Metaphors for Teachers1

A teacher is a scholar.

In a survey of the roles, images, and metaphors used to represent teachers and teaching in textbooks published in the United States before the 1940s, Pamela Joseph discusses a number of ideal images, including this onea teacher is a scholar.i The notion of the teacher as an intellectual sharply contrasts the teacher as technician or as clinician. This open-minded scholar must engage in the same intellectual pursuits in which he asks his students to engage, because [s]cholarship [can] bring delight to the teacher who [grows] intellectually along with his studentsii and also because there must be a thinking teacher before there can be a thinking child.iii The metaphor of the teacher as scholar positions teachers alongside other serious investigators into the nature and workings of things of the mind. It runs the risk, however, of privileging the realms of scholarship into which adults who have already been through the educational system make forays over the realms within which students still in their formal process of education explore. The phrase the reflective practitioner was coined by Schn in the early 1980s. Advocates of fostering the development of reflective practitionersiv argue that, in the absence of reflection, one runs the risk of relying on routinized teaching and . . .not developing as a teacher or as a person.v The ongoing interplay of reflection and action, or what Freire calls praxis,vi although not generally built into the structure of teaching,vii is essential to good pedagogical practice. As Zehm points out, reflection on the human dimensions of teaching is a useful tool for self-exploration as well as professional development.viii Furthermore, not only does becoming a reflective practitioner mean developing the disposition to reflect on practice, it means finding the words to express those reflections to othersthrough collaboration, building a shared language and a shared knowledge of practice.ix Thus the metaphor of teacher as reflective practitioner would appear to strive for more of a balance between calling for dwelling in the world of scholarship, like the teacher as scholar, and dwelling in the world that that teacher creates in the classroom.

A teacher is a reflective practitioner.

A teacher is a researcher.

In the mid-1990s, there was a movement to legitimate the systematic, intentional inquiry in which practicing teachers engage. Aiming to disrupt the one-way flow of educational knowledge from university-based researchers to curriculum and policy specialists to teachers, the teacher research movement argued that teachers can and should generate legitimate knowledge about educational practice. Teacher researchers use the sites of their own educational practice as subjects of inquiry with the more far-reaching goal of developing, assessing, and revising theories that inform practice.x Teacher research positions the classroom teacher as practitioner-inquirer rather than perpetuating the exclusive claim of the university professor as the scientist-theorist of the educational research past.xi Writing in the early 1990s, Scheffler suggested that the child is clay, and the teacher imposes a fixed mold on this clay, shaping it to the specification of the mold. He

A teacher is a sculptor.
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From Alison Cook-Sather, Education Is Translation: A Metaphor for Change in Learning and Teaching. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

continues: The sculptors statue does not grow of itself out of the rock, requiring only the artists nurture; the artist exercises real choice in its production, yet his initial block of marble is not wholly receptive to any idea he may wish to impose on it. This metaphor, in Schefflers discussion, throws into relief the power and control of the teacher but does not take into consideration those aspects of teaching and learning that are not within the teachers control. It casts the student as something inanimateclayyet something that can take shape. The consistency of the clay, of the student, the properties it brings to the creative process, help shape what is created.xii

A teacher is an artist.

Like education as growth, the teacher as artist has surfaced at various points in history. The artist knows what it takes to fashion works whose form and structure are holistic and unified.xiii An artist is someone who sees the all-overness of her process and who knows how, through that process, to create a new image.xiv Gage writes of teaching as a practical art which calls for intuition, creativity, improvisation, and expressivenessa process that leaves room for what is implied by rules, formulas, and algorithms. xvArt embraces both sensory and intellectual dimensions of the human mind. One teacher who sees herself as an artist states that in her classroom the air is full of possibilities; within such a classroom, a teacher must be comfortable with ambiguity and flexibility.xvi Teaching, writes another teacher, is an art full of subtle nuance.xvii Words such as holistic, all-overness, intuition, and possibilities highlight the indeterminate nature of this metaphor. An artist disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and he opens ways for better understanding.xviii The technique an artist uses must be evoked by the spirit of the things she wish[es] to express.xix To create a work of art, or to inspire others to create a work of art, teachers must both be guided by their own internal and individual visions and also go to kindred spiritsothers who have wanted [to create a particular] thingand study their ways and means, learn from their successes and failures.xx

A teacher is a coach.

Teachers who are coaches share the responsibility of making sure that students achieve excellence with other members of the school community, parents, and the students themselves. Coaches understand, explains Ladson-Billings, that the goal is team success. Although they operate behind the scenes and on the sidelines, coaches are always present to players through their expectations.xxi Allender explains: I think of teaching as if I were directing a playan improvised play in which there are no lines for the players to read or only a few at mostThe script is a set of notes, and at every juncture, detailed directions on how to proceed are given. What unfolds, in contrast, is undetermined and can be surprising.xxii In analyzing his own teaching practice, Allender narrates instances of role-playing and rehearsing opportunities he offers his students to explore their roles, critique their own and others performances, and co-construct the ultimate production of the course.

A teacher is a director.

A teacher is a savior.

In his critique of cinematic depictions of teachers between the mid-1950s and the mid1990s, William Ayers explains that many teaching movies represent schools and teachers as in the business of saving childrenfrom their families, from drugs and violence, from themselvesbut that individual teachers are mostly unable to live up to the job. Thus the rare good teacher is seen as a saint who must figure out who can be saved before

its too late. The saviors approach includes firmly establishing discipline then delivering the curriculum. But as Ayers points out, real learning requires assertion, not obedience, action not passivity; it is deeply human, intimate, intellectual, ambiguous, and unpredictable work.xxiii Compounding this image of teacher as savior is the fact that is usually white teachers saving kids of color. As Robert Lowe points out, films such as Dangerous Minds appear to offer White teachers models to emulate that might advance the project of racial justice. Lowe contends, however, that in fact the films justify white supremacy.xxiv We can visualize an orchestra conductor who approaches the orchestra stand; all members of the orchestra have their eyes fixed on the conductor. The members of the orchestra are the students. Teachers who are conductors take responsibility for assuring that the students achieve excellence; they lead their students toward it. But as is often the case in performances of orchestras, so powerful can the personality of the conductor be that the audience and musical critics describe the quality of the performance in terms of the conductors performance, even though the conductor did not play a single note.xxv Scheffler contends that there is an obvious analogy between the growing child and the growing plant, specifically in the sense that in both cases the developing organism goes through phases that are relatively independent of the efforts of gardener or teacher. Scheffler argues that this metaphor constructs the teachers role as one of studying and then indirectly helping the development of the child rather than shaping him into some preconceived form. Growth and development may be helped or hindered by [the teachers] efforts. xxvi But growth and development is the focus, and it is based on an inner growth principlethe notion that something simple grows into something complex through various preordained stages.xxvii A prospective teacher in an education course explains how this metaphor works for her. She writes an extended story within which she describes students as a mixed bag of seeds that the teacher has to find a way to nurture. She wants the best for the seeds that she plants; to be the best teacher she can be, she learns how to learn from the seedlings; and watching the stems, the leaves, and the blossoms dance in the breeze, the gardener too began to dance.xxviii When a teacher is a factory worker, she is assumed to be not very skilled, not very insightful, and, within the context of real professions such as law and medicine, not very bright. Furthermore, the control structures of the school are the control structures of the factory: tight supervision and product inspection. Curriculum design and the quest for teacher-proof materials dominate the thinking of many center office functionaries, but the curriculum guides must be made simple for teachers as well as students. Above all, the curriculum must be articulated with the tests that will be used to inspect the students who are the products of the controlled and rational process.xxix An underlying premise here is that there is limited utility for teachers to fashion the curriculum; like workers in a factory, they are thought to be best off following directions. The class biasthe considerable degrading of teachersis most evident in this metaphor. Classic examples of control structures for teachers aimed at efficient production are packaged curricula, readers, and textbooks organized into tightly sequenced units and accompanied by teachers guides forms of highly structured, step by step instructions that actively discourage creativity, critical thinking, or any kind of deviation from the standard set forth in the manuals.

A teacher is a conductor.

A teacher is a gardener.

A teacher is a factory worker.

A teacher is a machine.

One teacher describes himself as a well-ordered machine, explaining: My job seems to be like an engine that is well taken care of. Everything works the way it is supposed to work. There is a set rhythm and reason to why things work in the way they do. This machine works within a time frame in which you have a set of goals and objectives that need to be accomplished. You take a student from this point to that point. As Efron & Joseph suggest, this teacher is a technician who keeps the factorythe educational machineoperating.xxx

A teacher is an executive.

Here the teacher is the teacher is the mastermind that oversees the work of production, manager of a system, located not inside the process of teaching and learning but rather outside, a position from which he or she regulates the content and the activities on the learner.xxxi This model casts teachers as highly skilled technocrats: professionals in the sense that engineers, accountants, and architects are professionals.xxxii Within the conceptual framework of this metaphor, the teacher appears to be the manager of a kind of production line, where students enter the factory as raw material and are somehow assembled as persons.xxxiii In the late 1960s, David Hawkins suggested that the function of the teacher is to respond diagnostically and helpfully to a childs behavior, to make what he considers to be an appropriate response, a response which the child needs to complete the process hes engaged in at any given moment.xxxiv Thirty years later, Mildred Solomon wrote: [A] diagnostic teacher is one who casts oneself as an observer, scrutinizer, and assessor, as well as an engaged leader.xxxv Diagnostic teachers seek to know students current understandings and misconceptions. They aim also to deepen their own subject-area knowledge and make judgments about what concepts are worth teaching. Furthermore, they assess their own beliefs and practices, selecting, designing, and redesigning appropriate pedagogical strategies and curriculum materials that make sense given students understandings and the concepts and skills they want to promotexxxvilike a doctor assessing the needs of a sick patient. A diagnostic teacher assumes a stance of critical scrutiny.xxxvii

A teacher is a diagnostician.

A teacher is a therapist.

This metaphor has its roots in progressive models of education and in the advent of various forms of psycho-analysiswhere these work to humanize education. A teacher is an empathetic person charged with helping individuals grow personally and reach a high level of self-actualization, understanding, and acceptance.xxxviii According to this model, the teacher does not impart knowledge and skill to students; rather, he or she helps students gain their own knowledge and skill.xxxix

. Joseph, The Ideal Teacher, 139. . I. N. McFee, The Teacher, the School, and the Community (New York: American Book, 1918), cited in Joseph, The Ideal Teacher, 139. iii . A. Snyder & T. Alexander, Teaching as a Profession: Guidance Suggestions for Students, Teachers College Bulletin 23, no. 1, 65 quoted in Joseph, The Ideal Teacher, 139. iv . Carol Rodgers, Defining Reflection: Another Look at John Dewey and Reflective Thinking, Teachers College Record 4, no. 4 (2002): 842-866; Carol Rodgers, Seeing Student Learning: Teacher Change and the Role of Reflection, Harvard Educational Review 72, no. 2 (2002): 230-253; Amy Bernstein Colton and Georgea M. Sparks-Langer, A Conceptual Framework to Guide the Development of Teacher Reflection and Decision Making, Journal of Teacher Education 44, no. 1 (January-February 1990): 45-54; Anna Richert, Teaching Teachers to Reflect: A Consideration of Programme Structure, Journal of Curriculum Studies 22, 6 (1990): 509-527; Gwen L. Rudney and Andrea Guillaume, Reflective Teaching for Student Teachers, The Teacher Educator 25, no. 3 (1990): 13-20; Kenneth M. Zeichner and Daniel P. Liston, Teaching Student Teachers to Reflect, Harvard Educational Review 57, no. 1 (1987): 23-48. v . Alan J. Reiman and Lois Thies-Sprinthall, Mentoring and Supervision for Teacher Development (New York: Longman-Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 1998), 262. vi . Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. vii . Freema Elbaz, Teachers Knowledge of Teaching: Strategies for Reflection, in Educating Teachers: Changing the Nature of Pedagogical Knowledge, ed. John Smyth (Philadelphia: Farmer Press, 1987), 45. viii . Zehm, Deciding to Teach; see also Stanley J. Zehm and Jeffrey A. Kottler, On Being a Teacher: The Human Dimension, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2000). ix . Robert J. Yinger, Learning the Language of Practice, Curriculum Inquiry 17, 299-318, cited in Vianne S. McLean, Becoming a Teacher, 68. x . Lucy Calkins, The Art of Teaching Writing (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1994). xi . Gail E. Burnaford and David Hobson, Responding to Reform: Images for Teaching in the New Millennium, in Images of Schoolteachers, 235. For discussions of teacher research, see Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan L. Lytle. INSIDE/OUTSIDE: Teacher Research and Knowledge (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993); James Berlin, The Teacher as Researcher: Democracy, Dialogue, and Power, in The Writing Teacher as Researcher: Essays in the Theory and Practice of Class-Based Research, ed. Donald A. Daiker and Max Morenberg (Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1990); Nancy Martin, On the Move: Teacher-Researchers, in Reclaiming the Classroom: Teacher Research as an Agency for Change, ed. Dixie Goswami and Peter R. Stillman (Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1987). xii . Scheffler, In Praise, 47, 48. xiii . Dewey, Art as Experience, 6. xiv . Burnaford, Responding to Reform, 232. xv . Nate L. Gage, The Scientific Basis for the Art of Teaching (New York: Teachers College Press, 1987), 15. xvi . Burnaford, Responding to Reform, 233. xvii . Allender, Teacher Self, 125. xviii . Robert Henri, The Art Spirit (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1923), 15. xix . Ibid., 44. xx . Ibid., 55. xxi . Gloria Ladson-Billings, The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994), 23, 24, 25. xxii . Allender, Teacher Self, 5. xxiii . William Ayers, A Teacher Aint Nothin but a Hero: Teachers and Teaching in Film, in Images of Schoolteachers, 201, 202, 209. xxiv . Robert Lowe, Teachers as Saviors, Teachers Who Care, in Images of Schoolteachers, 212. xxv . Ladson-Billings, Dreamkeepers, 23. xxvi . Scheffler, In Praise, 46. 47. xxvii . Turner, Dramas, 31. xxviii . Allender, Teacher Self, 123, 117, 118, 123. xxix . Schlechty, Schools, 23. xxx . All references in this paragraph are from Sara Efron and Pamela Bolotin Joseph, Reflections in a Mirror: Metaphors of Teac hers in Teaching, in Images of Schoolteachers in America, 2nd ed., ed. Pamela M. Joseph and Gail E. Burnaford (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001), 78. xxxi . Fenstermacher, Approaches, 16 xxxii . Schlechty, Schools, 23 xxxiii . Fenstermacher, Approaches, 16. xxxiv . David Hawkins, I Thou, and It, in The Informed Vision: Essays on learning and Human Nature (New York: Agathon Press), 53. xxxv . Mildred Z. Solomon, ed., The Diagnostic Teacher: Constructing New Approaches to Professional Development (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999), xvi. xxxvi . Ibid., xvi-xvii xxxvii . Mildred A. Solomon and Catherine Cobb Morocco, The Diagnostic Teacher, in The Diagnostic Teacher, 231. xxxviii . Fenstermacher, Approaches, 4. xxxix . Ibid., 33.
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