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The Risking of Observations in the Classroom: Teacher as Cultural Critic

The eye sees more than the heart knows. --Blake Eleanor Duckworth taught me how to listen. Yes, this is an essay about observation--but it is also an essay about what happens when teachers invite students to observe. The invitation is empty if the teacher is not ready to listen. (1) I extended many empty invitations in my first two years of teaching. My own experience as a student had taught me enough to know that I did not want to lecture at others. I wanted my students to have, gratis, the right I had earned by fighting: to see and think independently. But I couldn't make it work. I presented my high school history classes with a text and asked my students to tell me what they thought. Then, like an addict watching himself relapse, I watched myself evaluate their comments, steer them toward specific points, get nervous when they did not follow my lead, and eventually all but take over the conversation. My colleagues were the same, and so were all the teachers I could remember. But hadn't I become a teacher partly to redeem my own experience? After two years of hit and miss, I decided something had to give. I handed in my resignation and signed up for a master's program in education. There, amidst professors who relied more than I ever had on lectures and rhetorical questions, and who spoke for three uninterrupted hours on the importance of classroom discussion, I met Eleanor Duckworth. In her 2hour sessions, with a few significant exceptions, she rarely spoke more than a combined fifteen minutes. Most of what she said was expressed in questions. Duckworth (1987/2006) has described the methodology through which she teaches teachers to listen. Briefly put, she creates a space wherein teachers learn to take their ideas, and the ideas of others, seriously. Three aspects of this learning process are particularly important for inviting and sustaining observations. First, the materials we offer students need to be complex enough to engage their interest for a long time. Materials cannot spoon-feed ideas the way most textbooks do. They should contain the complexities and conflicts inherent to the world. Second, all 'wrong' ideas, if taken seriously and attended to, can become productive or significant. Third, learning often rises out of a concentrated effort to reconcile conflicting observations. The teacher's role, then, involves "keeping the conflict on the floor as an issue worth trying to resolve, and refusing to believe too readily that we [have] resolved it" (Duckworth, 1987/2006, p. 141). This paper is about conflicting observations of a particular kind. It is not about contending observations held by students--as in when they notice that iron balls sink in water but also notice that iron ships float. What I want to address are those instances when student observations disturb the teacher. Here we are dealing with situations where the teacher is trained for (through Duckworth's method), and committed to, facilitating lessons that can only arise by student initiation and exploration. And yet, something in what students observe in the materials disquiets the teacher and forces renegotiation of his or her view of the lesson. Such instances are neither rare nor easy to navigate, and how they are addressed--by learners, teachers, and a community--is at the heart of the relationship between a listening and a critical pedagogy. A SIMPLE EXAMPLE On a basic level, the teacher's problem with what his or her students observe is a pragmatic problem. The lesson, as the teacher had imagined it, comes to a halt or takes an unwanted turn. After my first encounter with Duckworth, I began teaching in an elementary school. Early in the school year, I asked my third graders to solve an addition problem that I knew was slightly harder than what they were used to. 347 + 268 = ? I was not trying to test or trick them. I presented the question as a way of getting at how they thought about addition. …