Private parts

My more perceptive readers will have noticed that there is no picture to the right, and may even have guessed that Alice is not the name I go by In Real Life. Yup, Google has more data about me than any real person, including anyone interested enough to be reading this. Seems I'm not really following Marco Torres' good advice around building up a digital portfolio. But the reasons I haven't are fairly simple. I don't want to identify where I work, simply because I don't want to have to concentrate on being 'on message' all the time.


Lucky I have options...


Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village


...but hopeful I won't need them

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/password_reuse.png

What is Teaching? Hirst, 1974

I was flicking though a book at the weekend by a professor of education at the University of Cambridge, when I came to a chapter called "What is Teaching?". Towards the end of this essay, Professor Hirst observes,

I am not even sure that successful learning is a criterion for good teaching (p.114).

What a prat I must be - I always thought that learning was the whole point of teaching. So what does Hirst think teaching is - let alone good teaching?  How does he come to the conclusion that it doesn't necessarily involve learning? And is his theory still relevant?

Hirst distinguishes between two understandings of "teaching", as follows -

The most common [meaning of "teaching"] relates to the case in which a person may teach in the fullest sense of that word and yet, in spite of the intention and the appropriateness of the activities involved, the pupils may learn absolutely nothing. ... [The second] involves the implication that not only has there been the intention to bring about learning, but that the pupil has in fact learnt what was intended. (p.106)

I suppose in medicine the equivalent would be the difference between treating the patient and curing the patient - treating is the process, but curing implies success. The second sense is the 'taught' in "Mr Miyagi taught me karate" - which assumes that I now know karate, and Mr Miyagi did whatever it took to instill this in me. Sounds good, but Hirst explicitly discounts the second definition, and concentrates  on the first, which he asserts is the most common meaning. He seems to be concerned about situations where the teacher is ticking all the right boxes - things I suppose like showing rather than telling, allowing opportunities for the learner to discover for themselves - and yet the learning aim of the lesson doesn't seem to stick. Surely the process that the teacher is engaged in is 'teaching', he thinks - what else would it be?

There is an obvious flaw here. If you have taught the student, and the student hasn't learnt, then you haven't actually taught them. There is no difference according to this definition between 'teach' and 'intend to teach' or 'try to teach'. If I go to 'teach' my kindergarten class about Wittgenstein, and they end up asleep or wandering off, an observer might state that I tried to teach philosophy, but I didn't teach. In this case, I didn't take into account the context of the learners - i.e. that they are five years old and have no idea what I'm talking about.

Hirst would ascribe my failure to an exception to his definition: the fact that teaching implies that the learning is possible, and in this case it wasn't. But, in every case in which the teacher 'teaches' and the learner doesn't learn, there must be some reason why. As a teacher I would want to be able to identify this, as the first step towards enabling the student to learn. And the thing is that we know so much more about learning now than we did even in Hirst's heyday. What may have appeared to Hirst as a failure on the part of the student to learn, might now be explained by the fact that that is not how that student can learn.  How People Learn tells us that students' preconceptions need to be discovered, engaged, and if necessary, challenged. They need to develop a deep foundation of factual knowledge that they can organise in a framework for easy retrieval. And a metacognitive approach will help them to take control of their own learning. All of these aspects would need to be taken into account.

I think that Hirst may be reflecting a malaise about teaching and learning current in the 1970s, when classroom walls were being torn down in favour of open learning spaces. The problem was that no-one knew what to do in these spaces, and this led to a search for concrete answers to questions such as Hirst's. But simply going through the motions of teaching is not teaching. Students can all learn, and teaching is doing whatever it takes to make that happen.

Paul H Hirst, "What is Teaching?" in Knowledge and the Curriculum: A Collection of Philosophical Papers (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974) pp 101 - 115.

Beating the Odds (ABC, September 2010)

Continuing yesterday's news round up - there is a great piece here from the ABC, showing how education can give opportunities to kids in at risk areas - again out here in the west.

They were different classes, now they're one community (SMH, 6/9/10) and Bad mark on school funding (SMH, 9/9/10)

An article in Monday's Herald about how connected learning communities are leading to student centred learning in Western Sydney public schools. Says the principal, ''It's shocked some of the teachers just how enthused some of the students have become".
And an article in today's Herald, with the big news of how little Australia spends on public education, and how much on private, in comparison with other countries.

Testing times

An interesting article in the NY Times talks about the value of assessment for learning. Not the formative assessment that Hattie talks about - giving feedback to the teacher on how their teaching is going, but just how doing the right kind of test can itself help the student to learn.