Best People before Best Practices

How do teachers become “Gardeners of Human Potential?” 

When we examine the notion of “Best Practices” more carefully, we realize that it is Best People that make practices effective.  Just as students have the capacity to do far more than what is often asked of them, so too do instructors have the capacity to design and implement new learning environments that address the reality of our student population and of our planet’s challenges. A growing body of evidence indicates that shifts in pedagogy and practice not only liberate students, but instructors as well. It is also exciting and empowering for instructors to discover that they can develop their own pedagogical best practices that break from the traditions of their educational history, and even more exciting to imagine that this approach represents the foundation of the needed paradigm shift we so often talk about in education. As teachers change “from the inside,” instructional pedagogy and practices change.

The design of educational pedagogy and educational practices is driven by our assumptions about teaching, students, and the function and purpose of education.  If we subscribe to assumptions that are not valid, or that disregard the realities of the Climate Crisis, then doesn’t it follow that our pedagogy and practices we implement in the classroom may also be consequently ineffective?  For example, if we have subscribed to the belief that lecture is the most effective way to deliver information in the classroom, we in essence have subscribed to an underlying assumption of the blank mind or tabula rasa that must be filled with knowledge and understanding.  This assumption in turn becomes the justification for designing the course based on a lecture format.  The justification for traditional lecture based largely on the notion of tabula rasa is not difficult to challenge when we consider that small children, long before they enter the K-12 system, are not only inexhaustible explorers of life, they seem to have a grasp on the most fundamental strategies that support inquiry and critical thinking with words such as How, When, What, Where, and especially Why. Further, when we introduce students to the realities and challenges of the Climate Crisis, they immediately ask “What can I do?” They do not sit quietly in the face of these challenges. 

A key question: is this potential that once existed in children still a viable possibility for instructors to reactivate?  If we were to change our assumptions to embrace this possibility, it should motivate us also to redesign our educational practices to accommodate it.   

When we look to change our teaching, we tend to look outside for the new information e.g., best practices, not realizing that the new pedagogical strategies we seek are constrained by the assumptions we hold inside our own hearts and minds about educational practices.   The assumptions we hold about education, the ones we acquired through our own education, learned in teacher training, and the ones we absorb upon entering into the tribal customs of a discipline when first hired, shape the design of our pedagogy and practices in the classroom.  

When we begin to challenge our own assumptions about teaching and learning, we also begin to discover a new world of possibilities for our classrooms.  TEA  creates the space to examine our own boundaries and assumptions, with the opportunity to not only grow as an educator but as a person.  And this same process that functions to help individual educators broaden their primary responsibility for being experts in their fields to becoming gardeners of human potential in the classroom will one day collectively generate the institutional paradigm shift education so often talks about.   

Inspired by Jim Barr