I'm back, and took a day of total relaxation (enforced by a visit from my puppy therapist), and now it's time for me to work on processing what I learned.
One of the hardest things about this is overcoming the feeling that I'm a pretty good teacher. I think I am. But I know I'm not perfect. But exposing the soft underbelly of my difficulties as a teacher, even to myself, is hard. Over the years, I've gotten very protective of that soft underbelly.
And I'll be at these meetings, and I'll think, yes, I do that, yes, I do this. And I'll think I'm ahead of the game. Except I really think most of the people I work with do that and this well, too. So mostly I need to listen to the details: do I do that carefully, with forethought? Or is it rote? Do I do this as fully as I might?
And the other thing? I haven't heard of doing the other thing!
It's hard for me to move from the big goals things (students will think critically) to the real goals (students will learn to read verse; students will read and think about X plays and be able to analyze passages; students will understand genre, etc).
I have a week to do a bunch of reading and preparation for another learning about teaching session. (No, I wasn't assigned these sessions because I was naughty. See, I'm being defensive again.)
I think everyone feels weird about opening up their teaching to one another. I study pedagogy and write on it, but I still feel incredibly vulnerable when I share my scholarship with people outside my field because what I'm really doing is sharing my teaching.
ReplyDeleteThere are also only a few mechanisms for sharing one's teaching. For example, how many times have you had people watch your teaching when the goal wasn't evaluation?
I love all these blogposts and am only catching up now!