The Mindful Teacher: An Interview with Dennis Shirley
The practice of reflection—reappraising our experiences so we can learn from them—is widely recognized as a key to improving teaching and learning. But if reflection is truly valued by educators and researchers, then why does reflective practice seem so rare in schools? The Mindful Teacher, co-written by Elizabeth MacDonald, a teacher in the Boston Public Schools, and Dennis Shirley, a professor of education at Boston College, offers a practical vision of how teachers can utilize reflection to improve their practice.
Co-author Shirley's connection to Houston schools reaches back two decades to when he was on the faculty of Rice University. To gain more insight into Shirley's ideas, Houston A+ Challenge's Donna Reid sat down with him to discuss the new book, teacher professionalism, and university/school partnerships.
Shirley began with the idea that mindful teaching takes hold when "teachers struggle to attain congruence, integrity, and efficacy in their practice." It is integrative, reflective and deep. Shirley believes that allowing teachers to engage with that deeper dimension of their identity is an unbelievably rich model for nurturing teachers and keeping them in the profession.
One striking feature of The Mindful Teacher is that it is deeply respectful of teachers and teaching. The authors, both excellent teachers themselves, assume that teachers are responsible, intellectual beings who can and should make decisions about how to best serve their students. The book grew out of a series of Mindful Teacher Seminars, co-facilitated by MacDonald and Shirley, which brought classroom teachers together to examine their own practice in a collegial atmosphere.
Many of their strategies—such as creating a trusting climate, using a tuning protocol, and extended debriefing—will be familiar to readers who are engaged in Critical Friends work. Beyond drawing on the research and resources of professional learning communities, however, The Mindful Teacher makes a fresh contribution to professional practice by also incorporating strands of psychologist Ellen Langer's work on mindfulness as well as contemplative practices such as meditation. The purpose of the work is to address the painful dilemma of alienated teaching, which occurs when teachers feel like they must comply with policies that they know are not in their students' best interests.
The theme of teacher professionalism runs throughout The Mindful Teacher. When asked what it means to be a professional, Shirley first responded by telling a story about immigrant Kindergarten students who are given an English language fluency test with a stopwatch as soon as they first enter the public schools. "An utterly insensitive and insane thing to do," he said. "Where the professional comes in is to take things to the next level and say, 'Well, maybe reading fluency is important, but the first thing that this child needs to do is feel secure in this environment.' And there are things that come before reading fluency—especially at that age. Figuring out where the bathroom is, figuring out how to line up, figuring out how to play with others. Just so many things. So, the professionalism in the mindful teacher is thinking. The message is that we need to think."
Unfortunately, Shirley said, in too many settings, teachers are allowed to think only about accountability measures. Instead of encouraging more thinking about a wide variety of data sources, the standardized tests and frequent benchmarks that pervade schools today have prompted teachers to become "data-driven to distraction." Shirley posits, "Not to say that those things aren't important. It's just that there are other dimensions about teaching and learning -- if it's going to be a profession, if it's not just going to be this little data-driven cult -- then we're going to have to find ways to talk about kids' social well-being, their emotional well-being, how they interact amongst each other, what we learn from watching them."
Another compelling feature of the authors' work is how they model fruitful university/school partnerships that dissolve "the great divide" between theory and practice. For the past eight years, Shirley has team-taught all of his teacher preparation courses at Boston College with urban teachers. "I can come in there with the theory and the research and all that," he said. "But then the teacher can say, 'Well, OK, that's really good to know we have that. Now let me describe to you what happened this morning.'"
These innovative professor/teacher partnerships were nourished in their early stages by progressive federal policy such as the Title II Teacher Quality Enhancement grants that promoted school and university collaborations. Shirley believes that his role in the partnership is to offer a different perspective that connects the teachers' work to each other as well as the broader policy context.
"Conversations can turn into griping sessions," Shirley said. "People feel disempowered, like there's nothing you can do. That's where the advantage of a higher-ed partner is. Mindful Teacher Seminars are teacher-led, teacher-run. Everything about it is done by the teachers. But, it's good to have a higher-ed colleague there, who's kind of outside of this who can say, "OK, the grievances you’re feeling with this administrator are related to a national or even an international pattern. This is not anything that is particular to Boston, or Houston, or Los Angeles, or London, or Sydney, or any other place."
Indeed, although teachers often feel isolated in classrooms, they are bound together by many connections. Collaborating with one another and reflecting on that work breaks down the alienating obstacles that hinder true teacher professionalism. If such a culture is what we seek to create in our schools, The Mindful Teacher could be a huge tool for nurturing reflective practice and forging supportive connections to transform ourselves and our schools.
