Restoring Meaning to Teaching
Examining Beliefs About How Children Learn
Ten teachers4 from two schools are sitting in an elementary classroom. They have recently begun meeting every couple of weeks to talk about teaching and learning. The following perspectives are from their dialogue about learning, a dialogue that occurred in their third two-hour meeting.
Beth: Learning involves repetition, lots of repetition--doing things over and over again--that's how kids learn. They have learned it if they can repeat it, answer the questions.
Jane: In learning, hands are doing and the learning comes from what they are doing. Learning is demonstrated by students' actions--we know that they have gotten it when they can do something.
Carrie: I picture learning as someone pouring stuff into your head from the pitcher of knowledge, feeding stimuli, helping you learn. Learning is taking in new things. I don't really know what it is, learning is this vast, vague thing. What is the difference between learning and regurgitating things?
Maureen: Well, students are not learning when the teacher is talking all of the time. That stuff just bounces off the kids. Learning is better when it is generated from the child's interests.
Lisa: I think that students have to construct their own knowledge and that is based on what they bring with them--their prior knowledge--and what experiences the teachers provide. Experiences have to be meaningful, hands-on, and connected to student lives.
To put learning at the center of instructional practice, it's necessary to understand learning. The teachers above are beginning to examine their personal ideas about how learning happens, ideas that come from their educational experiences as children, students, parents, and teachers. Our first ideas about learning come from our childhood interactions with our parents, teachers, other adults, as well as our peers. How did they teach us, motivate us, reward us, or punish us? What did we experience that helped us learn or that prevented us from learning? As adults, we modify, refine, or extend our beliefs about learning based on new experiences.
During preservice, most of us learned a lot about being a teacher and little about learning. Until the mid-1980s, education professors projected the view of learners as passive beings, blank slates, or empty vessels. They focused on the teacher, teaching processes, teaching materials, and teaching outcomes. Teachers were seen as the holders of knowledge and learners as passive receivers of information. A number of different views of learning persist and exert influence on teaching practice, although understanding about how learning happens has become more sophisticated over time.
The instructional strategies we use today originate with theories of learning that were popular at different times in the past. Broadly speaking, we use drill and practice (behaviorism); information processing strategies such as selecting, organizing, integrating, and memorizing (the cognitive view of learning); and active learning strategies such as hands-on inquiries, collaborative work, reflection, and metacognition (constructivism). Constructivism is a complex theory of learning that emphasizes the active role of the learner and is currently accepted by many educators. However, our standard instructional practices most often place students in the role of passive receivers of expert knowledge. Even as we've tried to shed these representations, few of us have taken time to consider what ideas and images, if any, have replaced them.
Our ideas about the learning process remain largely unexamined or unconscious, and yet they influence the instructional choices we make every day. Researchers Renate and Geoffrey Caine study contemporary learning theory in an attempt to link it to classroom practice. They conclude that one of the most fundamental issues in educational improvement "hinges on the understanding that [teachers] have about how human beings learn" (1997, p. 9). By exploring one's own beliefs about learning, rethinking these beliefs, and remaining open to new ideas, one can learn to be more thoughtful about which ideas and approaches are appropriate for different learning situations.
We can ask ourselves reflective questions to help focus attention on learning. Are my images of school about teaching or about learning? How am I thinking about learning? How do children learn? Looking at teaching practice through the lens of learning, we begin to see children in new ways.
| 4 | In this paper, the dialogue excerpts are from one study group and are used to illustrate the kinds of conversations that occurred in all five of the study groups. Other quotes and examples are taken from the other four study groups. |
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