The Teaching Instinct
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The Teaching Instinct

Explorations Into What Makes Us Human

Kip Téllez

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eBook - ePub

The Teaching Instinct

Explorations Into What Makes Us Human

Kip Téllez

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About This Book

How we select, prepare, and support teachers has become a surprisingly common topic among journalists, politicians, and policymakers. Contemporary recommendations on teaching and teachers, whatever their intentions, fail to assess this deeply human activity from its historical roots. In The Teaching Instinct: Explorations Into What Makes Us Human, Kip Téllez invites us to reappraise teaching through a wide lens and argues that our capacity to teach is one part culture, two parts genetic. By rescuing the field of instinct psychology from the margins, this challenging book explores topics as diverse as teaching in other species, teaching across human cultures, and the development of teaching in young children, finally drawing readers into a discussion about how our teaching instinct influences modern teacher learning, selection, and preparation. Drawing on disciplines as diverse as comparative biology, evolutionary psychology, and teacher education policy, Téllez warns us that ignoring or contradicting our teaching instinct results in unhappy teachers and dysfunctional school systems.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2016
ISBN
9781317240105

1
What is Teaching? What is Instinct?

That some teachers get their psychology by instinct more effectively than others by any amount of reflective study may be unreservedly stated. It is not a question of manufacturing teachers, but of reinforcing and enlightening those who have a right to teach.
John Dewey, Psychology and Social Practice (1882/1953)
How do readers of a nonfiction work come to trust its author? What convinces readers to keep reading, confident that the author is being honest with them? How do readers decide if the author has the credibility to comment on the topic at hand? As a reader myself, I have several criteria, but each reader must decide on his or her own criteria.
This book is about teaching, which has become a surprisingly popular topic for books lately. And many of these recent books about teaching and teachers have been written by journalists. I can point to a particular example in which the author, a journalist, argues that teaching is not mysterious at all; if someone can follow a set of routines, a craftlike skill set develops, and teaching turns into a job like most others. I admit that many journalists are excellent writers who pride themselves on being able to explain complex ideas to nonexperts, but I do not consider this a virtue if we are talking about teaching. As I try to point out in this book, teaching is the most complex of human activities and deserves to be considered more expansively than do most human endeavors, by those who hold a background in the field. It strikes me as odd that a journalist, even after observing many teachers, would feel confident enough to offer advice about how to make good teachers. As any teacher will tell you, unless you’ve taught, you really can’t say much worthwhile about teaching.
I have made my point about journalists who write about teaching, but I am not sure if readers will consider me any more trustworthy. Like almost everyone else, I was first a child taught by parents, then a student in elementary, junior high, and high school. I was then an undergraduate and graduate student. I began school at age 5, but I didn’t finish graduate school until I was 30. I was in school, at least part-time, for 25 years. However, at about the 18-year mark in my career as a student, I became a professional teacher, and soon after that, I served as a guide teacher, then as an advisor of student teachers, and now as a professor in education. During the past 30 years, I’ve taught second graders and Ph.D. students, and nearly every age in between. I’ve taught high school algebra students, elementary-aged English learners, and severely developmentally delayed youths at a state hospital. For the past 10 years, I’ve served on my local school district’s board of trustees. I have taught teachers, both experienced educators and those in preparation. I’ve even taught graduate students in education who were hoping to be teachers of teachers, a task that can be comically described as teaching teachers who will teach teachers. And yet with all this experience, I don’t believe I should be given a reader’s immediate trust on the topic.
I was an effective elementary school teacher, or at least my peers, my supervisors, the students, and their parents seemed to think so. I think I am a decent enough college professor, although the students in my teacher education courses are never shy about telling me what I should do differently. I suppose that teaching is nothing if not a process, a personal saga, which is why, while writing this book, I decided to return to the K–12 classroom and spend a day or two a month substitute teaching in an elementary school. I knew I could still create strong curricula, develop sound assessments, work with colleagues, and the like, but could I still get 25 third-graders to line up for lunch? I am happy to report that, yes, I remain a capable classroom manager and leader. I also think that those of us who work in education, but who are not classroom teachers in the K–12 setting, should spend more time teaching there. Observation won’t do it.
These varied experiences in education have led me to this basic understanding: There is something about teaching that defies description, a mysterious ether between teacher and students in whatever context they find themselves, a recognition that this capacity is coming from somewhere very deep in our history, both our history as a human species and our personal histories. This book explores this mystery.
The following teaching examples offer a sampling of our topic:
A 2-year-old is leaving the grocery store with her mother. It’s 3 o’clock on a sweltering afternoon, and the sun has created a small greenhouse in the car. The windows were carefully cracked open to allow some ventilation, but it will still be unbearably hot. The mother notices that the silver buckle of the child’s car seat has been exposed to the sun and will be capable of causing a severe burn. Her daughter has lately taken to buckling herself—a proud moment and yet another marker of her growing independence. She tells her daughter not to touch the buckle because it will be very hot. “Mommy will do it for you.” But for a 2-year-old child who wants to buckle herself, these are fighting words, and she moves to buckle herself anyway. Mother slaps her hand and loudly says, “No!” Crying ensues; frustrations abound. The heat has worn them both down, but the child’s fingers have been spared, and she has learned not to touch the buckle when the car is hot.
If a family is lucky, at least one morning per week can be spent relaxing and making breakfast together. In a scene familiar the world over, a 4-year-old has watched his father frying eggs for half his life and asks if he can make the eggs this morning. The father knows in advance that this exercise is going to take much longer than if he were to fry them himself— and likely result in a ruined egg or two—but he relents. He begins by inviting the child to put the butter in the pan and carefully lighting the stove. Wait until the butter melts; now the challenge of cracking the egg (“Careful, you don’t need to hit it hard”). A tasty egg, made by your own hands, is even tastier, at least for a 4-year-old.
It might not be the best idea to hold eighth-grade algebra at 7:40 in the morning, but schools have a complicated rhythm, and sometimes this time and this subject are joined, and we find intrepid students filing into class; some appear to be more awake than humanly possible, while others seem still to be in bed. But whether they are impossibly awake or appear sleeping standing up, the thought crosses each of their minds at some point: “When am I going to need this? Why algebra?” They wonder how this topic could possibly prepare them for the greater world of adulthood. Algebra teachers, for their part, respond to this question in very different ways: (a) “you’ll need to know this material if you hope to pass Algebra II”; (b) “Algebra is like a mental vitamin; it strengthens your brain and makes it work better”; (c) “you need it to get into a good college”; or (d) “I think I can show you how to use it in a meaningful, useful way. Let’s say you are Taylor Swift’s manager and you want to know how many songs and albums she will sell by this time next year. We can use the linear formula to make a prediction. Remember, y = mx + b …”
In each of these examples, we see the nuances of complicated relationships. Trust, fear, motivation, confidence, application, modeling, and guidance are each present in the admixture. Because each of these examples is taken from my own general experience, I may have convinced you that I know something about teaching, but of course, vast mysteries remain. I cannot be sure if I have convinced you to place a tentative trust in me. If not, perhaps I’ll earn it along the way. If I already have, I am grateful.
Perhaps you noticed the photograph in the frontispiece. It’s a bit grainy, but it was taken in about 1965 and reprinted courtesy of Karen Wanke, a first-grade teacher living in southern California. For more years than I care to mention, I have taught an undergraduate class most often called Introduction to Teaching. Karen took this course from me in the mid-1980s. It is typically designed for those students who are considering a career in education, although many of the students have known for a very long time that they wanted to be teachers. At the first class meeting, I tell the students that they already know much about teaching and that the course title is misleading. I also ask them if they ever “played teacher” when they were young. Blank stares usually follow. But when I add just a little explanation, heads begin to nod. “You remember, you were about 4 to 6 years old, and you dragged your unwilling younger sibling to your room and made them sit while you taught?” “When you arranged your toys or dolls in a classroom?” Yes, now many recall. Over the years, I have collected stories and photographs of my students as young children playing teacher. Although I have noticed some striking variations in teacher play (e.g. the “students” in these mock classrooms range from siblings to stuffed animals to neighborhood kids to grandparents), they all report that no one encouraged them to play this game or told them how to play it. They seemed to do it by instinct.
I believe this book will be of great interest to teachers and those wishing to become teachers, and I hope they will enjoy it. My aim is to encourage us to reconsider some of the assumptions we so easily make about teaching: What it is, who teaches, and why. But this is not a book about how to become a better teacher. Like so many of us in contemporary times, from researchers in economics (Rivkin, Hanushek, & Kain, 2005) to popular writers (Brooks, 2012), I am also concerned about teacher “quality,” and I genuinely want to know what makes good teachers. But I think we began asking questions about the nature of good teachers and teaching before we had a grasp on the nature of teaching itself. That hasn’t stopped a great many “experts” from telling us what makes good teachers.
The curriculum theorist Philip Jackson (1966) wrote: “Anyone who is broadly interested in man and his characteristic activities must sooner or later turn to an examination of teaching. And when he does, he will find that very little is known about this everyday event” (p. 9).
Conditions have not changed much in the intervening decades. We continue to pursue blindly any and all efforts to determine what makes good teaching, without first considering the “everyday event” under review. In modern societies, we understand the importance of education and are thus immediately drawn to questions about how can we teach better, teach more, and teach faster. But such expediency bypasses important foundational questions about teaching, such as, When did our species begin to teach? Do other animals teach? Can young children teach? If so, is there a developmental sequence to the process? What’s the difference between parenting and teaching? How do people decide if they should be teachers? How do we choose teachers? By investigating these questions and many others, I hope this book elevates the status of professional teaching by connecting instinct to practical matters such as teacher selection, beginning teacher experiences, and the role of professional preparation in the development of teachers.
As I noted, I do not intend to distinguish between good and bad teachers. Some might question if a book about teaching can even avoid this distinction. Indeed, is there a point to writing a book about teaching if you aren’t going to help people, especially those who might want to become teachers, know how to become good at it? To begin, I argue that we simply don’t have good evidence that we can define the good teacher, even if we might have some evidence about what constitutes good teaching, which is a different question entirely. And even when we think we have pinned down what makes a great teacher, we are bound to be disappointed. There are as many ways to be a good teacher as there are ways to be a good friend, spouse, employee, employer, leader, follower, and so on. Consider the varieties of influential (i.e. “good”) teachers in a person’s life, and we don’t find a common description; rather, we find teachers who were good, as determined by us as their students, in multiple ways. Some we consider good because they were kind to us at a time when we needed kindness. Others we found not so kind but rather very strict; they demanded that we learn challenging material at a time when we needed to rise to their high standards. To be considered good, teachers need certain contexts, proper timing, and specific students; that is, teachers cannot be good teachers all the time, with every student, in all subjects.
But this has not stopped a great many educators and others from seeking descriptions of good teachers. In the research for this book, I found a volume titled Extraordinary Teachers (F. J. Stephenson, 2001). I rushed to the library with high hopes, only to find that it was a collection of college teachers sharing their advice (e.g. be organized, be available to the students). The advice was decent enough, but it did not make these teachers “extraordinary.” That college instructors (of which I count myself), for whom teaching is usually an afterthought, would have much to say about teaching is a bit surprising. Some of them find, by chance, that they have a penchant for teaching and a celebration ensues. (Is my cynicism too obvious?)
I am, of course, in favor of good teachers, but I am inviting us to take a big step backward and suspend our desire to evaluate, praise, or critique. Instead, I want us to consider teaching using a wider lens, one that considers teaching as part of the larger human experience, one that explores teaching’s essence, its origins. I believe that our species has developed an instinct to teach and that exploring this instinct will help us learn more about teaching and ourselves.
Those with an interest in language will recognize quickly that the title of this book is deliberately meant to recall Steven Pinker’s widely read work The Language Instinct, in which Pinker explains why language is essentially innate (acquired, not learned). His arguments are based largely on the work of Noam Chomsky, whose theory of universal grammar completely reoriented the field of linguistics and the wider social sciences. Chomsky weakened behaviorism’s theoretical grip on explanations of language acquisition by pointing out that language could not possibly be learned in the way the behaviorists claimed; that is, no amount of operant conditioning could account for the vast and complicated language development we find in children (Chomsky, 1959). Chomsky argued, and linguists such as Pinker have agreed, that our capacity for language must be at least partly in place at birth. We are “hard-wired” for language; it is instinctual for us.
Since Chomsky first proposed his theory, cognitive science and genetics, joined by the emerging fields of neurobiology and evolutionary psychology, have continued to chip away at the belief that environment is always the lead actor in determining who we are and what we know. Researchers in genetics have determined that many diseases that we once thought to be a result of environmental conditions are, in fact, caused by faulty genes inherited from our parents and other ancestors. For instance, until the 1960s, dysfunctional family dynamics and maladaptive personal interactional explanations were considered the causes of schizophrenia (Tandon, Keshavan, & Nasrallah, 2008). We know now that this incorrect understanding ignored the disease’s strong genetic component. Similarly, we find that our personalities and, perhaps, our learning capacities might be “built in.” We even have evidence that our essential personalities may be wired in advance of any interaction with the world.
To learn that our genetic history is important to who we are is one thing, but how could teaching be instinctual? Isn’t teaching the highest form of human intellect, a pinnacle of our advanced cognition? Of course we must learn to do it. If it were instinctual, then we would be able to distinguish it from learned behavior, and it would need to meet a few criteria. We would all have some facility for it, in advance of any preparation or training. We would find it in every single human culture. We would probably not find a similar instinct in other animals, nor could we suppress the instinct in ourselves. These are, more or less, my claims, and my goal in this book is to see if they hold up.
My argument is that teaching has become an instinct in our species, which has given us the capacity to create culture, the very antithesis of instinct. Indeed, culture cannot be created without teaching. Although it seems like a contradiction, I am joined in this view by theorists in evolutionary psychology who have argued that cultural learning is made up of instincts specifically adapted to support cultural inheritance (Tooby & Cosmides, 2005). We’ll explore this notion in great depth later in the book, but for now we can provisionally think about it this way: We have a teaching instinct that has allowed us to create new ways of thinking and behaving that are entirely noninstinctual. Our instinct to teach others has driven, for example, our capacity for sharing the foundations of spirituality, which has given rise to the cultural-bound belief systems that we call religion. Our instinct to teach has fitted us with a way to pass on cultural values and beliefs as well as those behaviors essential for survival. This interaction between our instinct to teach, and culture creation is, for me, the essential paradox of our species. We are therefore driven to teach in a way that other animals are not; we are driven to teach because we simply cannot prevent ourselves from doing it.
So, if teaching is instinctual, we should start to examine it in the ways linguists have explored language, aski...

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