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Teaching: A Deleterious Relic
By Bill Page
By Bill Page
The word “teaching” obscures the essence of education, which is “learning”. The term, teaching, misleads educators, prevents teachers from seeking improvement, denies new research applications, obfuscates innovation, impedes reformation, stymies dialogue, discourages cooperation, and encourages minimal efficaciousness in the educative process. Everyone who has been through twelve or more years of school as students at every grade level, in a variety of subjects, with an array of teachers, and constant use of the word, applies the term without defining it. Teaching is what teachers do, period.
As long as teachers (another word that needs an alternative) think of teaching as presenting, imparting information, and imposing a scheduled, fixed-time curriculum on their captive students, they will have difficulty accepting student-centered strategies and teacher-as-facilitator research. Teachers have been successful in traditional teaching—sufficiently successful to have graduated from college. After what is essentially a 16 or more year apprenticeship, teachers quite naturally teach the way they were taught.
Everyone Knows What Teaching Is. Why Change It?
Teachers can accept student-centered, learning, hands-on approach, and engaged students intellectually, but emotionally they resort and revert to the didactic functions they experienced and know best. Furthermore, their better students will avoid taking any responsibility for their own learning. Good students know the school game and play it well. They will resist a new game with new rules. Students probably want to know what will be on the next test more than they want to dialogue, reflect, and interact as means of learning.
Because everyone has been exposed to teaching, they know what teaching is—and that’s the problem. Without a valid conception of the educative process, teachers’ acceptance of erroneous assumptions and traditional myths about teaching, permit use, misuse, and abuse of teaching to continue unquestioned. Without a working definition, teaching will continue to be equated with presenting, lecturing, and conveying information. No innovation, reform, or technology is likely to make a difference in student achievement or be accepted by educators.
Teaching Is General but Learning is Specific
One can teach in an empty classroom, or self-talking while preparing a new unit to one’s language arts class. In fact one can teach to a brick wall—and that can be done without discipline problems, interruptions, or “an attitude”—much like professors lecture in college classes. Education’s most publicized, persistent problems such as student failure, retention, dropping out, the achievement gap, poor test performance, chronic misbehavior, and inner city problems in education can never be eliminated or even reduced by attempts to improve traditional teaching. Learning is the goal of education and teaching is simply not efficacious to learning; it needs to be replaced. Teaching must get out of the way so student learning can proceed and succeed.
Since starting my schooling 70 years ago (1939), I have seen no significant changes in teaching, schools, or the educative processes. My own children’s schooling and that of my grandchildren was essentially the same as mine. And, since beginning my teaching career 51 years ago (1958), I have seen no meaningful changes in teaching–until the last dozen years. Unfortunately, those changes were for the worse.
Politicians, state department lackeys, and business opportunists, such as textbook companies, test creators, and tutoring businesses, hijacked emotionally charged educational issues in the name of accountability (testing of kids and teachers) and micro-management (scripted lessons, and administrative paperwork) for personal and administrative purposes. Virtually everything outside of education has changed dramatically, but not teaching and teachers—still burdened with tradition-laden, bureaucratic structure, unchallenged myths, and archaic policies supported by grade books, textbooks, arcane policies, and teaching-to-the-test mandates.
Teaching Is What Teachers Do to Students
Teaching has always been synonymous with presenting lessons and teaching, looping, block scheduling, year round schools, virtual and on-line schools are just better ways of cramming subject matter down students’ throats. Hands-on, pairing, dialogue, reflection, small groups, differentiation, curriculum alignment, faculty focus groups are educational ideas with the highest efficacy levels–and with the most resistance from teachers.
A story going around a few years ago told of a Rip Van Winkle type character, who awoke from a 100 years sleep. If he had awakened in a hospital, he would have not recognized anything there. Awakening in a jet plane in flight, he would have no idea where he was. But if he had awakened in any classroom in any school, he would have recognized it immediately with confident familiarity. Only the color of the “black” boards, the use of dry wipe pens, and some plastic desks replicating the old wooden ones are different. Many inner city school districts haven’t experienced even those differences from the past century.
A Definition of Teaching
Definition: Teaching is taking credit for some one else’s learning. If a student learns a given task and I claim credit for that learning, I can say, “I taught him/her.” But what if s/he didn’t learn, could I still say I taught it? There is a presumed, but not necessarily actual, causal relationship between teaching and learning. However, without learning occurring, there is no teaching. If I sell you something but you don’t buy it, there was no selling. If a kid learned something, and what I did caused that learning, I would say, “I taught him/her”. It would be more accurate, however ungrammatical, to say, “I learned him/her.” If s/he did not learn it, I could not say I taught him/her. Teaching is a relationship between teacher and learner, and teaching behaviors cannot exist independent of their effect on the learner’s behaviors.
“As we know, there is not really such a thing as education. There is only helping somebody to learn, and the learning process is a complex adaptive system; fooling around, making mistakes, somehow having contact with reality or truth, correcting the mistakes, assuring self-consistency and so on–in short, messing about.”
Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel prize physicist
While the phrase, teaching-learning phenomenon is more accurate than the term teaching, it is still not generally accepted or used. Continued use of “teaching” is misleading and perpetuates the dichotomy in teaching and learning and prevent understanding as an interactive process. Thus, I seek a replacement for the word teaching, but, given that there are 100,000 schools and 3,000,000 teachers in the U.S. now using the term, teaching, I would not attempt to create a new term for them, and I am willing to use teaching-learning process as an interim phrase. In the meantime, I offer the following descriptions in lieu of a new term:
A Description of Teaching
- Teaching is an incredibly complex phenomenon involving human beings in complicated interactions requiring intellectual, emotional, and attitudinal processes that defy simple definitions, applications, and explanations.
- Reducing teaching to skills, methodologies, and techniques typically taught in education courses and advocated in “how-to” books are obviously absurd. And when coupled with the varied contexts in which teaching occurs, teaching defies description.
- No matter how well school subject matter is presented, it cannot have any effect on students until they become personally involved in the subject, content, material, and methodology. Learning is a personal experience requiring each student to find his/her individual meaning.
- Coercion, intimidation, rewards, and punishments, however subtle, traditional, and well-intentioned offer only temporary class control solutions and are generally counterproductive to meaningful learning, self-actualization, and self-discipline.
- When students discover and figure out information and solutions on their own, when they use higher order thinking skills, and when they have the opportunity to interact, they learn and they remember.
Most Traditional Teaching Techniques Have No Research Basis
The ultimate failure in education is the failure to use its own proven research to make changes and improve its functioning. If the bureaucratic authorities would agree to use the learning strategies that have been proven effective and eliminate the ineffective antiquated practices, education could have a dramatic reformation. Following is a short-list of commonly known ineffective procedures and structures. We know that kids do not learn effectively under the following conditions:
By sitting silently, passively in rows staring at the back of the kid’s head in front of them, by being age and grade grouped, by reading textbooks and answering questions at the end of the chapters, by studying one period of each subject each day and with the ringing of a bell change to another subject every day for 180 days—year after year, from people they don’t like, respect, or identify with, from intimidation by evaluation, threats, embarrassment and failure, about subjects that are meaningless or valueless to them.
The Relationship between Teaching and Learning
Learning is a personal, private, internal process that only happens within each individual. Groups do not learn. They cannot learn. In spite of appearances, teachers do not teach classes; they teach individuals—in classes. Each student learns for him/herself. No matter how knowledgeable, no one can learn for anyone else. The most a teacher can do is provide information, experiences, and mediation that mesh with the child’s prior knowledge, understanding, and existing information. If a fifth grade boy doesn’t know his times tables, the teacher cannot learn them for him and cannot make him learn them
Through their relationship, teachers can encourage him and give him confidence in his ability to learn his times tables. They can provide explanations, examples, reasons, practice, material, and feedback. If he still doesn’t learn, they can offer manipulative material, make a game of it, let him write them in forty foot high letters in chalk on the playground, have him use a shoe box with an inch of sand to write and erase, If that doesn’t work, teachers can make up a song with him, read the tables into a recorder, have him create drawings of the numbers he is memorizing. They might even show him how to arrive at the answer in other ways.
Ignoring what we know about the learning process, disregarding the latest brain-mind research, the absence of student dialogue, and failing to acknowledge known myths are a national failure and disgrace. Just because our mandated learning, coercion, threats, and one-size-fits-all curriculum appear to work for some kids does not entitle educators to fail kids who don’t profit from the belabored group instruction.
Educators are responsible for the current status of education, and educators can change it. Teachers, who deal daily with the results of imposed mis-education, can begin to change the part that is within their realm. It is up to teachers to begin meeting the needs of the kids, regardless of ineffective traditional, mandated procedures.
The Term “Teaching” Obscures Its Real Function
Teaching is not really a bad word, but as long as educators focus on what teachers do instead of what students do, they will never improve educational efficacy. Focus on teaching is the reason that rewards and punishments abound and thrive years after behaviorism was totally debunked. Belief in traditional teaching concepts by which they were taught permits teachers to perpetuate myths, permit unnecessary failure, assign homework, and use unfair competition. Student ranking, discrimination, negativity, dropouts, grade retention, classroom tests and grades, marking papers, and report card grades are merely part of a sorting process, not teaching process.
Change Is Difficult but Necessary
Change is difficult. It involves letting go of familiar ways of behaving and grabbing on to new, untried alternatives. The emerging teaching-learning process poking through the century old tradition is ignored by most teachers, or accepted intellectually but not practically. Teachers naturally tend to teach the way they were taught. Teachers receptive to changes are frequently those who, in their disillusionment with the intractable problems such as failures, dropouts, and unlearned kids have sought relief through a new and better understanding and belief in learning, rather than teaching as the essence of the educative process.
As a farm kid, one of my jobs was to harness Ginny, our work horse. The bridle had two blinders affixed behind Ginny’s eyes so she couldn’t see the load or implement she would be pulling. That way she would keep her eyes focused ahead without worrying about the work load. Perhaps if teachers had blinders to keep them from worrying about teaching, they too could focus on facilitating kids’ learning.
With joy in sharing, Bill Page
I wrote a descriptive article, Teaching is…and Learning is…which was published and reprinted in several journals. The article gives a definitive definition of teaching and of learning, as replacements. The article is available for free downloading in the January 2002 back issues at www.teacherteacher.com;
Questions, comments, and challenges are welcomed and will be answered: billpage@bellsouth.net;
Annotated References:
In my career that spans five decades it is difficult to name references for my thinking and ideas. But, following are books, laden with highlighting, I reviewed as I wrote this article:
Cantor, Nathanial, The Dynamics of Learning, 1946, Foster & Stewart Publishing, Buffalo NY , A life-altering incident is one, “after which ones life will never be the same again.” This book and Dr. Cantor’s simple statement, “You can lead a student to a classroom or a textbook, but you can’t make him learn unless he wants to or wills to learn.” marked the first life-altering incident in my teaching. It became my first meaningful struggle to reconcile the dichotomy between my expressed beliefs and my denial in practice. Incidentally, the book was only twelve years old when I read it.
Franklin, Barry, (Ed) 1998, When Children Don’t Learn, Teachers College Press, NY , NY . A collection of articles about students’ failure to learn. “Failure to learn represents a virtual assault on the very act of teaching and on the work of those whose identities are subsumed in that role.”
Perceiving, Behaving, Becoming–Lessons Learned, Assn for Supervision / Curriculum Development. Alexandria , VA. 1999. For 30 years I have been proclaiming the 1962 ASCD yearbook, Perceiving Behavior, Becoming “The Best Book I Have Ever Read, a mind-blowing, life-changing revelation.” In 1999 ASCD re revived the fabulous book. The revised and expanded book includes new updates and applications by contemporary educators such as Alfie Kohn.
Kelly, Earl C. Education for What Is Real, 1947, Harper & Row, New York and London , After a foreword by John Dewey, this book showed me that children learn only by experience not by authority. Kelly challenges ten assumptions, (myths). Understanding his findings is worth more than my four-year college degree.
Page, Bill, At-Risk Students; Feeling Their Pain, Educational Dynamics, Nashville, TN, Second Edition 2009, A view of school from the perspective of unsuccessful students. Thirty-one essays designed for faculty focus groups and a wide range of solutions to problems of student failure. Visit: www.At-RiskStudents.com for information and for a free Newsletter
Reeves, Douglas B., Accountability for Learning: How Teachers and School Leaders Can Take Charge. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Alexandria , VA. A surprisingly practical book showing how to create a student-centered accountability system and more importantly, how teachers can and must take charge of their own accountability for student learning. Teachers know their effectiveness. They need to record and report their successes.
Smith, Frank, The Book of Learning and Forgetting, (1998). Teacher’s College Press, N.Y. The most interesting, thought provoking book I’ve ever read (Except Perhaps for any of the other twenty books I read by Frank Smith, including Unspeakable Acts and Unnatural Practices, 2003. Dr. Smith’s views are diametrically opposed to many conventional views, but he does it with irrefutable logic, assertions, and credentials that include 23 books, PhD, Harvard Grad, news reporter, professor, and editor.
