Educators Must Take Responsibility
The school system is failing. There are some who recognize this, but like the Titanic heading for the iceberg, no one seems to know there is an iceberg that will sink us unless we turn in time. In the last half of the twentieth century, schools began to be run on popular theories instead of common sense. Constructivism, a focus on self-esteem, and a hurry-up mentality combined to make schools into pressure cookers where only the strong survive. In the cooking process, so many students have failed to succeed that there have been policies created to allow students to leave an institution with a “leaving certificate” instead of a graduation diploma. This post is about how this happened and how teachers and administrators can easily turn this sinking ship around. It starts with common sense.
Many students are giving up in school, simply because they have not had the chance to learn how to learn. They are expected to discover that by doing tasks and activities they often do not see the reason for. There are students out there who are simply never going to want a good education, and there are some no one can help because they refuse to listen. But as intelligent educators, we must try to ascertain which students are which. It is up to us educators to provide every tool for them to succeed. If the efforts are rebuffed, we can move on to the next student who needs and wants help. In the atmosphere created by the laisser faire theory of constructivism, students are handed the responsibility of making sure they themselves are learning. When they fail to learn, teachers conclude there is something wrong with the child. Diagnoses of learning disabilities have gone overboard, and I have also heard teachers complain that the parents are failing to teach their kids anything. They do not realize that their faulty beliefs about education, what they learned in teachers’ colleges, cannot succeed.
The system has been foisting our failure to help students onto them. But if the students are failing, and we blame them, whom can the students turn to for help? If they are unmotivated because they just cannot get anywhere in this school thing, where will they find motivation? Students cannot fix the system they are in! They cannot motivate themselves to learn something no one is offering! Only educators can fix the system by refusing to do those things that keep students in failing mode.
These actions are:
1. Refusing to hold back students who are failing to protect their self-esteem
The policy in modern schools is to keep a student moving through the system. Some believe that if a student fails to learn, it will damage his self-esteem to let him know he has failed. While it may be true that the student will not like to hear of his failure from someone else, it is silly to think that the student does not know he is failing to learn. Allowing a student to squeak through the system simply sets him or her up for failure when real life provides much harsher penalties for failure. Failure is part of life and learning how to handle that and move forward is an important part of education. If a student is failing, put him back to a place where he can succeed. Find out what he doesn’t know and give him another chance to learn it. Don’t keep passing him through, thinking that somehow you are protecting his self-esteem by allowing him to keep failing in the next grade. Many eventually leave school thinking they are not smart enough to learn. Others think they are able to get into college until they cannot pass the entrance tests and must take upgrading courses.
2. Expecting students to learn material in a day, a week, or six weeks
It may surprise you to know that In the past, students had an entire year of a subject. I was a baby-boomer, and this is how I learned, in depth and through lots of practice. By the end of one year, we had learned a lot of Math, for example, because we had time to practise and time to understand. Understanding usually comes a long time after the learning takes place. Think about something you “learned” and then finally “got” when you had to move on to something else. I meet students who must learn one chapter of Math each school day, practicing on one or two exercises and moving on to the next concept the following day. This does not allow the brain to process the new information, and at best, only a fraction of the material is actually learned. Let’s slow this train down. Let’s give kids time to absorb and own the material they are learning instead of hurrying them through school so they can become adults faster. Everyone has the same amount of time, but we are led think we are on some kind of cosmic time conveyor belt, and something is wrong if students do not graduate by a certain age. That is artificial and does not reflect reality.
3. Allowing theory to dictate how teachers teach
While there are some kids who thrive in a discovery learning sort of environment, there are many who thrive when they are told what they need to know, how to do what they need to do, and what they can do to succeed. This argument is about constructivism versus direct teaching methodology. The constructivist theory has full control right now. This means that students are supposed to get exposed to all sorts of things, and they get to choose how to learn and what to do to learn it. Very little is counted as wrong, because they believe that the student is discovering how to learn instead of being told what to learn. It makes teaching very difficult, because when students do not know how to learn something, teachers do not know how to deliver the lesson so they can learn. Again, exposing a student to information and not providing specific direction for why, how, and what to learn is leaving the students guessing.
The latest craze (I use that word deliberately) is called Inquiry Learning. It means that students are told to ask a question and then use resources to find the answer and write it up in a report. One of my students was told to find a good question to ask. I helped her choose a topic and we framed it into a question she could find answers to. At our next session, I was told her teacher had said it was not a good question, so she had to choose another. The disappointed student was confused and wondered why she was not allowed to research her own question. I could not answer her. Why would a teacher not provide a set of questions she had preapproved for students to investigate if that is what she wanted?
Direct teaching, on the other hand, delivers a lesson in a very linear fashion, essentially leading the student through the predetermined steps to arrive at the learning. This is seen by constructivists as restricting and boring, because the “creativity” is taken out of the lesson and is more teacher-directed than student-directed. However, nothing is more boring than sitting day after day in a classroom where you are not learning, and you do not know what to do to keep up with the teacher’s expectations.
Constructivism works well when students know what they are expected to discover. However, it works poorly for students who need direct instruction and for teachers who see that their students are not really discovering what they are supposed to learn. Learning happens in many ways, and creativity makes learning fun. However, if students do not know what they are supposed to learn specifically by directly telling them, they will not be able to succeed. Constructivist approaches can be fun and useful in Science, and sometimes in Math. It is fun to observe a phenomenon and share what you have found. But if students are left floating because they cannot or did not discover what was intended to be taught, then the teacher has failed.
Conclusion:
To reiterate, only educators can change the system. Students are simply caught in the web of schooling not of their own making. When they fail to become the predetermined students that others have decided they should be, they have no way of fixing their own inability. When they turn to educators and ask why they do not succeed, they are tested and labelled as ADHD, dyslexic, or on the spectrum of autism. They feel blamed, and they go away thinking they are failures because they do not understand. They drop out of school and find menial jobs or turn to crime to survive, angry at themselves and the system. It is high time educators stopped trying to outdo one another in covering up for the system and started taking responsibility for what we should set out to do — educate students.