What Do We Want Our Students to Learn from Classroom Experience?

The following cited paragraphs from the book How People Learn include an interesting discussion of the question :

What do we want our children to learn from classroom experience?

Memorizing the facts and theories, or learn how to solve the problem, or even transfer the skills learned in the classroom to other fields?

In other words, do we teach students by giving them fish (like what Teacher A does), or by showing them how to fish (like what Teacher B does), or even helping them to transfer the fishing skills to later life experience (like what Teacher C does)?

-----Original Paragraph from the Book----

Imagine three teachers whose practices affect whether students learn to take control of their own learning.

• Teacher A’s goal is to get the students to produce work; this is accomplished by supervising and overseeing the quantity and quality of the work done by the students. The focus is on activities, which could be anything from old-style workbook activities to the trendies of space-age projects.

• Teacher B assumes responsibility for what the students are learning as they carry out their activities.

• Teacher C does this as well, but with the added objective of continually turning more of the learning process over to the students.

Walking into a classroom, you cannot immediately tell these three kinds of teachers apart. One of the things you might see is the students working in groups to produce videos or multimedia presentation.  The teacher is likely to be found going from group to group, checking how things are going and responding to requests.

Over the course of a few days, however, differences between Teacher A and Teacher B would become evidence. Teacher A’s focus is entirely on the production process and its products – whether the students are engaged, whether everyone is getting fair treatment,  and whether they are turning out good pieces of work. Teacher B attends to all of this as well, but Teacher B is also attending to what the students are learning from the experience and is taking steps to ensure that the students are processing content and not just dealing with show.

To see a difference between Teachers B and C, however, you might need to go back into the history of the media production project. What brought it about in the first place? Was it conceived from the starts as a learning activity, or did it emerge from the students’ own knowledge building efforts? In one striking example of a Teacher C classroom, the student had been studying cockroaches and had learned so much from their reading and observation that they wanted to share it with the rest of the school: the production of a video came about to achieve that purpose.

The difference in hat might seem to be the same learning activity are thus profound. In Teacher A’s classroom, the students are learning something of media production, but the media production may very well be getting in the way of learning anything else. In Teacher B’s classroom, the teacher is working to ensure that the original educational purposes of the exercise. In Teacher C’s classroom, the media production is continuous with and a direct outgrowth of the learning that is embodied in the media production. The greater part of Teacher C’s work has been done before that idea of a media production even comes up, and it remains only to help the students keep sight of their purposes as they carry out the project.