Resume of the video: (Very interesting by the way ! )
At the beginning, we can see a woman who is a teacher, she says that "investing in teaching and teachers is the key to K-12 education". Then, she introduces Lee Shulman who is a retired teacher. They worked together.
He says that he has spent his life "excellenting teaching". He was awarded for the things he created in order to improve teaching. Then, he speaks about he and Pam (the other teacher) who watch the same TV Channel: a food one ! It deals with candidates who have to realize courses with mistery ingredients. And he compares it to teaching: when you arrive at university, there are lot of surprises, pieces of curriculum you don't know, and you have to do something magic with it ! He asks this question: Who has never experienced the fact of talking about something you don't know ? He brought a book entitled: How to talk about a book you've never read ? And he tells some experiences he had with students who hadn't read a book, how they said interesting things without knowing what it dealt with, how people reminded him things he wrote in his books that he didn't remember and he thought: "What he/she says is far better that what I've written ! " He thinks that people who have read the book are sometimes blinded by all the information they get. His opinion is that it's not a problem to put some info aside. The same phenomenon can be experienced with Internet: when we read a text, we move to another one very quickly because of the links. The essential point is to teach pupils the sense of what they read ! "When you read a book, you're reading yourself" ! It's a combining between me and the book, it develops the imagination !
Then, he explains what he saw on a blog from the N-York Times entitled: "Speaking up for patient safety and survival better hand-washing through technology" (by Tina Rosenberg)
He talks about patients who got infections they hadn't before entring hospital. It's paradoxical.
To avoid this, nurses and doctors made a checklist, some things they had to do before being in touch with the patients.Result after that --> 0 infections thanks to one principle: every one is responsible for another people. You have to "feel collectively responsible for the quality of the work rather than individually responsible".
How to bring the two texts together ? "Reflecting on their work as teachers". Teachers have to combine the need for creativity in performance, practice (the book) and the need for developing a quite strict routine (checklist). Some experiences made in class proved that creativity can't be separated from routine. It means teachers have to link the past and the present in order to keep pupils motivated, interested.
Eventually, Lee Shulman congratulates teachers for "how they manage engaging in this remarkable profession that requires routine and spontaneity !
I think this video is very useful to understand what we have to do, what we have to focus on and what we have to forget as teachers ! Watch it ;)
