Over the weekend I annoyed some friends when I let the air out of their discussion of the awesomeness of learning styles. It seems they weren’t psyched when I pointed out that research has largely debunked learning styles and has shown that such style may be detrimental to students. Yet the whole learning style trend still exists in pockets of various communities and comes up at parent/teacher conferences from time to time. After apologizing for dampening the mood I went for a jog and started thinking to avoid the pain.
In education we often find ourselves fighting, or at least spectating, at the grudge match between research and practice. If you teach even for a brief period of time you will find yourself staring at this unfortunate Catch 22. Teachers constantly wrestle with “damned if you, damned if you don’t” situations. Lately my feeds have filled up with science of reading and math articles and articles lamenting how schools teach things all wrong or how teachers don’t practice up to date methodologies. Oddly enough I find myself agreeing with and lamenting such press.
This article delves into how teachers, schools, and parents fail to support efforts to infuse up to date teaching methods based on established research in various subjects. The reality of using up to date research methodologies is that many schools do not support such efforts until they have to and parents don’t support such efforts when the methods seem unfamiliar or different from what they know or expect school to look like (hello new math, Common Core, etc.). For this article, I have organized the locus of concern into broad categories: The Customer Is Not Always Right and Same As It Ever Was.
The Customer Is Not Always Right
Parents tend to know their kids pretty well (for the most part). Yet their knowledge or understanding of their kid tends to be limited or biased. Students spend the majority of their youth at school. As a result, teachers interact with and get to know way more about individual students than their parents. Yet parents like to tell teachers what their kid needs or how to teach them more effectively. Sometimes this happens as a productive conversation or as part of a team effort. However, more and more parents treat teachers as the help and demand change.
When schools introduce new teaching methods, parents rarely embrace these changes. Sure schools can always communicate more effectively, but even when they do well to let grown ups know, the school community recoils from these changes. Soon enough a group of confused grown ups, unsure of what’s going on, demand things go back to the way they were. As a result, updating teaching methods rarely evolve.
Same As It Ever Was
There are no bad teachers, just bad administrations? Ha, I wish that was true. Schools and teachers share a good chunk of the blame. Our society likes to blame teachers for whatever problems schools have. Everybody likes to tell teachers how to do their job and teachers can always improve.
Unfortunately, teachers have a role in this problem. Let’s focus that blame on three interconnected areas - control issues, complacency, and status quo cultures. First, quite a few teachers have control issues. They like to control what, when, and how things go in their classrooms. They also don’t like to be told what to do. Many veterans tell themselves they reached the height of their craft and there is no need to change. This bleeds into the fact that the day to day reality of teaching overwhelms individual teachers.. So when an admin announces something new, the response is rarely overwhelmingly positive. Doing something new threatens their control by putting them into the learner role. Uncertainty breeds contempt for change. This leads to the complacency of teachers. Yes, teaching is hard. Yet too many teachers do the exact same thing, the exact same way for years and maybe decades. Sameness makes teaching easier, but that complacency prevents students from having access to updated methods or strategies and perhaps more meaningful curriculum. Last, the teachers at some schools often cultivate and protect their status quo communities. When young and/new teachers arrive fresh from university eager to make a difference the veteran teachers tend to squash their enthusiasm and ridicule their new fangled ideas. This is why many new teachers avoid the teachers lounge and feel isolated in the workplace. New principals often battle this as well. The resistance admin face may however be couched in tenure and union protections. At least the admin gets paid a living wage…
What Next?
There’s plenty of blame to go around. Yet, assigning blame doesn’t solve the underlying problems. Each of the constituencies within school can work to make things better for the benefit of their students.
So how do we move beyond this? No easy answers present themselves. Guess that’s the thing about Catch 22s. Parents need to trust and treat teachers like professionals. Teachers need to act like and treat their craft as a profession. Schools need to seek and support the best teaching strategies, not just the easiest to implement and not just when someone forces them to shift gears. Teachers would benefit from adopting a learning mindset in order to constantly evolve and reshape their teaching practice. No easy path forward but it is critical that educators confront these difficulties. Otherwise I’m sure there is some technology waiting to take our jobs.