But because teaching is profoundly and often unconsciously affected by the language we use to describe it, the most direct and powerful way to change teaching may be to change its dominant metaphor.
The metaphor of “teacher as performer” for the most part continues to dominate the thinking of educators and the general public.
A powerful replacement metaphor—one that I owe to Phil Schlechty—is to view teachers as “leaders of knowledge workers” whose primary responsibility is the design of engaging knowledge work. (I say more about that here.)
Here are several implications of this metaphor:
1. Instead of “performance evaluation,” principals and teaching colleagues would meet with teachers to learn more about the design of the knowledge work assigned to students to consider its rigor and potential for meaningful engagement.
2. Classroom observers would assess students’ engagement with their work. They might also sample a few students about their understanding of the work’s purpose and clarity.
3. Observers would also pay attention to teachers’ leadership skills—their ability to clearly communicate a purpose for the learning, to place it in a larger context, to manage the flow of the work process, and to provide clear directions for the work with which students will engage individually and in small groups.
4. Formal professional learning would be focused for the most part on enabling teachers to design engaging work, on structuring student group work for maximum engagement, on real-time assessment of student engagement and learning, and on skillfully managing students and the flow of classroom procedures and processes.
Some school systems, I know, have made progress in this general direction, whether or not they have applied the “teachers as leaders of knowledge workers” metaphor. But in many schools the teacher as performer metaphor is as dominant as it was decades ago, which locks into place a teacher-centric view of the classroom and of learning.
Question: Do you agree that metaphors affect what we think and do? I have heard teachers described as performers, designers, gardeners, and architects, among other metaphors. What do you think is the best metaphor for teaching?