Ysterday I offered a diary involving a former student and his seeking information that might help him come to support Obama rather than McCain. If you have not read the diary, or the fantastic responses offered by the members of this virtual community, I suggest that you take the time.
That diary was a product of a relationship. Teaching, for me, is less about the content, although content is important, than it is about relationships, including those between students and teachers. And on a morning when I do not have to go to school I nevertheless find myself thinking about school, teaching and students. In part this is because of the relationship with Brian, the student whose email to me lead to yesterday's diary Please grant me some forbearance as I share these. I hope you will find them of some relevance to the political processes in which we involve ourselves.
Relationships. Following Parker Palmer (in The Courage To Teach) I believe that teaching consists of simultaneous and overlapping relationships: between teacher and students, between the curricular material and both teachers and students, and among the students. For me the nature of those relationships is not unidirectional. Certainly any experienced educator knows that s/he learns from the students. The multidirectionality of the relationship with the curricular material may be surprising, but it exists: as I as teacher, and people like Brian as students, learn and appreciate more about that material, we enrich it by our involvement.
Let me explore this a bit more. I did say the relationships were simultaneous and overlapping. If one student in the class chooses to involve herself with the curricular material, she infuses it with her perceptions, which then become part of the material for the others, including the teacher. She has in that way changed, even enriched, the curricular material beyond what it was when the class began. Please retain this crucial idea.
Nowadays we see an overarching concern, expressed ungrammatically by our current President in the form of "Is our children learning?' Let me assure all who read this that our children are always learning, in every class. What they learn might well NOT be what we ostensibly intend, or even be directly related to the content implied by the title of the course. They may be learning that the teacher doesn't care about them. or he is a bully and a petty tyrant, or that he cannot manage a classroom so the clowns will be able to throw him off course. They might learn which of their fellows can manipulate both teacher and fellow students. They might learn exactly how much they need to do to keep teachers - and parents - off their back. The learning process includes not only the individuals, teachers and students in the room, not only the supposed material of the course, but the personalities present in that room - the personalities of those physically present, but also the personalities of those whose presence looms over all else because of the rules they have dictated and the sanctions they may be able to apply. Even a teacher with a forceful personality cannot totally keep this presence out - after all, I have to apply the rules of the school on dress and behavior, and I must prepare my students to take tests I believe to be meaningless indicators of what they may have actually learned.
We are in the US obsessed by measurement and comparison, and our schools reflect this. We give grades, announce honors and awards. We do so to individual students, to schools and school systems, and in connecting those two we do so either explicitly or implicitly to teachers as well. We are so concerned with the scores that we attempt to game the system. We give bonuses to principals, schools, even students, who "achieve" on certain measures, thereby going directly against the 1975 observation by Donald Campbell that
The More any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.
He rightly observed that the sanctions we impose as a result of social measures, of which educational tests are a clear subset. affect the value of those tests. Perhaps if I might cynically recall Pavlov's work with dogs - after a while the dogs salivated at the sound of the bell, anticipating the food that was to arrive. Applied to our offering rewards or punishments on the basis of test scores is to diminish the motivational process to attempting to gain the rewards by the most efficient path possible, even if that has little to do with learning the underlying content or skills supposedly measured by those tests. And in the process it distorts all the classroom relationships described above: students will have power over teachers who are rewarded on the basis of their scores, students who receive individual rewards begin to view their classmates as competitors, and the curricular material is restricted to "is this going to be on the test?"
Real learning can occur in more than one context. Certainly the need for understanding material, or to be able to demonstrate competence for some other purpose such as admission to a college will inevitably be part of the context. Excitement at grasping a new idea, of having pieces come together is also a part of the learning context. But students may not be able to persist in the presence of learning obstacles to achieve that coming together, nor may they be able to maintain focus for a distant goal, unless there are several layers of trust. First, they have to believe that they themselves are capable, and that self-trust is often far more fragile than many adults making educational policy realize. And students who are held back a grade often find that self-worth demolished, and become less likely to persist in the face of academic difficulties. Life situations external to the school and difficult relationships within the school can also undercut the confidence and trust in self necessary to persist.
A teacher is important because in the relationship between teacher and student we have the necessary context to provide the support to enable the students to believe in themselves. A teacher who constantly reinforces the students as being capable of learning difficult material, who helps them find ways of making sense of it is far more likely to see those students achieve what we erroneously describe as academic success. I say "erroneously" because it is not academic, it is not in isolation in the classroom, rather it is an essential part of experiencing the world and other people as other than hostile and dangerous. Keep this in mind as well.
And if the students trust the teacher those students will be far more likely to do two things. First, they will be willing to risk being wrong because they demonstrating their lack of understanding will not be treated as a sing of failure, but as an indicator to help them understand where and how they are wrong and empower them to begin the process of self-correction that is essential to lifelong learning. And thus when confronted with something new and difficult that does not seem possible or for which they see no way of making sense of it, they will trust the teacher not to let them crash and burn, and will take the first steps necessary to increase their learning.
What I have just described is a part of what is often labeled the constructivist approach. Largely developed by Lev Vygotsky, born in 1895 and who operated in the Soviet Union (which of course was used by political and educational yahoos to reject what he had to offer us). it has a key idea known as the zone of proximal development (ZPD) - what children can do only with the assistance of others, adults or peers, is far more indicative of what they are capable than is what they can do by themselves. In this conceptual framework the greatest cognitive development occurs at or just beyond this boundary between the individual and assisted capabilities. Key to his work is the concept that Full cognitive development requires social interaction and occurs within a social context, so that full development of the ZPD depends upon full social interaction, with he range of skill that can be developed with adult guidance or peer collaboration exceeding what can be attained alone.
Both Vygotsky and Palmer understand the importance of relationship, especially between adults and younger learners. And if I can revisit the idea of the multi-directional nature of the relationships, including between student and curricular material, perhaps this will make more sense. As a student begins to apply his newly gained knowledge and skill to the curricular material, it takes on a new form for him, The connections of which he is capable expand, and as they do, the possibilities for greater and deeper understand expand almost exponentially. Simultaneously, the locus of the ZPD changes, requiring the attentive adult instructor to change how s/he relates not only with the student, but with the material - for her the curricular material is also now different, for in the learning environment it must be approached in the context of each of the participants. This is the social context of learning on which much of Vygotsky's insight is based, and which unfortunately is too often ignored or even prevented in our approach to schools and education.
What I find destructive of our approach to schooling is that for sake of efficiency we structure our schools and our assessments on the basis of a false efficiency that assumes that the vast majority of our children are similar enough that we can take do things on a broad basis and assume (incorrectly, in my opinion) that we will succeed in providing the vast majority of our students with a sufficient educational experience. We waste time and money and - most of all - the natural inclination towards learning of our young people.
I think this has a profound impact upon our society, including in our politics. I can think of nothing more deadly in my field than the old rote learning of how a bill becomes a law when it has no connection with the reality of what actually occurs but a few miles from my classroom in Greenbelt MD and my students are capable by simply picking up a newspaper or turning on even local news to discern that contradiction. Why learn something that is not 'real" to them?
I believe that ALL of my students are capable of learning. Not all will learn to the same depth in my course, and this might have nothing to do with so-called "intelligence" or intellectual capability. My task should not be to focus on having them achieve to a common standard as measured by an external test, although that is seemingly unavoidable, at least in our current environment. As a teacher I need sufficient time - with each student, which probably means far fewer than the 130+ I deal with each day - to find the individual ZPDs for those students, as well as the commonality they may share in the social context of the classroom. Give me that and I will have a far better chance of seeing those students grow in knowledge, skill, self-confidence, and even their ability to perform successfully on external tests. Those external test scores will not be our goal, but success will be a concomitant aspect of the real learning that will occur. Focus on the tests may or may not get you success on the tests, but it will destroy the social context so necessary to real learning. Focus on the persons, the relationships, the social context of learning, and one is far more likely to see both success on external tests, which should therefore be less frequent, and the kind of lifelong learning upon which we should be focused.
Yesterday those who read my diary got to meet Brian. He is a gifted young man, as those who have read the comments he has since posted to the thread have discovered. I knew him outside the confines of my classroom as I also coached him. I knew about him because I had taught his older sister, and had helped coach his older brother. That knowledge of the student's life outside the classroom was an important part of developing the kind of relationship that allowed his learning to continue even after he left the four walls of my classroom.
I wish I were able to develop those kind of relationships with all of my students. In some cases there will not be sufficient commonality between us for the kind of ongoing communication which Brian and I have maintained in the almost 20 months since he was last my student. But then, one never knows. On Thursday I received a personal invitation to come to a reception by our Robotics team, brought by a young lady I taught the same year I last taught Brian, with whom I have since had but occasional contact in the halls of our school. One never knows the nature of the relationship from the student perspective, does one?
Not so random thoughts - on teaching, school and students. I hope they have served some value.
Have a nice weekend.
Peace.