Wednesday, June 07, 2006

The "Constant Sum Game" of Teaching

As I look back, I can see that the problem was simply a matter of falling prey to the same type of thinking that devours so many teachers. "How will I address my subject area standards if I allow students to simply 'explore'?" As so many teachers do, I was thinking if I reduced my "teaching" time that students wouldn't learn. I conceived of classroom time management as an economics problem, a constant sum game of time where I had the choice of either letting kids explore or teaching to the standards. Quite simply, it's not that simple.

The constant sum game is one in which the gains and losses of participants always add up to a constant, the constant sum. It's like sharing a pizza. If Mike cuts himself a huge slice, he leaves less for his friends to enjoy. It doesn't matter how you slice it in the constant sum game. The parts always have to add up to a complete pizza. So it goes with the thinking that teaching is a constant sum game. "The more time I allow students to explore, the less time I have to teach. There's only so much time (the constant sum) in the school day." Fortunately, the constant sum game of teaching is just that, a game. It's easy to quit playing and start a different sort of game, one in which it's possible for all participants to win.

The fact is, teaching and learning is not a tangible thing like a pizza, and it is rarely, if ever, a constant sum game of intellectual economics. I suspect that if it were, I would have never gone into teaching. When we teach/learn, information does not flow in a straight line from teacher to student, like water flows out of a faucet into a pitcher. This is what Paulo Friere points out so eloquently in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. What I found I needed to do was to fully adopt my intrinsic philosophy that I was a facilitator and a co-learner in my classroom, not a teacher in the traditional sense. Furthermore, I needed to define my own goals and my role as a facilitator more clearly, so I would have the freedom of mind to simply work with my students, rather than worrying about following a scripted lesson or whether I was addressing standards.

So I began to view my role in my classroom more as a resource person and as a general goal setter. I did not give up teaching in the traditional sense entirely; rather, I simply revised my thinking about why I was teaching in the first place. All teachers, traditional or non, teach because they want their students to be successful. I decided to take that quite literally as a motivation for me as I taught art concepts and techniques. Rather than taking a subject-centered approach and presenting, say, two-point perspective as "a concept you must learn as you study art," I presented it as one concept and one technique among many other spatial techniques in two-dimensional art that students could use to make satisfying and successful works of art. I began to see that, as the teacher/facilitator, I was more valuable to my students when I provided them with an array of art concepts and techniques (tools, if you will) that they could apply to their specific project goals as they saw fit. Contrast this to the "cookie cutter" approach where the art teacher provides one "tool" (two-point perspective) and demands that students fit their creativity to the constraints of that one tool to create a project.

This is where I find the whole contemporary notion of accountability in education to be a big, fat red herring. The dominant thinking is that standardized testing hold students and teachers accountable to a certain degree of excellence. Unfortunately, politicians, parents and way to many educators have, to use the vernacular, "dank the kool-aid" on this one. While I wouldn't go so far as to completely discount the value of testing, I would assert a different perspective, that just as testing sets standards and goals for students to reach, it also places limits on exactly where they reach and on how high they climb.

Think of it this way. When we attempt to quantify learning in terms of test scores and percentages, we are setting up a system that, by its very nature, places limits. Barring extra credit (which is a bogus idea in my view anyway), it's not possible to score better than 100%.

Now, think of this a slightly different way. An eighth grade student scores 100% on a comprehensive final exam in American history. That's a perfect score, right? Does that really mean that this very bright 8th grader has a "perfect" knowledge of all American history?

Maybe all of this is a semantics game--"100%," "perfect score," "standards," "accountability"--but here's the crucial point. External standards of accountability create a situation wherein we are training students to be externally motivated. We are teaching students that learning is a constant sum game, and it is not. It's as if we set an academic "pizza" in front of them, and when they've consumed it all, they're done. Study after study has proven that the best and most meaningful learning is the product of a student's intrinsic motivation. The best and most productive people in the workforce are those who are intrinsically motivated to do their jobs to the best of their ability. The question is whether we want students and workers to jump through hoops, to meet a standard, or to pursue their own learning and work with a sense of gusto. Should school and work merely be a matter of paperwork and accounting or should it be the sort of "optimal experience," where intrinsic motivation, engagement, focus and meaning are at their pinnacle?

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