“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
“I don’t really think about the degree of difficulty or the possibility of making a mistake. I just try to relax and let my preparation and training take over.”
Seneca. Abraham Lincoln. Simone Biles. We’ve all heard versions of these preparation maxims.
Student learning hinges on teacher preparation.
I recently came across an NPR series called 50 Great Teachers and, thus, crossed paths with this piece by Claudio Sanchez about Ken Bain and a book I’ve loved and drawn on since reading in 2005: What the Best College Teachers Do.
With respect to preparing to teach—preparing for students to learn—Bain centers “two powerful notions—that teaching is fostering learning and that it requires serious intellectual work” (49)—and from these notions launches into this exceptional checklist of specific and essential questions for teaching and learning (Chapter 3, 46-67):
- What big questions will my course help students answer; or what skills, abilities, or qualities will help them develop, and how will I encourage my students’ interest in these questions and abilities?
- What reasoning abilities must students have or develop to answer the questions that the course raises?
- What mental models are students likely to bring with them that I will want them to challenge? How can I help them construct that intellectual challenge?
- What information will my students need to understand in order to answer the important questions of the course and challenge their assumptions? How will they best obtain that information?
- How will I help students who have difficulty understanding the questions and using evidence and reason to answer them?
- How will I confront my students with conflicting problems (maybe even conflicting claims about the truth) and encourage them to grapple (perhaps collaboratively) with the issues?
- How will I find out what they know already and what they expect from the course, and how will I reconcile any differences between my expectations and theirs?
- How will I help students learn to learn, to examine and assess their own learning and thinking; and to read more effectively, analytically, and actively?
- How will I find out how students are learning before assessing them, and how will I provide feedback before—and separate from—any assessment of them?
- How will I communicate with students in a way that will keep them thinking?
- How will I spell out the intellectual and professional standards I will be using in assessing students’ work, and why do I use those standards? How will I help students learn to assess their own work using those standards?
- How will the students and I best understand the nature, progress, and quality of their learning?
from What the Best College Teachers Do by Ken Bain
- How will I create a natural critical learning environment in which I embed the skills and information I wish to teach in assignments (questions and tasks) that students will find fascinating—authentic tasks that will arouse curiosity, challenge students to rethink their assumptions and examine their mental models of reality? How will I create a safe environment in which students can try, fail, receive feedback, and try again?
Each of these questions merits intensive inquiry and consideration. Each requires decision-making and clear expression.
And while Bain has asked them within the context of higher education, these questions—versions of them—prove applicable to teaching students of all ages. Imagine a kindergarten and a high-school teacher in conversation with one another about how they already do and might better answer this question: How will I help students examine and assess their own learning and thinking?
If you don’t have time to grapple with and answer every question right now, choose a few and ask them in light of an upcoming unit you’re designing. Consider and answer even one question—perhaps this one: “How will I communicate with students in a way that will keep them thinking?” Identify the ways in which you already communicate with students, and jot down why you communicate those ways. Then, identify and experiment with how you communicate—with your feedback to and questions of students. Let your students know that you’re experimenting in an attempt to reach them all the more effectively. Employ multiple, diverse means of providing feedback. Ask them which ways of communicating work for them, and why.
I’ll close with this merger of the epigraph assertions by Seneca, Lincoln, and Biles: Spend many hours sharpening the proverbial axe—without fear of difficulties and mistakes—because learning is what happens when crazy 😀 teacher preparation meets student opportunity.
