Teaching people to teach is teaching people to look

David Hockney (in Hockney (2014), directed by Randall Wright) suggests that “teaching people to draw is teaching people to look”, that is because “most people don’t look that hard” (Hockney and Gayford, 2016, p. 50). These two thoughts have been used by David Powell (2016) in his doctoral work to think differently about how we teach people to learn about teaching.

Powell’s starting point is that we perhaps make too many assumptions about what beginning teachers can see when they observe teaching. By the time someone arrives at university, they have spent close to 13,000 hours watching teachers through their formal schooling. Yet, as Powell argues, they have predominantly experienced teaching as learners, leading to a focus on personal preferences, rather than looking at it through the lens of a teacher. Simply being in the presence of teaching does not mean that we learn to see teaching. This is where Powell draws upon Hockney. Learning to draw involves learning to look more carefully at something that has always been visible. Powell makes a similar argument about teaching. Learning to teach starts with “learning to look” at teaching through the eyes of a teacher, and part of our role is to intentionally and explicitly help students to do that.

This perspective resonates with me and has begun to influence how I think about my own work with undergraduate students learning to teach and coach in physical education and youth sport. These students are at the beginning of learning to see practice from the perspective of a teacher or coach. They have huge amounts of experience of being a pupil or participant, but limited experience of being a teacher or coach. Where they do have experience, they may not yet have thought deeply about why something is done the way it is done. From this position, I’m increasingly thinking about my work with beginning teachers and coaches through three simple maxims:

• Teaching people to teach is teaching them how to look at teaching.
• Teaching people to teach is teaching them how to reason about teaching.
• Teaching people to teach is teaching them how to practise teaching.

Teaching people to teach is teaching them how to look at teaching

The students I work with need opportunities to look at teaching and coaching differently. It isn’t simply about watching exemplar teaching and imitating it, but about learning to notice what happens within that teaching. This starts with developing a shared language that allows us to watch and analyse observable practice, and to begin to understand the purposes and decisions behind it. This means learning to look at teaching as it unfolds, constantly moving between a broad philosophical perspective and the more granular details of practice, and developing the professional language to talk about what is seen at different levels. In doing so, students can begin to notice what might be significant rather than simply watching what happens.

Teaching people to teach is teaching them how to reason about teaching

However, noticing what might be significant and using a shared language to understand it is only the beginning of the work. Students also need opportunities to reason about what they see. Why do you think that question worked? Why did the teacher stop the activity at that moment? What might the learners be learning? What else could the teacher have done? What evidence supports your interpretation? These questions are about moving students beyond describing the sayings, doings and relatings they see in teaching towards interrogating, interpreting, explaining and making judgements about them.

Articulation, by both myself and the students, is an important step here because it makes that developing reasoning visible. By putting our thinking into words, we can begin to explain and justify our interpretations together, and those interpretations can then be shared leading to challenge and refinement. The aim of articulation is not to identify the correct answer, but to develop students’ professional capacity to make increasingly informed judgements about teaching.

Teaching people to teach is teaching them how to practise teaching

In the end, we need to get students teaching because teaching is both a practical and intentional activity. Learning to look at teaching and learning to reason about teaching cannot be ends in themselves. They need to feed into students’ own planning and enactment of practice, alongside ongoing reflection on that practice. Students need to practice and practising teaching at university offers something different from simply gaining more teaching experience. It can provide a relatively safe space where practice can be slowed down, paused, discussed and replayed. Students can make decisions about what they are trying to achieve, put those decisions into practice, see what happens, make an adjustment and try again. If needed, they can practise something over and over again, noticing something different or refining what they do each time.

As they practice they are doing this alongside other aspiring teachers and coaches who are also learning how to look at teaching, reason about what they see and articulate their developing thinking. Their practice becomes something we can look at together, talk about, question, learn from and ultimately emulate or reject. Practising teaching at a university is therefore not simply about doing more teaching. It is about creating the space for students to experiment, make mistakes, try things again and gradually develop a different way of seeing and understanding their own and others’ teaching practice.

Learning to teach is learning to see

For me, this is increasingly what undergraduate teacher and coach education should involve. We need to provide students with practice worth looking at and help them learn how to look at it. We need to create spaces in which they can articulate and interrogate their reasoning about what they see. Then we need to provide ongoing opportunities for them to explore that developing understanding through their own practice supported by a community of professional learners. This brings me back to Hockney and Powell thoughts and words at the beginning of this blog post. Helping students learn to teach begins with helping them to learn to look at teaching through a teacher’s eyes. Over time, what they are able to see should change. They begin to notice things that were previously hidden in plain sight, to look more carefully at teaching and from different perspectives, and to see significance in aspects of practice that they might previously have simply not noticed. Learning to teach is, at least in part, learning to see teaching differently.