Entrance slip (Oct. 21): Van Manen reading on the tact of teaching — reading and response

At the beginning of this article, author lists many questions that teachers may pose. I was soon attracted by these words because I really wanted to know the answers to all of these questions. However, due to different circumstances there should not be a certain answer to each question. The author provides us principles and concepts in the article to help us deal with various situations. I will choose three quotes from the article to share with you in this blog post.  

"Pedagogy is the ability of actively distinguishing what is “good” from what is not good, what is appropriate from what is less appropriate in interacting with children or young people. The task of teaching cannot be properly understood unless we are willing to conceive of practical teacher knowledge in a pedagogical manner."(P. 4)

Author uses the negative consequences of praising students to remind teachers about pedagogical sensitivity. Teacher's pedagogical sensitivity could protect students from embarrassment, confusion or stress. To develop this ability, I think teachers should constantly reflect on the events and the situations that they interact with the students they teach, and ask themselves the pedagogical question: did I act appropriately? 

"The concept of the teacher as a reflective practitioner is, in part, a response to the sense that a technical theory into practice epistemology does not seem sensitive to the realization that teacher practical knowledge must play an active and dynamic role in the ever-changing challenges of the school and classroom." (p. 10) 

I am inspired from this quote. As teacher candidates, we could accumulate practical knowledge through reflective practice. We need to constantly reflect on our own actions and experiences. We are provided many opportunities to develop our reflective practices in this program. Through microteaching, I gained valuable online teaching experiences. I reflected on how different the teaching and presenting are. In short, we need to be a reflective practitioner.

"Oakeshott (1962) distinguishes between technical knowledge that can be captured in written text and practical knowledge that can only be expressed in action and learned through experience." (p. 17) 

No matter how many case studies we analyze and learn in the class, practical knowledge can only be learned through experience. During the two weeks practicum, I will try to be an active and reflective practitioner.

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Set 16, 2021

Reading: Pedagogical Sensitivity and Teachers Practical Knowing-in-Action

Highlights from the article:

1. Giving recognition may lead to feelings of inequality. (So, be careful to give the praise to a single student in public. Some teachers like to say "good question!" I always think this is an inappropriate compliment. Some students may be worried to ask a question since they don't know if it is a good one. If there are good questions, there must be bad questions. Therefore, teachers should just need to simply say "thank you" and answer that question carefully.)

2. The caring involves helping, encouraging, admonishing, praising, prodding, and worrying about individual students and classes. (This means teachers should care their students "as persons who have names and personalities and with whom they have concrete interactions.")

3. What we need to have to develop certain qualities or traits of character includes open-mindedness, sincerity, wholehearted, absorbed interests, responsibility, a habit of thinking in a reflective way, and so forth. 

4. A good teacher is able to read, as it were, the inner life of the young person; the tactful teacher knows how to interpret the deeper significance of shyness, frustration, interest, difficulty, tenderness, humor, discipline in concrete situations with particular children or groups of children; the tactful teacher have a fine sense of standards, limits, and balance that makes it possible to know almost automatically how far to enter into a situation and what distance to keep in individual circumstances; a tactful teacher seems to have the ability of instantly sensing what is the appropriate, right or good thing to do on the basis of perceptive pedagogical understanding of children's individual nature and circumstances. 

I am attracted by a depiction of a tactful teacher on page 17. The author says, "this teacher feels at home in this room, in a way that allows her to act with such confidence and self-forgetful ease." I believe that this is the condition that all teachers want to reach. Can this teacher still behave like this in a new school facing a new group of students? What and how should this teacher do? I really want to know what the first thing she will do in a completely new environment. But there is one word that impressed me, forgetful. "That teacher can forget herself and completely absorb herself in this situation with her students." Yes, focus, focus on my job. Always remember why I am here in this classroom.