Passivity
Ask someone to describe a classroom, and they will inevitably evoke the scene ingrained in all our minds from our youth and the media: Children sitting in neat rows of desks with a teacher at the front standing in front of a blackboard. It's striking that such a design is rarely challenged -- not so much the positioning of the desks, but the passivity of the students who are at the feet of the benevolent teacher who passes on knowledge. As Alfie Kohn puts it, students today are, by and large,
This isn't just speculation, of course; this is the state of most of our schools. The TIMSS video study, for example, tells us that in the average 8th grade math classroom, the teacher talks 85% of the time. Certainly group projects and student choice exist in small measure, but compared to the passivity, they are but pebbles tossed about in a mighty river. Quite frankly, my experiences at U.Va., one of the finest institutions of higher education in the country, have been rife with student passivity in their own right.
But what does the passivity accomplish? What we now know about psychology dispells any notion that it improves motivation -- in fact, it can demolish motivation. Nor, if our goal is to produce critical thinkers, does passivity further our pedagogical endeavors. One does not gain mobility and deftness of mind from spending the majority of time being talked at and told things. If anything, it imparts a sort of learned helplessness, where students have few opportunities to gain independent, malleable skills. There's a reason why switching 87 - 24 to "subtract 24 from 87" trips up nearly a fifth of students who got the first one right.
Student-centered learning has gotten a bad rap as being soft or fuzzy or not rigorous, and I'll be the first to admit there are plenty of examples of terribly executed student-centered programs. But that's an indictment of the execution, not the idea. Conceptually, I cannot see how leaving students in their passive vice -- a striking characteristic of a system which continues to stagnate in its achievement -- is a sound educational move.
[A]n empty bin, a reciever of other people's ideas ... they are supposed to sit there and do what they're told, finish the assignment, study for the student, memorize the right answers that someone else deicided they have to know. Other people prepare the meal for students, feed it to them, and then oversee their digestion of it.
This isn't just speculation, of course; this is the state of most of our schools. The TIMSS video study, for example, tells us that in the average 8th grade math classroom, the teacher talks 85% of the time. Certainly group projects and student choice exist in small measure, but compared to the passivity, they are but pebbles tossed about in a mighty river. Quite frankly, my experiences at U.Va., one of the finest institutions of higher education in the country, have been rife with student passivity in their own right.
But what does the passivity accomplish? What we now know about psychology dispells any notion that it improves motivation -- in fact, it can demolish motivation. Nor, if our goal is to produce critical thinkers, does passivity further our pedagogical endeavors. One does not gain mobility and deftness of mind from spending the majority of time being talked at and told things. If anything, it imparts a sort of learned helplessness, where students have few opportunities to gain independent, malleable skills. There's a reason why switching 87 - 24 to "subtract 24 from 87" trips up nearly a fifth of students who got the first one right.
Student-centered learning has gotten a bad rap as being soft or fuzzy or not rigorous, and I'll be the first to admit there are plenty of examples of terribly executed student-centered programs. But that's an indictment of the execution, not the idea. Conceptually, I cannot see how leaving students in their passive vice -- a striking characteristic of a system which continues to stagnate in its achievement -- is a sound educational move.
This entry was posted
on Sunday, February 26, 2006 at 7:10 PM.
|
