On Wed, 24 Dec 1997, Jay Lemke wrote:
>
> First, although there seems to be no reason why students should not
> immediately respond to many of these approaches, especially the youngest
> students -- teachers' adaptiveness seems to present quite a different
> problem. How easily can we expect teachers, especially those with more than
> about 5 years experience, to adopt methods which may require radical
> changes in both practices and philosophies of education? My experience
> suggests that as eager as many teachers are for 'methods that work' with
> their students, it is not at all easy for experienced teachers to adapt to
> the spirit, as opposed to simply the procedures, of radically different
> approaches. .....
>
> One of the problems with making learning theory the center of educational
> thinking is that it can lead us to forget that we have built the entire
> system not around the learner but around the teacher. Equally educational
> practices have to be conceived of more adequately as teacher practices, and
> seen not as importable commodities to be delivered to students without the
> mediation of real teachers. I know this is not the view in most of the BP
> programs I scanned, but neither did I feel confident that sufficient
> attention was being directed toward teachers.
There is no doubt that education is designed around teaching, not
learning. One obvious evidence is the organization of the timetable:
measured blocks of time, scheduled by 'subjects' taught by specialists,
mid-term and final exams in preparation for which the specified curriculum
must be covered, etc. Then there is teacher evaluation. As many of my
teacher students report, they are warned not to try any of these new
methods in which the teacher is not firmly in control, as they can't
guarantee the outcomes; some, who are nevertheless brave enough to try
more 'distributed' activities, tell of being visited by the principal who,
after a few minutes, says s/he will come back when they are 'teaching'.
Not surprisingly, teachers find it difficult to adopt new ways of
thinking about teaching-and-learning when they receive so little support
from those who administer the educational enterprise (as Tharp and
Gallimore remarked in 'Rousing Minds to Life').
But there is another problem that besets many of 'the new approaches',
however excellent the principles upon which they are based. And that is
that they are typically designed by educational researchers, tried out
with the cooperation of a small number of hand-picked teachers, and then
presented to the profession as 'approaches' or 'packages' to be
implemented or delivered according to the researchers' design. To my
mind, this is not very different from the 'transmission' approach which
is typically what the new approaches are reacting against. The mistake,
I think, is in the insufficiently questioned assumption that there are
ideal methods, which if they could only be identified, would be
universally effective. What is not sufficiently taken into account is:
a) the unique 'chemistry' of every class and the unpredictability of every
learning-and-teaching event; and b) the crucial contribution of the
teacher-as-an-individual to what happens in that event, and the extent to
which the quality of that contribution depends upon the teacher also
being an active learner in the process.
In a recent paper, I advanced the suggestion that there are three
ingredients that are crucial for new approaches and that they are just as
important as the teacher's understanding of the relevant concepts. These
are: inquiry, dialogue and community; and they are essential at two levels:
in the development and adoption of new approaches, and in their use in the
classroom. What to spend time on in the classroom and how to do so most
effectively must always be a matter of ongoing inquiry (I believe there
are no final answers, as every class is both diverse and unique) and this
inquiry must involve teachers in a dialogue with researchers and other
'stakeholders' in a community in which teachers are equal, active
partners. But the same needs to apply in the classroom; students and
teacher need to be active inquirers in relation to the topics they
address, treating the (re)construction of knowledge as an ongoing
dialogue in a community in which everybody's voice is recognized and
their contributions valued.
In the light of Peter Smagorinsky's reaction to the paper, querying
whether these values aren't the products of a particularly 'western'
cultural perspective, I would be interested in hearing other people's
reactions. Obviously, my championing of these values - inquiry, dialogue and
community - is related to my own personal trajectory and my
participation in particular cultural communities (including xmca). But
my belief is that they don't prejudge what topics should be focused
on in particular situations of learning and teaching nor how they
should be approached, since these are properly the subject of inquiries
in the relevant communities. But others may not share this confidence.
So - what do you think?
Gordon Wells, gwells who-is-at oise.utoronto.ca
OISE/University of Toronto
http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/~ctd/DICEP/
Visit NETWORKS, the new on-line journal for teacher research, at:
http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/~ctd/networks/