced by some teachers. Teachers feel compelled to serve so many masters3 that they find it difficult to remember and pay attention to the fundamental reason for going into teaching-–the children and learning. They become overwhelmed by new demands–-standards, tests, checklists, or forms–-and are left with "no time to care for or connect with their students. When this happens, teachers feel that their fundamental purposes have been lost–with catastrophic results for their commitment and effectiveness" (Hargreaves, 1997, p. ix).
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In our work with teachers, we are discovering that the "solution" to this dilemma lies more in internal commitment and transformation than in external programs. Asking and answering the "hard" questions about teaching practice can spark this transformation. At one of our research sites, for example, a group of teachers was discussing how to be more purposeful and thoughtful in their teaching. They developed a set of questions to keep critical issues in the foreground as they planned lessons and made decisions. The voicing of questions for consideration pushed the teachers to examine their assumptions about teaching and learning in an open dialogue that gave voice to their feelings, beliefs, values, dilemmas, and tensions. We hope the questions we raise in this paper will likewise spark your interest and prompt your reflection on the decisions you make in your teaching practice.
Parker Palmer, author of The Courage to Teach, asks, "How can we who teach reclaim our hearts, for the sake of our students, ourselves, and educational reform?" (1998, p. 19). He believes that "when you love your work, the only way to get out of trouble is to go deeper in" (p. 2). Going deeper takes courage as you carefully and critically consider the teaching and learning that happens in your classroom. We have come to believe that three key strategies can guide your efforts to improve student learning and make your work more meaningful and satisfying:
- shifting your focus from what you are teaching to what students are learning,
- talking with colleagues about educational issues and ideas, and
- reflecting and being thoughtful as you make choices in your practice.
We offer ideas–-not a map, but a flashlight and compass–-to help you find your own path as a teacher through the maze of educational trails.
| 1 | We are using the written and spoken words of participating teachers who were in various stages of self-reflection and inquiry. |
| 2 | We are using pseudonyms for the teachers' names. |
| 3 | State and national policies, district and campus rules and guidelines, professional society recommendations, community expectations, and so on. |
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