It's Not What We Teach, It's What They Learn

Ed Digest

Finally got around to reading through the articles in the newest edition of Ed Digest. Three stood out to me.

The most impressive one was written by Alfie Kohn, who is a progressive school reformer probably best known for his book The Case Against Standardized Tests. Kohn’s article is entitled, “It’s Not What We Teach, It’s What They Learn.”

Kohn challenges the old teacher excuse of “I taught a good lesson even though the students didn’t learn it.”

I’ll come clean. I’ve been guilty of using this excuse more than my share of times, especially in the spring of the year when kids’ attentions are focused anywhere else other than school. But that’s my problem more than the kids. Or at least that’s how I should see it.

Another excellent point Kohn raises, which also goes along with the above excuse, is that teachers should “regard learning – as opposed to just teaching – as the point of what they do for a living.” I really like the sound of that.

And it makes a tremendous amount of sense.

Outside of a couple of methods classes in college, my education classes (as well as my English classes) never focused on how to get kids to learn. I mean I never had an English class where my professor said, “Now for you future teachers out there, how are you going to get your sixteen year olds interested in Beowulf or King Lear?

Instead I had to read the works and, for the most part, listen to the professors pontificate about how much they knew about each work. In some cases, discussions arose, but that was the extent of student engagement. They crammed me full of content knowledge. However, this is just part of the vicious circle.

When I was a senior, I was debating about whether to go right into grad school or do my student teaching. I talked to one professor and she gave me the old line, “Teachers go into high school teaching because they love students; they go into university teaching because they love the material.” Nowhere in that discussion did the topic of learning come up.

The assumption in that line is that teachers go to the secondary level because they want to deal with adolescents and teachers become professors because they want to master their content. Again, where is the idea of actually learning how to teach?

And think about it. What were your college classes like? Did they engage you or did you just sit in a lecture hall and scribble down notes from the professor. I had too few of the former classes.

In the most ironic instance of all, I had a measurement and evaluation education class (along with one of my fellow teachers here, though I didn’t know him at the time, but he had the same experience as I did in the class) where our professor, who was also head of the Education department at the time, basically sat us in a tiny closet-sized room in the ed building and put us to sleep with lecture after lecture followed by overhead after overhead. Yet, the point of the class was how to measure and evaluate learning – and all we did was scribble down notes when the class could have been so much more!

This reminds me of a quote from the Kohn article: “Many years ago, the writer George Leonard described lecturing as the ‘best way to get information from teacher’s notebook to student’s notebook without touching the student’s mind.’” How true.

Yet, how many classes do teachers take in learning or pedagogy? I took classes in discipline, using technology, human relations, measurement and evaluation, Ed psych, fundamentals of education . . . and so on.

Too few focused on teaching me how to teach the kids I would have in my classes. Too many focused on giving me content mastery of the information I would have to convey. They just never focused on how to convey it.

From my experience, most of my university level teachers were true experts in their fields. They didn’t have to concern themselves with pedagogy. That was the student’s problem. The teachers presented the information and it was the student’s job to digest it.

Again, this is how many high school teachers, who survived the aforementioned learning process in college, wind up complaining, “I taught a good lesson even though the students didn’t learn it” because they are just following the process that was modeled for them in college.

I fell prey to this a couple of years ago when I planned a really innovative review session for To Kill a Mockingbird. I had all these questions and prompts to engage students and get them really thinking about the text.

But the problem was that everything I did up to then (reading guides, quizzes, homework, and so on) conditioned them to passively respond to the text – just as I had been taught in most of my college classes.

So when I put them in charge of actively tackling the text, they looked at me like deer in headlights.

They had that look that basically said, “Can’t we just have a worksheet where we don’t have to think? Give us something that we can finish and then move on to the things we find really meaningful, like visiting or sleeping!”

They were right too. I had it all wrong. I had failed to make the novel resonate with their lives, so it would have true meaning.

I never taught the novel the same way again. And it made me reconsider how I teach everything.

I think since many beginning teachers aren’t exposed to nearly enough pedagogy classes, they resort to either teaching how their professors taught or rehashing the lessons that they had enjoyed from high school. Kohn agrees, “preservice teachers in many states spend very little time learning about learning, relative to the time devoted to subject-matter content.”

That was how I survived my first year of teaching. But where does that leave room for developing your own teaching style? It really doesn’t. I think this is the reason for so many kids not being actively engaged in school.

This, though, is but one topic Kohn tackles.

He addresses the issue of homework. Or, more importantly, how students view homework. He raises an excellent point – “if students view homework as something they can’t wait to be done with, it doesn’t matter how well-designed or valuable we think those assignments are.” That was the exact case with my “To Kill a Mockingbird” review session. I thought it was well-designed (and it was), but I had conditioned my students to view the work in my class as just that, work, not something that connected to their lives and, therefore, had meaning and significance.

I think of my poor KoKo who has been swamped with Earth Science worksheets on mechanical and chemical weathering and continental and valley glaciers. Now, I’m no science expert. I just help her with her homework. But the problem is that she sees the work as just something she can hurry through before heading to facebook or texting on her phone. The assignments have very little to do with KoKo’s personal life. So everything she ‘learns’ will not stick.

Now, I’m not blaming her science teacher. It’s just a sad fact that KoKo – and I don’t know how many of her classmates and other students in our country – didn’t really learn how to learn. So I try to help her derive personal meaning from the work, connecting it to our lives and how, for example, mechanical verse chemical weathering affects us – I used our new patio as an example. Mechanical weathering like tree roots and frost boils can wreak havoc on all of the carefully placed stones.

But this doesn’t always work. And too often I end up giving in and just giving her clues on how to get through the work (look for the bold or italicized words and how to read for context clues and so on).

Unfortunately, many teachers, especially in reading, math, and science, are pushed to focus on the measurable skills for the standardized tests. So KoKo is crammed full of information she can then repeat on a standardized test to make her school’s AYP. But what is she really learning? Again, as Kohn notes “The point isn’t to deepen understanding (and enthusiasm), but merely to elevate test scores.”

Students are not blind to this either. When I had my college comp students work on their “How to Improve School” essays, one student brought up the issue of homework. She argued that – shock – students should get less homework.

When I questioned this, for it sounded to me like a lazy student making an excuse for less work, she made an excellent point: “I mean less busy work for homework. Instead, give us some meaningful work. Students really don’t mind doing the work if it’s important.”

I’m not making that up either. The students know all about our little tricks to cover material.

However, often times the real learning that occurs in all of our rooms can’t always be neatly measured by a test. But just listen to the school reformers, especially superintendents Michelle Rhee in Washington DC and Paul Vallas in New Orleans, and all you’ll hear from them is test scores, test scores, test scores.

Kohn states: “real learning often can’t be quantified, and a corporate-style preoccupation with ‘data’ turns schooling into something shallow and lifeless” and again, I’m reminded of KoKo struggling over her science homework.

Just today I tried to combat this in our work on “To Kill a Mockingbird.” We are at the point early in the novel where Scout hates her first grade teacher. Atticus tells Scout that she can’t expect her teacher, Miss Caroline, who is a new teacher and unfamiliar with how things are done in Maycomb, to learn all of Maycomb’s ways in just one day.

This got me to thinking. What are some ways of where we live? How do we know them? Why do we take them for granted? How can we learn to recognize them? What ‘odd’ practices, behaviors, or traditions do we have here that an outsider would find different? That is, let’s try and put ourselves in Miss Caroline’s shoes for a moment.

So we started brainstorming ideas on the ways of TRF. Here’s a sampling of what we came up with –

Mudding
Camouflage clothing
Ice fishing
Minnesota “nice”
Cold weather (with the emphasis being on what we consider ‘cold’ as opposed to what someone in Arizona or Florida may consider cold)
Local store and restaurant chains (Hugo’s, for example)
Very few minorities (a mostly white dominant culture)
The word “uffda”
Eating lefsa and hot dishes and lutefisk
Deer hunting
Everyone thinks having a Walmart is a big deal (remember we had kids camp out overnight in the parking lot to be among the first customers)
Farmland
Everyone knows everyone else’s parents
We have deer antler contests!
Your business is the town’s business
Hunting is an excused absence
Everyone drives oversized, gas guzzling four wheel drive trucks.
Hockey and choir are big

And these are just a few of the things we came up with.

The next step will be to have students write essays on one of these – or one of their own. By doing this, I’m hoping to get kids thinking (learning?) about how they view their own lives. I’m trying to do – in Kohn’s words – “capture how each student makes sense of the world, so [I] can meet them where they are.”

What I hope to do after reading their essays is find a lot of ‘ins’ that I can use to connect other events, themes, and characters in TKM to my students’ lives. In the words of another progressive education reformer, Deborah Meier, “’Teaching is mostly listening.’”

And that’s all I do when I read their papers.

Now, I admit I’ve got it made when it comes to trying to connect with my students and their lives, for I tell every class that unlike science or math where they have to study someone else’s theories or concepts, in English classes, the real subject (and this is never more true than in a composition class, though it still holds true in a lit class) is them. That’s our real textbook. I want to know what they think and believe and have to say. Then I want to know what they think and believe and have to say about what we read and write.

That’s the good stuff.

I’m just not sure how it’s accurately measured on the NWEA or MCAIIs, but I do know that it’s learning.