Good Enough, Isn't
I overheard a teacher offering this advice to a student-teacher the other day: "As long as you stay a chapter ahead of the kids, that's good enough."
I know that there are some things we do in our lives for which just getting them done is good enough. Dusting, grocery shopping, paying bills, putting out the garbage, walking the dog. Of course everybody's list is different. But some things should never be on the "good enough" list.
Teaching is one of them.
This is my 25th year in the job we call teacher, and the most important things I know about being a teacher is that I will never know all there is to know about being a teacher, and that "good enough" isn't good enough. In more practical terms, I know that there are two critical areas of knowledge that form part of the foundation of all good teaching.
-You have to know your subject.
I know that there are some things we do in our lives for which just getting them done is good enough. Dusting, grocery shopping, paying bills, putting out the garbage, walking the dog. Of course everybody's list is different. But some things should never be on the "good enough" list.
Teaching is one of them.
This is my 25th year in the job we call teacher, and the most important things I know about being a teacher is that I will never know all there is to know about being a teacher, and that "good enough" isn't good enough. In more practical terms, I know that there are two critical areas of knowledge that form part of the foundation of all good teaching.
-You have to know your subject.
-You have to know students, including yourself.
Teaching situations can change from year to year (or more frequently in some cases) and from place to place. It’s great to have your own classroom, but that is not always how it works out. It’s great to have visionary and supportive school leaders and colleagues, but you can’t always count on that. It’s great to have every book, marker, post-it and sentence strip you want in the supply closet, but you will always be running to Staples and Barnes and Noble.
But regardless of your teaching situation, you will always have your content, and your students, and your self. And understanding how those components come together allows you to get the most out of all three.
Knowing your subject is not about having more information to pour into the brains of 25 empty receptacles sitting before you.
And while research shows that there is a correlation between student achievement and the level of education or field expertise of the teacher, knowing your stuff is not about being able to impress your students with how much you know about American literature (substitute your content here).
All learning is a part of our individual process of making sense of the world and finding our place in it. In schools we have vivisected what we know about the world and packaged it in absurdly compartmentalized packets of “content” that bear little resemblance to the fluidity of knowledge and information, and living, in the outside world.
But the more you know about your subject, the more you can connect parts of your curriculum together internally, and to other academic disciplines, and to the larger universe. The more you know, the more assets you have to help make sense of how things fit together. –This is how we make meaning in our lives.
There is also the implication that if you have acquired sufficient working knowledge of a subject to be considered a relative expert, you have devoted some considerable time and effort to learning about it. You have found some degree of interest in it and some ways in which 19th century American literature, for example (again, substitute your own discipline here), is relevant to your own life. It seems to me that that increases the chances of your being able to help other students find relevance in it as well.
When you really know your subject, you have the comfort and the capacity to turn it around in you head, look at it from different angles, see different ways to approach a question, a problem, or a passage of text. And more importantly in some cases—see different possible outcomes as valid.
This comfort allows, and even encourages, more creative approaches to and uses of curriculum—it allows a teacher to move beyond the limiting crutch of the “Teacher’s Edition,” and the derisive moniker of "Textbook Teacher."
Among the benefits of moving away from the confines of the textbook is the degree of depth that can be encouraged. Textbooks—such as those which try to cover the entirety of American literature or the entire history of the nation, or the multifarious cultures of the world in 800-1000 pages are unavoidably and unforgivably superficial.
If my knowledge is limited to the textbook, I can do little more than scratch the surface of intellectual issues and questions that deserve more substantial consideration—the kind of intellectual opportunities that we must provide to students if they are going to develop into thoughtful adults capable of making decisions and considering the important questions of their lives, rather than merely parrots who repeat the phrases, names, and dates we have given to them, but who can not use those things in any meaningful and authentic way.
Knowing your subject, and developing trust in its potential to be meaningful in important ways—knowing that it doesn't have to be confined within artificial boundaries--means that you can go with that information wherever it leads you, even if that is to a place where you don’t know the answers to the questions. Your comfort with the subject tells you that either the answer is findable, or that the act of questioning is more important than any definitive answer could be.
I imagine we have all had days, especially as we were beginning to learn what it is to be a teacher, where staying a chapter ahead of the kids seemed like the best we could do at the time. (I must admit to more than a few of those days more recently, as I was in the final throes of dissertation writing.) I don't mean to oversimplify things; of course there is more to good teaching than content knowledge. We all have sat in classrooms with instructors who were experts in their fields but lacked the human factors that good teaching requires. But even in those "good enough" moments, I always know that the more I know about the content I am teaching, the better a teacher I am able to be.
Teaching situations can change from year to year (or more frequently in some cases) and from place to place. It’s great to have your own classroom, but that is not always how it works out. It’s great to have visionary and supportive school leaders and colleagues, but you can’t always count on that. It’s great to have every book, marker, post-it and sentence strip you want in the supply closet, but you will always be running to Staples and Barnes and Noble.
But regardless of your teaching situation, you will always have your content, and your students, and your self. And understanding how those components come together allows you to get the most out of all three.
Knowing your subject is not about having more information to pour into the brains of 25 empty receptacles sitting before you.
And while research shows that there is a correlation between student achievement and the level of education or field expertise of the teacher, knowing your stuff is not about being able to impress your students with how much you know about American literature (substitute your content here).
All learning is a part of our individual process of making sense of the world and finding our place in it. In schools we have vivisected what we know about the world and packaged it in absurdly compartmentalized packets of “content” that bear little resemblance to the fluidity of knowledge and information, and living, in the outside world.
But the more you know about your subject, the more you can connect parts of your curriculum together internally, and to other academic disciplines, and to the larger universe. The more you know, the more assets you have to help make sense of how things fit together. –This is how we make meaning in our lives.
There is also the implication that if you have acquired sufficient working knowledge of a subject to be considered a relative expert, you have devoted some considerable time and effort to learning about it. You have found some degree of interest in it and some ways in which 19th century American literature, for example (again, substitute your own discipline here), is relevant to your own life. It seems to me that that increases the chances of your being able to help other students find relevance in it as well.
When you really know your subject, you have the comfort and the capacity to turn it around in you head, look at it from different angles, see different ways to approach a question, a problem, or a passage of text. And more importantly in some cases—see different possible outcomes as valid.
This comfort allows, and even encourages, more creative approaches to and uses of curriculum—it allows a teacher to move beyond the limiting crutch of the “Teacher’s Edition,” and the derisive moniker of "Textbook Teacher."
Among the benefits of moving away from the confines of the textbook is the degree of depth that can be encouraged. Textbooks—such as those which try to cover the entirety of American literature or the entire history of the nation, or the multifarious cultures of the world in 800-1000 pages are unavoidably and unforgivably superficial.
If my knowledge is limited to the textbook, I can do little more than scratch the surface of intellectual issues and questions that deserve more substantial consideration—the kind of intellectual opportunities that we must provide to students if they are going to develop into thoughtful adults capable of making decisions and considering the important questions of their lives, rather than merely parrots who repeat the phrases, names, and dates we have given to them, but who can not use those things in any meaningful and authentic way.
Knowing your subject, and developing trust in its potential to be meaningful in important ways—knowing that it doesn't have to be confined within artificial boundaries--means that you can go with that information wherever it leads you, even if that is to a place where you don’t know the answers to the questions. Your comfort with the subject tells you that either the answer is findable, or that the act of questioning is more important than any definitive answer could be.
I imagine we have all had days, especially as we were beginning to learn what it is to be a teacher, where staying a chapter ahead of the kids seemed like the best we could do at the time. (I must admit to more than a few of those days more recently, as I was in the final throes of dissertation writing.) I don't mean to oversimplify things; of course there is more to good teaching than content knowledge. We all have sat in classrooms with instructors who were experts in their fields but lacked the human factors that good teaching requires. But even in those "good enough" moments, I always know that the more I know about the content I am teaching, the better a teacher I am able to be.
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