The most important reason why we need to quit teaching and start designing learning is that teaching, in general and traditionally, is passive. Students come to class, get information or have skills modeled for them, then they complete work. Repeat for next class. Basically, we could replace this same process with Youtube videos and save a lot of time and money.
I will give a shout out to the elementary teachers out there. Out of the three levels of school, elementary, middle and high, you all tend to lean more toward active learning rather than passive teaching. However, I have been in many elementary classrooms where the teacher stands and delivers while the students sit and get on a regular basis. Middle school and high school teachers, we are chief of sinners when it comes to this. What’s so wrong with the way we teach?
The passive nature of teaching typically leads to focusing on content and compliance over critical thinking and creativity. Some of you now are reading this and thinking, “Oh, he’s one of THOSE educators.” Well, if you are implying that I believe that, in the words of John Keating from Dead Poet’s Society, “the idea of education was to learn to think for yourself,” then yes, I AM proudly one of those educators. What our students need most out of teachers is not content knowledge, but critical experience.
Think about it. Our public education system should be producing citizens who are ready for higher learning, technical training or gainful employment. We prepare them for these destinations by having them sit in rows, listen to instructions, complete worksheets or answer questions, and turn in the results. Very little of that process involves critical thinking, decisions making, collaboration with others, testing differing methods, tackling problems as they arise. Basically, everything that the real world will ask of them as adults and also what employers are begging for in future employees. The last I checked, I have not seen a listing for “Worksheet Completer” on Indeed. If worksheets were created for learning, they’d be called “learning sheets.” But where’s our current focus? On the work instead of the learning, so worksheets live on.
The fact is that teaching, the passive way we tend to do it now, can be a quickly and assumedly effective improv that even rookie teachers can perform at a moment’s notice. I’ve done, I’ve seen countless others do it as well. If you are looking for and at teaching, then there are many of us who seem to have it down. I never want to say of myself again, “I am a great teacher” because that’s not what this education thing is about.
Learning, on the other hand, takes time and thought and purpose to design. It takes preparation, which most teachers have built into their work days, to make the intentional choices in the information, skills and tools required to provide to students so that they can demonstrate learning in an effective and visible way. You can “see” learning in a classroom where it has been designed around and for. It’s there and in your face and you can talk with students in an active learning classroom and they will tell you the answers to the three magic questions, “What am I learning? Why am I learning it? and How do I know I’ve learned it?
But I can walk into a class where teaching is happening, and learning is hidden. You have to dig for it. It’s inconsistent and rare because it was not designed or prepared for. It looks good on the outside, desks in rows, quiet, work being completed, but where is the learning? After all, that is the reason why the school was built and the teachers were hired and the administration was put into place. ACTIVE Learning.
