Thursday, October 1, 2015

Donald M. Murray--"The Teaching Craft: Telling, Listening, Revealing"

The St. Martin's Guide to Teaching Writing. Cheryl Glenn and Melissa A. Goldthwaite. Eds. Bedford/St. Martin's: New York, NY. 2014

In reflecting on his teaching career, Murray states that he has "done three kinds of teaching."


Teaching by Telling
  • "To teach well standing up we have to be able to see through the complexities of the subjects we have learned to the unifying simplicities. We have to learn to repeat without seeming to repeat, to hear the question asked instead of the question expected, to read the audience, to teach by telling. In teaching teachers many of us, myself included, advocate inductive methods of teaching, forgetting that we had to learn to teach by telling first, to perform to get attention and hold it, to command the classroom. Teaching standing up isn't easy; it's an art in itself. And we have colleagues who make a respectable career of teaching by telling. But after approximately five years of teaching standing up I was moved to a new classroom, and I found I have a new craft to learn."

Teaching by Listening

  • After learning how to teach sitting down, Murray writes, "When I did listen I found that they were discovering in their writing and their reading that I had been telling them, and they found it before I told them. Somehow I had developed an environment in which we wrote writing and read writing and in which we were able to share what we were learning...when I was able to listen they were able to include me in their learning.
Teaching by Revealing
  • Murray at this later point in his teaching career (10+ years) mixes telling and listening styles of teaching, but now he has "become comfortable enough to teach by revealing my own learning."
  • His revealing approach is termed "demonstration" and closely resembles modeling.
  • "The teacher shows the student how to do a particular kind of writing, or demonstrates a particular method of reading. The focus is on showing how to do something properly."
"I no longer know what I will teach or what I will learn in a class, or form a class. I am never sure, in fact, what has been learned. But I do know that learning is taking place, for I am learning, and my students are learning, and we are revealing our learning to each other."
  • I really like this idea, but how in the age of objectives, standards, and provable transfer of knowledge can a teacher give themselves the space to let learning arise organically?

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