Post 484 The Courage To Teach Chapter 5

 

 

 Post 484: The Courage To Teach Chapter 5

I am now on the fifth week of my Professional Development class, and we are on the fifth chapter of the book, The Courage To Teach.  In Chapter 5, Palmer focuses on the importance of forming a community of learners in the classroom. Students depend on the teacher for learning, and teachers also depend on the students for End of Class feedback to improve their teaching. True community occurs when both the student and the teacher learn from each other. This week, the writing prompt for the class read

Chapter 5: Teaching in Community

 

I'm going to ask of you something that is difficult this week. 

Part 1:

I want you to describe a time in a class when you were wrong, and the students corrected you....or maybe you discovered your error later on.

 

Part 2:

The most important part of this though is that I want you to describe what you learned from it. What did you do? How did you handle it in the class? How did it change you?

 Here was my response to the Week 5 Teaching in Community Question:

     It took me a while to understand what this question had to do with this week's reading on a subject centered classroom. Then, when you said in your writing prompt...'What did you learn when a student corrects you', then I got it. You are talking about the interdependence that we need to develop between teacher and student that a teacher depends on students to learn just as much as students depend on teachers to learn. " It is possible to teach in a manner that puts part of our fate into the hands of students, as part of their fate is in ours.  Such a teaching yields not only more community but also more learning by drawing us more deeply into the community of truth." (Palmer,  2017,142)

     In other words, if a teacher makes a mistake, or receives feedback from a student about how to improve her class in the Blue Surveys, then we learn from student feedback to teach or improve the class.  You want to say that teachers can learn just as much from students just like students learn from their teachers. I think you want to ask what I have learned from students through the years when I receive my End of Class surveys.  For Fortis, I once received feedback that a student wanted me to use more Powerpoint in my lectures (since I had been using Microsoft Word for my lectures), so every since I got that correction feedback in my Blue Survey, I have used a lot more PPT in my lectures. 

     Usually, the mistakes I make are so minor I can't even remember them anymore. Sometimes students find a broken link in the class (old link I had found but now needs replacing), or I incorrectly tabulated a test grade (I no longer do that with automatic tabulation by embedded rubrics :), but whatever minor mistake I make I learn from it, and I own it. I say to the student, "Sorry, my bad." and I learn not to make that mistake again.  Also, I have students to thank for finding some of the English grammar quiz mistakes when the quiz mistakenly said that a word ending in 'ly' is always an adjective, when the correct answer is that words ending in 'ly' are always adverbs.

     I respect my students even more when they are able to find mistakes like this and report it to me. It means I have created an atmosphere of trust where students are not afraid to point out my mistakes :) and that's what I call community, bonding and trust. Only when fear is eliminated (Chapter 2) and trust is established can you have a successful classroom. 

     I think Palmer says it best when talking about this interdependence between student and teacher which needs to occur to have successful learning for the teacher (to improve her teaching or see her mistakes) and for the student (to improve her writing or whatever skill the teacher is teaching) in these words, "when we are willing to abandon our self protective professional autonomy and make ourselves as dependent on our students as they are on us, we move closer to the interdependence that the community of truth requires." (2017, 144). We always learn best when we seek out feedback from others whether it be our boss (teaching evaluations) or our students (Blue Surveys).  By seeking out feedback, we learn to improve our teaching craft as we are all works in progress.

  Also, this week's chapter focuses on the fact that we are not establishing a teacher centered classroom, nor a student centered classroom, but we are establishing a classroom that focuses on the subject that Palmer coins 'a subject-centered classroom.'  The subject is so fascinating that both the teacher and the student gravitate to the subject and discuss that subject in equal discourse.

 

     Palmer says when the teacher shows passion for her subject, students pick up on that passion, and also become passionate about that subject. Thus, a synergy develops where the passion of the teacher  for the subject infects the students as both teachers and students learn from each other. It is through this synergy of teacher and student toward the subject I think is when Palmer states the community of truth occurs.

     Also, I like it that Palmer says that for writing teachers, we are to teach writing as an expression of writing as the music of words. How fitting as one of my uplifting says has to do with 'Write from the heart,  writing is music that expresses the joys and despair of the soul" (I just made that up. I hope I am not remembering it from somewhere :) Anyway, therefore, what I am learning from this class is to make writing more fun, and to focus less on technique (5 paragraph essay structure), but more on teaching writing as music of words.  I will find ways to vary the 5 paragraph essay structure and to teach students how to write it in creative fun ways from now on--that is one of the take aways I am getting from this class.