Passion is so fickle, change one little aspect of the environment and passions follow along. Passion is a fashion, it's a tune we artists dance to while others shake their heads and call us crazy.
My new role: coaching teachers into a fairly rigid, set curriculum that will in some instances, go against long-held beliefs about things like "comprehensible input" and the use of multiple languages in a class organized to teach English.
No matter what cognitive science researches and publishes about human learning, people have deeply anchored beliefs about who, what, and how is best to teach. Administrators, policy-makers, those who make purchasing decisions about curricula - these folks are often far from the latest science on how humans learn and their decisions often rankle the experienced teacher that stays current on learning theory and practice.
So, teachers are justifiably wary of anyone who is coming into their classrooms from the "district" to "help" them teach in ways they might not understand or support.
Then there's the more personal aspect of receptivity to coaching - what if the coach is crippled, or old or ugly or votes differently from the teacher or has a different way of planning or grading or managing classroom behaviors? Humans are fairly brutal with "others" and can do great harm to each other in their attempts to bring the wayward other into line.
Teachers themselves face this down everyday - WE ARE OTHER to our students, they have no experience with being the teacher. We forget the importance of empathy in this struggle. We have been students, we can empathize with the powerlessness and subjugation of being told what to do, when and where to do it, and with the degradations inherent in institutional settings that often trigger the most vulnerable of our students.
Coaches of teachers can benefit by remembering how they empowered their students, how they did their utmost to downplay the hierarchical and build agency and equity among the students they taught. But still, at the end of the day, the teacher or the coach needs to see a change.
Is it ok to say, "I can't learn from you. You are too healthy, sick, young, old, ugly, fat, skinny, white, black, rich or poor for me to believe a word you say!"
Is it ok to say, "I can't teach you. You are too young, old, healthy, sick, ugly, beautiful, skinny, fat, white or black"?
So now my new passion is finding a way to be credible. Finding a way to establish trust between teachers, coaches, administrators, true believers in oppressive reformista mindsets, and freedom loving philosophers who started this whole "school" thing in the first place.
Any ideas?
