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Practice Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach
In this ethnographic study contributing to the discourse on what teaching does to teachers, Britzman (education, social and political thought; women's studies, York U., Toronto) explores the meaning of their often contradictory experiences through secondary teacher narratives. This edition (no date is given for the first) adds a self- critique of her methodology. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1991
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September 1, 2016
I wasn’t sure what to expect from this, but this really is a very good book. It is an ethnography on student teachers and as the author says at one point, it looks at what teaching does to student teachers, and by implication to teachers too.
Now, that is a seriously interesting thing to look at. Not least since it goes against the way we generally think these things are meant to run. You know, it is teachers that are the agents of change in the classroom. Thinking about how they might be changed by teaching seems to reverse causality. But, of course, teaching changes teachers, or, at least, it ought to.
The problem here is that there are a number of myths that exist around teaching and being a teacher that need to be gotten out of the way before questions of how teaching changes teachers can really be asked properly. The first is the problem I like to think of as the Hegel problem. You see in one of his introductions – perhaps to the Encyclopaedia, I can’t remember now – he complains that everyone thinks that all you need to be a philosopher is a brain and that that automatically qualifies you as much as someone who has spent a lifetime studying the subject and thinking about it. Hegel says having a brain no more prepares you for being a philosopher than having a foot prepares you for being a cobbler – but complain as he might, people still think they are entitled to their opinions…
And the same goes with teaching. Virtually everyone has spent far too much time in classrooms watching teachers do teacher type things and so everyone is an expert on what it is teachers do – well, until they try it themselves for five minutes, then they aren’t quite so sure.
The problem is also that student teachers are in a remarkably paradoxical position. They are not ‘proper’ teachers, but they also aren’t really proper students either. They are learning to teach – something everyone thinks they more or less know how to do already – and they are doing that in a classroom that also isn’t really their own, but belongs to the supervising teacher. A supervising teacher who is likely to think they don’t really have a clue and who expects them to crash and burn at any minute.
This makes the life of the student teacher – what? – bloody miserable, mostly, I think. This book is from the US and things obviously work differently over there. The two student teachers discussed here were both introduced variously to the classes they were going to teach and then watched as their supervising teacher left them to it, literally, I mean, left the room and left them there to teach. That doesn’t happen in Australia – student teachers are never left in a classroom unsupervised, or, at least, they are never meant to be. This makes the whole experience one of being watched by an expert and of being given immediate feedback from that expert on just about every class you give - character forming, I think they call it.
And that can be a real problem. If you want to be a different sort of teacher from the one that your supervising teacher would like you to become that can be the making of a very difficult time. And they can not only make your life a complete bloody misery, they also grade you as a teacher.
As the author says, one of the things that is important here is the notion of experience and what it means to learn from experience. Student teachers spend some time at university (learning crap from academics in their ivory towers… as supervising teachers often like to say) and then they get their ‘real’ learning experiences, which is what happens when they are on their teaching rounds in real classrooms in real schools. It is hard, when you are going through this experience, not to see it somewhat like that too. Not all of my supervising teachers told me that what I was learning at university was basically rubbish, but enough of the teachers that I talked to did for it to be clear this was a fairly common belief. What was made very clear was that getting, maintaining and constantly asserting disciplining control over your classroom was a key aspect to how you were going to be judged as a teacher. As one of my supervising teachers put it, “The first thing I do is to walk around the classroom and piss in every corner – I need everyone to know this is my territory.” He was, of course, speaking metaphorically - about the pissing, anyway. This idea of 'teacher in control' is related to the 'teacher as self-made', but in both cases it can actively work against students learning.
One of the things you learn very quickly is that the workload, particularly for a starting teacher, is absurd. Lessons take ages to plan. And it feels like they almost always go wrong. Or worse, you can give two identical lessons to two different classes of students and the first one will go like a dream and, just when you’ve gotten your confidence up, the next one will fall on its face in a complete mess and there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason why the one worked and the other didn’t. Often you will be told, 'don't worry, it will come with experience' - but experience rarely teaches what you need to learn - what you really need is 'deliberative practice' - practice with theory supporting it - but we've already decided theory is academic, ivory tower crap... Hmm.
The other problem is that the curriculum you need to teach is so overloaded that it is difficult to see how you can cram everything into the partially interested and only ever half-open minds of the students in the time allocated to you. Your career will also probably depend on the little bastards' test scores too, just to make it more fun. This means that all of the wonderful stuff you were going to do with your classroom – inquiry based learning, progressive pedagogies, creative lesson plans and democratic assessment strategies – all that sort of stuff - ends up giving way to what is called in this book and elsewhere ‘defensive pedagogies’. That is, ways of teaching that maintain control, cover the text and allow you to look like you sort of know what you are doing.
And that is one of the things this book really highlights beautifully, the idea that one of the worst myths about teaching is that the teacher needs to ‘know their shit’. You are expected to be the ‘expert in the room’ and often you are teaching stuff – especially, if like me, you are humanities teacher who hadn’t studied history since high school yourself – that you are about one step ahead of the class on learning, looking like an expert in this situation isn’t nearly as simple as it sounds. And as a student teacher, you might only be a couple of years older than the kids you are teaching too. This isn’t the most productive ground for allowing open and free discussion and inquiry based learning for your students – although, as this book argues, it actually ought to be. Perpetuating the myth that the teacher ought to know-it-all isn’t doing anyone any good in this situation. Still, teaching what you barely know yourself teaches you how to become a particular kind of teacher – not one that anyone ever dreamt of becoming when their hearts set on 'the vocation', but a particular kind of teacher all the same.
We expect a lot from experience. Ironically enough we also expect a lot from subject content knowledge. The idea is that you can’t really be taught how to teach, it’s a gift or it’s a craft – but certainly not something that ‘theory’ can help you learn how to do. And so, you need to learn it through ‘practice’. That is one side of the coin. The other side is that you need to know the subject and that knowledge on its own will be enough for you to be able to teach it. Both of these myths (or ‘common sense’ ideas) often go toward making teachers who will maintain the status quo. It is very hard to learn to be creative from experience – experience generally teaches how to do the commonplace. And if the experience is hectic – as the experience of becoming a student teacher generally is – falling back on ‘teach to the test’ and ‘teach from the textbook’ are the kinds of defensive pedagogies it is very hard to avoid.
The other problem is that content knowledge on its own really isn’t enough to teach. It isn’t enough to know your stuff, you also need to know how to make that knowledge clear to people who might well find it utterly confounding - or even totally boring. This is known as ‘pedagogical content knowledge’ – not just knowing what it is you want your students to learn, but also a series of different ways that might help them to learn it.
The point of all this is that the kind of teachers we ought to be trying to produce – teachers who are less ‘transmitters of knowledge’ and more co-creators of learning experiences, who don’t just walk into a classroom ‘knowing’ all the answers, but rather have a series of strategies to teach so as to allow their students to challenge how they think and find their own answers – that sort of teacher needs to be nurtured in a special sort of environment, and too often the environment our student teachers find themselves in encourages quite different teaching. It encourages defensive, rather than supportive pedagogies. It encourages hacks rather than teacher/researchers who never 'know' how they are going to teach until they work out what it is their class needs if it is to learn.
There is a lovely bit in this where the author talks about becoming a teacher so as to save the younger version of yourself vicariously in your own students from the poor teaching you received in your school days. These ideas of redemption and of ‘being the change you want to see in the world’ are strong motive forces that incline people toward teaching in the first place. But these desires have negative as well as positive connotations. They might not always lead to disillusionment, but if you wanted to set someone up to be disillusioned, this wouldn't be the worst place to start.
This really is a very good book – it has so much else to say that I just can’t cover it all. The stuff on the problems of ethnography in the 'hidden chapter' at the end is particularly interesting, as is the major theme around voice (who has one, how it develops, who is denied a voice, how teaching is formed out of heteroglossia and a polyphony of voices many of which are your own, how voice is always about power) are stunningly interesting and I haven’t touched on any of them at all. The three chapters on the various ethnographies conducted are also worth reading too - particularly since they show so beautifully the messiness of being a student teacher.
Sometimes I think it is probably best everyone already 'knows' what becoming a teacher will be like, otherwise, if they really did know, they would never start down that track at all. If you want to see yourself, the mirror of student teachering is a particularly 'true' one.
If you are thinking of becoming a student teacher – reading this book will really give you a head start. This book challenges, but also illuminates ideas and situations you will find yourself in, but that you might also might find yourself a bit too close to to be able to see clearly. Like I said, a lovely book.
Now, that is a seriously interesting thing to look at. Not least since it goes against the way we generally think these things are meant to run. You know, it is teachers that are the agents of change in the classroom. Thinking about how they might be changed by teaching seems to reverse causality. But, of course, teaching changes teachers, or, at least, it ought to.
The problem here is that there are a number of myths that exist around teaching and being a teacher that need to be gotten out of the way before questions of how teaching changes teachers can really be asked properly. The first is the problem I like to think of as the Hegel problem. You see in one of his introductions – perhaps to the Encyclopaedia, I can’t remember now – he complains that everyone thinks that all you need to be a philosopher is a brain and that that automatically qualifies you as much as someone who has spent a lifetime studying the subject and thinking about it. Hegel says having a brain no more prepares you for being a philosopher than having a foot prepares you for being a cobbler – but complain as he might, people still think they are entitled to their opinions…
And the same goes with teaching. Virtually everyone has spent far too much time in classrooms watching teachers do teacher type things and so everyone is an expert on what it is teachers do – well, until they try it themselves for five minutes, then they aren’t quite so sure.
The problem is also that student teachers are in a remarkably paradoxical position. They are not ‘proper’ teachers, but they also aren’t really proper students either. They are learning to teach – something everyone thinks they more or less know how to do already – and they are doing that in a classroom that also isn’t really their own, but belongs to the supervising teacher. A supervising teacher who is likely to think they don’t really have a clue and who expects them to crash and burn at any minute.
This makes the life of the student teacher – what? – bloody miserable, mostly, I think. This book is from the US and things obviously work differently over there. The two student teachers discussed here were both introduced variously to the classes they were going to teach and then watched as their supervising teacher left them to it, literally, I mean, left the room and left them there to teach. That doesn’t happen in Australia – student teachers are never left in a classroom unsupervised, or, at least, they are never meant to be. This makes the whole experience one of being watched by an expert and of being given immediate feedback from that expert on just about every class you give - character forming, I think they call it.
And that can be a real problem. If you want to be a different sort of teacher from the one that your supervising teacher would like you to become that can be the making of a very difficult time. And they can not only make your life a complete bloody misery, they also grade you as a teacher.
As the author says, one of the things that is important here is the notion of experience and what it means to learn from experience. Student teachers spend some time at university (learning crap from academics in their ivory towers… as supervising teachers often like to say) and then they get their ‘real’ learning experiences, which is what happens when they are on their teaching rounds in real classrooms in real schools. It is hard, when you are going through this experience, not to see it somewhat like that too. Not all of my supervising teachers told me that what I was learning at university was basically rubbish, but enough of the teachers that I talked to did for it to be clear this was a fairly common belief. What was made very clear was that getting, maintaining and constantly asserting disciplining control over your classroom was a key aspect to how you were going to be judged as a teacher. As one of my supervising teachers put it, “The first thing I do is to walk around the classroom and piss in every corner – I need everyone to know this is my territory.” He was, of course, speaking metaphorically - about the pissing, anyway. This idea of 'teacher in control' is related to the 'teacher as self-made', but in both cases it can actively work against students learning.
One of the things you learn very quickly is that the workload, particularly for a starting teacher, is absurd. Lessons take ages to plan. And it feels like they almost always go wrong. Or worse, you can give two identical lessons to two different classes of students and the first one will go like a dream and, just when you’ve gotten your confidence up, the next one will fall on its face in a complete mess and there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason why the one worked and the other didn’t. Often you will be told, 'don't worry, it will come with experience' - but experience rarely teaches what you need to learn - what you really need is 'deliberative practice' - practice with theory supporting it - but we've already decided theory is academic, ivory tower crap... Hmm.
The other problem is that the curriculum you need to teach is so overloaded that it is difficult to see how you can cram everything into the partially interested and only ever half-open minds of the students in the time allocated to you. Your career will also probably depend on the little bastards' test scores too, just to make it more fun. This means that all of the wonderful stuff you were going to do with your classroom – inquiry based learning, progressive pedagogies, creative lesson plans and democratic assessment strategies – all that sort of stuff - ends up giving way to what is called in this book and elsewhere ‘defensive pedagogies’. That is, ways of teaching that maintain control, cover the text and allow you to look like you sort of know what you are doing.
And that is one of the things this book really highlights beautifully, the idea that one of the worst myths about teaching is that the teacher needs to ‘know their shit’. You are expected to be the ‘expert in the room’ and often you are teaching stuff – especially, if like me, you are humanities teacher who hadn’t studied history since high school yourself – that you are about one step ahead of the class on learning, looking like an expert in this situation isn’t nearly as simple as it sounds. And as a student teacher, you might only be a couple of years older than the kids you are teaching too. This isn’t the most productive ground for allowing open and free discussion and inquiry based learning for your students – although, as this book argues, it actually ought to be. Perpetuating the myth that the teacher ought to know-it-all isn’t doing anyone any good in this situation. Still, teaching what you barely know yourself teaches you how to become a particular kind of teacher – not one that anyone ever dreamt of becoming when their hearts set on 'the vocation', but a particular kind of teacher all the same.
We expect a lot from experience. Ironically enough we also expect a lot from subject content knowledge. The idea is that you can’t really be taught how to teach, it’s a gift or it’s a craft – but certainly not something that ‘theory’ can help you learn how to do. And so, you need to learn it through ‘practice’. That is one side of the coin. The other side is that you need to know the subject and that knowledge on its own will be enough for you to be able to teach it. Both of these myths (or ‘common sense’ ideas) often go toward making teachers who will maintain the status quo. It is very hard to learn to be creative from experience – experience generally teaches how to do the commonplace. And if the experience is hectic – as the experience of becoming a student teacher generally is – falling back on ‘teach to the test’ and ‘teach from the textbook’ are the kinds of defensive pedagogies it is very hard to avoid.
The other problem is that content knowledge on its own really isn’t enough to teach. It isn’t enough to know your stuff, you also need to know how to make that knowledge clear to people who might well find it utterly confounding - or even totally boring. This is known as ‘pedagogical content knowledge’ – not just knowing what it is you want your students to learn, but also a series of different ways that might help them to learn it.
The point of all this is that the kind of teachers we ought to be trying to produce – teachers who are less ‘transmitters of knowledge’ and more co-creators of learning experiences, who don’t just walk into a classroom ‘knowing’ all the answers, but rather have a series of strategies to teach so as to allow their students to challenge how they think and find their own answers – that sort of teacher needs to be nurtured in a special sort of environment, and too often the environment our student teachers find themselves in encourages quite different teaching. It encourages defensive, rather than supportive pedagogies. It encourages hacks rather than teacher/researchers who never 'know' how they are going to teach until they work out what it is their class needs if it is to learn.
There is a lovely bit in this where the author talks about becoming a teacher so as to save the younger version of yourself vicariously in your own students from the poor teaching you received in your school days. These ideas of redemption and of ‘being the change you want to see in the world’ are strong motive forces that incline people toward teaching in the first place. But these desires have negative as well as positive connotations. They might not always lead to disillusionment, but if you wanted to set someone up to be disillusioned, this wouldn't be the worst place to start.
This really is a very good book – it has so much else to say that I just can’t cover it all. The stuff on the problems of ethnography in the 'hidden chapter' at the end is particularly interesting, as is the major theme around voice (who has one, how it develops, who is denied a voice, how teaching is formed out of heteroglossia and a polyphony of voices many of which are your own, how voice is always about power) are stunningly interesting and I haven’t touched on any of them at all. The three chapters on the various ethnographies conducted are also worth reading too - particularly since they show so beautifully the messiness of being a student teacher.
Sometimes I think it is probably best everyone already 'knows' what becoming a teacher will be like, otherwise, if they really did know, they would never start down that track at all. If you want to see yourself, the mirror of student teachering is a particularly 'true' one.
If you are thinking of becoming a student teacher – reading this book will really give you a head start. This book challenges, but also illuminates ideas and situations you will find yourself in, but that you might also might find yourself a bit too close to to be able to see clearly. Like I said, a lovely book.
June 10, 2012
This is an interesting work aimed at examining pedagogy critically. Pedagogy is the science of teaching as I have been forced to understand rapidly. Deborah Britzman in this work explores the idea that teaching affects and moulds those who become teachers, she examines individual student teacher stories and identities and she examines the act of teaching itself.
I read this book because it was recommended as a work all student teachers should read before they finish their course. I can certainly see why this is the case. Britzman may write in a highly theoretical manner but her ideas certainly have application for the classroom. How can teachers truly teach (a task which as I have come to see is certainly not merely linear in nature) unless they understand themselves, the role teachers must fulfil and the role of teaching?
I would certainly recommend this work as a study for anyone studying teaching like myself or engaged in teaching individuals. It certainly provides a different look at teaching and provides to anyone interested a better understanding of what teachers and teaching exist for. That said this is a highly academic piece of writing and as such may not be for everyone. It contains less jargon than some works of academia that I have read yet if you lack any previous knowledge of pedagogy it may prove a frustrating read. That is my simple warning to anyone purely interested in looking at a book on teaching.
I read this book because it was recommended as a work all student teachers should read before they finish their course. I can certainly see why this is the case. Britzman may write in a highly theoretical manner but her ideas certainly have application for the classroom. How can teachers truly teach (a task which as I have come to see is certainly not merely linear in nature) unless they understand themselves, the role teachers must fulfil and the role of teaching?
I would certainly recommend this work as a study for anyone studying teaching like myself or engaged in teaching individuals. It certainly provides a different look at teaching and provides to anyone interested a better understanding of what teachers and teaching exist for. That said this is a highly academic piece of writing and as such may not be for everyone. It contains less jargon than some works of academia that I have read yet if you lack any previous knowledge of pedagogy it may prove a frustrating read. That is my simple warning to anyone purely interested in looking at a book on teaching.
March 24, 2021
I found this very useful. Initially it seemed interesting but all over the place, but for me the last couple of chapters (especially the very last one) pulled it together well. The author also has a nice reflexive view of her own tendency to judge when she is deconstructing that tendency in her respondents. I don't know how useful this would be to a preservice teacher but as a teacher-educator it made me think a lot about pedagogical knowledge vs content knowledge and how I can (and whether i should) resist the push for more "hands-on" practitioner focus instead of theory.
I always feel torn there because I love theory but the question is to what degree will they use it (and which sort of theory?). Can anyone teach you how to be a teacher? This book gives me hope that I am doing something useful and I feel the students respond to my energy of hope.
I always feel torn there because I love theory but the question is to what degree will they use it (and which sort of theory?). Can anyone teach you how to be a teacher? This book gives me hope that I am doing something useful and I feel the students respond to my energy of hope.
July 17, 2012
Read most of it though skimmed or skipped a few of chapters. Great stuff on discourses in teaching.
March 10, 2011
This is the best book I've ever read about teacher education. Brave, strong, compelling.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews