INTRODUCTION TO ESSENTIAL BELIEFS
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PART ONE | ESSENTIAL BELIEFS | INTRODUCTION
Part 1 Introduction to Essential Beliefs
Essential Beliefs Introduction
The Skillful Teacher is a book about how to make the knowledge base of teach- ing more accessible. It is also about teacher learning and is a resource for it. There are certain beliefs about children, about professional learning, and about schools that bear heavily on a teacher’s willingness to learn, and what it is he or she feels impelled to seek to learn. Without these beliefs, teachers are not com- mitted to stretching themselves to acquire the expertise that none of us starts with. Beliefs drive behavior, are often unexamined, and are resistant to change. Without understanding one’s beliefs, it is impossible to understand one’s atti- tude and motivation to learn new skills and approaches to teaching.
Chapter 3: “Schooling” takes on beliefs about the nature of profes- sional teaching knowledge and describes how this view influences the way “Adult Professional Culture” develops. Also in this chapter are es- sential beliefs about the learning environments we create for students, and the impact those environments have on student learning. Finally, we discuss teacher efficacy and how important our own beliefs are about what is possible for us to accomplish, even with students who are discouraged and far behind academically.
Chapter 4: “Cultural Proficiency and Anti-Racism” separates out, for special treatment, our beliefs about the need for culturally proficient instruction in our classrooms and active anti-racism in our stance. In this chapter, we trace the similarities and important differences be- tween cultural proficiency and anti-racism.
In these two chapters, we push back against beliefs that stand in the way of teacher learning. In particular, we push against the beliefs that there is no es- tablished knowledge base on teaching, that improving schools requires noth- ing more than recruiting superior people who know their content, and that teaching knowledge consists of a prescribed set of effective behaviors. These beliefs devalue the complexity of the profession and hobble teacher learning. Unfortunately, they are widespread and articulated frequently from pulpits of high visibility.
Beliefs drive behavior, are often unexamined, and are resistant to change.
3. Schooling
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PART ONE | ESSENTIAL BELIEFS | SCHOOLING
Essential Beliefs:
Schooling
There are certain beliefs about children, about professional learning, and about schools that bear heavily on a teacher’s willingness to learn, and what it is he or she feels impelled to seek to learn. BELIEFS ABOUT TEACHING KNOWLEDGE AND SKILL
1. Belief: Teaching is intellectually complex, difficult, and demanding work. The knowledge and skills required to teach successfully are on a par with that required for proficient practice in architecture, engineering, or law.
For those who believe that teaching is intellectually complex, difficult, and de- manding and that, like any other true profession, its knowledge is based on repertoires and matching, then the doors of professional dialogue are opened wide. The need to learn with colleagues by examining situation specific ques- tions comes to the fore, as does the need to reach out for new strategies and ways of thinking in the public knowledge base (Saphier, 2005).
Think about why it is so difficult to get teachers to share their good ideas and successful practices openly at faculty meetings and other forums. Teachers who believe in the effectiveness paradigm assume there are right ways and wrong ways of doing things—effective and ineffective (or at least less effective). Sup- pose you share a successful practice that is different from what I do. The tacit inference, based on my effectiveness belief system, is that either you are right or I am. You are either showing me up or trying to tell me how to do it right, which I’m not doing now. But if a school culture has internalized the belief in the complexity of teaching and the view of professional knowledge posed in this book, then I can hear your successful practice as an interesting alternative for my consideration, not a prescription for how to do it instead of the way I employ. Thus one belief essential to fruitful teacher learning and a strong pro- fessional community is about the nature of professional knowledge itself; it is based on repertoires and matching, not effective behaviors.
Teaching is intellectually complex, difficult, and demanding work.
Essential Beliefs Schooling
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PART ONE | ESSENTIAL BELIEFS | SCHOOLING
2. Belief: The nature of professional knowledge is defined by areas of performance, repertoires, and matching, not effective behaviors.
Skillful teaching requires informed and continuous decision-making based on an understanding of multiple and interconnected areas of performance, reper- toires, and matching versus learning a prescribed set of behaviors. Consequently, teachers are never finished learning. They must constantly enlarge their reper- toires, stretch their comfort zones, and develop their ability to match particular situations to reach more students with appropriate instruction.
Skillfulness in teaching derives from having large repertoires so that you are equipped to make choices in the major areas of performance that affect stu- dent learning. Once you have the repertoires, skillfulness means making choices thoughtfully based on reason, experience, and knowledge that are appropriate for a given student, situation, or curriculum.
This is the nature of professional knowledge and its use in any profession. In a profession, you have to have knowledge of your clients, your content, and the array of tools particular to your craft in order to act with expertise and get good results. So it is with teaching.
3. Belief: The knowledge bases of a professional teacher are many, diverse, and complex; skillful teaching requires systematic and continual study of these knowledge bases.
The seven knowledge bases, described in Chapter 1, include continuing devel- opment in knowledge about content, generic pedagogy, content-specific peda- gogy, children and their differences, behaviors of individuals in effective organi- zations, and communications with family and community. For purposes of the category system here, pedagogy includes the study of curriculum design and planning. All of these are important areas of teacher knowledge in addition to interactive teaching skill. Teachers must broaden their concept of professional development to include these domains and find ways to build repertoires in them.
4. Belief: The development of skillful teaching requires deep collabora- tion and non-defensive self-examination of practice in relation to student results.
We need each other in this profession. The complexity of the work requires high-functioning teams that design lessons and common formative assessments together, who do error analysis of student work, and who help each other with the design and implementation of reteaching. This kind of deep collaboration
Professional knowledge is based on repertoires and matching, not effective behaviors.
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PART ONE | ESSENTIAL BELIEFS | SCHOOLING
requires more than structures and protocols. It requires skillful leadership and the interpersonal skills to build trust, safety, risk-taking, and determination to reach all the children. “All the children belong to us” is the mantra of such teams.