When is Teaching Real?

I teach at Northeastern University's College of Professional Studies. My title? Lecturer. Teaching is much more than lecturing. It's a give-and-take experience. How do you know if real teaching takes place? You observe teachers and students and ask if both are exchanging roles regularly: are students learning and teaching... and are their teachers teaching as well as learning?

Paulo Freire, the author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed" put it this way: “Whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching, and whoever learns teaches in the act of learning.”

I wrote this article about the late Dr. Richard Ladd, an extraordinary language teacher at Ipswich High School. I sat in on his classes at Ipswich High School, interviewed him, and saw the interaction of students with him and their classmates. The give-and-take or exchange of roles of teacher and students was real. One former student of Ladd told me that 20 years later, she remembered how the interaction between students and Dr. Ladd enabled her to remember what she learned and to use it today in working with French-speaking clients.

What I saw in that Ipswich classroom reminded me of a weekend I spent with Paulo Freire some time ago with a small group of Union Theological Seminary students & teachers. Freire had been so successful in teaching indigenous people in his native Brazil how to read, write and speak clearly and forcefully, he became a threat to the then authoritarian regime and was imprisoned. Years later, he left Brazil and was a renowned leader in education circles around the world.

About teaching at Northeastern, I ask myself many of the same questions Freire raised that weekend about what makes teaching and learning real. The same questions pertain to learning a language or learning about organizational communication, a subject my colleagues and I teach at Northeastern.

It's the give-and-take, the exchange of roles that defines real learning. Freire said it best: "Learning is a process where knowledge is presented to us, then shaped through understanding, discussion and reflection."

Learning and Teaching at its best...

When Dr. Richard Ladd, head of Ipswich High School’s language department, started teaching in Ipswich in 1989, he heard the same message over and over again from parents. “At parent-teacher meetings, I got sick and tired of hearing parents saying ‘Yeah, I took French for four years in high school but I don’t remember a word of it.’” ?Ladd knew he had to figure out a better way to teach their children French. And he did.

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So what has he been doing in past 25 years that’s made such a deep impression on students and helped them remember what they learned? Asked this question, Ladd answered, “Number One: I don’t teach. And Number two: I rarely give tests. What I do is instead is give students the tools they need to work with each other, to speak with each other, to write, and to constantly use the language in practical ways.”

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But does this approach work? Just ask Sarah Player, a former student of Dr. Ladd’s in the late 1990s. Today a member of the Ipswich School Committee and a physical therapist in Gloucester, Player says “I use the French I learned with many of the students I work with in Gloucester.” When she was a student at the University of Kentucky, she did so well in a ?comprehensive French proficiency test, members of the French Department tried unsuccessfully to persuade her to major in French.

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So how does a teacher who doesn’t “teach” and rarely gives tests get students to learn and remember so much? I wanted to find out so I sat down on two occasions to interview Dr. Ladd and to see him in action. It was like watching a stage director on a rehearsal day. The director works with the stage crew, set designers, producers, actors and others. He coaches, directs, encourages, inspires, consults with, and often seems like a whirling dervish moving from one group to another. Dr. Ladd likewise does similar things but from his command post at the front of the classroom – one that seems lived in where students move about freely, engaged in conversations, working on joint projects, writing scripts, listening, and learning.? An outsider might think this was an operations center or a crowded dorm room instead of a classroom.

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Students work in pairs or small groups on projects and they are constantly speaking to each other in French – in small doses at first but later in the program in large doses. “This is a more viable way to teach French. ” says Ladd. “Students are speaking, writing, and reading? French. If I taught students the way their parents were taught, a typical class of 25 students would have only a minute or two of practice a day, and you just don’t learn to speak French that way.”

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Today in education, there’s much talk about 21st century skills and new models for teaching and learning. Dr. Ladd has been decades ahead of the experts. After his first few years at Ipswich High School, he started seeing good results. “Students were speaking French and writing French. They were able to function in the language. That’s what it is all about.”??

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But what about “rarely testing” students? Dr. Ladd measures performance but in a more practical real-life way.? In well orchestrated activities, for example, students have to read, write and talk about subjects ranging from explaining family roles and describing one’s neighborhood to discussing virtually every aspect of food from ordering it to cooking it. Students then have to draw pictures of various units and spend 7 or 8 minutes explaining their work.? Ladd engages them in conversation using a rubric to determine how well they speak and understand. “Students are so engaged and enthusiastic in these discussions that when I tell them time is up, they’ll say “But I wanted to tell you about this or I wanted to tell you about that.”

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Dr. Ladd’s role as a teacher is more behind-the-scenes. He stays in the background as a guiding but unobtrusive presence -– as a coach, a consultant, and listener who inspires and demands students to give it everything they’ve got. But he acknowledges they have to learn French on their own terms.? “I know teenagers don’t like to have an adult in their face constantly,” he says. “They will quickly turn you off. So the best thing I do as a teacher is to give them imaginative and practical things to do and get out of their way and watch them learn.”

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Does not “teaching” and giving few tests really work? “Yes,” says Ladd. “Look at the high Advanced Placement (AP) scores Ipswich students receive.” Ladd is also the author of the country’s leading Advanced Placement textbook helping students prepare for that exam. Titled “AP French: Preparing for the Language and Culture Examination,” (Pearson 2012) it is in its third printing and mirrors the kind of activities and exercises Ladd uses in all his classes. In addition to good AP scores, former students regularly contact Dr. Ladd about using French in their travels or in their work.

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Asked about the teaching of foreign languages in schools today, Dr. Ladd laments the lack of commitment and resources to preparing students for a more globally integrated world. “Ideally, I would like to have dedicated langauge teachers in the elementary school starting in grade 4 and continuing on through middle and high school,”? he stated.? He also noted that the Milton and Holliston public schools hired teachers fluent in French beginning with kindergarten students.? Students learn the basic subjects but do it in French, for example, for half a day and in English the other half. “Any school district could do this,” he continued. “All you need are teachers who speak French or Spanish.”

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Right now, however, Dr. Ladd is focused on making sure his Ipswich students perform well in French.? Asked to sum up his experience as a teacher with a active hands-on approach, he paused for a minute and spoke slowly with some emotion: “There is not a day that I walk out of this building that I have not seen somebody do his or her personal best, reach a mountain they never thought they could climb…or do something extraordinary in my classroom. I work with the most amazing children who will not stop when they get to the mountaintop…when they get to the mountaintop they have to find the skyhook for the ladder. I cannot believe what kids will give back to me.”