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This issue is written by Robert Fried author of: 'The Passionate Teacher', 'The Passionate Learner', and the 'Game of School.' We recommend these books strongly - inspiring and practical. We thank Robert for giving his enthusiastic permission to publish his speech. We are thrilled to share Robert's ideas.

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Theme: The Celebration of Teaching

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Celebration of Teaching Speech
By Rob Fried,
May 1, 2006, Lebanon Opera House, Lebanon, New Hampshire

You expect a talk on the celebration of teaching. But-guess what!-there is no celebration of teaching without a celebration of learning-that would be like celebrating artistry in the absence of painting, dance, or music, or celebrating democracy in the absence of people feeling free to express their concerns, people actually voting. We know good teaching by the learning that results from it. So my discussion, today, is mostly about celebrating learning and, by extension the great teaching that enables good learning to happen.

We who look at the nation's schools don't often get to see that much good learning, and when we think we've found it, it is often hard to measure. If we try to nail down what we mean by "good learning," we get into a lot of trouble. And the trouble is, too many in our schools and our society are trying to do just that-to nail down learning in ways easy to measure. Unfortunately, learning that's easy to measure doesn't always measure up as "good learning."

Let me just say that I believe a program of statewide testing is necessary, but only as a diagnostic tool. I believe we should test a scientific sample of students in each of our major subjects and use that data to figure out how to teach more effectively-as opposed to putting students and teachers and schools "at risk" by testing every child, every year, in a manner that narrows what creative teachers can teach and limits students' access to what we mean by "good learning." But to celebrate good teaching is to highlight classrooms where grades and grading are less important than other things-less important than quality of engagement, depth of thought, eagerness to seek the truth, openness to new experience, or pride of accomplishment.

Seymour Sarason has long advocated the idea that we know good learning, or "productive learning," as he puts it, by one primary criterion: Do students want to learn more-about themselves, society, and the world-as a result of what we teach them? In The Game of School, I ask parents to put such a question to their children as they greet them at the end of the school day. Instead of asking, "How was school today, Honey?" or "What'd you learn in Math class?" why not ask them, "Did you learn anything in school today that you'd like to know more about?" We can't expect the answer always to be "yes," followed by a list of topics that have sparked our child's curiosity to learn more. But if we rarely see evidence that teachers' efforts have provoked in our child a desire to learn more, then even if he or she is getting good grades, we should be concerned about the health of what I call our child's "learning spirit."

Now, I believe each of us has a "learning spirit." It's not really the same as having a soul, but there are some similarities. Our learning spirit is the part of us that seeks to know, to discover, to become skilled at something. It's so easy to see it in a little child, that eagerness to do, to say, to find out. "My two year old-she's into everything!"

 Our learning spirit is largely self-motivated-and that's really the key. Our learning spirit can't be pushed around, or threatened, or bribed to learn. It wants to have its own way. Our learning spirit is the two-year-old in each one of us that is curious, truth-seeking, hungry to learn. Like a toddler, our learning spirit is always reaching out to know things and to master the world.

As youngsters, teenagers, working adults, and as retirees, our learning spirit appears most often in our hobbies. A hobby is another word for learning that is its own reward Our hobbies may, indeed, become profitable; or they can make us famous; win us blue ribbons. But we do it primarily because the act of learning gives us pleasure-not because it is required or graded or otherwise rewarded. The Learning Spirit in every child cries out for something

Against the backdrop of the Game of School, I propose that we teachers and parents emphasize what I have called "Authentic Learning." I feel embarrassed to have to put that modifier "authentic" in front of the word "learning." It's like saying, "I want to breath genuine air," or to drink "actual water" or see the "real sun" come up in the morning. But I use "authentic" to distinguish learning that invokes our "learning spirit" from learning we do because it's required, because someone says we have to learn it and will grade us on it. Our learning spirit hungers for deeper satisfaction.

One of the biggest assaults on authentic learning is to confuse it with "achievement." The slogans surround us: All Students Can Achieve at High Levels, We Need to Close the Achievement Gap. What's the difference between "achievement"-as the term is used in today's schools-and "authentic learning?" How do we put authentic learning at risk when we focus exclusively upon student achievement? I believe that what "achievement" really means to the politicians is "compliance." They think kids achieve when they comply with standards that they have set for those kids, standards that are easy to measure and compare. But that picture is woefully incomplete.
 
The problem with "achievement" is that it channels the learning spirit of our kids into pathways easy to measure but hard to relate to other values in children's learning: freedom, curiosity, pleasure, inventiveness, cooperation, fairness, creativity, humor, usefulness, kindness, and self-motivation, the desire to know more about self, others, and the world. These are what truly engage our learning spirit, but because they are not easy to measure, we tend to ignore them.

Great teachers encourage kids to figure things out for themselves, even if that takes longer. In The Passionate Learner, I write about pre-school kids who admire a huge sunflower but wonder where the sunflower seeds are. Their teacher decides not to tell them but to encourage them to look closer. The kids are thrilled when they figure out that the sunflower is made up of sunflower seeds.
  
Great teachers do these things even if they may not contribute to their students' test scores. They do them because they want to honor the learning spirit within those kids and to model for them how grown-ups think, and feel, and learn. Because they know that although kindness, humor, respect for each other and for the community we live in and the planet we inhabit will never be on that test, and won't figure into a student's grade, they are well worth spending time on because they make us feel special, valued and collectively powerful as human beings.

But there is one thing I do know, and that is that we, as teachers and educators and supporters of learning in our homes, in our schools and towns, we the adults cannot promote authentic learning without engaging our children and youth in figuring out what makes learning "authentic."

We need to ask the experts-our kids-what they need to count on from us grownups to help them learn-in school and out-with confidence, with creativity, with pride, and with a sense of joy. I predict they will tell us that it takes a teacher-a really good teacher-who listens, who explains things, who smiles (even before Christmas), who helps them learn to get along with each other and be fair, who lets them know it's okay to make mistakes. My students tell me that one of the most important things they learned from my course on curriculum design is the idea that making mistakes is part of the learning process. One math teacher who grew up in China, where all mistakes were severely punished, showed us a banner she will put up in her class, that says "Mistakes are our friends." A science teacher put it this way, "With each wrong answer, we only get closer to the truth."

Our kids may not put it into words, but they know it takes a teacher who is also a learner-someone who's really excited about discovering things, someone who wonders out loud why the experiment didn't turn out as planned. Every little kid who comes into Kindergarten expects to find just such a great teacher-and most do. But something happens as they rise through the grades-they begin to play that 'Game of School' and to see their teachers as "assigners of work, graders of tests, givers of grades."

They don't see us as learners, but as school masters. They figure out how to get around us. Some of them try to see what they can get away with. A lot of kids cheat. They stop doing "school stuff"-like reading and writing-on their own, because they have to do so much of it for class. The more material that teachers are pressured to "cover"-for the sake of those tests-the less time anybody has to "dis-cover."
 
And before we know it, the energy, the joy, the enthusiasm, the humor, the creativity and the confidence, have waned. Kids become bored with school, and teachers burn out. Competition for honors replaces zest for learning. And no one's to blame. It just sort of happens. It seems inevitable.

But the learning spirit within us and within our students never dies. It just goes into hibernation. It sleeps within us all, as the demands for "achievement" overwhelm the joys of "learning." But it does not die. Our learning spirit endures. Let's imagine what might take place in our schools if that tremendous potential energy within our young people were to burst forth in our classrooms!

I believe that slumbering spirit can be awakened. The curiosity and energy and enterprise that so characterize the young child and adult hobbyist lie dormant-waiting, I believe, for a great teacher to awaken these things.

But an awakened learning spirit in a pre-teen or young adult must feel free, must have choices, must feel powerful and confident and valued, or it will go to sleep again and allow the Game of School to take over, and turn college into just an extension of the old high school Game.

It's very hard to ask one teacher, acting alone, to provide all that-against the background of a school culture that remains locked within the Game, a culture that has accustomed itself to the belief that the learning spirit no longer exists in our students, who now must be threatened or bribed in order to "produce work." So the inspiration that I offer today, in celebration of teaching, can seem like a cruel joke to the isolated classroom practitioner, buffeted by curriculum guides, test prep mandates, facing a classroom of grade-grubbers, slackers, or just plain resistant learners.

We can be great teachers, but we cannot be great teachers alone. We can, for a time, shine a beacon in the midst of a dark or dreary school culture-should we find ourselves there-but our light will flicker if we see our students' eyes grow dim as they pass beyond us to our burned-out colleagues, toiling in the traces.

We can champion the learning spirit in ourselves and our students, and that can sustain us for a while. But sooner or later we need to find or build a collaborative environment where our energies are part of a larger effort, such that the Game changes and authentic learning has a chance to flower in the difficult soil of a school's culture. We teachers need networks, we need good conversations; we need exemplary role models, and supportive administrators and understanding parents. And we need to listen to our children.

But most of all, we teachers need to nurture and protect the passions within ourselves and the learning spirits within our students. We need to see ourselves as the creative and compassionate people that we are, and reach out to our reluctant students as the fascinating and complex learners that they are.

Between us, we can make great things happen. We can demonstrate, here in the valley and everywhere, that the spirit of learning is alive, in ourselves and our children, in our schools and our homes, and that the celebration of teaching and the celebration of learning are one and the same.

Thank you.
Robert Fried

Robert is happy to receive feedback about his address: robfried@gmail.com


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Editors:
Bruce Hammonds
Wayne Morris

Website: www.leading-learning.co.nz

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