Learning to teach, teaching to learn

Anuja Venkataraman

My first assignment as a teacher was with a class of four-year-olds in an alternative school. I was both excited and nervous, but also hopeful that my teacher training course had taught me sufficiently to meet the challenges of teaching. Little did I know that my learning journey had only just begun. Every new day, topic, student, session brought manifold challenges and reminded me of the need to take advice from books, the internet, and people.

With time, I took comfort in knowing that I am not alone. A question faced by many teachers is how can we do justice to the wonderful opportunity to make a positive difference in young people’s lives? How do we keep ourselves updated so we can support our students in the best ways possible? How do we keep up the spirit of curiosity and excitement of learning that we first began our teaching journey with? Through this article I will share experiences and attempts that have been useful for me to grow and better myself as a teacher.

Attitude of learning
Feeling joy in learning is as crucial for a teacher as it is for a child. But our stressful, busy schedules require us to discern and prioritize the most important things and identify our current areas of interest. Do I need to learn everything? What do I want to learn now? How do I decide?

There are many ways to approach this. One that I have experienced often is that something comes up in the classroom and we recognize the need to know more. At no point can a teacher know and be equipped to handle everything. Continuous improvement is a good philosophy to work with.

Learning as an alternative school teacher
In my first school, there was tremendous emphasis on learning using multiple intelligences (MI). My role involved dealing with very young children and exposing them to a variety of content via games and MI-based activities. The second alternative school I was part of was democratically run with guiding principles of equality and respect for all. The role required being a mentor or friend to the children. Adults were expected to hold back and let children take the lead and committees of children and adults worked on running different functions of the school. Conflicts were handled without teachers or adults as the deciding authority. Children could take time to do project work that included carpentry, sewing, cooking, etc., and that demanded that the facilitators learn and support activities that were out of their comfort zone.

I faced multiple questions when working in these alternative school spaces. One was questions around the specifics of applying a freedom schooling philosophy to young children and to understand what it means to you as a teacher. Another was how can a teacher support children’s emotional ups and downs. A third category of questions revolved around classroom management activities like balancing discipline, fairness, and productive work, trying to enable every child to feel that they have gained something and not feel ignored or sidelined or worse. I felt a need to learn more about specific content areas – theory, skills, applications, relating to real life, etc.

There was a need to reflect, remain curious and work diligently to respond to these questions in my search for directions and solutions.

Actions taken to learn
Many actions were needed to keep updated with the new ideas and skills needed in this novel environment. General ways included calling experts, suggesting topics and participating in trainings organized monthly, picking up library books, clarifying doubts and raising questions, reflecting on practices, having conversations, learning alongside children, and not assuming a position of knowledge, observing other teachers teaching and collaborating.

Examples of learning for specific challenges are shared below.

Understanding and applying the school philosophy: My school was influenced by the ideas of Daniel Greenberg, founder of Sudbury Valley school, USA. Its philosophy permeated every area of functioning – from democratic processes, conversations, decision-making, which involved seeing all school members as equal regardless of age, freedom for all students and faculty to plan their day without being strictly bound by time-tables, tight schedules decided by someone else, etc.

I read books and articles on the philosophy, watched YouTube videos to learn more about the systems and how they are implemented. This helped visualize and form an outline of how one can approach freedom. Discussions with colleagues and students added multiple perspectives. Working with systems like school parliament, or committees that took care of different aspects of the school using group decision-making and equality, supported exercising freedom with an open, curious mind, helped me understand and practice, try, succeed or fail, and learn from experience. Reflection and maintaining a journal, bringing up one’s questions and views for discussions in team meetings, not only on things to do, but also philosophy and how to translate it in practice, helped.

I read and compared our way with the Montessori system to find parallels, contrasts, or ideas. Attended teacher retreats around alternative teaching and learnt about ideas on de-schooling by thinkers like Ivan Ilyich. I read on child psychology, democracy, freedom, communication, equality, etc., and authors like John Dewey, Tagore, and J Krishnamurthy. Visiting other schools, attending talks, conferences helped to stay updated with current conversations on education.

Support children and self emotionally: To support children’s emotional ups and downs, we invited psychologists and counsellors who could share their insights in child psychology and development. Counsellors were invited to conduct short/long-term workshops for facilitators to understand themselves and extend empathy to children. Works by authors like Carl Rogers, Marshal Rosenberg who emphasize creating a listening space for children gave us ideas on how one can support children better – individually, as a group, via conversation. In addition, by reading books together, teachers celebrated the art of book-reading, discussion, and reflecting on what can be applied to their specific situations. Short-term online courses on MOOC platforms like Coursera were another useful source of information. For example, a course called ‘Effective Classroom Interactions: Supporting Young Children’s Development’ focused on helping teachers offer emotionally supportive interactions to the children in their care. Having regular one-on-one conversations with children while doing some activity together like playing with Lego blocks or drawing are examples of some of the many ways to bond with children.

Upon encountering situations of a child hitting or biting, we tried to find ways and routines to calm, or deal with it empathically. Approaches like non-violent communication, sources like websites, books, videos, trainings, practice groups, discussions in staff meetings helped.

Classroom management: Classroom management was a tricky area because behaviourist methods to establish and maintain discipline are popular by default and any attempt to work with students in a more empathic, or ‘soft’ manner seems risky, noisy and time-consuming to many. Notions like ‘if you are soft with them, they will sit on your head’ are believed and teachers use methods like raising their voice, using positive or negative reinforcement to establish pin-drop silence and a room of children sitting firmly in their designated places in a disciplined, learning classroom.

Alternative schooling expects a softer form of classroom management that gives every child equal opportunity to participate and treat disrupting children with humanity, kindness, and understanding. Teachers are expected to try to empathically understand why students behave in a certain way and not directly jump to using punishment or penalty to discourage disruptive behaviour. To translate these ideas into reality involved learning more about child-centric ways of managing groups of children. We discovered the works of educationists like A.S. Neill and John Holt, and their ideas gave us more conviction that alternate, kinder ways are practical too. I also became curious about the assumptions made by philosophers of education or otherwise, about human nature, children’s nature, etc. I learnt about Rousseau and John Locke, and how this question of nature vs nurture doesn’t have a single right answer.

Authors like Robert Tauber and Carolyn Evertson have researched and written about different ways of classroom management. Research has found that teacher burnout, stress, and resignations are contributed by long-term challenges around classroom indiscipline and management. To address certain challenges, one may need to do one’s own research, look for articles and books specific to a topic using databases like JStor, Academia, Springer, etc. It is a good idea to keep some time for this extra reading, however challenging and busy our lives are as teachers.

Through reading and discussions, I recognized that classroom management could be approached differently with cooperative learning, project-based learning, etc.

Content area, pedagogy, assessment: In an open schooling environment, children showed curiosity in a diverse range of topics from bugs, space, Lego, geography, fire, making slime, balls, learning a new language, song,etc. To be able to keep up and facilitate their learning, I had to search, browse books in the school library, lookout for interesting books in bookshops, search online, hunt for quality YouTube videos, talk to other teachers, experts, and attend teacher workshops.

I would ask other teachers about pedagogies they use, learn about using approaches like multiple intelligences, learning by doing, enquiry model, project-based learning, peer-learning, self-directed learning, using books, websites, Google searches, research papers, etc.

I learnt to make and write down observations and process what is happening. When there was confusion about what exactly we are supposed to observe, templates of learning indicators, assessment criteria of different boards helped. Attending trainings on specific subjects helped in learning new ways, perspectives, and meeting other teachers.

For using multiple intelligences as a part of content and pedagogy, I read articles, book extracts, had discussions with colleagues who were well-versed with it, and asked questions. A cycle of thinking of different areas of using multiple intelligences, trying to use those ideas in lesson plans, seeing them in action, and reflection helped.

Perspectives on education: Keeping up with thoughts on educational questions and policies is important to give a context and meaning to its larger goal. I joined courses like ‘The future of education’ by University of London on Coursera to know how they see the direction in which education is and should head. Joining social media groups on alternative education, book reading, helped build a network of minds and thoughts who helped one keep in touch with the latest. Need for deeper perspective while teaching is what led me to do an MA in Education and it opened my eyes to the different purposes, contexts, challenges, and approaches to education.

Creating goals and projects for self-growth
While one is busy keeping up with the demands of the moment, teaching can feel very inspired if one can work on a ‘passion project’ that involves a mixture of learning and doing. For example, I felt a deep urge to do something for my school that is aligned to something I was very interested in – publishing a book. This led to a co-operative project involving students and teachers to bring out a book celebrating five years of the school’s existence. The project drove learning about skills needed to manage multiple groups, designing and laying out pages, writing, proof-reading, graphics, etc. A project like this helps everyone learn together.

Research and teaching
My current job has a mixture of action research and pure research in the field of conflict resolution in education. The challenge is to find relevant readings, translate them into practical life, and use some ideas to teach. Using the university’s (Azim Premji University) online and offline library, attending talks and presentations, storing potentially interesting reading material by creating organized folders, accessing online papers, magazines, songs, attending conferences, talking to people helps.

Conclusion
Teacher training had prepared me intellectually, but little did I realize then that teaching is a lifelong journey of learning and reflection – emotionally, skill-wise, content-wise, identity-wise. Challenges are of various types and arise continually. It is these challenges that prompt us to learn more and feel confident. As one teaches, the challenges point to areas we need to learn more about. The main thing is to remember we owe our best to the children we are associated with.

The author is a research associate at Azim Premji University, working with the interest group for dialogue, fraternity, and justice, interested in working towards humane, dialogic educational spaces. She has worked as a facilitator in alternative schools in Bangalore, and has a Masters of Arts in Education degree from Azim Premji University. She can be reached at anuja.venkataraman@apu.edu.in.