Today we (Texas Region Service Center ELAR Specialists) watched this video and had some time to write:
I believe in _____ because of a teacher. My methods teacher for lower strings, Edward Tillery, asked me to leave the room. But I had done nothing wrong. I stood outside the closed door until he called out that I could re-enter the room. He'd be posed with his cello, doing something ridiculous with the bow pose, fingering, posture, the stand donut, and so on. I was supposed to identify and correct the flaw immediately. After several iterations, I opened the door and busted out laughing.
Everything he was doing was correct - the bow position, his posture, his bow hold and fingering. Except for one thing: it was all wrong.
Tillery laughed with me, explaining that most students couldn't figure out what he was doing wrong. They looked so closely at the details that they missed the whole.
As I think about teaching, this story makes even more sense to me about what my cello teacher helped me learn about the teaching act. We can be technically correct. We can look at data points and rubrics. And we can still be wrong. And kids can still fail. To reach the moral imperative in achieving educational excellence for learners, we must have a way of thinking that situates our work in the ultimate outcomes. Our theoretical perspective, the framework that drives our efforts, must reveal and consider how the learner uses, and perceives, and engages with the teaching act, content, and processes.
Because of Tillery, I believe that teaching is not about us. It's about how the students use what we empower them to do. An uncompromising pursuit to surpass our educational lineage and future contributions must begin with how our work changes students. Let's get this part right. Teaching is about them.
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