I got to go to four different inservices late last month. Two of them were part of Manitoba Ed’s Summer Institute. A lot of sessions in all sorts of subjects were offered each day for a week. We had staggered lunch breaks, and ours was nearly last. That meant I got to walk the halls while other workshops were in session.
I found it curious that nearly all the sessions had the teachers/students sitting in desks in nice neat rows, with the instructor at the front writing on a blackboard (or white board). There seemed to be little interactivity, and little creativity in the delivery of most of the sessions.
I couldn’t help but observe to myself that it was really no wonder that some complain there’s little original teaching going on. When you can’t risk doing something a little risky in front of colleagues who are there to learn to teach better, well, when can you take the risk? It’s a lot harder to take risks when your teaching contract is at risk, or when there’s grumpy parents, rambunctious kids, or standardized tests looming. In these sessions there were a lot of eager teachers, mainly led by other teachers. The greatest risk anyone took was that if they tried something and it didn’t work they wouldn’t be asked to lead a workshop again next year.
The people at these sessions were there to learn better teaching techniques. Shouldn’t better techniques be modelled?
I faced this in leading a session on how to run classroom discussion. I sat down in front of Powerpoint when it occurred to me that it was absurd to lecture or present on class discussion. So I redid it as a guided discussion about discussion. I can then use examples from the session I’m running to demonstrate how to run discussion. But let’s face it, a simple lecture/Powerpoint presentation is just so much easier to do, which is why we fall back to it.