In conversations with my students, I have said to them, “You cannot have student learning without management, but you can have management without student learning.” Now, this may not be entirely true, as I have seen students learn in the middle of a management nightmare, however, this is not best practices. Often, my residents plan activities based on student management and not student learning. The result can be that the residency student has a perfectly managed class, but the student learning is somewhat deficient because of the time spent on procedures etc. I know this is all a part of growing as a teacher; I don’t want to give the impression that they should know all of this by now. I shared with my classmates this struggle I was having with helping my residents consider the importance of student learning as much as they consider student management. This was my dilemma!
My peers began to speak of my dilemma and, according to the protocol, I could only listen, not speak. I sat there and took notes as I heard them state their wonderings and comments, “Why didn’t Tracy intervene? Did she show the resident the data? She may need to take a more directive approach. Did the resident have data of her own?” For each question and statement, I wanted to respond, but had to wait. As the peers finished up their discussion time their conversations started to connect with me, I knew what I needed to do to help my students.
Here is what I learned:
1. I need to change my language. This means that I need to think about how I word my questions. They need to be framed in a way that helps my residents unpack the learning. I think I see a future inquiry.
2. One of the reasons I didn’t intervene during her lesson was because a content coach was also observing her lesson. I didn’t want to get in the way and I wasn’t sure if the content coach might intervene or if he even thought it was appropriate. From this I learned that I needed to have a conversation with the content coaches about defining our roles in an observation setting.
3. The last thing I learned was that when you “put yourself out there” you can really learn a lot about your own practice.
Although this experience provided much anxiety, it was well worth it. I felt I learned so much about supervision, my role and how to improve my practice.