Being the person you want your students to be…

Stephen Downes had the unenviable task of listening in on all the focus groups during the blog.ac.uk conference and then creating a closing keynote talk that paid more than the usual lip-service to the day’s proceedings. The result was an unpolished mixture of summary and commentary that fired up my thinking but on reflection, left me wanting more from him. More of what I am still not sure.

Stephen seemed to underplay the role of teachers in education, citing his development of literacy as ‘accidental’ based around certain key memories, events or people who presented him with clear opportunities or inspiration to begin writing. I can also map my literary development around certain positive and negative markers, as can Ewan, but teachers did lay foundations at least in part.

I do also recognise that many others are involved in the education of a child and that a child sometimes learns in spite of my teaching and learning. Adam first introduced me to the concept of it taking ‘a whole village to educate a child’ when he wrote about my role as teacher on his blog years ago. My role in educating his daughter was just that – a role, certainly not the most significant one but important nevertheless.

One’s recollection and one’s assignment of value to formal education is rather like watching the recorded highlights of a football match – you see and remember the inspirational bits of brilliance, the goals and the red-cards. The whole 90-minute match though is made up of lots of forgettable yet foundational passes and tackles, most of which will quickly fade into the memories of the players and spectators. It is also founded on lots of training behind the scenes that does not grab the headlines but is nevertheless crucial to success. The flashes of brilliance may appear effortless but they are a result of hidden input from a range of sources.

His view of the ‘broken’ educational system with its ineffective (or way-too effective) control systems seems quite valid to me but he was dismissive unoptimistic about the prospects of any mechanisms or guidelines within the current system bringing about any effective change. In his view, we (as blogging folks or teachers in education) have to be content with recording the events at the end of an age of education. The real revolution will be ushered in by future generations. We are not the revolutionaries. In my view this outlook just leads to futility and inaction. Steve Hooker points out the dangers of this in his brutally honest yet exquisitely challenging review of the blog.ac.uk conference day.

However, out of this generally pessimistic worldview came advice from Stephen with which I wholeheartedly agreed. Commenting on what the role the teacher plays, he advised them to be honest with themselves and to model and demonstrate being the person you want your students to be. If you want students to be avid readers then you have to demonstrate your love of reading. The same goes with blogging. Being ‘the person you want your students to be’ will go a long way to helping them learn.

To this I would add that it is crucial to have the honesty to show students that you don’t always live up to expectations. Furthermore, teachers need to be confident that they still play a significant role in the village that helps bring up the child in the 21st century, even if that village is a global one!