It's taken a while, writes Luke Meddings and they have been almost as well hidden as James Blunt's musical genius, but there have been five steps of the T-ching so far.
I was going to go over them last time out, but I got distracted by Adlestrop. And some readers got into an Adlestrop of their own.
Yes! From London to Leipzig I've been logging in with great interest and a degree of morbid fascination to read responses to the last piece, one of which from kammera invites me to move on from theory by giving some practical examples.
I am certainly going to move in that direction (he says cautiously, like a politician challenged to be honest). Interestingly enough, talk elsewhere has recently turned to the usefulness of practical examples.
T-ching rejects a staffroom culture where cut and paste is the default model for lesson planning, and so can hardly offer lesson plans to cut out and keep. If a lesson emerges from the context of a particular teaching environment and a particular group of people (sometimes in a particular mood), it can't be mapped onto another.
Instead teachers offer descriptions of their unorthodox classes, sometimes giving accounts of a particular lesson (see Diarmiud's blog), sometimes contributing summaries of a whole class experience over many months (see Fiona's posting).
There are principles behind these lessons, principles behind the guiding of a class over time. I have tried to capture some of these in the five steps; there are more. But there are also techniques and activities which I will endeavour to describe and group. Principles, techniques and activities all need to be flexible enough to meet the challenge of any given environment.
As T-ching poster boy Bruce Lee said, 'A good teacher can never be fixed in a routine ... each moment requires a sensitive mind that is constantly changing and constantly adapting.'
Oh, and here are those five steps in full: the highlights - or the lowlights, depending on whose side you're on - so far.
1 - First principle of the path: letting go. By letting go one reaches a state of acceptance: instead of teaching from a point where everything is finished (the road-map lesson plan, with its start and finish points, its objectives and conclusions), and where anything which does not meet these expectations represents a kind of disruption, you are teaching from a point where nothing is started, and where anything which happens is a development.
2 - The second step on the path is to see the lesson not as performance but as experience.
3 - Starting where you find yourself, and proceeding from there, is the next step of the path.
4 - This kind of teaching isn't about impacting on students' lives. It's about allowing the students' lives to impact on us.
5 - The fifth step of T-ching is not to focus on the aims, but to escape them.
