Pedagogy First (A Note on Elizabeth Green’s Building A Better Teacher)
19 0 0 19 0Every so often, I love reading other folks talk about standards without any current teachers present in their conversation. Even a cursory read of education history in this country shows how intellectual [white] men throw their moral and scholarly swag about what teachers should and shouldn’t be focused on. On the other hand, the teachers I eavesdrop on try to out-intellectual the folks imposing their “thought leadership” onto those of us in schools. Over and again, I see templates and talking points, and less about the day-to-day events and adjustments we as teachers have to make to make school work when other adults can’t.
Thankfully, Elizabeth Green’s book Building A Better Teacher does quite a bit of this.
As an urban middle school math teacher going into my 10th year, I valued getting a different perspective about teaching. Hearing things about Finland, Singapore, and Japan are nice, and all the cool kids who get to travel over there and tell us how their talking points matched with their experience over there is all well and good, but on more than one occasion found myself saying, “So what does that have to do with me?”
Green’s book, in sharp contrast, expounds on ideas I’ve only heard in passing, like the heavily-touted Japanese model of lesson study or Magdalene Lampert’s TKOT. I appreciated hearing the trials and failures of these pedagogical movements as well. It’s great to hear that teachers want to observe each other, come together, and make observations about how they can improve their pedagogy and assessments. It’s great to hear that people had the time and resources to work with each other and feel vested in this intellectually challenging work. It’s great to hear that, at some point, a group of folks actually wanted to disband the “ed-schools from afar” approach.
It also felt weird that, simultaneously, article after article came out disputing some of the claims in the book, which I found odd. For instance, Reiko Watanabe came out with an article Pedagogy First (A Note on Elizabeth Green's Building A Better Teacher) | The Jose Vilson:
This Is Not A Test
"Out of this cacophony rises a beautiful, lyrical voice—one that is uncompromisingly self-aware, reflective, and analytical. That transcendent voice belongs to “The” José Luis Vilson."
- Karen Lewis, President of the Chicago Teachers Union
My debut solo book, This Is Not A Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and Education already has endorsements from Karen Lewis, Pedro Noguera, Raquel Cepeda, Gregory Michie, Chris Lehmann, Randi Weingarten, Dennis van Roekel, Diane Ravitch, Barnett Berry, Renee Moore, Cindi Rigsbee, and many more ...