Initial Stance on Quality Teaching

Karen Van Poperin

TE 807

As educators, we talk often about the whole child, affirming the idea that inside
each of our students is an entire being, not just a data plot point. We can extend this
idea to our discussion of almost anything- about places or ideas as being whole. Or, in
the case this assignment, we can talk about a process (of teaching) as whole. An
intricate and dynamic process like helping to create whole children can’t be
meaningfully discussed in simplistic terms. We can only talk about it in slivers, and
hope that by collecting many meaningful slivers, we can somehow glimpse something
close to the whole. This is my attempt at collecting meaningful slivers about what
quality teaching is.
Fensternmacher & Richardson discuss many different lenses through which we
can attempt a full idea of quality teaching and its connection to learning, learning
outcome successes, research on best practices and the resulting interventions, skilled
behavioral decision making, creative constructivist allowing students to structure their
own understanding.

In this article that I found unique was the understanding garnered from a learner
sensitive approach. “Quality teaching,” is an unconscious appraisal I have of how
present and connected the students feel to themselves, to others, to the material, and
to the teacher. As Fensternmacher & Richardson say, “We are aware that certain kinds
of behaviors and actions by students are indicative of their substantive engagement in
what the teacher is doing, and when we observe these behaviors we note that the
students are ‘with’ the teacher: They are engaged, motivated, following, excited,
connected…” (Fenstermacher & Richardson, 2005, p. 194).  To me, quality teaching is
an ebb and flow responsiveness of everyone in the room being present.
Being present is only one part of what it means to “be with” a child. In quality
teaching interactions, this feeling of “with,” also means does a student feel cared for or
does a student feel all alone? I As McBee writes, “Having a caring adult in students’
lives who takes the time to get to know them, show an interested in their
circumstances, just listen to them and their concerns, and communicate high
expectations for them is one factor consistently reported in the literature on resilience,”
(McBee, 2012, p. 34).
In order for there to be responsive, caring presence of all people in the
classroom, students and teachers both need time for practice, which is what Sara
Mosle argues for in “Building Better Teachers.” While, jugyokenkyu is a word I’ve never
used for it, I have experience with lesson plan study. When I taught in Denver, our
principal was a proponent for a program called, “Beyond Our Four Walls,” where we
were encouraged to go watch our teaching partners teach the same lessons we
ourselves had taught.
Education is a very outcome-based career, with endless learning objectives and
as Mosle states, “In practice, this means that most teachers in this country have zero
time to work together on new pedagogical approaches and share feedback...They
rarely have an opportunity to watch other teachers teach, the single best kind of
training, in my experience; they’re too busy in their own classrooms (not to mention
outside them). A big problem with American education, in other words, is how we
conceive of the job,” (Mosle, 2014).
Quality teaching to me isn’t something that can be captured in a still frame
because it is too much of a whole idea. It is more a moving, flowing, living, breathing
organism that just requires us to invest our presence, time, energy, and care into. 

Fenstermacher, G. D., & Richardson, V. (2005). On Making Determinations of Quality in

Teaching. Teachers College Record,107(1), 186-213. doi:10.1111/j.
1467-9620.2005.00462.x

Mcbee, R. H. (2007). What it Means to Care: How Educators Conceptualize and

Actualize Caring. Action in Teacher Education,29(3), 33-42. doi:
10.1080/01626620.2007.10463458

Mosle, S. (2014, September). Building Better Teachers. The Atlantic.

doi:www.theatlantic.com