Teaching 102: How to detect and categorize educational rhetoric

In this series of posts, veteran teacher, guide teacher and induction mentor Thomas Courtney bridges the other gap that we don’t talk enough about. That gap, the difference between what we are trained to do in our credential program, what we are asked to do by our employer, what the families and students we serve most want and need from us, and what we ourselves need is the substance of his upcoming book: Teaching 102: The Lessons You’ll Need (But May Not Get) To Survive (and Help Kids Thrive) in Today’s Modern Classroom

“Every one of my professors at State keeps telling me that we’re entering a challenging time for teachers,” says the wide-eyed, student teacher before me.

“Do they say it like that?” I ask, taking a sip of pre-5th grade Monday coffee. The kids are about to walk in and as usual, we’re enjoying a calm before the storm at opposite ends of the kidney table.

“Actually, no,” she says, “One calls it a hot mess, and another said in all her years she has never seen it so stressful.”

The Rhetoric Behind the Reality

When you’re just starting out, it’s hard to predict what will be the trigger that will absolutely drive you nuts (or worse out of the profession). For example, your greatest stress as an educator may wind up being helicopter parents. Or perhaps, the bane of your teaching existence may wind up being the disrespect some students display. Heck, I read a post on Facebook just the other day about a teacher quitting because of the scrunched-up papers she finds in her book bins.

It may be an administrator-like the tinman in the Wizard of Oz-that needs a new heart. And we will look at all of these scenarios in upcoming posts, just in case you need a yellow brick road to the next summer.

But far more likely, your greatest stress as a teacher will likely not come from outside school, nor come from one person within it. Teachers are, and always have been, seen as heroes to some. For others, and since time immortal, we will also be, as Bernard Shaw famously said, “those who cannot do,” ourselves.  Some parents will love you, others will not. Some administrators will appreciate you, others won’t. Some support staff will support you, others will secretly gossip about you over wine. Some kids will be all in, and others will be all into sinking your ship.

But the one underlying trigger that research shows will drive you to madness will do far more than annoy you. It will take away your efficacy. It will take away your autonomy, and your passion. It will take away your expertise, and it will strip you of your very philosophy of teaching if you let it. Like an invisible wind, it will blow into your classroom and change everything you want to do, and everything you want to be for kids. Sounds too dramatic? Think again.

You will want to teach a thematic unit you wrote in your credential program but scrap it worrying there isn’t enough instructional time nor site approval for the methodoloy. You will feel as though your children need hygiene practice, but instead stick to what is on the benchmark exam-the one where scores will be posted publicly. You will be told you should speak only 20% of every lesson, even though your kids clearly need a review while you speak to them.

You will find a practice so enlightening that you’ll want to share it with every colleague you know but won’t dare. You may even, as I did, let your favorite art lessons become fossilized, dusty relics, or decide to stop reading books to students after lunch-for fear of being caught teaching something “non-negotiable.”

You will do so, not because of any reality. You will do so because of the rhetoric now inherent in our education system-rhetoric meant to fix you-rhetoric that will sound perfectly acceptable.

Every minute must count.

They’ll get the rest of that stuff later.

We have to do better for kids.

The kids will thank us some day.

Phrases like these will change, if you let them, everything about your teaching. Worse, as benign as they may seem, they will, if you let them, drive you to madness, or out of the profession altogether.

And the reason these phrases will crush you is because you were doing right by kids before someone said these phrases to you, in an effort to persuade you to change your practice.  Because that is the function of these phrases.

You will be told to do this, and to do that, when you are trained to do this and trained to that, when your heart calls you to do this or that, when you know kids love this and hate that, when your head tells you this or that is working. You will know your kids need this and their parents say they need that, and you will be asked to do something completely different by people who are in your classroom for a handful of minutes-people who love kids too, but who really, really, really need things like test scores to improve.

This is why everyone in induction programs right now is talking about teacher “efficacy” because the idea of teachers as experts is non-existent for many teachers in our modern school environment-even veteran teachers. This is why teachers say things like “when I teach spelling I close the door,” or “I close the door and get some direct instruction in when I need to do that.”

But closing the door isn’t going to help you make it long term, and it isn’t the way you flourish and kids thrive. Its also not how you share your best practices with others at your school, because even if you don’t think you have any, you do.  It’s just survival.  And you can do better than survive.

What is Educational Rhetoric?

Let’s start with the elephant in the staff room taking away our efficacy and causing us stress in the first place. You’ll hear many names for it, office politics or work drama. But I think the unique type of drama teachers face today deserves it’s own turn of phrase. I call it “educational rhetoric”. Websters’ calls rhetoric “the art of speaking or writing effectively.” But I feel as though this doesn’t fit our educational environments well. Instead, let’s take the words of a teacher, Aristotle. He seems to hit the way rhetoric permeates our schools right on the nose. “The ability, in each particular case, to identify the available means of persuasion.” In other words, to Aristotle, rhetoric is what to tell people when you want to get them to do something. And few definitions of any era explain better the recent history of our profession than this. 

Examples of Educational Rhetoric

Educators love buzz words like “rigor” and “efficacy”, but they also love buzz phrases, especially administrators. Unlike teacher buzz words though, these buzz phrases are meant to persuade us.

Phrases like, “We must lift ourselves above the soft-bigotry of low expectations,” is why you give benchmark exams that mirror standardized tests and bring their results to share at PLCs.  This phrase originated from George W. Bush, and his supposed Texas Miracle, now widely considered misleading at best. Phrases like “They’ll get the rest later,” and “Every minute counts,” is why you feel pressure about running a school play, or taking kids to PE, or even teaching a thematic unit or a PBL activity.  Each was attributed to superintendents of urban districts at the height of NCLB. However, most are much less general. Here are some I have collected in just the last year:

• Homework doesn’t help kids. I don’t believe in homework.
• People are either good spellers or bad spellers.
• Cursive handwriting is a waste of class time.
• Multiplication facts aren’t worth studying in class.
• You should never teach phonics without a text.
• The division algorithm is super complicated and kids don’t need to know it.

No doubt you have heard and will hear many more phrases during your tenure. Some of this rhetoric is just how any functioning system works. Businesses, programs, teams, they all need their rhetoric to get the job done. Not all of the rhetoric you are going to hear is bad for kids, which is why it can be confusing to sort out.

So let’s cover the basics of how you close your own gap between the reality of what you think is right for kids and the work reality you’ve inherited. Because this is the gap you will have to teach within in today’s modern classroom, along with the rest of us.

It starts at the lowest of Bloom’s taxonomic levels: identification.

A System to Categorize the Rhetoric

I have found that rhetorical phrases can be categorized as one of four things. The first category is the most essential. I call it Category A, and this rhetoric doesn’t just sound good, it’s always based on authentic evidence. To me, factual evidence is also authentic evidence that includes a good track record, well-documented and meaningful data, and diverse stakeholder agreement. Sounds like a lot, but it’s not as complicated as it seems. You see, rhetoric that is based on good evidence, about things that work well for kids above a test score, are almost always aligned with anecdotal and survey data that support the parents wishes for their children (not to mention the diverse school setting in which we teach). That our evidence also is in-line with the wishes of the families we serve is often overlooked in school settings.

But if the phrase aligns with parents, and the phrase comes with real measured gains in something important to the school community, then it falls under Category A. That means Category A is where I want to set my compass.  I ask myself: Does this work? How do I know kids are learning? Is this right for kids? Do my students’ parents want this in our classroom?

The latter is the hardest because too often educators assume they know what parents actually want. For example, how do you know if parents agree when you are new to your particular school site? For one, states usually collect parent and student survey data, which is still often overlooked by districts seeking a bottom line of test scores. For example, in California we have the Healthy Kids Survey, which polls parents and kids on everything from bullying to homework. You can also gauge what parents think better by attending school functions, and especially meetings where parents are present and their voice is actively, authentically sought out. Easiest though is to just ask your parents what they think of certain things whenever you are with them. I have found parent-teacher conferences, and back-to-school nights to be excellent opportunities not just to listen, but to ask parents questions.

Sadly, survey data like the Healthy Kids Survey is not on our California dashboard, and it takes some searching to find. Inevitably, when you do find what parents at your school think, rest assured it will often be at odds with district policy in California, especially in marginalized communities. Therefore, the type of rhetoric that we are hoping for, here in category a is usually, and sadly hard to come by from school leadership in the modern testing era.

You are therefore far more likely to find rhetoric based not on communal input, and factual evidence, but instead from one of three other categories: B) good intentions, C) higher test scores as a proxy to factual evidence or D) both. In any of these events, they are often not based on what you have been trained at university to be right for kids, or what families want unless they do so coincidentally.

And just as I must check my own biases, I also must identify these rhetorical phrases from others and try to filter what comes down the pipe.  In other words, just disassociating myself from my own rhetoric is a type of bias-check that I must continually do. But just as I must check myself, I must also check what others are telling me is right for kids within our modern, inequitable school system.

Every teacher I know who is surviving and thriving (and sleeping well at night as a person of conscience)  has their own rhetoric detector of some kind. What you must know is that this is normal and ethical for you to use, despite the constant and incessant call for you to, “Keep a growth mindset.” Education is not fascism, and “A quality teacher in every classroom” can be a quality teacher in many varied ways. Keep in mind that the call to “Keep an open mindset” is itself rhetoric when used by administrators wishing you’d only teach the way they ask because they are seeking higher test scores, or perhaps not someone of conscience themselves.

Some organizations have a similar detector. For example, Rotary International has the Four Way Test. I got to see the Four Way Test in action while I was a cultural exchange ambassador.

I personally begin with a type of flow filter map that reminds me of the Four Way Test. The first thing I do is take a phrase I hear, such as “Whoever talks the most learns the most,” which was a common phrase in the early 2010s within our district. At my school, this phrase was the rhetoric used to reduce teacher talk to no more than 20% of a lesson’s total time-because a consultant from New Zealand said we should. It also was going to increase our test scores. It felt absurd to me, but I wanted to try it to better my classroom for kids and at first, as it was presented to me, considered it to be in category a. However, somewhere along the way, my teacher sense began to tingle.

I researched it, tried it out, and reflected on its use taking into account the kids, the parents, my colleagues, the school community, all as stakeholders.

With a quick search, I found that the phrase “Whoever talks the most learns the most,” was first attributed to a principal, who became an author and conference speaker to businesses and companies. He wrote a popular blog about toning down teacher talk. However, researching “teacher talk” I found that in most elementary school lessons, a 30% teacher talk model was better than a 20% model, and I also found that when teaching content, it was better to be closer to 50%. This didn’t exactly match what my admin was telling me, nor the consultant that they had hired from New Zealand.

This helped me see that reducing my talk to only 1/5 of total time was a lot closer to Category B, good intentions, or Category C) higher test scores or D) both b and c. It wasn’t improving my students’ learning over time, nor was it what my parents wanted. However, it also helped me to see that I could move a practice of reducing my own talk into Category A and make myself a better educator for my students. In the case of the “whoever talks the most” phrase, I found, for instance, that just because the data was off a little, didn’t mean that the idea of being less of a “sage-on-a-stage” didn’t have merit. It just didn’t need to be so extreme. I therefore took steps with fidelity to reduce my talk and encouraged more student talk using various strategies we had been asked to practice.

Figure 1 Mr. Courtney’s Rhetoric Categorization TEMPLATE

Rhetorical Phrase	My Personaized Four Way “Test”   Does this work? How do I know? Is it right for kids? Do parents want this to be a core part of our instruction?	Category and Implications CATEGORY A: Authentic and Purposeful CATEGORY B: Good intentions CATEGORY C: Testing gains CATEGORY D: Both good intentions and testing gains    Can it be adapted and moved to Category A?
Example:   Whoever talks the most, learns the most. Ie. Speak only 20% of the lesson	Example:   *This works well to introduce units, or when routines are well established but not when students need intense review or in new material. *Most research supports more teacher talk than this, but no more than ½ the class time. Formative data in my class supports this. *Kids can benefit from more class time, especially ELL students. Student talk is also empowering. *Yes, parents want their children empowered but not at the sake of learned outcomes.	Example:   As stated, this phrase looked like Category A. However, over time, research and classroom data confirmed it as a practice mostly in Category B.   Nevertheless, my current teacher talk is well over 50%, and can be cut way down. Therefore, I should incorporate this strategy with fidelity to a good degree, and especially in certain situations (like the start of units and at guided reading).

Using the above filtration system has helped me to both sleep at night, and smile in my classroom during the day. It doesn’t always make an administrator happy, but I remind myself that an administrator’s school site tenure is on average 5-6 years. Kids on the other hand, visit me as adults decades into the future.

Extension Activity

Whether or not you agree with my filter, you may wish to consider making one of your own. Click here for a template you can use. You may want to start by considering several buzz phrases you hear thrown around in your teaching context, those that have perhaps been bothering you professionally. Decide what your filter questions are. Then, consider the categories you feel are appropriate to put each into, or make your own categories. Finally, consider what your next ethical steps should be as an educator of conscience.