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CHAPTER 1
THE THEORIES THAT HAVE LED US ASTRAY
My first teaching position was in a very affluent neighborhood in the suburbs outside New York City. Typically teachers roughed it out for years in urban public schools, trying to gain enough credentials to land such a position. For me this was the result of a mistake. I hadn't realized that, after graduating with a teaching degree, I should have gone into the Board of Education pool with other new teachers seeking jobs within New York City. Had I done so, I would have been "matched" and placed in a vacant position at a random public school. Instead I scoured through the education section of the New York Times every Wednesday and applied to every English position I found listed.
So there I was, standing in my brand-new classroom with a crisp, clean copy of the new teacher manual. During the first English department meeting I attended, I was given a tried-and-true curriculum guide, compiled by the department head over years of teaching high school students. All I had to do, I was told, was choose from an approved list the books that I would read with my class, then pull those books from the department storage room.
Upon entering the storage room, I was greeted with rows and rows of shiny new books. I quickly envisioned myself standing in the front of my classroom, book in hand, reciting line after line from Shakespeare as students absorbed every word. I would be like a conductor bringing forth and organizing the beautiful music created by past masters. The results would be magical: as my audience, the students, heard this masterpiece, their minds would travel to previously unknown worlds for them to explore. I wanted nothing more than to share with students the way I understood Shakespeare. I was certain that I could get them to love the works by seeing them the way that I did. Surely, I thought, their apathy was the result of disinterested grown-ups. I wanted them to really learn, as opposed to just regurgitating facts.
The senior teachers cautioned me against using too much passion in my classroom: "Just read the books, ask them questions of comprehension, and have them write essays to prove that they've learned the appropriate theme of the book." If I could do that while also convincing students to love the literature, I thought, then I was being a great teacher. After all, I was the one holding all the knowledge, right? I just needed to ignite my students' passions to free them of the shackles affixed by past teachers and experiences. My goal was to give all of my knowledge to my not-yet-hungry students. I was sure the key to success was simply to motivate them to a point where they were so excited to receive the knowledge that they would ask for it — thirst for it, even.
I often try to make myself feel better by remembering that this definition of teaching has been around for at least fifty years. These erroneous assumptions of best teaching practices have led us astray when we train our teachers, establish expectations, and design schools, testing, and curricula. To be blunt, our current models of teaching are outdated and unsophisticated. Their deterministic and rigid criteria stand in the way of fully integrating current research from the learning sciences and what we know of how the brain works.
As counterintuitive as it may seem, there is quite a bit of evidence that we have structured our system of education on animal behavior experiments, utilizing definitions of how animals teach.
PAVLOV, PIED BABBLERS, AND PUNISHMENT
One of the most common assumptions about teaching comes out of behaviorist research on learning. The behaviorist view of learning is one in which learners are seen as empty vessels, ready to be filled with knowledge. In their view learning is an additive process where information is held by experts and given to naive learners who are otherwise a blank slate. Pavlov is perhaps most notable for his contribution to the foundation upon which behaviorist learning theories are built. His studies detailed how animals react to stimuli in response to the environment around them. We all know of the classic experiment involving Pavlov's dogs, who learned to expect food every time they heard the sound of a bell ring. Once the dogs learned that the bell meant food, Pavlov could watch the dogs salivate each time he rang the bell.
Psychologist John B. Watson saw great potential in Pavlov's design and decided that this method of stimulus response could tell him quite a bit about human learning. He believed that people learned due to continued experience with different stimuli in their environment. Learning was considered a conditioned response, and in his view anyone could be conditioned to have a certain response. Once a behavior was learned, it could be adapted based on changes in the environment. Watson believed that understanding the range of human behaviors was the key to understanding learning.
To be clear, it's quite possible for a person to be trained to react a certain way. Even if you know you'll be sorely disappointed with the outcome, you might still feel compelled to buy a Subway sandwich when you get a whiff of that bread aroma while walking down the street. This reaction is not mediated by logic flowing through your mind. It's just a reaction that you've been trained to follow — your free will basically takes a step back.
B.F. Skinner drew on this concept to design a system that he felt would guarantee preferred behavior. He believed that one could use rewards and punishment to influence behavior and learning, and his model of operant conditioning claimed that the mind, or one's thoughts and beliefs, were not relevant factors in decision making. All processes, he argued, were the result of either a reward or punishment received at the end of a task, not the product of free will.
These concepts were an important influence in the way behaviorists viewed teaching. Their definition of teaching was based on what could be observed. In the behaviorist view, teaching is an act where the teacher changes his or her behavior to aid a naive student in acquiring knowledge or skills. Let's take a common example from the animal kingdom.
Pied babblers are birds who use special calls to lure their young away from danger. The training begins young, when the birds are first learning to eat. The mother bird makes this special call, and each time she calls, she then feeds her baby. It's very Pavlovian: over time the young bird learns that when he hears the call, he gets food. When they are old enough to leave the nest, the mother bird can use this special call to keep her young away from dangerous situations. Granted, she ends up expending a lot of energy and food to solidify these life lessons, but the outcome can be lifesaving.
This definition of teaching makes perfect sense in conjunction with the behaviorist view of learning. Throughout the interaction the teacher is providing the student with feedback, and as a result, the students have learned the knowledge or skill more effectively than they would have had they not had the interaction. Note that this type of interaction yields no direct benefit to the teacher. In fact, the mother bird could very well go hungry for a few days while her offspring are first learning the call. However, think of the benefit that does exist. This is how humans and animals learn to catch food, locate watering holes, and in general survive. This logic, if oversimplified or misapplied, could easily lead to the conclusion that being a selfless teacher is just something we all have to do. This bird example is actually quite popular among biologists, who argue that animals, just like humans, can teach and that they do so in the same way as we humans. Some researchers argue that teaching in fact evolved independently of learning and is therefore able to be observed and quantitatively tested.
In this frame, teaching looks something like this: the mother bird and baby bird are cooperating, and we can see from their behavior that the payoff is dependent on the response. That is, in order to receive food, the baby must come running (or flying) when it hears the special call, otherwise it will starve. And the mother must issue the appropriate call when there is food to be had. The whole interaction functions purely to facilitate learning in the young bird. The donor (the mother bird, who has absolute knowledge and power) gives information to the receiver. The mother bird gathers the food and chooses when and where to release it. The sole beneficiary of the teaching is the baby bird, for presumably this is the only way the baby will learn how to eat and to be part of the pied babbler community. This is how adults within a community teach the young both to survive and to participate in the culture. It's a necessary part of building organized societies.
A CLOSER LOOK AT BEHAVIORIST VIEWS OF TEACHING
Skinner's suggestions for improving teaching followed this animal model. Skinner believed that humans and animals were cut from the same cloth. He thought that teaching could be completed utilizing a stimulus response, meaning that teachers could input or transmit information to students, not unlike pouring juice into a glass or filling up a bowl with rice, and the students would learn the information, supposedly because they were being given positive rewards to do so. To prove his theory, Skinner designed a teaching machine, which modeled how he thought the interaction should occur. The machine was programmed to give students a list of questions to respond to and to reward correct answers. The machine provided students with immediate personalized feedback and new questions based on their responses, led students through correcting their errors, and automatically adjusted to the pace and level of assistance required by the learner. Skinner believed this individualized instruction guaranteed that students would pay attention and remain motivated. Teaching machines were thought to be useful in teaching actual content, self-management, and decision making. In the ensuing decades, computer-assisted instruction such as this became a driving force in the programmed-instruction movement. Companies such as IBM partnered with universities including Stanford to design computer-assisted instructional systems to teach an entire class of students.
The history of the behaviorist view of learning matters because it developed into a widely accepted view of teaching that, along with other threads in the history of learning and teaching, still hold considerable sway over how we make educational decisions today, even as our understanding of learning has undergone a profound shift over time, from a unidimensional view of a learner being filled with knowledge to a recognition of the learner's brain as a dynamic, context-dependent system. The transmission model of learning takes many forms. It is most easily viewed by looking at behaviorist frameworks, most significant among them the work of Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner. In a nutshell, these behaviorists argued that learning was the product of either positive or negative reinforcement of a response to a stimulus. Skinner took the concept of tabula rasa one step further to create the doctrine of the empty organism, which postulates that a person is like "a vessel to be filled by carefully designed experiences."
In contrast to the behaviorists, cognitive theorists viewed learning as the acquisition or reorganization of mental structures through which humans process and store information. Piaget was the first to systematically study and develop principles of human cognitive development and learning. Founded on these principles was the belief that learners construct knowledge from their experiences. Adding to this foundation, Vygotsky's theory of social cognition further argued that learners develop while interacting with their world. Utilizing these principles as well as those of the constructivists, including Dewey, Montessori, and Kolb, who believed that children learn most effectively when they are given opportunities to co-create knowledge, Kurt Fischer and others drew inspiration from dynamic systems and extended cognitive theories by developing a flexible model of how the learning brain develops from birth through adulthood. This theory posited that the learner's brain is a complex, dynamic system. Therefore the development of learning does not follow a linear pattern. Instead, there are learning spurts that are due to shifts in context and level of support.
This concept of cognitive development is called dynamic skill theory (which you will read more about in chapter 3) and is increasingly being substantiated on a neurologic level by new studies of the learning brain that use brain imaging and other technologies to identify the neural processes and pathways through which learning develops over time. This integrated approach of complex, dynamic cognitive theoretical frameworks and neurologic mapping of learning pathways is the foundation of the popular modern view of brain-based learning. Still, behaviorist principles are alive and well in our everyday educational lives — they drive state-mandated exams, charter schools that rely on "no excuse" cultures, incentivized teaching models, and several other current education reform policies. While the next chapter will go into greater detail on how this model plays out in classrooms today, let's review quickly what behaviorist theory, drawing primarily from animal behavior studies, sees as the three main aspects of teaching:
1. A cooperative donor-receiver behavior. The teacher purposely alters his or her behavior in the presence of the student in order to facilitate learning.
2. Teaching is a selfless act. It comes at a cost to the teacher, who does not directly benefit from the interaction.
3. The interaction allows a student to learn efficiently. A student learning on his or her own would learn less efficiently.
There are a number of problematic repercussions to the underlying assumptions inherent in these three characteristics of behaviorist teaching. This definition of teaching is firmly rooted in animal studies on learning, and no proven, obvious, or sensible reason exists for applying it to humans, let alone for using it to design entire school systems. And humans' ability to read and respond to the body language of others, which is something that takes place in a teaching interaction, is beyond the abilities of other animals that have been seen to teach.
Even though the behaviorist model of input-output comes up short in describing the broad range of the teaching skill, that's not to say that it is entirely wrong. I am not so bold as to fly in the face of a wealth of significant research in this area. The point is that these Skinner-esque models of teaching are a mere sliver of the range of teaching that is capable by humans. The cognitive processing required to produce the teaching output we see in behaviorist models is quite low.
Yet many researchers, economists, and policy makers continue their attachment to this basic definition, which makes teaching into a largely functional endeavor. They do so primarily because it provides testable criteria by which to measure learning and therefore (by their estimation) teaching. While this input-output model offers a clean and linear framework to understand and assess teaching and learning, it is harmfully oversimplified.
THE PROBLEM WITH THE EMPTY-VESSEL THEORY OF LEARNING
Indeed, there is a problem with treating learners as mere empty vessels. Pouring knowledge into the passively receptive head of a student leaves the student to conceive of knowledge as something that already exists, rather than something that is created or co-constructed. In this scenario, the teacher is little more than a learning tool, transferring knowledge from one vessel (the teacher) to another (the student). This is precisely why Skinner believed that a teaching machine could do the job of a classroom teacher. The machine was programmed to enact the behavior of a knowledge expert transmitting information to the naive student and offering feedback in the form of rewards and punishment on the student's answers, voilà! — a ready-made teacher. Recall that Skinner was one of the first to suggest that a teacher could be something other than a human. In his model and that of other behaviorist believers, a teacher could be a television, a computer program, or even an ant. A teacher is anything that causes you to learn. This is of course a summarized explanation, but that's the gist.
The behaviorists are not the only researchers who hold an empty-vessel view of learning. Over the years, many pedagogical approaches — that is, theories of teaching — have been premised on a similar view: that novice learners obtain knowledge through interaction with their expert teachers. If teachers are merely learning tools, then it follows that they too just need to be filled with any information necessary for the learner to acquire knowledge. It is this definition that ignited the current excitement for new modes of technology-based "teaching" (via the Internet, computers, and TV). Learning tools that are programmable, and ostensibly more reliable because of their lack of human error, are in many cases cheaper knowledge transmitters. Initially that might seem like a great relief — we don't need more money or more teachers to improve schools; we just need machines. Unfortunately, any definition of teaching that is premised on learners being empty vessels and teachers being mere transmitters of knowledge and information fails to take account of the latest discoveries in the learning sciences.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Teaching Brain"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Vanessa Rodriguez and Michelle Fitzpatrick.
Excerpted by permission of The New Press.
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