Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone)

by Elizabeth Green

The neriage section of a lesson, in which many different ideas yielded to a consensus and a new academic concept, might not make sense to the interpreter—“knead and rise”—but it resonated with Deborah. There was a word, bansho, to describe the art of writing clearly on the chalkboard; another, kikanjunshi, to describe the part of the lesson in which the teacher walks between students’ desks, looking at their work to determine which student should share and in what order. There was a word to describe the process of effectively using students’ ideas to achieve a lesson’s goal and another for the category of mistakes that, when shared with the whole class, offer the richest opportunities to learn (neriage and tsumazuki, respectively). There were key questions for posing the problem of the day (shu-hatsumon) and the practice of observing students (mitori) and the lesson opener (donyu). The words were another product of jugyokenkyu. To talk about teaching and all its components, teachers had invented new words to describe them.