Despite being 40 years old, Grant and Zeichner's "On Becoming a Reflective Teacher" still feels very relevant. This timelessness mostly feels like a product of the generality with which they speak though. Open-mindedness, responsibility, and wholeheartedness are essential to every walk of life in every era, so it does not feel possible for those to become outdated. A little more surprisingly, whenever the authors referred to the teacher education system, it was a little shocking how the current system appears to be almost identical, with some comments about the situations we will face in practicum mirroring what we've been told in many of our classes. One thing that maybe felt a little outdated was the way in which they speak about curriculum. In particular, the modern open-ended BC curriculum contrasts the type of more rigid curriculum they refer to, but that could be more of a regional difference than a temporal difference (or a mix of the two). There were a number of skills and approaches mentioned that I have tried to incorporate into my life for as long as I can remember, in particular open-mindedness and rational (critical) analysis. These drive much of how I engage with ideas, so it is nice for it to be re-affirmed that they are beneficial to teaching as well (something I already knew, but still nice to hear). The comment on some teachers not fitting the "bureaucratic mold" was also nice to have acknowledged because a dislike of bureaucracy was one of the main things that made me hesitate to become a teacher for many years. In contrast, their apparent dislike of intuition based approaches was hard to read as someone who does enjoy doing things intuitively. I did take a lot away from their discussion on the specific ways a teacher can be reflective and what towards, which I think will help me in my teacher inquiry journey.
One thing that I struggled with was the implication that to be a "good teacher" you have to perform a lot of extra labour questioning and analyzing everything you do and are told. During teacher's college this seems like an obvious practice because we're learning, and obviously the learning should never stop, but with a burn out crisis plaguing the profession, it did feel a little detached from the on-the-ground realities (though that could be due to the difference in era). I've been rewatching Abbott Elementary as my little dinner time show and in one of the first episodes the main character Janine, who is unquestionably a very reflective teacher, asks a couple of the older teachers why they don't seem to care about all the little things, to which they responded that they care so much that they refuse to burn out. This really struck me and as I was reading the paper it kept popping up in the back of my mind. Just like with everything, it is about finding a balance. Yes it is important to be reflective, especially with respect to the "big" things, but there is also something to be said for taking some things for granted and just letting intuition take the wheel in order to save what little extra energy we have.
No comments:
Post a Comment