The Thinking Teacher

by Oliver Quinlan

Overview

Good Teachers do, great teachers think'. Oliver Quinlan presents ideas from education, business and other areas of life that teachers and educational leaders can use to enhance and explore their thinking. In order to progress we must philosophise about learning, question traditional practice and be resourceful in providing solutions for better education. The only way the education system can improve standards and be at its best is by ensuring that those who govern it don't stop thinking about it! Innovation is the key to our progress as individuals and society as a whole

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781781351529
Publisher:	Independent Thinking Press
Publication date:	01/09/2014
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	328 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Oliver Quinlan is an educator with experience from Early Years and Primary to Higher Education. His background has involved developing the use of new technologies and pedagogical approaches based on authentic communication with children and new and existing teachers. Since being a school teacher, Oliver has been a Lecturer in Education at Plymouth University and Programme Manager for Digital Education at Nesta, working on innovation projects in Education. He is currently Research Manager at The Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Read an Excerpt

Preface

In one of those moments when you know you have been at something too long, I looked out of the library window. I was halfway through the reading list for my PGCE essay on managing children’s behaviour and felt totally uninspired. I wondered, not for the first time, whether what was expected of me was to simply paraphrase all the instructions I was reading about how to control children. I thought teaching was going to be about more than this.

I moved on to the next book on the pile, opening the simple blue and orange cover expecting more instructions. This one was different; the author hadn’t set out to tell me what to do, but to raise some questions and present some research on the evidence that might inform the answers. The case studies encouraged me to think about what effect the way the furniture in a classroom might affect how the children perceived it, raise questions about the messages that were being put across through the way tasks were designed, and question the assumptions I was making about how people think when implementing reward charts, even if they do appear to work … This, I thought, is what teaching should be about; not ticking off the answers, but starting to think.

Several months later, as I walked off the stage, I felt a hand on my arm.
Turning round, I saw a teacher whose blog I had been following for the past year and who had been giving me ideas for the classroom since I had started training to be a teacher. ‘Great stuff,’ he said, ‘you really made me think differently about that; you took some research, thought about it and made it happen in your classroom. More of us should be thinking like that.’

I had found out about TeachMeets only a few months before, when I heard about a group of teachers who got together in Nottingham to share ideas that had worked in their classrooms. The empowering nature of them appealed to me and, as a newly qualified teacher in a school with a remit for trying new things, I was hungry for ideas I could develop.

So, when I saw a similar get-together was happening at an education technology show I was going to, I signed up to attend, and without thinking too much about it, I also signed up to share an idea, just thinking that was the way it worked.
I did not expect to be picked by the random generator to be one of the first to present. I did not expect to stand on a stage in front of 300 people.

I certainly did not expect for so many of those people to say I had made them think about taking perspectives from research to think differently about their teaching. That, I thought, is what teaching is about; not ticking off the next new idea, but always trying to think.

Some weeks later, I was teaching subtracting two-digit numbers, and I was demonstrating to the class of 8-year-olds how to use a hundred square to calculate the difference between 100 and any two-digit number. I was halfway through when Barnes put his hand up. So as not to confuse things, I thought I would come to his question once I had finished explaining. But Barnes couldn’t wait, and he politely but assertively interrupted me. ‘Mr Quinlan, please don’t say “count down”,’ he said. ‘It might be moving down the board but you are counting up in tens – that could really confuse some people.’ He knew what I meant, but he was thinking beyond that – thinking about the implications of the language I was using on the understanding of the rest of the class. That, I thought, is what teaching should be about; getting them thinking.

If we want thinking children, we need thinking teachers.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
1. All you need is love
2. Lenses for teaching
3. The futility of utility
4. Technology as a mirror
5. Quantifying learning
6. Best practice or next practice?
7. Regulation: lessons from finance
8. Minimum viable lessons
9. Worse is better
10. Learning as becoming
11. On inspiration
12. Don’t settle
Conclusion
Further thinking
Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

I was recently sat at the back of a secondary school classroom in a Middle-Eastern country waiting for the lesson to start. Why was I there? I was on a fact-finding mission to inform me of what might be needed for a curriculum development project I had been commissioned to undertake. I had asked
to meet key stakeholders: education ministers, funders, teacher-education college lecturers, school teachers and students. The ministry was suspicious of me wanting to go into a school – they had asked me to write curriculum materials to a brief for teachers to ‘deliver’, but why would I want to
consult with teachers, more so students? They relented as I had argued that it would help me create better materials if I understood the audience. So here I was. The teacher walked in to start the lesson, powered up the electronic whiteboard and started by going through his intended learning outcomes point by point. My heart sank – I could well have been in any classroom in England. The
lesson was good in many respects, but formulaic and predictable. There isn’t anything wrong with learning objectives, learning outcomes and success criteria per se, it is just that their mechanical use often leads to uninspiring teaching and passive learning. Let’s have some more thought from teachers
beyond the obvious. I was thus intrigued to receive The Thinking Teacher to review.
The Thinking Teacher is not a ‘how to’ book; indeed, Quinlan notes that ‘there is no one model of a highly effective teacher, no one set of things that these people do to make things happen’. There are many good teachers who achieve good results by following a tried and tested repertoire of teaching approaches. Quinlan argues that what separates the truly great teachers from the good ones is that they truly understand learning and the different forms it can take; they spot opportunities for encouraging it in ways that they were never taught to do. These are the individuals who can adapt their teaching to the changing world that young people are in; these are the individuals that move teaching forward. These teachers think for themselves and get their pupils to think for themselves too. I could not agree more.
The book is divided into twelve chapters each exploring an aspect of schooling with intriguing titles such as ‘All you need is love’; ‘Technology as a mirror’ and ‘Learning as becoming’, but each with a consistent argument: teachers should reflect on their own practice and students should think for themselves if their learning is to be deep and meaningful. In Chapter 2, Quinlan asks: ‘What kind of teacher are you?’ and explains that how you define yourself as a teacher is one of the most powerful areas to consider. Rehearsed are the typical tensions between progressives (characterised by Dewey as being more interested in expression, the cultivation of individuality and interacting with the world in a way that prepares young people for participation in a changing world) and traditionalists (who see education as the transmission of a body of knowledge and skills formulated in the past). Quinlan argues that asking questions that we already know the answers to simply reproduces the world as it
is, or was, but by asking questions that we do not know the answers to can lead to change – either a change in how we interact with the world or about how we think about the way it works. Indeed, the argument of Chapter 6 is that replicating ‘best practice’ is not good enough as this is a retrospective
exercise; rather we should strive for ‘next practice’, that is, the best practice of tomorrow.
There is a thoughtful section on reflection and references to Donald Schon’s concepts of ‘reflection on action’ and ‘reflection in action’, which are now standard as part of the curriculum in many teacher-education institutions, and most teachers are encouraged to continue learning from their practice by reflecting on it afterwards and considering how they could move forward in developing students. I also like the discussion of how much information we should supply learners to help them formulate problems and come up with solutions. There is a strong argument to give learners ‘spaces to think’. On the use of silence, Quinlan writes: ‘Imagine what would happen if when you
asked a question you met the answer with silence. The result could be similar to providing thinking time before choosing a member of the class to answer.’
Following Mick Waters’s excellent book Thinking Allowed on Schooling (2013), we now have another ‘must buy’ book for the thinking teacher: The Thinking Teacher. Continuing the same theme, Quinlan gets the reader to move on from thinking of ‘learning as acquiring to learning as becoming’; in other
words, he is advocating a classroom based around students becoming participants in the subject rather than possessors of certain, closely defined slices of it. This shift in thinking transforms a subject from a collection of knowledge or skills to be gained to a field of discussion, a community and a space.
Dr Jacek Brant, Institute of Education

This is not a teaching manual. It’s not a guide to help you impress your senior leadership team or Ofsted. There are no checklists or worksheets. And you’d struggle to place it one side or the other of any of the either/or debates about education that are the current focus of so many pedagogues and politicians.
Quinlan doesn’t have an axe to grind, nor a method to sell – he simply wants all of us involved in education to pause and take some time to think, properly, about what we’re doing and, perhaps more importantly, why. Through a series of gently challenging essays, he questions ingrained assumptions, suggests avenues of mental exploration and encourages honest, open reflection. There are some
practical ideas you could try out in your own classroom, but the main aim of this book is to inspire you to develop yourself as a ‘thinking teacher’, who will naturally help to nurture thinking children with the skills and aspirations to shape a truly successful and fulfilled future.
Helen Mulley, Editor, Teach Secondary magazine

‘If we want thinking children, we need thinking teachers’, says Oliver Quinlan at the start of his book. He’s dead right – and systematically and skilfully he shows us what that means. The result is a book of considerable depth, yet written with a lightness of touch that makes it eminently readable. For
me, now approaching my thirtieth year as a teacher, I learn't a huge amount that was new and was nudged to rethink ideas that I have for too long taken for granted as the only way of doing things.
Like all the best education books, this one left me genuinely excited about my work as a teacher and thoroughly refreshed in my own thinking.
Geoff Barton, Head Teacher, King Edward VI School, Suffolk

Oliver Quinlan makes an impassioned plea in this manifesto for teachers and school leaders everywhere: don’t stop thinking. He makes a convincing case that making time to think is not just the key ingredient of great learning, it’s also in the make-up of our top teachers.
Ewan McIntosh, founder NoTosh.com

From the Publisher