Dịch
I teach tai chi chuan, but like most of us in our school, I do not have a formal teaching background. Some of us in the school are professional teachers in schools, colleges, universities and other environments and will know well the great deal of thought that goes into the teaching profession to understand how people learn and how best to teach. Please take what I write in that context, as an amateur, not a professional teacher.
The profession of teaching in wider society takes place in opinionated, polarised and politicised environments, with claims and counterclaims on how best to educate. Debates range from the benefits or drawbacks of school uniforms, private tuition, or the value of the arts. How do you navigate this contested environment?
One solution tried here in the UK to navigate this opinionated environment was for an independent body, the Educational Endowment Foundation, to set out in a neutral way what works and does not work to support learning. The foundation produced a toolkit of interventions which ranks them by cost, evidence and effectiveness: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/evidence-summaries/teaching-learning-toolkit/
The toolkit is focused mostly on students younger than ours, so the interventions are not directly transferable, but the toolkit is well worth a look. At its simplest, a dashboard sets out each intervention, the level of evidence for it on a 1 to 5 scale, the cost of the intervention, again on a 1 to 5 scale, and the impact of the intervention, in terms of equivalent months of school teaching.
For instance, “Participating in the arts” is relatively inexpensive (2 out of 5); there is reasonable evidence for it (3 out of 5); and it adds the equivalent impact of another two months of school teaching. “Wearing a school uniform” is relatively inexpensive (1 out of 5), but there is little evidence of effectiveness (1 out of 5) and it has no impact on educational attainment (0 months of impact). Below the top level, of course, is endless detail. For example, school uniforms as part of wider behavioural programmes have a different impact.
What has this got to do with teaching tai chi?
The most effective intervention in the Educational Endowment Foundation toolkit is feedback. Feedback delivers an additional eight months of learning impact, at low cost, with moderate evidence for the intervention. Given the central role of feedback in our tai chi school’s teaching approach, it is nice to see that we’ve been doing something really right in our tai chi school for the last 40 years!
The second most effective intervention is called “Metacognition and Self-Regulation,” giving an additional seven months of impact at a low cost, and with a strong evidence base. So what is metacognition and how might it apply to our teaching, as it looks pretty effective?
What is metacognition?
Metacognition is “thinking about thinking” or in a learning context, by understanding better how we learn, we learn better. In classrooms, this has strongly positive results.
In a tai chi class using metacognition, the teaching tape might be, “This is what we are going to learn this hour. We are going to be visualising three points of stability under the feet, in the pad of the foot behind the big and little toe and in the heel. This is why we are learning it: it will help your feet be more stable on the ground. If your feet are more stable, the rest of you will be too.”
Now as teachers many of us instinctively do this in our classes. Our senior teachers do this, and we have learnt in our apprenticeship classes to give students a structure to work with over 10, 20 or 30 weeks of hourly classes.
There is another aspect to metacognition: it isn’t just about the student. Having to set out what you are going to teach the student forces you as a teacher to think about what you are really trying to teach. Simply working that out, and having it in the forefront of your mind, may well bring more clarity and direction to your own teaching.
Why we shouldn’t tell people what they are doing
Metacognition is a way of thinking, not a rote method. Yes, if you are a new apprentice teaching B1, perhaps saying to students, “Here is what we are learning today” would help you teach better, and the students learn better. It’s not to say this is how thinking about learning would play out.
First, we know as teachers, we do not necessarily know what it is our students are experiencing in a class. A person might be getting something wholly different and deeply meaningful to them, rather than the particular aspect we think we are teaching, or happen to be focusing on. I am sure you will have had that experience as a teacher. You do a fundamentals class on feet and weight and someone says “Wow, I never realized I was so tense in my shoulders.” Yep, that’s tai chi, doing its thing! Good teaching!
Second, there is value in an experiential approach to the class, where the flow of teaching lets your students arrive at an end point of understanding, without much apparent explanation. As a student, you don’t have to consciously know why something calls to you or works for you in order to profoundly connect to it. At a Sunday morning practice in Greenwich Park a few weeks back, a passer-by walked up to us. He’d done tai chi many years ago, and we invited him to join our practice. He couldn’t articulate what was calling out to him in tai chi, but he knew there was something there that resonated with him, and it was clear to see it in him. I’m sure many of you will have had that experience with your students and indeed, yourselves.
Finally, there is a long depth and complexity to what we teach people. The class is not really there to teach someone how to turn their foot a particular way or stand in a particular posture—that’s just a waypoint on the journey. And if we wanted to explain fully what we are teaching, well, it would take the whole class just to start explaining it, and every class thereafter, and we’d never get around to teaching anything at all.
Why thinking about teaching and learning is important
Teaching without thinking about learning, is rather like when I practice tai chi without conscious awareness. You wander around, your arms and legs wave about, and not much goes on. If I bring just a slight conscious awareness to my tai chi practice, the form becomes alive and does its thing. I would say this “metacognition” practiced by educational professionals, bringing a little conscious awareness to the practice of teaching and learning, gives a seed of the yang in our teaching experience.
Conclusions
Some of the core techniques in our school’s teaching approach, such as feedback, have a strong basis in educational practice. I would take encouragement that our teaching methods have strength and validity. Given the care we take in creating and delivering our teaching, seeing what else we can learn from the wide mainstream profession of teaching, about the techniques of teaching, seems a useful thing for us to do in our school. I encourage those of you who are teachers in more formal educational environments to think of what learnings you might bring to us.
Happy teaching!
Danyal Sattar
Editor’s Note:
Danyal suggested we add this note to invite teaching professionals of other subjects to write blogs about how their teaching experience could help inform our teaching of tai chi and qigong.
Give a Reply