Ashley Danyew

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034 - Do We Really Teach How We Were Taught?

Ashley Danyew

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034 - Do We Really Teach How We Were Taught? Ashley Danyew

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*Disclosure: I get commissions for purchases made through links in this post.

Teaching How We Were Taught

Who were your favorite teachers growing up?

Maybe it was a private music teacher or a choir director or your high school English teacher or a professor you had in college.

What do you remember about them? What was your learning experience like? What approaches did you observe? What do you find yourself incorporating into your own teaching?

This is our topic today. Perhaps you've heard the age-old adage: we teach how we were taught.

Of course, we know this isn’t the full story: we all have unique backgrounds and a variety of experiences that inform the people we are today and the teachers we are becoming.

Observing and imitating our own teachers is certainly a part of that, but this alone doesn’t define what type of teacher we are or will become. But it is worth considering every now and again: 

  • How do these influences and past experiences affect our teaching mindsets, our approaches, and the way we think about learning? 

  • Are we keeping an open mind, pursuing new avenues of instruction, learning new technologies, and challenging our perceptions from time to time or are we getting stuck in a rut, clinging to the things that feel comfortable and safe and familiar, teaching the way we’ve always taught?

Author and speaker Peter Drucker once wrote:

“Learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.” (source)

Think about how much the world has changed since you were a student. Think about how much the world has changed in the last year and a half. To connect to students where they are today and prepare them for the world they’ll face in the future, our teaching has to remain flexible, responsive, and adaptive to the changing world around us.

We need to keep our eyes and ears and minds open to new ideas, new ways of thinking, new ways of doing. We need to continue learning ourselves.

Dr. Rebecca Graetz, Instructional Program Manager at the University of Wisconsin-Superior wrote:

"Learning how to teach the students we have and not the students we want can be an eye-opener. . . .It is important to continuously assess our style and come up with ways to improve our teaching for better student engagement and student success.” (source)

That being said, as you begin to reflect on your own past experiences and current teaching practices, here are three things you should know:

No. 1 - Experience informs practice

In a 2013 article, researchers Amanda Oleson and Matthew T. Hora interviewed and observed 53 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics faculty at three research institutions. They discovered three primary teaching influences: previous teachers, past teaching experiences, and experience as learners.

In sum, modeling and imitating our own teachers is one type of experience (of several) that informs our knowledge and practice of teaching. (source)

If you're interested in learning more about this, here are a few resources to check out:

  • First is the book, Experience & Education by John Dewey. This is a small but important book about learning and the power of active experience.

  • Second is the article, Five Things You Only Learn When You Start Teaching on the Cambridge University Press Blog. This is a quick read. The author interviewed five educators to find out about their best learning experiences after they started teaching.

  • Third is the article, What My Teachers Taught Me About Teaching by David Cutler, a reflection on teaching and learning from the perspective of both learner and teacher.

No. 2 - We teach based on how we learned

This makes sense, doesn’t it? We remember the teaching strategies that were most effective for us as learners.

Stephanie Cox, in her 2014 master’s thesis, explored the question: "Do Teachers Teach as They Were Taught?” and determined that teachers take a deeper and more thoughtful approach to teaching than simply imitating the way they were taught. Instead, they reflect on their past experiences as students and choose strategies and approaches that they feel helped them learn.

It's important to note here that the most memorable lesson is not necessarily the one where the greatest learning took place. There are a number of factors that make an experience memorable, whereas there are many learning experiences throughout our lives that we don't remember specifically but where learning took place.

That being said, I do think we tend to reflect back on our own learning experiences and what was meaningful to us when developing our own teaching practice (even if some of those things are more peripheral to the actual learning process).

In sum, we teach the way we preferred to be taught and the way we think students will learn best (often, the way we learned best). (source)

If you're interested in learning more about this, I have two resources to recommend:

No. 3 - Learning takes effort

Learning isn’t always easy. As teachers, we know this to be true. But as students, it’s hard to accept the fact that learning requires effort. It’s a struggle, sometimes, to achieve mastery of a new concept or skill. And sometimes, that means failing multiple times before achieving success.

In a review of the book, Make It Stick by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel, Jennifer Gonzalez wrote, “Easy learning is not long-lasting; it’s the effort required to learn that results in true retention.” (source)

In sum, teaching and learning is a two-sided coin. For true learning to take place and take root, it requires effort on both sides.

If you're interested in learning more about this topic, I have a few resources to suggest:

  • First is the book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink. I shared my review of this book in Episode 003. The book is based on scientific research by people like Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, Carol Dweck, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, among others and it offers great insight into motivation, both intrinsic and extrinsic.

  • Second is the book, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool. You may be familiar with Anders Ericsson's research on deliberate practice. In this book, he distills three decades of research into a learning strategy about increasing ability and achieving peak performance.

  • Next is an article from Cult of Pedagogy, "To Learn, Students Need to DO Something." Jennifer Gonzalez makes a case for problem-based learning and teaching sequences that include time for guided practice and application and an active experience of some kind.

  • Finally, the book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth. This book is just as it sounds -- an exploration of what grit looks like and how to cultivate passion, perseverance, and tenacity in a variety of situations.

Summary

In summary, do we teach how we were taught? Not necessarily. While we may be influenced by our teachers and perhaps more specifically, experiences that were meaningful to us, this is not the full extent of our teaching persona or potential.

I want to close today with a challenge — a few thought-provoking questions for you to consider as we begin a new school year:

  1. What prior influences do you see reflected in your teaching?

  2. What are you doing to pursue new avenues of instruction, learn new technologies, and challenge your perceptions and assumptions?

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