Teach Secondary Issue 14.2

And if that doesn’t work, they usually won’t have any other methods to fall back on: “ Well, that’s the only way I know to do it... ” Expandyour range As professionals doing this all day long as our day job, we aspire to do more than that. Being able to master the content ourselves is merely the beginning of a teacher’s journey. We want to learn as many different ways of doing things as we can – as many different examples, as many different explanations. We’ll then be as prepared as we possibly can be for whatever we encounter in the classroom. Simply knowing something one way is never enough. In his 1987 book Impro – Improvisation and the Theatre , the theatre director Keith Johnstone described how professional actors often specialise in either high- status roles (‘straight actors’) or low-status roles (‘character actors’). He wrote that “ In a bad drama school it’s possible to play your ‘preferred’ status all the time, since they cast you to type, exploiting what you can do, instead of widening your range .” In contrast, he observed, “ the very best actors can play both tragedy and comedy .” Similarly, in teacher training, irrespective of the route you go through there’s always the danger of capitalising on what you’re naturally good at and ending up only being able to do that. This approachmay seem sensible, especially early on, since it can be hard enough to just ‘survive’ when starting out as a teacher. Any approach that achieves that goal will be seen as desirable. However, as a teacher gains experience and becomes increasingly comfortable and successful doing things in a certain way, that’s the point at which they should start to ask themselves, “ How else might I do this? ” Be open-minded That’s not to say that there’s necessarily anything wrong with whatever a teacher’s established practice might be. It’s probably very good. Alternative methods may not be ‘better’ in any absolute sense. But under certain circumstances, with certain pupils, they might be more effective . No teacher will ever claim that they’ve found the ‘perfect’ way to teach anything, so it follows that we should all remain open-minded. Unless we try new things from time to time, howwill we ever improve or discover better ways of working? Sometimes, the teaching methods a teacher uses day to day can be the product of historical accident. They’ll use ideas they picked up during their initial training, or continue doing what they witnessed their mentor doing when they were in their first job. Those practices then stick with them, because the more they repeat them, the more familiar and ‘safe’ they’ll feel. This can eventually give way to “ That’s how I do it ”, and perceiving suggestions from others to try something else as threatening. Again, there may not be anything wrong per se with a given teacher’s preferred methods – but as professionals, we must be constantly open to being challenged. Professional autonomy isn’t just the right to do things ‘ my way ’ if I want to; it’s also the autonomy to decide to experiment, and be willing to consider new possibilities. We should be able to reject ideas we don’t like, of course – but we might want to test things out, or at least think them through carefully, before rejecting them. Mix it up One way to avoid going stale in teaching is to add in some variety. Mixing things up a bit will keep your lessons varied – which students will appreciate – while keeping us on our toes. Once you’ve taught addition of fractions to every class, every year, for multiple years, things can get a bit... monotonous. Thinking regularly about newways of doing things, rather than just repeating whatever it was you did last time, will help to break that cycle of sameness and keep things fresh. Instead of thinking, “I have an [X] teaching style, and that’s what works for me ”, take the view that “ I can teach in way [A], [B] or [C]. ” Do that, and you’ll quickly find that there’s no such thing as a ‘typical’ teaching day. Because who knows – your eventual preferred way of teaching something might be one that you haven’t even tried yet... “Wewant to learnas manydifferentways ofdoing things aswe can – asmany different examples,asmany different explanations” ABOUT THE AUTHOR Colin Foster (@colinfoster77) is a Reader in Mathematics Education in the Department of Mathematics Education at Loughborough University, and has written many books and articles for teachers; find out more at foster77.co.uk 23 teachwire.net/secondary P E D A G O G Y