Excavating Teaching
Strong teaching practices are hard to transfer across classrooms. We’ve all heard a good idea from a colleague, and then tried replicating it in our classroom and had it flop.
A better way to share the what, how, why, and why it works
The Excavating Teaching Guide
Everything you need to try and adapt the Excavating practice in your context.
The Protocol
Just the tool.
Why Excavating?
As teachers, we constantly experiment with new approaches and ideas in an effort to keep learning and improving our practice. However, we rarely have a chance to sit down and consolidate our learning, or to formalize emerging theories about instruction. Cycles of “trial and error” may lead to breakthroughs with one group of kids, but that learning may not always transfer to future situations.
Furthermore, as teachers and coaches grow more expert-like in knowledge and practice, we become less explicitly aware of the knowledge, beliefs, and skills we draw on to make our practice effective. This is the nature of expertise – it is hard to remember the time when you didn’t know what you know! And as professional knowledge grows in complexity, it becomes increasingly difficult to explain what it is that we know, or how we know it.
The strategically designed questions in the Excavating Teaching Protocol are our attempt to solve this problem.
What is Excavating Teaching?
Excavating teaching is a process designed to help a teacher articulate what they have learned from experience and make it more explicit, generalizable, and transferable -- for themselves, and for others.
It is a structured, facilitated conversation between educators, designed to build a deep understanding of how and why a teacher does {something} and why it works for students’ learning.
Who is this for?
VETERAN TEACHERS. The questions posed through Excavating Teaching help a teacher to unearth (or “excavate”) the complex set of knowledge, beliefs, values, and theories underlying their decisions. Making these connections helps you transfer what you’ve learned from past experience and apply it in new situations, and helps you better articulate what you know to share with others.
EARLY CAREER TEACHERS. Excavating Teaching supports novice teachers to learn better from their colleagues. When they learn what their neighbor does, but also how, why, and under what conditions those practices work, they are more successful at adapting those moves to work in their own classroom.
TEACHER EDUCATORS. An Excavating conversation can happen only once and still be impactful. However, its real power lies in building teachers’ capacity to analyze teaching practice. Using this protocol strategically as part of a system for teacher induction and ongoing development can help to maximize teachers’ learning.