Teach Yourself Teaching

Suppose you had to dump a colleague (or yourself) on a desert island and they had to come back six months later with a tan and a book-based understanding of how to teach. What textbooks would you send with them?

From the language teaching side of things I'd suggest Vivian Cook's Second Language Learning and Language Teaching and the more practical A Course in Language Teaching: Theory and Practice by Penny Ur. 

How about for how to be a teacher more generally? The guy your going to maroon doesn't know how much of language teaching is the same as teaching per se.

Teaching per sae is very very big... and wide... There are reasons why we specialize in particular areas... and if we are doing what you want to do why we would equally specialize in the things that we are weakest in... to become stronger in or  in ongoing professional development why we choose particular things to focus on.  The question you are asking right now is too big for me to really know how to respond to it.  Are you looking at high school teaching OR university teaching? They are NOT the same.  What particular areas do you really want to know more about?  I can be much more helpful if you can be more specific.

Well, I figure high school requires a measure more professionalism than university, so let's say high school.

(Real university as classically conceived means your "teacher" is a subject researcher first and an instiller of knowledge second. It seems like, in utopian ideal, they'll be subject enthusiasts standing before a crowd of people who've chosen to come along and find out what's going on. So when I say "teacher", I guess I'm meaning someone who knows not just the subject, but something of the mechanics of imparting that subject. Perhaps too, since in China the universities are not exactly as classically conceived, the methods of high school teaching might be helpful to know.)

Business Studies and Economics are my preferred subjects. That makes a difference?

What specific areas are you most interested in? Lesson planning, class management, student learning, innovative teaching approaches, developing creative thinking, subject content, educational psychology, teaching cross-culturally are among the possibilities that quickly come to mind.

Don't sell professionalism in teaching at University level short. Sometimes I think some universities (or some people within them) simply don't expect foreign teachers to meet the same professional expectations which they have for Chinese teachers. That can sometimes be challenging when you are approaching it professionally, or do have the background... as much as when you don't.

I don't know what areas I'm interested in - the ones I don't know? That said, the first three you mentioned - lesson planning, class management, student learning - sound likely. I'm naively thinking lesson planning might be a key. I don't know much about structuring an hour. In particular, I don't know what different things can be done, or why they would be.


(I don't mean to be mean about professionalism in universities. It just strikes me, again, naively, that university and high school - outside of China - have different requirements.)

That said, the first three you mentioned - lesson planning, class management, student learning - sound likely. I'm naively thinking lesson planning might be a key. I don't know much about structuring an hour. In particular, I don't know what different things can be done, or why they would be. 

If it were me, I would pick one of those topics and start a search on the Internet.  I would probably begin with Google Scholar.  Then start reading.  You will eventually begin coming across some of the same names, but more importantly in doing so you will start absorbing the terminology and language.  Then you would start searching for more material by some of those reoccurring names.  Of the three listed, I would start with student learning and go from there.  Eventually, classroom management and lesson planning would be dealt with in some way or another through readings of research based articles dealing with student learning. 

If it's learning how to teach ESL, I strongly recommend 'Teach Yourself Teaching English as a Foreign Language' by David Riddell.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Teaching-English-Foreign-Language-Yourself/dp/0340868562

Teaching generally requires a slightly different set of skills I think.

I don't know...for the courses I normally teach, Literature and History, there is not exactly a manual. For lesson writing, I would recommend "Simple & Direct" by Jacques Barzun, for lit teaching the works by Thomas C. Foster and all the Norton Anthologies and for history..well....I am partial to narrative, sociological history, so I would recommend reading historians who present history in such a way, like Niall Ferguson, Andrew Marr, Norman Davies and throw in pretty much any book by James Burke.

I am talking about outside China here (lol, "waiguo" has a use):

Suggesting that university teaching isn't as professional as high school teaching kind of ignores the fact that in universities, staff have to design complete courses and programs themselves.  That takes alot of subject and education knowledge and is a major undertaking.  Trust me, I used to be a university administrator: universities have a huge "back end" to their teaching process, most of which they have to build themselves (again, that takes knowledge and organisational skill).

I think there's a tendency - and it is reasonable in many ways because it creates a metric with which we can measure things with an element of uniform accuracy - to fetishize school teaching because there is a "system".  And that system is supported by a range of important props like salary, stability, status and so forth.  In some cases I think (although not most) this goes quite beyond what it actually deserves.

Don't get me wrong, I think being a certified HS teacher is great but it's not the be all and end all it's sometimes made out to be. 

Let's take a couple of "good" people and ask who would make a better IB teacher for a high school in Beijing on paper:

Candidate A:
BA History and Social Policy (2.1) from Manchester Metropolitan.
PGCE (High School, History) from the University of Bradford.

Candidate B:
BA History and Classics (1st) from Durham University
MA International Development Studies from Manchester University

I have my opinions, but what do you guys think and why?

Yeah, come to think on it, my claim about relative lack of professionalism in university lecturers is based on the experience of part-time lecturing. Where high school is compulsory and university is voluntary, a part-timer delivering a semester course has fewer formal responsibilities to manage and motivate the student. Universities the world over have been talking up the value of professionalism in their teaching staff, but that conversation is riddled with bizarre consumerist contradictions. For the sake of bums on lecture seats, they try hiding just how much the balance of professionalism rests on the student's shoulders.

Howevaire... I forgot about the full-timer. And deans. Those people are supposed to create degree programs and structure several years worth of education. They'd need their own kind of professional characteristics.


Wild guess on the candidates:

Candidate A is a literal match since s/he has high school teaching qualifications, but Candidate B might work out better if IB students need access to "higher" learning skills and more informed intellectual exercise such as someone with the ability and interest to finish a Masters in that particular field may possess. Candidate B might not be able to overtly teach those skills, because s/he may not recognise how s/he was able to finish the degree, but s/he would be able to exercise those skills with the IB students and the students would gain anyway.



(It occurs to me that perhaps by "Teach Yourself Teaching" I mean seek out an explicit understanding of methodology and current theory. Not what can the candidate do, but does the candidate know what can be done.)

I'd go with candidate B aswell, and for similar reasons.  Although I would also say it might be likely that canA would struggle to adapt to the IB curriculum and would focus on the "differences between" that and A Level, rather than looking at the ends first.   

I am making vast generalisations but I have never been particularly impressed with how tickety box alot of the teacher training is in the UK (from what I have seen of US Masters via a colleague's studies last year it seems worse there).  I am not saying there isn't a need for a systematic approach but outside that system I am more than willing to consider people with alternative backgrounds on equal terms, if their qualifications and experience justify it.

I am aware that this derails a little from your initial topic but between this thread and the other I it seemed like a worthwhile point to make.

I'd recommend The First Days of School as a general teaching book.

I am feeling argumentative and iconoclastic (goodness me, this topic has brought it out in me) so I am going to ask this:

Show me a teaching book that begins with a specific, complex, real pedagogical problem and then solves it thoroughly without using it as a proxy to segue into the same theoretical discussion that one can find everywhere else.

"Context specific problem --to-- context specific solution" is  how most teachers teach and it's how teaching books should be written.

Why I prefer journal articles and action research to textbooks too ~ it's easier to A: get published and B: solve problems. 

There's no good academic reason why there isn't a host of context specific textbooks written by teachers themselves that serve the needs of other teachers.  There are plenty of institutional and financial reasons, but no academic ones.  The best we've got is collections of journal articles.  Grrrrr.