A Classroom of Individuals or a Group of Learners?

For all the years I have spent in education, I still find the process of teaching and learning amazingly complex. I worry a great deal about those who are trying to quantify education today with test scores and who want to use degree-based concepts, paper credentials, to call a teacher highly qualified.

ThereforeI read with great interest Martin Haberman’s recent explanation of learning in his article, “The Source and Nature of Best Practice in Teaching.” A columnist and Board advisor to EdNews.org, Haberman begins his article with a specific definition, “learning is changed behavior.”

Notice he doesn’t suggest knowledge acquisition, concept mastery, or some other phrase. Haberman defines learning as changed behavior.

The major premise of Haberman’s piece is the notion that schools of education are using the wrong field of study as they work with new teachers.

Psychology or Sociology

The University of Wisconsin Distinguished Professor suggests that the theory of learning that is being taught to prospective teachers comes primarily from the field of psychology. He insists that this is a major mistake that costs children access to the best teaching available.

Haberman stipulates:
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“We have a solid and expanding body of knowledge regarding how people learn from the field of psychology. The problem is that psychology tells us how individuals learn. If we want to know how groups of people learn we must turn to sociology and anthropology or to biology and chemistry but then we may no longer speak of ‘learning’ we speak of ‘socialization’ in the case of the social sciences, or ‘growth’ in the case of the physical sciences.

“There are at least a dozen fields of scholarly discipline that explain causes for changed behavior. Unfortunately for teacher education as a field of inquiry and for teachers of children and youth, education scholars make one discipline the premier explanation for understanding the causes of changed behavior. Other equally or more relevant academic disciplines for explaining changed behavior in schools are marginalized to a secondary, supplementary and less functional role in explaining and predicting learning.”

And in a scathing rebuke of the current system of education, he writes:

“Schools are places organized on the bizarre expectation that groups of children and youth of the same age “learn” at roughly the same rate and in the same ways. Schools organized on the basis of age-grades are an American cultural and historic phenomenon that have not only survived but thrived……..Schools reflect what America wants not what America needs.”

Current Push to Individualize in the Classroom
Haberman’s thoughts are very enlightening and likely obvious to anyone who has taught. Training is indeed focused upon how an individual learns. However, I was immediately taken by the notion that one of the big pushes in education today is to individualize learning in the classroom. In other words, that latest push is counter to what Haberman suggests. The push to individualize is to move away from the notion of using socialization and growth as methods to foster greater learning in a classroom.

Haberman, believed to have developed more teacher education programs to prepare teachers to work with children in poverty than anyone in American education, is clearly correct. There have been many years where I have taught a classroom full of students and accomplished a great deal more than in other years. There have been times when I have had the good fortune to teach an entire group that is hungry for learning, students who interact with one another in a way that one question feeds off another question, etc., leading to a greater understanding of the material and of each other. In other words, there is growth in many more ways than simply thinking about learning as acquisition of knowledge or mastery of concepts.

I have also had those years where it is a struggle to bring that dynamic to the classroom. And when that dynamic is missing, the learning is simply not as great. Though I desperately tried to improve that dynamic, my teacher toolbox was not filled with a multitude of ways to improve that aspect. Ironically, the students often produced materials that were roughly similar, but the intangible, the idea of personal student growth was simply not a significant part of the end product.