[This weblog entry is written to allow further work on the question about how we might be 'blind' to dysfunctional learning environments.]
What might be inconceivable to workers in other workspaces is that the essentials of a classroom are pretty unsupervised, pretty wideopen. That is,absent complaints, absent excessive referrals of students to the office, absent 'the appearance of chaose' when a supervisor glances through the window, somewhere, that allows visual review without entry, absent all of those things -- what a teacher does is up to him/her.
If he/she works to contract, he/she keeps the job. And, the contract does not refer to any specifics re amount of learning derived by learners. In fact, there is NEVER any requirement for any degree of learning nor is there any consequence for low learning, bad learning, no learning. In each of these cases this is because there are no tests of student learning that are part of a teacher's reward /disincentive package.
Having 'been there' for 37 years, as tutor, teacher, professor, supervisor and consultant I know directly how little can be done. I also know how rare a find is the 'great' and how unusual even the 'good' teacher is.
It is with this personal background that I credential my mental experiment(maybe plural ) in 'minimal delivery' classrooms. Ones in which both the students and teacher's aims are to get through the day and to 'get along' [i.e., not have any frightening or disrespecting confrontations]. During 'get along' days a most days hav the textbook, the workbook and teacheer explanation as the common learning elements.
Experiment 1- Is the 'March through the textbook' experiment. Take a class of 15-25 students chapter by chapter, day by day, through a textbook over the course of a year and determine what the learning effects might be.
[---Big Pause for Teaching Summer School---
As best as I can recollect we're addresing the question -- What happens when the textbook and teacher and students interact in what I am calling the 'normal' , my 'presumed average', way--]
We have text teacher and students... all wishing to get along, teacher 'knowing' that her/his job, and peace of mind, riddes on 'order' and students wanting friends, to please and perhaps to be raised up over pears or at least to avoid embarassment.
Let's add to that the textbook. It's been chosen by a purchasing committee and designed/written by a publishing house, to provide a sequential delivery of ideas (science, arithmetic, history, social studies, biochemistry etc,etc). It will have probably been purchased because it not only provides what appear to be interesting and sequetnial presentation of ideqs but also workbook materials that allow students to do follo2-up work at home (homework) and in their seats (seatwork).
Normal class day? Teacher explains or lectures with a particular chapter in the text as a reference. There is some form of question and answer discussion, there is seatwork and the period is over. In a typical weak there may be two or more homework assignments and perhaps a test.
[I was about to explain failure to learn... but we better try to understand success first]
How does a student succeed in this situation? He/she stays out of trouble, is polite to other students and the teacher and does well on seatwork and homework. Success will also have to include doing well on tests. (Answering 8 or more of every question asked correctly).. Let's call this success.. it's getting an A or B or Good or Excellent on a report card.
What allows this kind of success? Well, for starters, ability to comprehend the teacher's spoiken work (text explanations, directions, commands), an ability to respond in the same language in an approrpriate [and polite] fashion. Plus, quite importantly, being 'within reach' of the text and teacher broadcasts-- sufficiently so to produce responses which are deemed responsive. Let's add that success is achieved in many classrooms by those who have already mastered the material. For them a success is produced by using prior learning to generate the expected behavior.
Thus we have a significant proportion responding appropriately. A real proporition showing responses which are unresponsive. The degree to which the teacher is 'cause' of learning is relatively minor-- partly because student responsiveness can only occasionally be explained based upon teacher behavior as a cause.
In short. It's too easy to explain the success that happens in the classroom as a product of past history, social compliance or responsiveness, and of a roughly successful use of a textbook. The most powerful potential cause of learning in the classroom is not being evaluated, trained, supported or paid in response to any kind of analysis of her/his instructional influence. Our conclusion has to be, for lack of evidence to the contrary, that the average teacher is primarily an under- or dys functional support system for learning.
