In a casual conversation today where we expressed our frustration with teachers who complain that the low grades of their students are due to the lack of motivation and work effort of the students, my executive principal and I were discussing the question, “If no learning is occurring, then has teaching taken place?” My executive principal stated that she believed that learning must occur or no teaching is taking place. In other words, don’t say “I taught the material, they just didn’t learn it!” I agreed with her and then I remembered this wonderful optical illusion that I saw in a book about two years ago. I was able to find a copy of it on the internet (here):
I could go into more detail about my thoughts on this, but before I do I’d like to hear what you think. If no learning takes place, then has teaching occurred? Can learning occur without teaching? How else would you measure teaching if not through some type of measurement of learning?
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I think that it is being assumed that all teaching must originate from the teacher. Aren’t we doing a disservice to our students by not teaching them how to teach themselves.
I was reading a Reader’s Digest article yesterday about an orthopedic surgeon who quit her practice and started a business designing shoes. She made the statement that going through medical school taught her how to learn – how to teach herself. This is what we need to be teaching students.
Why are we so stuck on content? Why not concentrate on teaching processes and giving students the skills that they will need to make their own way in their future.
A change of this type must be multidimensional – it must be top-down, bottom-up, side-to-side, corner-to-corner, and every way possible. Everyone involved must buy into it – parents, teachers, administrators, and especially students.
Sometimes students don’t learn what we expect or meet our objectives. Sometimes they learn how to get over on the adults who are forcing them to play school.
I suppose that would depend on your definition of “teaching”. If you believe teaching to be the act of “dispensing” information, then you might be able to say that teaching, i.e. dispensing, has occurred. If, however, teaching = dispensing information, then we have some problems. First of all, information is increasing at a rate much too fast for anyone to be able to keep up, much less contain it all to dispense it to others. Secondly, if a teacher is a dispenser of information, then we would have to consider many things as teachers, including the internet, computers, etc.
If, on the other hand, a teacher is one who facilitates learning, then we must conclude that teaching only occurs when learning occurs. Of course, learning is usually occurring, whether or not it is the intended learning.
Maybe we should be asking, “What is the role of a teacher?†Are we dispensers? Facilitators? Guides?
I like to think of myself more as a facilitator; one who helps students learn how to access the information they need. Information I give them today may be obsolete by the time they leave school. Learning how to learn, on the other hand, is ageless. Do I want them to depend on me for learning, or do I wan them to become independent learners?
Becky