Blog the Second

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“I have no question that students who learn, not professors who perform, is what teaching is all about: students who learn are the finest fruit of teachers who teach. Nor do I doubt that students learn in diverse and wondrous ways, including ways that bypass the teacher in the classroom and ways that require neither a classroom nor a teacher!”

— Parker Palmer

Introduction

We were sat in rows, our desks lining three of the room’s four walls. If we turned our heads to the side we could see our classmate’s legs – bare knees in all seasons because the seasons were all relatively warm. Passed their hips they became disembodied, a thick, dark-brown piece of wood shielding torsos, heads, and faces from distracted eyes. My experience at school in the 1990s was simultaneously alternative and exceedingly tedious. Our walled-in desks inhibited communication and focused our gaze on our tasks. Every day we participated in assembly and then dispersed to our desks, silently working on the goals we had set for ourselves at the beginning of the week. If we had a question we placed a flag at the top of our desk to signal, battle-like, that we had a question – that we had surrendered to the need for assistance.

Our small, multi-cultural Christian school was using a curriculum based on a theory of self-guided learning and motivation. While we received little oral instruction, our books required a sizeable amount of reading comprehension to guide our learning. Teachers watched for flags and provided instruction one-on-one as needed. Although the practice of setting personal goals is a form of differentiation based on self-perceived ability, the solitary, reading-and-writing nature of the curriculum met a very narrow range of learning preferences and needs.

How Students Learn

“Learning,” explains Barker, “is a multifarious process” (Barker, 2012, p. 17). By this Barker means that learning is complex and changeable. An individual student’s learning preference, approach, and needs may change context to context and subject to subject (Burton, 2009). Learning style tests indicate that some people learn visually while others excel more when they are able to learn through auditory or kinaesthetic means (Burton, 2009). Further complicating the learning process is the fact that not only are the ways and speeds at which students learn different, but they all need to develop different kinds of learning and knowledge. The NZC’s Key Competencies seek to address the need for knowledge that goes beyond the purely intellectual by championing ontological as well as epistemological knowledge. Barker (2012) refers to this when he speaks of the Key Competencies’ “emphasis on learning as ‘being’, as well as ‘knowing’” (p. 40). Just as intellectual growth is complex and varied, so too will students grow and develop at diverse speeds as they find their identities and place in society.  Even the smaller, most streamed classrooms will be composed of students who learn at different rates, in different ways, and through different motivations and strategies.

When students step into the classroom they bring with them the motivations that drive their learning. Burton identifies several different kinds of motives that students may adopt. “Deep motive,” he asserts, “results from an intrinsic desire to learn and can inspire the use of deep strategies, emphasizing understanding and meaning,” (Burton, 2009, p. 264). This contrasts with surface or instrumental motive, which tends to lead to reproduction-style rote learning. Another motivation – and perhaps one we are all very familiar with, teacher and student alike – is the motivation that attends the desire to pass or do well on an assessment. The results of this motivation may include strategies to manage time and organise resources. Then of course there are those students who do not appear to bring any motivation to their school-based tasks. Identifying the underlying reason for the lack of motivation is one of their teacher’s challenges.

How I Teach

In the real world, in the real classroom, for the real teacher, theories of learning and motivation meet and intermingle with the very real lives and needs of the students under their care. This is why a one-size-fits-all approach to teaching and learning does not work. The most effective teachers I have seen use multiple different teaching strategies, often even in the same lesson, and will vary their approach to differentiate as needed. For example, I have witnessed one AT work with students from a lower-ability NCEA Level 2 English class in a manner not dissimilar to my own educational experience in the 1990s. That is, she assigned them a goal (a film internal), provided them with the materials and instruction they needed to work towards that goal, and then asked them to work silently for the remainder of the lesson to meet that goal. If a student indicated they needed clarification or assistance she would go and work with them one-on-one. While not the most stimulating, this form of learning does have a place in the contemporary classroom. Students need to know how to work independently towards a goal, but it should not be the only way we expect them to learn. I have seen this same class: being taught via a multimedia presentation, I have seen them engage in class-wide discussion, and I know that sometimes their teacher motivates and rewards them through promised treats such as a pizza lunch or a surprise break from a more tedious task.

A large part of effective teaching comes down to relationship with and knowledge of the students. When teachers know their students they know what their needs are and can work to meet them. Yet even in an unfamiliar class teachers may effectively differentiate by planning lessons that are diversified, with different kinds of tasks and different pedagogical approaches (Burton, 2009). Barker (2012) asserts that one of our main challenges as teachers is figuring out “how to avoid stealing the learning from our students” (p. 12). Learning should be an act of guided discovery. We have a greater chance of developing deep motivation in our students if we excite them, if we encourage their curiousity, if we welcome their prior knowledge into the classroom, and if we take necessary steps to help them overcome challenges such as dyslexia or autism so that they can feel valued, engaged, and intelligent.

This may mean taking a long time individually with one student to help them grasp concepts they find difficult. For other students encouraging deeper motivation may require the teacher to find more challenging or creative tasks for a gifted and talented student. At other times a group of students may be sparked to look at a topic from a different perspective by getting up from their desks, rearranging the classroom, and engaging in role-play or reenactment. In all these tasks, approaches, and activities teachers should “encourage comparison between objects or ideas and introduce new ideas by reference to concrete examples” (Burton, 2009, p. 261). Teachers need to tether their students’ learning to real-world examples and illustrations, connecting the dots between their students’ lives and what is being learnt.  

References

Barker, M. (2012). How do people learn? Understanding the learning process. In C. McGee & D. Fraser (Eds.), The professional practice of teaching (4th ed., pp. 17-46). Southern Melbourne, Australia: Cengage.

Burton, D. (2009). Ways pupils learn. In S. Capel, M. Leask, & T. Turner (Eds.), Learning to teach in the secondary school (5th ed., pp. 244-257). Oxford, England: Routledge.