Teaching Is an Art

An A?Z Handbook for Successful Teaching in Middle Schools and High Schools

Leon Spreyer

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781634507202
• eBook ISBN: 9781634507219
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Classroom Management

Drawing upon close to thirty years of teaching experience, Leon Spreyer provides teachers with practical information that is not always taught in teacher education courses. New and veteran teachers alike will find useful advice for managing their work both in and out of the classroom. The book covers eighty-two essential topics, including cooperative learning, managing parents, staff meetings, implementing tests, portfolios, setting rules, and much more.Highlights include: Practical advice on more than eighty subjects
Book suggestions and games for the classroom
Suggestions for staying motivated and avoiding burnoutTeaching ability, wisdom, and fervor are not inborn; teachers learn the elements of their art. With that in mind, Spreyer provides information, games, book recommendations, specific lesson plans, and straightforward advice on all aspects of teaching, ranging from Back-to-School Night to power in the classroom, and from homework to substitute teachers. And he does it in a reader-friendly style, with easy-to-follow lists, examples, and suggested resources.

The Art of Teaching

I love to teach as a painter loves to paint, as a musician loves to play, as a singer loves to sing, as a strong man rejoices to run a race. Teaching is an art—an art so great and so difficult to master that a man or woman can spend a long life at it, without realizing much more than his limitations and mistakes and his distances from the ideal.

—William Phelps

Teaching is many things, but most of all it’s an art. I taught for twenty-seven years, and when I stopped, I knew there was still much left for me to learn. As with all art, mastery is never complete. Skills learned become stepping stones to reach farther, to understand more, to see where you could not see before.

When I think of my best days as a teacher, they were when kids became excited about learning, when I saw them changing behavior patterns, when students eagerly cooperated toward a common goal. In short, they were times when I felt that I was making a difference in some students’ lives.

I’ve always looked with suspicion at books about teaching written by an “expert” who spent one or two years in the classroom before going into administration or getting an advanced degree. Research has its place, but the real artists are, for the most part, still in the classrooms, still creating lesson plans, still encouraging kids, and still looking for answers.

Teaching ability, teaching wisdom, and teaching fervor are not inborn. Neither are they acquired from a textbook or a few teachertraining classes. Teachers can be taught elements of their art; there are materials to master, techniques to learn, even keys to creativity to be acquired. As in the pursuit of any art, the closest you can come to mastery in teaching is the constant striving for perfection.

See also TEACHING: A LOOK BACK.

Assessment

To understand the role of assessment in schools, we might start by examining the assessment techniques developed in the Ministry of Pies. To determine which pies are “good pies,” they are measured: weight, circumference, thickness, density of filling, density of crust, and force needed to pierce the crust. Pies that score in the top 15 percent are good pies. Even if a pie tastes so bad that no one will eat it, we have measurements to prove that it is a good pie.

I hate to be the one to break this to you, but the Ministry of Pies has influenced Departments of Education at the national, state, and local levels, and this sort of “assessment” of students is proceeding at great expense in school districts across the nation. The tools of choice in most districts are standardized tests that are norm referenced. What this means is that the tests compare each student’s performance to a norm established by testing a large student sample.

Norm-referenced tests do not measure the individual student’s mastery of specific subject matter; they simply compare the student’s performance to that of other students. In other words, even if all students in the norming population score high, there still must be a bottom 10 percent. Furthermore, if everyone who takes the test does badly, a mediocre result could be considered very good—sort of like Garrison Keillor’s fictional Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average.

It is comforting to parents, administrators, and, above all, politicians to believe that we can buy and administer machine-scored tests to determine the effectiveness of our schools. The truth is that, if such a determination were possible, we can’t achieve it using the current approach. Nevertheless, pressures are ever present for schools to demonstrate that all is well—and maybe even a notch better than that.

Some schools resort to creative ways of improving student test scores. I once worked for a principal who had his resource teacher “improve” some student test responses. This effort had the desired effect. My school showed remarkable progress and was officially designated a state Turnaround School. The principal and the resource teacher both got their pictures in the newspaper and went on to bigger and better things in another school district. It wasn’t until a year or two later that the truth came out.

Aside from the obvious damage done by cheating, what harm is being done by the current emphasis on norm-referenced tests? There are many problems:

1. The tests are costly, and most school districts don’t have money to spare.

2. The tests create anxiety and fear among students, teachers, and administrators.

3. The tests waste precious class time. Teachers feel pressured to prep students for the test and to teach test-taking skills. This consumes time that could be better used on more substantive lessons.

4. Some teachers alter their curriculum to place emphasis on facts and simple diagnostic skills that show up on the tests. Higherlevel thinking becomes a “frill,” undetectable with standardized tests.

5. Standardized tests teach us that getting the right answer is the important thing, not the thought processes that lead to answers.

6. Standardized tests are timed. Students learn that speed is more important than thoroughness or imagination.

7. The tests are an individual effort—cooperation is not allowed. This is not the way real problems are solved at NASA, Ford, and Microsoft.

8. The contents of the test are a secret. Students are not told specifically how they performed, nor are teachers permitted to use the test as a follow-up learning tool.

9. Worst of all, the public and students are deluded into thinking that the tests give us information about who has learned well, who has taught well, and what school districts have a problem. We have come to believe that these tests are an objective measure of student achievement. They are not.

So what is good about standardized tests? It’s a shorter list:

1. They produce numbers that we can attach to student names. Numbers give the illusion of scientific validity.

2. The tests are easily scored by machines. We can get numbers for each student in a short period of time.

3. The companies that create, sell, and score the norm-referenced tests are making a lot of money. That’s a good thing for them.

4. Politicians—from the president to the school board member—can declare that they are monitoring the quality of public education.

Are there standardized tests in use that are not norm referenced? Sure, but not many. They are called criterion-referenced tests. They compare each student to a standard rather than to other students. However, even these tests measure mostly what students can cram into their short-term memory. They don’t measure critical thinking, creativity, reasoning ability, or the capacity to solve problems. In order to test these higherlevel thinking skills, schools must resort to more time-consuming and subjective measurements, such as performance, portfolios, and projects. Moreover, to use these measures of learning, we require teachers to engage in more time-consuming activities compounded by heavy student-teacher ratios.

Let’s assume that class sizes ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• About the Author
• Teaching Is an Art
• Index