Current Views and Practices

How do they undermine teaching and learning as complex systems?

The following are a few common practices and some of the assumptions that underlie them.

Classroom “Management”

• Children are to be controlled and manipulated.
• Teachers are in control.
• Learning requires that children are “in control.”
• Most approaches are based on Pavlovian behaviorism, where emotions and cognition are considered irrelevant.

Teacher-Proof Curriculum

• Teachers are not professionals, but rather are technicians.
• Learning is in the control of remote others.
• Learning is static.
• Learning is a standardized, linear process.

Curriculum Mapping

• Sequence and focus of curriculum needs to be predetermined.
• Subject matter content is determined by teacher and others.
• The “map” is the “territory” (where we think that reality is the knowledge learned, rather than seeing knowledge as an idiosyncratic representation of reality).
• Learning is and should be the same for all students.

Lesson Plans

• Sequence and focus of teaching is predetermined.
• Learning is determined by teacher.
• “Bits” of information can be taught as isolated segment.
• Dismisses the spontaneity, recursiveness, and multidimensional nature of learning.

Learning Objectives

• All learning can be measured (A common problem involving a belief that certain phenomena or "things" can be measured that have no dimensions, quantities, or substance. Learning is a prime example).
• All learning can be observed. (We only can see indications or markers of learning, much like the tip of an iceberg.)
• Learning is predictable. (Learning is a complex phenomenon that undergoes continuous change. As a complex phenomenon, we cannot predict how learning will occur in any individual and certainly not across multiple individuals.)

Content Standards

• What is “good” for one student is “good” for all students.
• Some “content” is more important than other “content” & this content is determined by a relatively small group of people. In the case of the Common Core, most of the individuals involved in creating these standards had no subject matter training or training and experience in teaching.
• What is to be learned is age-dependent ⇒ learning capabilities are standardized, linear, and restrictive progressions. (As Jerome Bruner has suggested, children are capable of learning almost anything given the appropriate experiences.)

Learning occurs from Concrete to Abstract

• Learning is a linear progression from simple to complex or abstract. (This assumption makes some kind of naive sense. Children often move from abstraction to simplicity in their learning and sense-making.)
• Learning simple, concrete ideas is “easier” than more complex and abstract ideas. (More complicated and abstract ideas often provided the meaning and relevance that stimulate children's learning.)

Tests & (most) Assessment Practices

• Learning is measurable. (See above…)
• Discrete bits of information about what has or has not been learned are indicative of a student’s understanding.
• Assessment of learning has to be done by someone other than the learner.
• Students are incapable of self- and peer-evaluation.
• Assumes students are not (and are probably incapable of being) aware of their own learning.
• Learning is contained purely within an individual (much, if not most, learning is social and distributed among individuals.)

Grading

• The teacher is in control.
• Learning is discretely measurable.
• Learning can be evaluated on an abstract scale.

Homework (as typically practiced)

• Assumes learning is a process of simple repetition and practice.
• Assumes learning is devoid of context.

Drill & Practice

• Assumes learning can be achieved by simple repetitive cycles.
• Assumes learning is simple rote memory.

Student Achievement

• Learning is a level of performance that can be measured.
• “Achievement” is confusing a piece of the “map” with the whole “map” and with the “territory.”
• Confuses “achievement” with learning (one can achieve or score highly on a test without significant learning).

Student Achievement as Measure of Teacher Effectiveness

• Achievement is not necessarily learning.
• Assumes student learning is entirely due to “effectiveness” of teacher.
• Assumes that student learning is only affected by teacher and what takes place in classroom.
• Assumes students have no responsibility for their own learning.
• Assumes that other factors do not affect learning, such as family life, everyday life contexts that are outside of family and school, etc.

Time On Task

• Assumes that learning only occurs while focused on a task.
• Assumes that children can be totally focused on a task, while no adult is ever totally “on task” while at work.
• Assumes that “time off task” is a waste of time, even though creativity, insight, and solutions to problems often occur while “off task.”

Time Limited Tasks (including tests)

• Assumes learning can be accomplished during discrete periods of time.
• Assumes that all students can learn at the same rate.
• Assumes that learning has discrete limits in depth, extent, and abstraction.

Adherence to State Standards

• Most literature have statements about adhering to state standards for all teaching activity & have statements about promoting connections to student prior knowledge, curiosity, and their everyday lives. However, these two statements are contradictory - if you truly promote connections to student prior knowledge, their lives, and their curiosity, you will have to deviate from state standards.

Teachers Teach

• Teachers are in control of student learning.
• Assumes that someone “can teach” someone else and ignores learning as an integrative process that occurs within an individual and among individuals.

Learning Progressions

• Assumes learning is linear.
• Assumes that learning progresses through the same sequence.
• Assumes that learning processes are standardized across all individuals.
• Assumes learning follows a linear pathway from simple to complex (abstract).

“Teachable Moments”

• Assumes that learning occurs around specific and discrete “meaningful” events, as opposed to learning that occurs as helices in time and space.
• Assumes that someone other than the learner(s) must be responsible for recognizing opportunities to learn.
• Does not recognize such moments as possible points of departure or emergence from existing learning helices (but are seen as discrete, fragmented, and disconnected moments).

Scaffolding

• Although seen as helical, scaffolding assumes a certain sequential linearity to conceptual learning.

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Much of what we do in the name of schooling revolves around the notion of “control”:
— controlling students, controlling teachers, controlling knowledge —

Linearity and working towards equilibrium are manifestations of our attempts to solidify & control our worlds, our children, and ourselves.

Positivism, mechanism, reductionism, functionalism, and egotism are traps of solidification & control.

Complexification of Learning requires a shift in our worldview that sees learning as a continual process of engaging with a variety of “worlds” (our physical and biological worlds, our social worlds, our worlds of ideas and emotions) in ways where the barriers between self & others and self & worlds begin to dissolve and where control is distributed & shared.

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© 2010 Jeffrey W. Bloom

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