When Good Teaching Is Bad for Learning
In one of my earlier posts, I summarized a David Perkins article about what he calls "intelligence in the wild," the kind of messy, real-world kinds of thinking that seem so rare in carefully-managed school assignments. So often in our work and social lives, he points out, problem finding can be just as important as problem solving. And I can think of no better profession for problem finding than being a teacher, particularly in the settings where teachers are given wide discretion over their curricula and teaching methods; for better or worse, teachers are often expected to identify what needs to be learned/done/fixed in their classrooms and, of course, to then make it happen.Indeed, my teacher friends have often noted that they never learn something more thoroughly than they do when they're responsible for teaching it, and while that comment can serve as a strong endorsement for becoming a teacher, it also highlights a possible contrast between the learning that teachers get to do and the learning that is available for the students to do. At its best, learning is generative rather than zero-sum, but too often, I've come to think that quite a bit of what is considered good teaching actually forecloses opportunities for student thinking and learning.
To test this theory, I've begun a somewhat unusual practice during the first day of my college seminar: I withhold the syllabus from my students. When I ask my students what a well-prepared teacher does on the first day, they inevitably remind me that a good teacher has a syllabus that lays out, among other things, the readings and assignments for each week of the course. But why, I ask them, should the teacher be the only one to benefit from the difficult puzzle of deciding what should be going on in class? When was it decided that this is a puzzle that only the teacher is worthy of (or benefits from) solving? Sure, the teacher has expertise and prior experience that his students might not, but for as long as the students are expected to adhere to the readings and assignments on the course calendar--for as long as they are paying a lot of money to do what the syllabus says--why shouldn't they take part in writing it?
So we spend about fifteen minutes talking about what we should be doing over the next four months given the particular end-of-semester goals built into the class (in the case of my class, producing certain kinds of academic writing and a final project related to our course theme). What I find is that this backwards planning work--which has become a booming professional development industry for teachers and entrepreneurs--is hard for students, but just hard enough. They end up proposing a range of things that they and I can read, write, share, practice, or give and get feedback about in pursuit of our semester goals. They disagree with each other about who should be responsible for what and think broadly about the topics we should cover, knowing as they do that their own grade depends on really learning/doing this stuff. They uncover problems in meeting my end-of-semester expectation, and work together to build a syllabus that makes it likely that they can solve those problems in time. By the end of the discussion, I'm relieved to find that we've derived something like the syllabus I did indeed write, but I feel a little ridiculous handing out my prepared document immediately after all of that collaborative thinking.
There are some excellent teachers who make this kind of curricular brainstorming a regular routine at the beginning of a new unit or semester, but not that many, and virtually all of them seem to teach in elementary or secondary schools. Somehow, the messy work of mapping out a four-month college learning trajectory has been placed in the hands of instructors only. I wonder what other aspects of preparation and planning (whatever their other benefits) serve to sanitize learning environments and leave mostly low-stakes, overly-structured tasks for students to try and get excited about.
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