Teaching: Strategies vs. Process

Learning is key in education.  Lifelong, constant, on-going.  Reflection is one of the greatest things that drives learning.  Schools should be learning organizations where everyone in the school is constantly learning and growing, not just the students.  Even when things are going in the right direction and seem “good”, we know there are still opportunities for growth and improvement.  While we should celebrate accomplishments and successes, complacency should never be allowed or tolerated. 

 

When I was a younger coach, coaching football, I taught things the way they were taught to me when I was a player.  I was a pretty good offensive line coach, was very detail-oriented, and kids seemed to play hard for me.  I constantly learned and tried to find ways to coach that would help our players be successful.  Most skills were taught in sequences and in parts of the whole type approaches.  While there was a good deal of success, was it maximizing our capacity?  I had the opportunity to work with a couple of more seasoned (25+ years’ experience).  He taught the same type of blocking concepts in a much more holistic or conceptual way.   As I adapted to more of this type of approach, our players were even more successful.  What I learned was that this seemed to better prepare our players to be able to adapt to anything the defense might do to try to counter what we were doing on offense.   For example, if a defensive end widened a little bit, the tackle understood the concept of reaching/running him on a sweep and would widen his initial step and then knew how to redirect to reach or run based on hat and body position. 

 

The process of teaching styles/methods that changed in athletics is very relevant to what we see in classrooms and the approach many people take in trying to improve teaching and learning.  As a young and enthusiastic school administrator, I wanted to focus our PD on instructional strategies that engaged students.  While this isn’t a bad thing and was a good step in the right direction, it was only working on providing a small tool to go into people’s instructional toolbox and didn’t work on the process of how to build teaching capacity.  There’s no such thing as a “standardized student” and no single instructional strategy that works for every student.  If there was, we would all do that all day, every day.  It doesn’t hurt to help teachers or principals add instructional strategies, but one strategy isn’t the answer for everyone.  The key is to focus on the process of effective teaching.  Best practices in teaching have been consistent for decades, works in both face-to-face and virtual settings, and are student-centered. 

 

 

A common instruction framework provides this common language and focus on the process of teaching across an entire school or district.  We use a CIF that incorporates effective questioning, writing to learn, classroom talk and collaboration, scaffolding, and a literacy foundation across all areas.  There are 251 different instructional strategies that were identified by the Gates Foundation that go along with this instructional framework.  Instead of trying to teach everyone in the building 251+ effective instructional strategies, we focus on the process of teaching that involve five components and requires that students read, write, think, and speak every day in every class in some manner.

 

Maybe for some people, this is too simple of an approach?  We have a habit of overcomplicating things in education.  What I do know…….it works, it works at all levels K-12, it works in multiple states, it works for all students, it works for all teachers, and it’s worked across a long span time.  Learning is as simple as connecting something that a student doesn’t know to something that they do know.   Everything is about students and should be student-centered.  Teaching is a process of helping students be successful.  Are we truly preparing our teachers and staff to be able to continue growing and improving if we don’t focus on the process of teaching?  Are we maximizing the positive instructional impact we can have on students if we don’t focus on the process of teaching?