For a profession that professes rigor and high expectations, you might be surprised at how little experience a teacher new to the profession brings to their first job.  Oh, I’m not blaming the collegiate community who trains these individuals.  You can only do so much with the time you have, requirements (from the state and elsewhere) and practicum experiences future teachers have and how good their cooperating teacher was.  If education was just a numbers game and all about the data, we could train teachers like an accountant.  If it was all about building community, we could train them like community planners.  If it was all about analyzing childrens’ mental and emotional well being we would train them like psychologists.  But what we do is we focus on the subject matter they want to teach and the fundamental techniques of teaching itself.  Everything else has to be absorbed when they enter the classroom, assuming the new teacher is intuitive.  For a lot of these young people, it’s either sink or swim.

I’m beginning to understand this more and more in the last several years.  Yes, we can give an aspiring teacher all the tools to do the job, but it takes that AND a person who can think on their feet, analyze situations and children in a heartbeat and know intuitively if that child is engaged and learning in our classroom, to turn teaching into an art form.   In education, we have tools and data that enhance and inform our teaching, but it’s the person, the EDUCATOR who is the lynch pin in a child’s education.

Going back to the beginning however, the question is, how do we or CAN we train a teacher to be intuitive?  Or is intuitiveness just something we have?  And if a teacher is intuitive, how do we teach them to trust that intuition?  Especially when it goes against pages of data or policies that have been put into place in our schools.  And you know, if you take intuition out of the equation, that makes things equal for every child, and that’s what we all want, right?  Or, maybe not.

Maybe intuition is dead.  Maybe we’re training our new teachers to ONLY trust the data and the policies and intuition isn’t a consideration which for me is a little scary. Trusting your intuition can sometimes take your thinking outside the box.  Intuition can force you to think differently when a child doesn’t fit within the parameters of the data you’ve been given.  Intuition lets you know that maybe the kids aren’t really getting it, despite the well scheduled assessment (by someone else), that tells you otherwise.  And intuition doesn’t let you settle.  If you’re just going through the motions of teaching, it’s easy to believe that everything is going just fine.  It’s the intuition that gives you that little feeling in the stomach that things may not be as they appear.

Maybe we don’t trust intuition because there’s not a clear right or wrong.  Everyone seems to be afraid of making mistakes these days and maybe intuition just isn’t clear enough for some people.  But I believe the more you use your intuition, the sharper it gets and the more you can trust it.  You see, you begin to collect your own data of sorts, the experience portion of teaching where you’ve seen something that works for kids that maybe the numerical data didn’t catch.  And that’s what makes a great teacher, that’s when teaching becomes the art form and THAT’S when kids learn.

As a cooperating teacher who has worked with many student teachers, one of the things I stress is for these young people to learn to trust their gut.  Does something “feel” right?  Not very scientific, right?  Goes against all the latest trends in education.  But despite all the data we collect about children, they still remain the unknown factor.  Even after nearly 30 years,  I still occasionally get surprised despite my intuitiveness  and I just file that new information in case I need it again.

The sink or swim issue is real as we see young teachers leave the profession after just a few years.  Should we be spending less time on all the stats and research or should we spend more time on finding and practicing their intuition?  My intuition tells me….