My paper on effective teaching
I'm turning in a paper on effective teaching, tomorrow. Here it is, sans references. I enjoyed writing it.
Effective teaching: A humble perspective
Many years of review of the literature on effective teaching has convinced me of a few truisms. First, teachers and researchers, as a rule, are far too focused on what teachers are doing and thinking and too little on what students and the people they teach are doing and thinking. Second, teachers and researchers are far too convinced of and focused on learning that happens in the classroom rather than learning that happens in life, inside and, as and sometimes more often, outside of the classroom. Third, teachers are far too invested in the idea that the right management, the right model, the right theory, the right approach or the right lesson is the key to effective teaching and learning, when, largely, I believe, most learning and certainly the best learning happens despite our efforts to control and predict it, even as well-organized, creative, thoughtful, and engaging efforts can have important added value to students’ and teachers’ educations. Finally, teachers and researchers seriously undervalue the self-determined nature of learning. They are too focused on what learning teachers make happen and seriously undervalue learning experiences that students choose and influences on kids and people outside of teacher efforts. None of these truisms mean, in the least, that teachers do not have important influence. It suggests that, perhaps, we just take our efforts a bit too seriously.
In a non-random, non-scientific review of 20 education and teaching related sources (that I could gather on a Tuesday evening), only two focused on self-determined learning by students and people, independent of and as a function teaching and education. One was a fiction book that my 7th grade students are reading in their Read 180 class, Freak the Mighty. It is a fictional story of a young man, Max, who “is L.D.” and frequently refers to himself as a “typical butthead” who befriends a brilliant same-age friend with a serious physical disability, Kevin, who is known to Max and his friends as Freak. Freak the Mighty is a fictional account of kids and learning, but it is one that more thoroughly acknowledges the limited role that teachers and school have in a young person’s or even an older student’s learning, and yet illustrates that much learning and self-determined notions of the world develop both in conjunction with school and classrooms and largely independent of both. The second source is a true life account of a student who returns to his teacher decades after studying sociology with him in college, Tuesdays with Morrie. Tuesdays with Morrie is a very sweet true story of an acclaimed sports journalist, Mitch Albom, who returns to discuss life and lessons learned with his university sociology teacher, Morrie Schwartz, very close to the end of his mentor’s life. It is a beautiful story of learning in the unguarded context of a two men sharing a love for ideas and life wisdom independent of a formal classroom setting.
The significance of far too disproportionate focus on what happens in classrooms in education research and by teachers working with kids, rather than on the larger learning and life experiences that shapes kids’ and students’ lives is that the research literature and the teaching profession, I believe, develops a myopia about how much influence or control they really have over young peoples’ or older peoples’ lives.
More than any of the research that I have encountered that touts heterogeneous grouping or homogenous grouping, basic skills or higher order thinking, full or limited inclusion, independent, paired, small group, or large group learning, live or on-line engagement, a results orientation or a compliance orientation, large or small school communities, more or less money committed, mixed or same gender, race, disability, nationality or language spoken, the most effective teaching fundamentally comes to terms with this limitation. The most effective teaching accepts that it has influence, but that its influence is limited by the self-determined and critical thinking and choices of students and people who take learning more or less seriously.
That thesis would likely need a carefully developed hypothesis, thoughtful research questions, a carefully controlled experiment with randomly selected control and treatment groups, and a peer-reviewed publication to serve as any kind of science of effective teaching. But absent my ability to produce any of those things, at this point, I think it is a thesis that rings more true to me as a teacher, today, than it wholeheartedly rang true to me as a student, forever wondering why teachers ambled about with such self-importance, assuming that their accepted wisdom was mine as well. It is much easier to me to see this when I am the teacher being ignored than when I was the student doing the ignoring. Effective teaching, I have concluded at this point in my life, is humble. It recognizes that the highest value of teaching is one that models and takes seriously critical, skeptical, and undogmatic thinking enough that it has no expectation that it will have any influence except insofar as students and those who encounter it find it valuable. And wise teaching, at least, accepts that many people will not find value in a thesis or an argument or a lesson even if it is most certainly there.
Effective teaching most certainly involves facilitating independent and cooperative student learning to master concepts and solve problems and appreciate learning for its own sake as well as performing well on assessments of academic skills. But the most effective teaching, I would hope, at least, is the kind that assumes that students and people will engage in learning far beyond the classroom – at home, with friends, with family, while watching movies and television, while listening to music and sales speeches, while reading books for professional endeavor, books for pleasure, and labels for soup cans – and that what happens in the classroom is a humblingly small proportion of that learning. It is a proportion to be engaged with as much powerful attention to high intellectual and otherwise standards and real student learning as possible. But it is a small proportion nonetheless. And coming to terms with that fact of life is one of the most powerful things of all that all teachers could do to enhance their effectiveness as people who offer something of value that may not always be taken or as seriously as they would like but which offers a substantial opportunity to understand something in the world better.
Love,
Ben
