There have been some superb blogs and discussions recently exploring classroom practice -the specifics of techniques and the issues that surround implementing ideas. I work with these issues every day and find it endlessly fascinating exploring the interplay of teacher characteristics and the routines and interactions that play out during lessons of all kinds. Teachers have so much in common in the challenges they face and the techniques they use and, at the same time, teachers can be hugely successful in multiple different ways, expressing their personalities and idiosyncrasies as they go.
Something I’ve been thinking about recently is how the idea of a technique in teaching interacts with each teacher’s personality and values. When you codify them or write them down, a technique can appear to be a technocratic procedure; rigid in some way. However, in practice, they never are because they are always being enacted by a complex human being. In general, I never really worry about techniques being too rigid – because teachers are too variable, organic and spontaneous for that to happen. If anything, I find that precision in defining and using a technique has huge benefits; it’s often ill-defined techniques that get distorted into ineffective practices.
So, for me, across this array of teacher variability – and perhaps because of it – it is perfectly sensible for schools to seek to implement commonly understood techniques that are known to deal with commonly experienced challenges. We can’t and don’t need to reinvent teaching every time we talk about it. We’re not *that* different.
