Talking to Other Teachers About Teaching

Teacher Talk: Teachers Building a Professional Community
by Talking to Other Teachers About Teaching
by William Ayers

Eight teachers settle into child-sized chairs in room 201 of the Gwendolyn Brooks Academy, a struggling public school on Chicago's near west side, as Carla Jordan, the host teacher, begins to pull the meeting together. "Has everyone got a snack?" she asks. "There are more donuts and apples on the side table. Cider... Coffee... Everyone OK?" She pauses and smiles, arms open and welcoming. "OK", she continues. "Why don't we bring our chairs forward, a little closer together, and let's make this more of a circle." She gestures with her hands as chair-legs scrape linoleum until a little halfhearted ring forms up. "Good. Let's begin."

Carla welcomes her colleagues to her second-grade classroom and reminds them that they have only forty minutes together today and that five minutes are already gone. "The house rules allow for two minutes of complaining," she laughs, "but I'm dispensing with that so we can plunge right into the heart of things. You can complain on your own time." Everyone laughs as Robert Thompson, a sixth grade teacher and the group comedian, pulls a mock frown and says, "I've been waiting two weeks for a chance to offer a major whine, and now you're bottling me up." "Tell it to your therapist," Carla jokes.

Carla Jordan sets a small portable oven timer for ten minutes, places it on a nearby desk, and begins presenting a portrait of her classroom--her environment for learning--and the rhythm and routine of her day. This is the eleventh meeting for this group of teachers, and they are by now comfortable with each other and familiar with the format: they always meet in a group member's classroom; the host teacher provides a modest (or elaborate) snack, and chairs the meeting; after a two-minute period allowed for gossip and complaint, the host teacher spends ten minutes describing the classroom, emphasizing the choices she or he has made and the thinking behind each decision; the group then talks back to the presenting teacher for eight minutes, expanding on some points, seeking clarification, critically reflecting, describing practices to amplify or intensify aspects of the environment; gears shift, and during the next ten minutes the host teacher presents a student to the group through the lens of that student's work; the group then talks back to the presenting teacher offering critical advice for future work with the student; the final two minutes are devoted to calendar, future meetings, details, business. Forty minutes. Out the door.

Carla Jordan has been teaching for four years, neither a novice nor quite yet a veteran. Of the eight teachers gathered here, two are first-year teachers, five have been teaching from between four and ten years, and Robert has been teaching eighteen years. Each teacher has hosted at least one Teacher Talk; this is Carla's second round, and she highlights changes since the last meeting in her room. "I took seriously the suggestions about the importance of displaying student work as you can see," she says, " gesturing towards a wall displaying student papers, a clothesline stretched across the back of the room hung with paintings, and a large table under a banner that trumpets, "Our Museum of Culture." The reading area bristles with book reports, the place is alive with child-made art, and one large space is decorated with the results of an ongoing graphing, charting, mapping project. The room looks denser, more vibrant and dynamic, busier and more interesting. It's made a difference I think in the pride and effort that goes into their work," Carla says. Everyone is impressed.

"I've been wondering," says Veronica Adams, a fourth-grade teacher who has consistently and increasingly argued for a stronger emphasis on pushing children to write across the curriculum, "in my own classroom about making visible the process of writing. I mean, why not display, for example, three drafts of the same paper? That might underline the point I make to the kids--how writing requires an idea, some effort and editing, and then rewriting." One teacher thinks out loud about the importance of not intimidating beginning writers, allowing them to simply write, and another argues for the different demands made of fourth graders and second graders.

Carla takes notes on the conversation and then, when the time is up, pulls out a fat file folder and says, "Let me tell you about Rodney." At the last meeting she had described a challenging child, and today she has decided to provide some balance. This kid works hard and adds some zest and fun to her day. The group admires the creativity and intensity of Rodney's writing, the colorful paintings and meticulous maps he has drawn of the classroom and the school building. There are a few suggestions of ways to stretch the work with Rodney before the session comes to an end.

Teaching demands thoughtfulness. There simply is no way to become an outstanding teacher through adherence to routine, formula, habit, convention, or standardized ways of speaking and acting. Thoughtfulness requires time and focus and wide-awakeness--a willingness to look at the conditions of our teaching lives, to consider alternatives and different possibilities, to challenge received wisdom and the taken for granted, and to link our conduct with our consciousness... to think what we are doing.

It can be overwhelming to try to think what you are doing in a classroom of 30 students, embedded in a school of several hundred (or thousand), situated in a town or city of several thousand (or million). Each of your students has her or his own needs, skills, capacities, hopes, and dreams. The school has its own goals and plans to attend to, and society makes its own demands as well.

Although there is always more to learn and more to know as a teacher, the heart of teaching is a passionate regard for students. With it, mistakes and obstacles will be met and overcome; without it, no amount of technical skill will ever fully compensate. The work of teaching involves struggling to see each student in as full and dynamic a way as possible, and simultaneously to create environments that nurture and challenge the wide range of students who are actually there in our classrooms.

Teachers need opportunities to collectively engage serious questions of immediacy and urgency from their classrooms: What are my teaching goals? How do they fit the visions/standards of the larger community? What is going on in our classrooms? What does it mean for the teacher? How are the kids experiencing it? How can we learn from one another?

It is important that teachers fight the atomization, isolation, and alienation endemic in teaching. Teachers typically find themselves alone in classrooms with too many children and too little time. When teachers talk to other teachers, it is usually a brief encounter at lunch or during a break, and the talk is rarely about the content and conduct of their work. The isolation is sometimes defended as a precious and guarded autonomy, but it can easily turn to disconnection and burnout.

The most successful teacher development projects do not rely on university people, curriculum specialists, gurus, or outsiders of any kind. Rather, they are teacher-run, small, informal, and personal. They are teachers talking to teachers about teaching. Teacher Talk.

These networks are promising because they require no special expertise or equipment or package. They are built on the needs, experiences, and collective wisdom of teachers themselves. They are close to the realities of classroom life and promise, therefore, no pie in the sky. And yet, by focusing on teachers' own concerns collectively and publicly, they assume that good teachers are always in search of better teaching practice. They allow for scrutiny, self-reflection, criticism, and support in the difficult task of becoming outstanding teachers.

The focus of Teacher Talk is curriculum, instruction, and evaluation--the content and conduct of teaching. This is itself remarkable. School staff meetings are so dominated by procedure and organization (announcements of regulations, reports of committees) that a visitor to such a meeting would have no idea what the enterprise is about. By contrast, Teacher Talk is only about students and teaching.

Teacher Talk is an initiative for and by teachers and is based on a simple principle: teaching is intellectual and ethical work, and it requires a thoughtful, caring person to do it well. Teacher Talk is the beginning of a professional conversation, a reflective dialogue focused on the lives of particular students and the opportunities for student success in our classrooms. It points to important aspects of the teaching enterprise that teachers can control in significant ways; observing and understanding students as learners, and creating environments for learning that nurture and challenge the wide range of students in any classroom.

The message of Teacher Talk is that the people with the problems are also the people with the solutions, and that only the self-activity of teachers can, in the end, improve teaching in any fundamental or sustained way. Teacher Talk unlocks the tacit knowledge of teachers, makes that knowledge public and shared, and therefore subject to deliberate and thoughtful change. Teacher Talk is a form of voluntary peer staff development and can be conceived as teacher action research, formal teacher reflection, sustained appreciative inquiry.

We hear a lot these days about accountability. Teacher Talk strives for lateral accountability--peer accountability--rather than the sort and punish top-down accountability that has been a proven failure for too long. Teacher Talk aims at professional development leading to whole-school change. It is not a model of nibbling around the margins of the school through pulling out a few like-minded teachers. Teacher Talk is a potential activity for every teacher.

Teacher Talk is more than talk--it is a way for teachers to collaborate, to support each other, to push each other as teachers. In short, Teacher Talk aims to build a professional community.

About the Author:
William Ayers is Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and author of To Teach (Teachers' College Press) and A Kind and Just Parent (Beacon Press).

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