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1100__337722__0000__FFrroonntt..iinndddd BB 88//1100//1100 11::0033 PPMM
Teaching on a Tightrope
The Diverse Roles
of a Great Teacher
Jack Zevin
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD EDUCATION
A division of
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Lanham (cid:129) New York (cid:129) Toronto (cid:129) Plymouth, UK
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Frontispiece: “The Lecture” (1695) attributed to Wm. Hogarth. Owned by
the author.
Published by Rowman & Littlefield Education
A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of
The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
http://www.rowmaneducation.com
Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom
Copyright © 2010 by Jack Zevin
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or
by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and
retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by
a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zevin, Jack.
Teaching on a tightrope : the diverse roles of a great teacher / Jack Zevin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-60709-589-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-60709-590-3
(pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-60709-591-0 (electronic)
1. Effective teacher. 2. Educational leadership. 3. Role playing. 4.
Classroom management. I. Title.
LB1025.3.Z467 2010
371.102—dc22 2010018518
(cid:2) ™
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements
of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America.
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Contents
Preface v
Acknowledgments xi
1 The Five Dimensions of Teaching Roles 1
2 Audience and Actor 27
3 Teaching as Art and as Science 53
4 Content and Process 85
5 Cognition and Emotion 111
6 Theory and Practice 133
7 Teacher “Madness” and Its Causes 155
Bibliography 171
About the Author 179
iii
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Preface
Even a rock can be teacher.
—Old Buddhist proverb
You are invited to consider teaching as role-play, teaching as a rela-
tionship between actress/actor and audience. Everyone teaches—pre-
sentation, explanation, instruction, pedagogy—but few think about its
conception and design, its component parts, or how these add up to
more than a sum of the parts.
This book is designed to assist you in thinking about the act of
teaching on both sides of the desk, podium, stage, field, and even
computer screen. Nowadays, in this age of postmodernism, ubiquitous
cell phones, and knowledge by download, we often forget who is teach-
ing and who is learning or why. We don’t think about the theory, the
metaphor, inherent in a teacher’s actions. Even the teacher may be
unaware of the dynamic that lies at the depths of the role.
The age-old problems of teaching and learning are still very much
with us, even though many administrations, politicians, and private
and government agencies are hell-bent to “reform” the “system.”
Government agencies and private interests set goals for what each and
every child, young adult, and adult should learn. Values are demanded
for becoming an adequate public citizen, a thoughtful environmental-
ist, and a smart shopper. Most of all, it is important not to be a drag
on the workplace!
Old problems are still with us for two major reasons: First, we have
a simpleminded “model” of instruction and what it is supposed to ac-
complish, information in and testing out. Second, we often view our
audience with a mixture of contempt and/or authority that overlooks
v
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vi PREFACE
Figure P.1. Intersections
both their strengths and weaknesses, and denies them a feeling of par-
ticipation and contribution.
Many teachers—and parents, business leaders, politicians, coaches,
and symphony conductors (teachers all)—act as if they believe (and
probably do believe) that to teach is to learn. They view their role as
to be in command and act the authority, to provide direction and an-
swers to build appreciation and gratitude. Alas, the results of national
testing, local testing, quizzes, surveys, exams, and other assessment
devices often (but not always; let’s be a bit hopeful!) show that input
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PREFACE vii
alone doesn’t seem to do the trick, and can actually produce negative
results in terms of student attitudes.
More is needed than the notion that teaching is communication
that can deliver content efficiently and effectively. Teachers talk and
talk, computers download, principals direct, and (voilà!) students
learn, and understand complex material. This simpleminded idea of
cause and effect leads to demands for constantly increasing test scores
when it is obvious to some that the vast overload of data now available
has done little to improve student performance.
Effective teachers first and foremost must build relationships be-
tween actress/actor and audience. Relationships, mediated by roles,
encourage a flow of information, ideas, and feelings between and
within both “sides.” Actually, there really aren’t two sides at all (i.e.,
teacher and student), but rather a duality, a dyad, in which either or
both can contribute to or take away from the learning and teaching
process. Teaching is an organic relationship between partners playing
roles that take time to develop, with short- and long-term effects that
are not always predictable.
The big idea of this book is that roles are malleable and inter-
changeable. Teachers can assume roles for different objectives, and
so can students. Teachers and students can exchange roles as well,
with the teacher playing a student, and the student playing a teacher.
The many roles of a teacher can range across a wide spectrum of
actions, from being a tough little Mussolini to a warmhearted an-
archist. Each role has a goal, a style, and an impact. Willy-nilly,
teachers impact their students in ways that are evident and direct, or
indirect and delayed. And above all, we need to communicate across
roles with each other.
Many teachers teach for themselves, basically overlooking audi-
ence reaction, even when adverse. They move on to other things long
before their pupils have demonstrated, clearly, that the materials were
intelligently absorbed and understood. Getting an audience to really
understand and apply ideas new to them is no easy matter, even if they
are motivated and interested. So let’s think about those who are bored,
disabled, phobic, or average, or who see little or no value in learning a
lot of “stuff,” old and abstract stuff.
Even worse for role-play is the problem of social status, with
lower socioeconomic groups tending to perform more poorly on
assessments than middle- or upper-level groups. A social problem
confronts us as teachers. Not only is learning distributed along class
lines, but social standing also shapes the roles that are accepted or
rejected. Many groups prefer a tough disciplinarian for a teacher,
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Description:Teaching on a Tightrope offers those seeking to play the teacher's role a way of thinking about the major components of teaching. These components or dimensions are described in terms of pairings that interact and overlap with each other, e.g., teaching as art and science, content and process, theor
