Teacher Presence: A listening based approach

I wrote recently about the importance of teacher presence starting with teachers being more present in the classroom. Those of you who know me know that I’m a huge advocate for mindfulness practice. This is not as a spiritual practice in some esoteric way but so that we can show up in our lives in healthy and effective ways.  A clear corollary of this is the ways in which cultivating more mindfulness in our own lives as teachers and leaders can support classroom practice.

The worst lessons I observe are the ones where teachers are ‘not really in the room’. Either because they haven’t planned well and frankly they’re a bit checked out, or they’re so well planned that they’re all up in their heads speeding through their PowerPoint or even worse trying to demonstrate what they think I (or other observers) want to see.

The best lessons I observe are adaptive and responsive. Formative assessment and questioning are key pillars of this but when you really reduce it, I think it comes down to- listening. When we are present, we can listen, when we listen we are able to respond to what is truly in front of us. So, with this in mind I’ve pulled an extract from the final section of my 2022 book Leading Mindfully for Healthy and Successful Schools on listening to share with you.

Listening

It is important to really listen to the answers our students give, rather than becoming too focused on our own questioning. We need to expect high quality responses. These should come in full sentences and students should be (gently) corrected or asked to rephrase their answer until they get it right. Sometimes responses to questions need to be scaffolded. If we are aiming for a high level of discourse, where students are doing a higher ratio of work than the teacher, students need encouragement to build on and challenge each other’s answers in a constructive way. This can be scaffolded through sentence stems. Displaying examples like I maintain that…, I see it differently because… or Despite disagreeing on… somewhere visible until they become second nature for students is a useful way to do this. 

Most importantly, when we listen to these answers, we get a window into what our students do and do not understand. We need to respond to this data in a meaningful way, changing lesson our lesson if need be, not rigidly sticking to your plan. More on this in the next chapter.  

Do not be disappointed if students do not know the answer, you have just been given important information to help you do your job, it might indicate that you are challenging them which is a good thing, or you might have assumed prior knowledge that they do not have, or they may have not been listening. Either way, as long as you do something to adjust your teaching to respond to it, it is an opportunity to enrich the students learning experience. It is also an opportunity to model a learning mindset to the students. An excellent example of this came from @VallanceTeach on Twitter, who described a colleague saying to a student “I’m really glad you made that mistake because it allowed us to see that”.   

This approach has the power to be revolutionary for student’s sense of self-esteem as a learner and beyond. Responsive teaching, when done well is so energising for students, it allows them to truly track their progress. This was always the promise of AfL. However, even in its rebranded form, responsive teaching can very quickly become a distortion, if the focus becomes on anything other than learning for learnings sake. I believe there is really possibility for us to reclaim assessment in a way that is meaningful and positive for our students.  

As a way of listening deeply to our students.