subtext

Teaching is an improvisational act. The teacher needs to be able to improvise what is needed to be taught/shown/demonstrated/talked about on the spot as the need arises. This is not to say that the teacher does not plan for the class; the planning should allow for the possibility of change dependent upon student engagement with the word. Taking advantage of the teachable moment should be something that is built into the day; the teachable moment should be an affordance of the lesson that spontaneously occurs on a regular/daily basis. What tends to happen when a self-imposed lesson/unit is being followed is the teacher feels as if there is a deadline which must be met: we must get to the end of the third chapter by Thursday in order to take a test over that section of the book by Friday. Where the kids want to go with a text, or their writing, is of little importance. The teacher knows how to do this, they are the expert. The student does not matter. Class discussion of longer than a few minutes, real exchanges where the students are constructing an understanding, very rarely occurs, let alone individual instruction with a child about a book the child is reading because they want to read the book, or a specific problem in a piece of writing. While lip service to a child-centered classroom is deriguer at workshops and inservice presentations, the reality is the teacher is the main focus of the room.
Recently a survey was sent around to the teachers of my school asking for input on how to spend money on technology from some grant the district had received. All of the options were for high tech presentation devices of some kind or another. Cool gadgets for the teacher to use to enhance or replace what they were currently using, like a projector hanging from the ceiling connected to a computer, instead of an overhead with a screen. No mention of more access to technology on a more frequent basis for the students. When the tech consultant for our school tried to set up a secure blog site for the students to begin blogging about their classes where the teacher’s blog was the central hub to which all of the students were linked, the district, afraid of the “dangers” of the web, or just afraid of what the students would write about the school on a public accessible site, shot down the idea before it could get beyond the initial proposal stage.