I have been thinking about how much teachers know, and in particular, how much teachers who write know. Teachers know more about who and what they teach than most commentators and critics could possibly imagine. And yet commentators and critics feel free to deride teachers and to complain about their many shortfalls. Some governments have such little faith in teachers that they make pronouncements about what children should learn and how teachers should teach even though they (the advice givers) generally know far less about the matter than either teachers or children. No wonder teachers doubt themselves. But you shouldn’t! I hope you don’t!
In the 1970s and 80s, teachers often got together to reflect on their teaching and what their students were teaching them. In the schools where I taught at that time, it was natural to gather at the end of the day to discuss what had happened, what we had noticed, what we were learning and what we might do next. One more formal group, the Talk Workshop Group at Vauxhall Manor School, published becoming our own experts, a thought-provoking set of papers in which teachers explore and share what they are learning about reading and writing, speaking and listening, about learners and cultures, about language and languages, and about learning. Not LURRRNING as it is pronounced so often now, with its hints of moral rectitude and utterly dismal unattractiveness, but learning in all its complicated, difficult , wondrously joyful complexity. Learning as an essential human activity. One of the contributors to the book was Michael Rosen -at the time described as ‘Mike Rosen Writer-in-Inner-City-Residence.’
I think that you should pause and write. Maybe you should ask your students to write alongside you. Write down ‘Five things [or ten or twenty or a one hundred] things I know about writing.’ Or write down the things that you think it is essential that the writers in your class should learn – what they should know, understand and be able to do as writers by the time they leave you. Or write down what you know about the writers in your class, and what they have taught you. What are they learning?
It would be a great thing to talk about in your classroom.
Perhaps you could share some of it with us.
Writing Box 