The Diagnostic Teacher

Afterword by Janet Whitla

When we speak of professional development, we most often focus on the roles that people play: teacher, principal, staff developer, school board member. Many readers of this volume live in these roles; each involves strong notions of competence already achieved and expertise ready to be put into play.

My hope is that The Diagnostic Teacher breaks the mold of these notions and helps us as practitioners and researchers to start from different premises: that we are all learners; that none of us is fully prepared for our work as educators, caregivers, and guides to our children; that the future most certainly hasn’t been invented yet; and that change will be a constant in our lives. If we accept these premises, then access to new knowledge and know-how is essential for all of us. "Learning" is therefore the key word. It is the distinguishing characteristic for defining the diagnostic teacher. It assumes by definition that knowledge about students and about how to encourage better teaching is provisional.

As an organization with a long history, we have had firsthand experience with the provisional nature of such knowledge. For a brief period during its earliest years as an organization, EDC made several attempts to develop curricula influenced by the misguided goal of being "teacher-proof." Yet, the chapters in this volume show how far we have come from that ill-conceived, indeed foolhardy, notion. All of the language used to tell these stories refutes such a stance. Even in the early days, we quickly moved to innovative "parallel curriculum" for teachers on the content and pedagogy of new materials. Then came, over time, in-depth workshop experiences, enriching teachers’ disciplinary knowledge. Presently, as this volume demonstrates, teachers are engaged as co-constructors with EDC staff in developing instructional materials, and as researchers and developers in their own communities of practice with EDC staff as guides and critical friends. This book, then, very much represents a journey, taken over several decades. It reflects the current conceptions of EDC staff, as the organization turns 40.

It is generally acknowledged today that teachers need to break out of the isolation of the classroom and join together in such communities of practice. EDC’s work, whether with adults or youth, has been strongly influenced by this and other theories of social learning. Many of the chapters in this volume state explicitly that knowledge is socially constructed, and is gained through active, hands-on experiences and opportunities to reflect with one’s colleagues. The emerging language and literature around "communities of practice" has therefore been of special importance to our work in teacher development. These learning communities are, quite simply, groups of people united by common enterprise, and as Solomon and Morocco point out in their two concluding chapters, the vigor of these communities is at the heart of their professionalism.

This afterword would be incomplete without including the thinking of David Hawkins, one of EDC’s earliest and most distinguished teacher educators. Exactly 30 years ago, Dr. Hawkins presented to the world of mathematics teachers his thoughts on what he termed "the triangle" of I-Thou-It: student, teacher, and the stuff of learning that must be in a relationship together if the classroom is to be a rich world of learning. He wrote and spoke eloquently about the essential connection of the human duet—the "I" and the "Thou"—with the "It"—the curriculum and its tangible experiences. His formulation was the precursor to the work of Sarah Lightfoot and of others, including staff of EDC.

What is even more astonishing and delightful is that 30 years ago, David Hawkins wrote also about the "diagnostic teacher." While we believed throughout the development of this volume that we had created this powerful descriptor for ourselves, what I uncovered in his work was the deep-running tradition of EDC’s theory into practice that launched our ensuing decades of commitment to the development of teaching as a profession and that brought us back, through intuitive and analytic means, to the same language as David Hawkins used himself so long ago.

I leave the reader with a few quotations from David Hawkins’ article, "I-Thou-It," published in EDC’s ESS (Elementary Science Study) Reader in the late 1960s.

The function of the teacher… is to respond diagnostically and helpfully to a child’s behavior…. I’m speaking as one very much in favour of richness and diversity in the environment, and of teaching which allows a group of children to diversify their activities and which—far more than we usually think proper—keeps them out of their hair. What seems very clear to me—and I think this is a descriptive, factual statement, not praising or blaming—is that if you operate a school, as we in America almost entirely do, in such a style that the children are rather passively sitting in neat rows and columns and manipulating you into believing that they’re being attentive because they’re not making any trouble, then you won’t get very much information about them. Not getting much information about them, you won’t be a very good diagnostician of what they need. Not being a good diagnostician, you will be a poor teacher….It doesn’t say that you will but that you can get more significant diagnostic information about children, and can refine your behavior as a teacher far beyond the point of what’s possible when every child is being made to perform in a rather uniform pattern….

Of course, you certainly aren’t going to succeed all the time with every child in this diagnostic and planning process. There are going to be several misses for every hit, but you just say, ‘Well, let’s keep on missing and the more we miss the more we’ll hit.’ The importance of this in the ‘I-Thou’ relationship between the teacher and the child is that the child learns something about the adult which we can describe with words like ‘confidence’, ‘trust’ and ‘respect’.

…It seems to me that many of us, whether our background was in science or not, have learned something about ourselves from working with children in this way that we’ve begun to explore. We’ve begun to see the things of the physical and biological world through children’s eyes rather more than we were able to before, and have discovered and enjoyed a lot that is there that we were not aware of before. We don’t any longer feel satisfied with the kind of adult grasp that we had of the very subject matter that we’ve been teaching; we find it more problematic, more full of surprises, and less and less a matter of the textbook order.

One of the nicest stories of this kind that I know comes from a young physicist friend who was very learned. He had just got his Ph.D. and of course he understood everything. (The Ph.D. has been called ‘the certificate of omniscience’.) My wife was asking him to explain something to her about two coupled pendulums. He said, ‘Well now you can see that there’s a conservation of… Well, there’s really a conservation of angle here.’ She looked at him. ‘Well, you see, in the transfer of energy from one pendulum to the other there is…’ and so on and so on. And she said, ‘No, I don’t mean that. I want you to notice this and tell me what’s happening.’ Finally, he looked at the pendulums and he saw what she was asking. He looked at it, and he looked at her, and he grinned and said, ‘Well, I know the right words but I don’t understand it either.’ This confession, wrung from a potential teacher, I’ve always valued very much. It proves that we’re all in it together.

As indeed we are!