Turning Teaching Inside Out
“The real goal of teaching is to persuade students to initiate their internal learning processes.” — Robert Leamnson
The cognitive sciences contradict notions that the mind records like a camera and that learning is merely absorption. We know that the mind builds mental constructions that order experience. The brain represents rather than records reality. Even sight is an act of construction and depends as much on brain processes as on the actual world it seeks to represent. Like an artist, the brain selects and seeks constancies to make up our images of the world. From sound and light waves, combined with previous models, it constructs information like "The cat is eating a mouse." And it creates knowledge like "Cats eat mice" that can be used later to predict and control.
Learning is an active process of making changes in the mind's representations by reasoning about the world -- not just taking it as it comes. Learning means breaking, making, and remolding connections in our brains. The physical structure of the brain and the inferred representations of the mind depend not only on innate processes, but also on prior experience and knowledge.
Everyone has a different brain configuration because everyone has a unique body of experience. Imagine a theory-driven robot that navigates the world by generating maps and acting upon them. When it fails -- hits something or careens off a curve -- it changes its internal maps until these become more accurate and useful, but never complete. Though our brains work like this, we aren't robots. This gives us an advantage: Learning gives us pleasure, just as eating, sleeping, or having sex.
What is Teaching?
Given this view of learning what is teaching? It can't be just telling. We can lecture until we are breathless, but unless students have some desire and relevant prior experience they will not learn. If we put enough pressure on them with grades and exams they will use their short-term memory enough to get high grades. The half-life of such “learning” is a few months at best. As long as we don't care about understanding or how students will use what we teach there are no problems.
Can we teach with our mouths shut? Can we replace the great man/woman teaching model for a great learner model? Can we move away from grand enactments of entertainment and enthusiasm to design and coach? These questions underline the difficulty of trying to teach more effectively and efficiently in the light of what we know about learning.
The teacher's goal is to get students to make the decision to learn. The teacher cannot learn for the student. The teacher's repetitions affect only the teacher. The teacher's expositions please only the speaker. But once students decide to learn the rest is not easy but it is doable. The teacher provides feedback, suggestions, resources, and exercises. The first part of the job is to design situations that persuade students to learn. The second part of the job is to provide students with the coaching and the resources they need to learn.
That is the teaching program of problem-based learning – persuade students to learn by offering compelling situations and provide them with the needed resources to formulate and solve problems. Teaching then becomes the design of learning situations with problems, goals, outcomes, and resources before class and an activity of coaching in class. The focus moves from super teachers, stunning in erudition and excitement, to classrooms of super learners astonishing in curiosity and enthusiasm.
In the words of Rosemary O'Leary “Turn it inside out: Focus on the students as great learners, not on yourself as a great teacher.”