Chapter 6C

The Next Generation

“Mr. Brock, I’m nervous!” said Katie.
I glanced over to where she was helping me set up lab stations for the workshop and tried to reassure her.
“You’re going to do fine.” I told her. I counted out another set of media plates and lay them on the table. I looked over at her again. “You’ve been studying your notes for your part of the presentation, right?”
She nodded from across the room. “But what if someone asks me a question I don’t know the answer to?” She replied.
I gazed around the conference room of the hotel to make a quick inventory of the supplies at each station and headed back toward the podium.
“Katie, it’s not like I’m leaving the room while you give your portion of the presentation.” I said as I collected more supplies for the lab stations. “I’ll still be here to help you out if you need it.”
I studied the box in my hand and then looked over at where she was still counting out plates. “Have you set out all the pipettes yet?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “Only the ones for the sterile water.” She answered. “Each place still needs the ones for the dilutions and plating.”
I murmured understanding and started to count out disposable pipettes. Walking around to each workstation, I tried to encourage her some more.
“Just remember that it’s your protocol you’re teaching people.” I told her. “I doubt very much that anyone’s going to ask something that you haven’t had to think about already for yourself.”
She still didn’t look very convinced. But as she finished distributing the last of her plates, she didn’t hesitate about going back to the supply box and getting the next item on the materials list to pass out.
We worked in silence then, and pretty soon all ten lab stations were ready to go.
“What do you want me to do now?” She asked, fidgeting a bit.
I scrutinized the room once more and then glanced back and forth between the supply box and the computer screen.
“Why don’t you double check each station one last time to make sure they all have the necessary supplies.” I told her. “Then go get yourself a glass of water to keep next you and try to relax. You’re going to be great!”
“Yeah, right, Mr. Brock.” She replied.
She began to turn and then stopped.
“Do you really think we need this many stations?” She asked, nervously.
I looked up at her and answered. “Katie, we have the mid-morning slot on the Friday of the convention. It’s the prime time when the maximum number of people will be going to sessions all weekend. I hope we have enough stuff.”
She glowered as she walked away. “Are you trying to frighten me, Mr. Brock?”
I had to suppress a chuckle as I watched her go. We had worked together as teacher and student for a long time, everything from classes to co-publishing to working as one of my teaching assistants in my summer research internship. If there was anyone I trusted to be up to the task of co-presenting a workshop at the national science teachers convention, it was Katie. She would be as poised as an old pro when the time came; she always was.
I turned my attention back to the computer, bringing up both the power point and the project web sites, and then clicked rapidly through the presentation’s pages to refresh my own memory. I was doing the introduction and protozoa; Katie was doing bacteria and fungi. I wanted to be sure I had a sense of how I wanted to transition one from the other.
“Everything’s in place.” Katie told me as she returned to the front of the room. “And I went ahead and passed out the instruction sheet now that people are starting to come in.”
She gestured toward the door at the rear of the room.
“Okay!” I replied and moved the mouse quickly to project the title slide. The screen filled with our “Little Things” motif, and I stretched to unkink. “Ready?” I asked her.
She swallowed and nodded.
“Then feel free to wait over with our stuff if you want.” I said, pointing toward the table where we had our extra materials organized. “I know how awkward it feels to have a room full of people staring at you in silence, waiting for you to begin; so I understand if you want to sit off to the side until I introduce you.”
She nodded nervously again and went to take a seat.
I noticed that a few people were starting to flip through the instruction packets at the lab stations and that others were clearly scanning the room looking for the pile of handouts. Nope folks, I thought; I do things a little differently.
Waiting until precisely our appointed starting time, I exchanged a quick look of ‘ready to go?’ with Katie and started the workshop.
“Good morning everyone!” I announced. “I’d like to welcome you all to our workshop today on soil ecology. My name is David Brock, and this is my colleague, Katie Loya.” I paused to let her wave shyly at the crowd and then continued. “I’m also proud to say that she is a former student of mine, and together, we’re both going to be showing you this morning how to study soil microbes and their ecological roles in your classes.”
I paused and clicked on the first slide.
“Because I’m a devout believer that not just our students learn best by doing,” I told them, “you’re all actually going to be practicing the protocols we show you today for yourselves. So for those of you just coming in or for those of you who didn’t take a seat near one of the piles of materials, you’ll want to take a moment and relocate yourself so that you’re next to a lab station.”
I gave people time to move and waited for the inevitable hand in the air.
“Do you have any more handouts?” asked a gentleman toward the front.
“Actually, no.” I replied. “We’ve only put a handful of handouts at each workstation for people to share as you follow along with the instructions we’ll be putting up on the screen. Everything you will be learning today is available to download free off our website–including this presentation.”
I shrugged and smiled.
“We figure if we’re teaching environmental science, then wiping out a forest of trees for photocopies sort of sends a mixed message.” I said. “Besides, if you’re like me when you go to one of these things, you want to be able to reformat everything for your own students anyway. So we simply provide everything to download so that folks can cut and paste to their heart’s desire.”
I paused to let that announcement actually sink in, and as usual, I saw a mixture of reactions: smiles and nods of approval and understanding from some; frowns and looks of annoyance from others. The latter, I knew from long experience, would never have used anything we were presenting anyway. They were the rabid gatherers of “handouts for the files”–the teachers who go through conventions as if somehow merely collecting the ideas of others made them a better educator. But with the nodders, there was hope because I knew good teachers will work for an idea—fight even—to make it theirs. Those were the people I was really trying to reach here today.
Thinking about all the trees I had just saved, I clicked on the first slide and began “When studying soil microbes, there are essentially four key steps you’ll be performing today….”

Practicing What We Preach

Perhaps the key challenge to incorporating the kind of teaching and learning discussed in Chapters 4 and 5 into our schools is that we don’t employ them in the actual teacher training process itself.  In spite of the fact that we already know “what conditions we can devise so that all humans will learn,”²² lecturing still remains the dominant pedagogy in both teacher colleges and at educational conferences, and this passive approach where an instructor talks while others listen–what Roland Barth calls the “sit ‘n’ git” (as in sit down and get some knowledge)²³–is then incorporated into the trainees own teaching because “it’s how they learned.”²⁴

The “sit ‘n’ git,” though, assumes that our knowledge of the universe consists of a set of propositions for transmitting and receiving like a radio broadcast, and as we have seen throughout this book, that epistemological assumption is a false one.  Genuine knowledge, you will recall, can only come from entering into community with the universe’s web of relationships, and because “there can be no community when one person is talking all the time and the rest are presumed to be listening,”²⁵ the “sit ‘n’ git” can’t teach anyone anything.  As Barth summarizes well when recounting finding a box full of:

all my notes from four years of college, along with syllabi and final examinations…I opened up the box and took out some folders.  Despite three-hour lectures for sixteen weeks each, I couldn’t even remember taking many of these courses.  I then administered myself a couple of final exams.  I’d have been very happy to settle for 0.5 percent retention.  I found none.²⁶

Hence, because most teachers are themselves trained using a fundamentally flawed method of instruction, their own instructing regularly reflects this fact, and since the majority of professional development that follows during the rest of their careers usually involves one “sit ‘n’ git” after another, little ever changes.  Indeed, research has shown that only 1% of the continuing professional development in this country is of high quality,²⁷ and because bad epistemology begets bad teaching—telling people how to get the kids in their classrooms doing is a self-contradiction—the way we instruct educators in their craft just reinforces the teacher-centered classroom. 

What we now know is that if we want teachers producing genuine learning, they must actively engage in the process of student-centered teaching, and since teachers are no different than students—they learn best by doing—the only way to learn how to teach in a student-centered fashion is to do exactly that.²⁸  Therefore, what we need in our schools are systemic mentoring programs where experienced already authentically engaged educators work with those entering the profession to demonstrate how to craft student-centered instruction and provide the opportunity for new teachers to practice such lessons under their mentor’s watchful eye.  New teachers “need to have an idea of what quality work looks like, have time to practice and work toward it, and take ownership of their next learning steps”²⁹ if we want to empower them to become authentically engaged educators themselves.

But that takes time and resources, and to do it well takes a lot of time and resources.  I know.  I was once blessed to mentor a former student of mine into the profession who was totally new to teaching, and it was an amazing experience to uncover and unpack all the skills and habits I now did almost instinctively and hold them up for reflection.  But the process also took nearly an hour of meeting time every single day of the work week and a few weekend afternoons that year, and while I did it without pay out of love for my former student, that is not a realistic model for the kind of truly systemic change in teacher training our schools so desperately need if we are going to have effective teaching and learning for every child.  I will return to the issue of investment in education in Part III of this project, but for now I will put it bluntly:  if we want good teaching, it is going to cost.

However, there is an alternative cost as well, and we are already paying it. Our society has clung now for decades to a dysfunctional approach to education that has “lost sight of the basic purposes of schooling, and of the high expectations and disciplined effort needed to attain them.  [More than a generation of children have passed through schools] eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity,”³⁰  and yet here we are billions of dollars in so-called reform later and “most of America’s high school students are [still] not ready for either college or work.”³¹  “Every school claims to teach its students to think, but few do,”³² and so we find ourselves in the very crisis this project is seeking to address. Put simply, we have collectively failed as a nation to provide the kind of schooling our children need to engage in the effective learning they will need for their lives.  Consequentially, we are actively risking denying them a future, and therefore, I ask us as a society:  which cost do we really want to pay?