Around a year ago, I decided to sit in on one of my girlfriend’s courses. To me, it was a nice thing to do and gave me an opportunity to sit down and work on my homework. Like most college courses, this course had around 100 students enrolled.
After the class started, it became apparent to me that my girlfriend was stuck in a class with a teacher that taught in a manner that was almost an antithesis of what was described in Joye Norris’s book, “From Telling to Teaching.” Instead of getting my work done, I listened closely to this teacher and created a short list of things she was doing that truly inhibited the creation of a culture of learning and student driven education.
Principally, this educator made was placing herself in a role of an intellectual authority. Although prevalent in our current academic atmosphere, it is ultimately a deterrent to student motivated learning. It creates a situation in which the students rely on the teacher, instead of themselves, in order to acquire knowledge within a subject. It creates the façade that the person lecturing at (or the in rare cases, to) the students know this material and the students must listen to them in order to learn the necessary steps to the knowledge. Ironically, this processor chronically put wrong information and answers on the board.
The final, and worst error in my opinion, of this educator was now allowing for the grassroots student learning and discussion that would allow for learners to internalize information: prohibiting what would actually allow learners to actually learn! This professor is asking herself the question “what do I need to do to teach this information?” not “what do my learners need to do to learn this information?” A good educator would ask the latter question. As Joye A. Norris explained:
The teacher of a teacher-centered approach asks, “what do I need to do to teach this information?”…The teacher of a learner-centered approach asks, “what do they [the learners] need to do to learn this topic.”
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Reading this post reminded me of an account I read by someone who had successfully taught a class of third-graders binary arithmetic by the Socratic method, limiting himself to simply asking questions. The whole process took about 25 minutes. He was clearly focused on what the students needed to do to learn rather than on deciding what to tell them.
http://www.garlikov.com/Soc_Meth.html
Regarding the penchant many teachers have to focus on the amount of information they are getting into the students, I often think of what Margaret Stevens, a famous Montessorian, would often say to her teacher-trainees: “We are not stuffing sausages!”
So many teachers seem to have no big picture idea of how people develop a fund of knowledge. Too often, it is viewed as mere input of facts to memory.
In this respect, I wonder about the kind of teacher-training many teachers get.
What’s forgotten is the importance of meaning to any facts one tries to remember – meaning makes information mentally sticky, but engaging one’s values and emotions. That’s why it’s so important for the teacher to allow the student to lead.
Regarding my previous post, I meant to say “BY engaging…”
Correction: Margaret Stephenson, not Margaret Stevens! These errors are what I get for doing the post too fast!
Thanks for posting this. I really enjoyed it.