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COMMITMENT TO STUDENTS AND STUDENT LEARNING: PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION (EXPANDED VERSION)
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The Need to Learn (Milan Kundera, 1985) An awareness of the vast amount of research surrounding learning is a good starting point for any educator to do their job well. More importantly, however, is the need for a philosophical basis to practice, and mine is, simply put, that all people need to learn. This need for learning is not only in the basic sense of acquiring the skills to participate in an economic machine, but is also a spiritual imperative in and of itself. Learning informs, creates, and empowers. What, then, are the conditions for learning to occur? They say that all you need to know you learned in kindergarten, and I do not contest such weighty insights. Consequently, I suggest that for any serious learning to occur, the fun, the small, the big, and respect must be addressed. FUN Without the relationship between fun and learning we would not learn nearly as much. (W.
Glasser, 1986) Fun is learning, and learning is fun. This is not a conflation of terms; fun creates a fountain of receptivity that enhances interaction with the world, others, and the self. Educators need to take the natural need to learn, and its connection with fun to heighten, use, and channel them. One of the best methods that a teacher can use to make learning fun is humor. Laughing is a good sign; anyone who has ever tried to understand a joke in a second language knows that laughing indicates understanding. Humor humanizes and unifies classes. Students will laugh more in a class in which they feel accepted, while a class with no laughs is one without trust. Finally - following Chaplin - humor is an also a good tool to teach students for dealing with the contradictions and difficulties that all humans encounter in learning and life. The greatest accomplishment anyone can achieve is to look at the web of complexity and contradiction of the universe and say "HA". When dealing with children, the most important thing is to get to the business of childhood. Energy, intensity, hands-on, dirt, great gestures: most children learn kinesthetically, and this physicality should be utilized as much as possible by educators to create a fun environment. Humans are multi-faceted beings, and though - as Gardner is known to go on about - we may lean towards one or the other learning styles, our complex beings need nourishment in all areas. Thus, despite his conservatism, Gardner’s taxonomy of multiple intelligences is of the utmost importance for fun and learning. To me the multiple intelligences not only serve the purpose of using different intelligences to foster learning for the individual student, but frankly, makes classes more varied and interesting for all students. In short, teaching that addresses the greatest number of areas of one’s being is a practice that mimics the ripe conditions of openness and receptivity that occurs during the multi-faceted and challenging event of play. Remember, fun is learning. One's sense of competency - of being able to learn - creates a great sense of achievement, which feeds on itself, and leads to more learning. I have seen this for myself in my students; when the light-bulb goes on, the mixture of emotion, satisfaction, release, and triumph is a joy to behold, and more importantly, to feel. SMALL
AND BIG School should make every effort to push them in that direction and to develop in them what is lacking in their own development. (L. S. Vygotsky, 1978) Educators need to make learning fun, yet practice must be grounded in sound methodology. As with all things conceptually simple, teaching should be concerned both with the small and the big, with discrete units and large concepts, with the practical and the conceptual. A good educational program will recognize stages of development. An overwhelmed child does not have fun, but rather frustration. While this makes rote learning necessary at times, the key is the pacing and sequencing of the program: "learning must - like the incidents of a well-arranged story or plot - take place in a certain cumulative order" (Wiggins & McTigue, 1999:134). Discrete skills and knowledge must be taught in an organized and logical way. Students - no matter the age - cannot be bombarded with information, and then process it in any manageable way without help. Teaching should be about scaffolding learning for the next step, not rushing through on account of state-mandated curriculum guidelines. Here, the Piagetian notion of stages guides us to respect where our students are, and to use age- and learning style appropriate techniques in instruction. It is a frustrating condition of humanity that many people "see" holistically, yet have difficulty connecting the big and the small; the need to split up tasks, to make the connections, and to teach clearly and simply is a need for all students. While we must be aware of developmental stages, we cannot underestimate, or lock our students into expectations. Vygotsky’s notion that there is a distance between the actual-recorded development of the child as evidenced by individual performance, and the potential development as determined through guided problem solving is key here. While the small is necessary, we must remember to swing between the concrete, the representational, and the symbolic: "concreteness is necessary and unavoidable only as a stepping stone for developing abstract thinking ... as a means, not as an end in itself"(Vygotsky, 1977:89).
The best way to provide guidance,
and to challenge students
to tackle the big is through integrated curriculum, and
constructivist teaching methods. When I started teaching ESL, I
solely taught discrete skills. After comparing the experience with
teaching adults, I found that rather than adjusting to the teacher,
a child must be adjusted to. I was attracted to this idea, and began
to try and figure out ways to mould myself. Experimentation began.
After trying many methods, I finally settled on themes as a way to
teach. I learned that doing, "The Family" for a month was much
more effective than isolated sentence patterns. Themes make learning
sensical to all students, small or big, as it helps them to
internally organize the stuff that is overwhelming, difficult, or
counter-intuitive. The backward design principles of Wiggins &
McTigue (1999), with their hands-on approach, logical progression of
skills, and guiding-light, authentic culminating tasks fit very well
into this framework. They propose that teaching the wide concepts
and the big structures can be achieved by anchoring curriculum with
essential questions that students focus on for the whole unit. These
constant reminders allow students to connect what they know to the
learning, and to connect their new learning to their conceptual
framework, which are processes that educational psychologists have
found are natural anyways (Ormrod, 1999). In relation to fun, we won’t
understand fully, no matter how clear an explanation, until we get
the chance to "play" with structure, many times. Revisiting the
same principles and questions over and over recognizes that
understanding is not a linear, but rather a spiraling process that
allows for the connections, building, and reconstruction of
knowledge to occur. It is in this sense that I suggest that the old
rote-creative, traditionalist-progressive dichotomies no longer
hold. As we learned in kindergarten, both the small and big are
needed. RESPECT Confusion ... is as natural a condition as clarity. The natural response to confusion is to keep trying to connect what you already know to what you don’t know. (V. G. Paley, 1986) The final and most important condition for learning to occur is simply the rule of respect. While this term is of such an encompassing scope that it is almost useless, it is the very wide nature of the term respect that makes it so applicable to both the minute and grand situations that educators, students, and other forms of human life find themselves in. First, respect for groups. While teaching to learning style could be considered a form of inclusion, the respect suggested here is more explicit. Much has been written about the benefit of social groups, cooperation, and role models to learning. This social, or identity theory of learning emphasizes the role of models in students?lives (Bandura, 2000), and actually contributes to cognitive development: "learning awakens a variety of internal developmental processes that are able to operate only when the child is interacting with people in his environment and in cooperation with his peers"(Vygotsky, 1978). Yet respect is also concerned with the affective aspects of the learner. Social learning not only facilitates learning, but also addresses the greater concern that we have about the hidden-curriculum; that students think about the needs of a multi-cultural society, have an awareness of others, and develop a global perspective on the world. Respect can be fostered by content, with equitable representation of groups, no matter how small a minority. Respect can also be fostered by group work. As the main way students interact with others and ideas, engage in problem solving activities, clarify, understand, and personalize ideas, develop their knowledge of language, talk is surely the main route to learning; by ensuring that our students talk, discuss, and work with others in heterogeneous groupings will give them the exposure and contact that they will need to become tolerant human beings. Now, the individual. One of the unfortunate results (instigators?) of equity research is that in an attempt to reach each child, the demon of efficiency can take precedence. We must, as educators, resist the turning the practice of inclusion into a vehicle for exclusion. Rather than emphasizing groups, we must always take care to resist homogenizing, labeling, and streaming at the expense of the individual. It is the job of educators how to meet the needs of each and every student. To paraphrase Rick Lavoie, it is our job to make sure that every kid has more poker chips when s/he goes to sleep than they had when they got up in the morning. Part of this is accomplished through the dignity gained by learning. Yet, for learning to occur, individuals need to have self-esteem, and to feel respected is one avenue towards this. We must respect the need and the desire of all kids to want to learn. The best way to do this is to listen to all voices. So, we turn to the importance of differentiation and assessment. Student self-esteem is related to learning, and self-esteem is related to seeing oneself represented and respected in a positive way. We must, as much as possible, relate learning to the lives of the students; in the smallest sense, by integrating curriculum, guiding learning, and facilitating or scaffolding learning, which, as it fosters competency and understanding, will relate the children to school. But on a deeper level, we need to actually tie the curriculum to the personality, to their life, fears, and interests. This requires the assessment of each child’s needs, and the differentiation of content. In such a reflective classroom, all students express their voices, and see themselves mirrored in their lives. An open, caring, fun, and respectful classroom will encourage learning in the best sense: as nourishment for the soul. PROCESS
= PRODUCT Must each generation try to completely reinvent society? The answer
is no - and yes. It is not as though everything that now exists must
be discarded and entirely new values fashioned (A. Kohn, 1993) Learning is both a cognitive and affective event. It includes both reason and caring, and the use of these skills, attitudes, and dispositions towards subjects, others, and most of all, the self. Juggling these two is a struggle for the teacher, and it is in this sense that teaching is more of an art, or a translation of worldviews and attitudes, than it is about lectures and facts. It is apt that I mention art and translation for these two areas have a lot in common; both are challenging and often difficult to comprehend, are forms of communication, and have both structural and semantic aspects. Art-translation is also an apt metaphor as it is a process in which both agents are participators in the process; we need to create and appreciate, to translate to and to translate from. It is in this sense that teaching is a method of reconstruction. A sensitive person respects the structural aspects (vocabulary, grammar, elements, design) - which must connect to what is already concretely known - yet forgoes the slavish worship of formalism by respecting the spirit of the meaning, and expression. I feel that considering their limited temporal and physical experiences, art-translation provides children with an opportunity to explore. Art-translation is often one of the only curriculum areas where total expression is the main idea, where fun is expected, where the small is important, but subordinated to the big, and where all ideas are respected and appreciated. Most importantly, these are subjects, which foster the attitude of doing it for its own sake, an attitude that we can try to generalize across the curriculum to other subject areas. I argue that having children play with different concepts, think in novel ways, re-analyze and re-analyze ideas all reflect that possibility that something akin to "artistic" method can and should be applied to the teaching of all subjects.
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