The Big Five

Classroom teaching involves a hundred daily tasks, but the job boils down to five critical actions.

Everyone has an opinion about teaching—I suppose because everyone has sat in a classroom. Living through school seems to make all of us feel like experts about teaching, even though living through a surgery doesn’t seem to make us feel qualified to practice medicine.

Everyone likes to talk about teaching—what it is, how it’s done, and what’s required to do it correctly. I am obviously no exception.

You can come at The Problem of Teaching from a variety of angles. You can do it the easy way (just get the kids to shut up and then tell them what you know), or you can do it the hard way (John Hattie’s study of 800 educational meta-studies covering 138 different teaching practices).

Everyone has a scheme or a plan or a formula. Teach Like a Champion. Teach Like a Pirate. The Art and Science of Teaching. Teaching with the Brain in Mind. Teaching in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The list seems endless.

Which makes me wonder…why aren’t I getting in on this action? I can come up with a formula as well as anyone.

So, here goes.

I’m not going to describe a hundred detailed practices that need to be mastered, with 20 pages of links to peer-reviewed research. I don’t have the time or patience for that anymore. And neither do you. This is Substack, not a dissertation defense. I’m just going to stay high-level and offer up five ideas—five big things teachers do, that speak to the heart of the craft of teaching.

Easy, right? Everybody can count to five.

Let’s do this.

1. Inspire

You can’t be a great teacher if you don’t love your subject matter enough to want everyone else to love it, too. If you think your curriculum is drudgery, you’re going to be a drudge in the classroom. No one looks back fondly on a teacher who screamed at her kids, “Look, you don’t wanna be here, and I don’t wanna be here, but we gotta get through this stuff, so SHADDUP.”

Yes, I heard an actual teacher, with an actual Master’s degree, say those actual words. It was a summer school class in an un-airconditioned room, but still.

The opposite of that teacher is not the cool, hipster teacher who’s above it all—who says essentially the same thing to his kids, but in a winking, conspiratorial way: you’re better than this stuff; we all are. But what can we do?

You’re not above it or better than it, pal. You’re in it—up to your neck. If you don’t like it, go do something else with your life.

An English teacher needs to love her novels and her poetry. A math teacher has to think geometric proofs are the greatest thing in the world. Wait—look. Isn’t this the coolest thing? It doesn’t matter if the kids think you’re a nerd. Be a nerd. Love what you teach. Let the kids know that you’re teaching them because you think those things matter.

We give our precious attention to teachers and gurus and guides because when we see them burn with passion, we assume they must have something worth knowing. And sometimes, we want something to light us on fire, too.

Civilization didn’t start when one caveman discovered fire. It started when a caveman shared fire with his neighbor.

2. Explain

This is obviously the nuts and bolts of teaching. A great teacher doesn’t simply hand students a textbook and say, “quiz on Friday.” She explains, and describes, and models, and demonstrates. She has a dozen examples up her sleeve. If one way of explaining a concept isn’t landing, she’s ready with another. She can think out loud in front of students, to show them how to get from conceptual Point A to Point B. She can deploy analogies, similes, and metaphors when the concept is too complex or abstract to grasp head-on.

I was working with an editor once, who was interviewing candidates for a curriculum writing job. Those jobs are trickier than you might think. They require knowing the content and also knowing how to teach the content to a particular age group and also knowing how to write coherently. Not everyone can do all of those things.

Anyway, one of the editor’s canned questions had to do with the idea of electrons and how they make “quantum leaps” from orbit to orbit around an atom, without being detected in transit. It’s a difficult and somewhat non-intuitive concept, and he wanted to know how each candidate would present it to young students. I wrote about this a while ago, here. The long and short of it, if you don’t have the patience to click and read, is that he was looking for a useful analogy or metaphor. The electron leaps from orbit to orbit like you might step from one stair to another or move from C-sharp to D on the piano. There is no in-between point to rest on; you’re at C-sharp and then you’re at D. Your finger—or your feet on stairs—may make a journey, but there’s no place for them to be except one place or the other.

Perfect comparison? No. Good enough to help you grasp the concept? Perhaps.

To teach is to be able to say, “it’s kind of like this…” a gazillion times.

3. Notice

Noticing is understood but rarely (in my experience) called out explicitly. There is a good book on “mathematics noticing” in teachers, but that’s about all I’ve seen. It’s not exactly the old-fashioned “teachers have eyes in the backs of their heads,” but it’s related.

The reason teachers need a variety of explanations and examples ready to deploy is that not everyone is going to grasp a concept the same way, at the same time, or master a skill with the same kind of practice. Kids are different. Brains are different. Cultural backgrounds are different.

A good teacher is watching and listening all the time, checking to see who “got it” and who is still grasping at it and who has checked out. A good teacher realizes that every single thing that happens in a classroom is data, and that she has to be a finely tuned instrument for picking up that data. Who is sitting up straight? Who’s yawning? Who had their eyes locked on the teacher for a while, but then drifted?

Part of noticing is also the ability to analyze. If the student got a question wrong, in what way was it wrong, and what does that say about their thinking? If their attention started to drift, when did that happen, and what caused it? What’s making them laugh? What’s making them sit up a little straighter and lean in?

4. Coach

A teacher is not just an explainer; she’s also a performance coach, showing what “great” looks like and working with students to hone their skills and reach that greatness. Just like athletic coaching, teaching involves a combination of cheerleading, berating, providing feedback, and intervening when necessary to change or tweak a technique.

This is where the “I taught them; it’s up to them to learn” idea falls apart. A teacher is not a mere disseminator of information. A teacher can’t simply teach and then bring down the hammer of judgment. A teacher, like a coach, is there to bring out the absolute best in each and every player. Will every player succeed? That depends on the player’s attitude and desire and determination. But it shouldn’t depend on whether a coach gives up on them or not.

5. Challenge

Challenge can refer to the coaching aspect of teaching I just mentioned—inspiring and training and wheedling to get students to try a little harder, reach a little further, do a little more. But it can also mean something else, that not every teacher or school may feel comfortable with.

“Challenge” can mean “provoke,” and there is an aspect of teaching that requires poking at a student’s preconceptions, provoking critical thinking, and making students think about their own thinking.

This act of (careful and responsible) provocation is one of the puzzle pieces that build the concept of “rigor,” according to Silver, Strong, and Perini, in their book, Teaching What Matters Most. Rigorous work isn’t simply “harder” or more complex; it’s also work that is ambiguous and messy and provocative. It doesn’t lead to a simple answer that’s black or white. It doesn’t lead to an easy answer that can be blurted out and then left alone. It requires turning it around and around in your mind. It requires some thought and discussion and argument. It requires some reflection and maybe a change of mind.

A small act of provocative challenge can make even simple work more rigorous. Ask a young child what three plus five is, and you’ll get the simple answer of eight (one hopes). But follow that with, “how do you know?” or “how can you prove that’s true?” and you provoke a little critical and reflective thinking. “What else can you do with threes and fives?” or “what are some other ways you can make eight?” and you get them to make use of their number knowledge in a different way. You take their simple answer and make them stretch it, to see what it can do.

And That’s All There Is To It

Well, no. Obviously not. There are a million more things to the job than these five actions. But I would argue that none of the other things will matter if these five aren’t happening. You may have a well-organized classroom and a well-behaved classroom. You may have your routines nailed down tight. Your paperwork may be pristine. But if you’re not inspiring, explaining, noticing, coaching, and challenging, students aren’t learning as much as they could be, or with as much engagement and enthusiasm as they could be. They may be compliant. They may even be happy. But that’s not enough.

If you’re going to invest in professional learning for your teachers, invest in these five things. Each one of them leads to a dozen other things. There’s plenty to unpack and explore and learn and practice. I think the ROI will be easy to see.