Also, when workshop participants are asked what assumptions and principles about how people learn were part of Mr. Miyagi’s style, the following are popular responses:
• People learn by doing.
• They learn by repeating basic skills on different tasks.
• Individuals learn by transferring skills from one task to another.
• People learn by having to discipline themselves to accomplish goals they may not completely understand at the time.
• We learn through a process of self-discovery the knowledge and skills that ultimately will be important to us.
In effect, there was an implicit conceptual base associated with Mr. Miyagi’s teaching style. The strategies and methods employed did not exist in isolation from principles and ideas about how people learn. And perhaps what is most important here, he undoubtedly chooses a style of teaching that would maximize the use of the above principles.
Beyond Pedagogy
Developing a teaching style is not about selecting particular methods from a bag of teaching tricks. Our teaching styles, like scholarship, should be based upon a conceptual base that forms our philosophy of teaching. This philosophy of teaching acts like a roadmap and helps to guide our thoughts, behaviors, the selection of particular instructional techniques, and our general outlook on who we are and what we want to become as teachers. Without an explicit philosophy of teaching, our teaching styles are intellectually hollow.
The content that we teach in our disciplines is intellectually rich. It is often based on scholarly research and inquiry and typically has an underlying philosophical, theoretical, and empirical base. The facts and ideas we teach are not pulled out of a hat. Those we choose to present also are not selected randomly. Typically, there is a broader point or theme that individual pieces of information play an important role in developing. In effect, our content has an intellectual history that can be unpacked and displayed for all to see.
The selection of particular teaching methods is often not as well developed. When college faculty were asked in workshop settings and interviews about what influenced the methods of teaching they employed, a number of diverse responses were given.
The most frequently cited reasons are listed in Table 3-1.
In the responses shown in Table 3-1, there is a focus on methods and a relative absence of how the methods relate to theories, principles, and accepted assumptions about the teaching learning process. Beliefs about such things are largely absent from the rationale given for using particular teaching techniques. In my experience, only a small minority of faculty list conceptual issues or a systematic philosophy of teaching as a justification for their instructional processes.
• I’m a [Rogerian, Behaviorist, Psychodynamic oriented person,
Cognitive scientist, etc., ] and teach accordingly.
• I’m from the old school and use traditional methods because I’ve never learned how to do it any other way.
• I’m not sure, I guess I just tried a few things along the way and eventually drifted into this way of teaching.
The Instructional Method Bias
This focus on disembodied teaching methods is a pervasive bias in higher education. When asked to visit a campus to conduct a workshop or seminar, I am frequently asked to “make sure you tell us about some of your favorite teaching methods.” When colleagues meet to discuss their classes, the discussion typically focuses on how well aspects of one’s lecture, discussion process, role plays, or other “methods” were executed. And, when materials are assembled for promotion, reappointment, and tenure, a syllabus is often requested along with evaluations of one’s teaching. What the latter emphasize are the methods employed and how well others think they were executed.
Historically, people who were perceived as “purveyors of pedagogy” were second class citizens in higher education. Teachers, instructional consultants, educators and others in the latter categories were perceived as only dealing in “technique and method.” This was not scholarship and inquiry as practiced in what one person told me were “more advanced disciplines.” Another said, “pedagogy lacks intellectual substance. It’s about technique and nothing more.” “What is often implied is that such knowledge is less complex, less understandable, and less amenable to scientific study” [Berliner, 1986, p. 13]. What is forgotten is that expertise in teaching as in anything else involves domain-specific knowledge.
It can and is studied scientifically! Because it involves practical knowledge, however, it is placed lower in the hierarchy of importance by those pursuing in their minds higher and more complex interests [Berliner, 1986].
Table 3-1
Most Frequently Cited Reasons Faculty Give For Adopting Teaching Methods
• My experiences as a student.
• How I think my colleagues and/or students expect me to teach.
• The goals that I have as a teacher.
• How I taught the course the last time I taught it.
• What I think will help me present the information best.
• Ideas I picked up talking about teaching with colleagues.
• How people I admired as teachers conducted their classes.
• Techniques I learned about reading a book or article on teaching.
• Processes I learned about attending a workshop on teaching.
• My ideas about how to best facilitate learning.
• Ideas from the research literature on teaching and learning.
• Processes my professional organization wants us to use more often.
• I’m a Rogerian, Behaviorist, Psychodynamic oriented person,
I also vividly remember early in my career an encounter with this bias in a meeting with a former provost of my university. He was a conservative individual who found it difficult to understand how faculty within a discipline could learn anything useful about teaching from anyone outside of the discipline. His idea of faculty development was to pair a new faculty member with an experienced one in the tradition of the apprentice model. He never did this, of course, he only thought it was a good idea.
After describing his apprentice model, he said to me, “You see Grasha, you deal in Ped—A—Go—Gy.” The words were drawn out in a sarcastic manner.
“This place is about more important things. Scholarship is what drives this institution, not pedagogy.”
It was hard for me at the time to completely dismiss what he was saying.
One reason was that my Faculty Resource Center reported directly to his office and he was my boss. [How I managed the resource center in the face of this bias is another story.] I was not interested in exploring his views because I did not think they could be influenced by rational argument.
The other reason for not exploring the issue was that he was right. What people could easily see in the ‘purveyors of pedagogy” were the methods they endorsed. The intellectual underpinning of those techniques was not publicly displayed. Unless one knew about theories of teaching and learning within education and psychology, and was familiar with the large body of empirical data in these areas, the methods might appear to exist in a vacuum.
The reality is that strategies for teaching and learning are often based upon empirical research and/or theoretical systems about how people learn.
Unfortunately, this conceptual base is not communicated as well to people outside the inner circle as are the details of specific teaching strategies and techniques. Thus, what most people learn about teaching is one or more methods that they can use. The fact that those methods are grounded in empirical data, that they have an underlying theoretical base, and often possess an intellectual history is seldom recognized.
In the final analysis, “teaching will be considered a scholarly activity only when professors develop a conception of pedagogy that is very tightly coupled to scholarship in the disciplines themselves” [Shulman, 1987, p. 20]. One way to link our teaching styles to scholarship is to insure that they are guided and directed by a conceptual or theoretical base. To do this, the selection of teaching methods should mimic the way methods of scholarship are chosen in almost any discipline. For example:
• Methods are generally used to achieve particular goals [i.e., to test hypotheses, to answer research questions].
• Those goals typically come from some theoretical or conceptual base.
• Methods are chosen because they are compatible with the theoretical or conceptual issues studied.
• The adequacy of a research project is often assessed by how well the outcomes support particular goals [i.e., hypotheses, research questions].
• The adequacy of the methods also is determined by how well they allowed certain goals to be achieved.
A research study, for example, would not be very interesting if the write-up said “I used x, y, and z methods to gather information and my findings appear below.” Rather, it is the theoretical or conceptual base in which particular methods are couched that makes them interesting. Consider the following statement. “Because I was interested in exploring the conceptual position taken by authors in this area, methods x, y, and z helped me to answer the following questions. The findings are presented below and they are compatible with theories and ideas derived from the literature. The methods employed were adequate to answer the questions I had raised.”
The Need for a Conceptual Base
In much the same way, the selection of our styles as teachers should be embedded in a conceptual context that includes principles of teaching and learning. This would help to give instructional processes a coherent theoretical structure that typically they now lack. In effect, the intellectual base would guide and direct the selection of goals to pursue, the instructional methods employed, and the desired outcomes. Evaluating processes also would examine the fit of the goals, methods, and outcomes to some underlying conceptual scheme.
For example, a history professor once told me that his goals in a survey course were: to teach his students to know basic historical facts, to think critically about historical issues, to develop positive societal values, and to have them learn to appreciate how historical themes appeared in modern life. I then asked him how he taught such things. He replied, “I give them very detailed and insightful lectures.” When asked how he evaluated the students’ ability to achieve such goals, he replied, “I use clever multiple choice exam items.” In effect, his goals and methods were discrepant.
The latter problem could be avoided by designing a course with a philosophy of teaching and learning in mind. Such principles would allow someone to select methods that would realistically help achieve particular goals. If a teacher, for example, believed that “students learn best when actively involved in the classroom,” alternatives to the lecture could be explored. Thus, attempts to achieve goals such as “teaching critical thinking” and “positive societal values” might better occur through small group discussions, position papers, and debates among students on important issues.
On the other hand, if one believed that “students learn best through very detailed and insightful lectures,” evaluation processes would test that assumption. It is unlikely that “clever multiple-choice exam items” would be a sufficient outcome measure for all of the stated goals. Other methods of
evaluation used might include whether students could write critical essays on the relationship of historical issues to modern times and their ability to list the positive societal values they acquired in the course. The outcomes of such evaluations would probably show that the lecture method helped students to acquire basic historical facts but did little to affect their ability to achieve the other goals.
In the process, a teacher would have to seriously question the principles of teaching and learning that guided the choice of instructional methods. Other ideas of how people learn and the role of the teacher would be examined. Or, the lofty goals would have to be set aside without evidence to support them.
This is not an uncommon problem. In my experiences, many teachers can articulate classroom goals but typically find it difficult to assess them. Thus, they either assume their “wished for outcomes” will occur or are content to employ traditional assessment devices such as exams and term papers. The range of other possibilities for assessing student outcomes is not widely known. For those readers interested in exploring a diverse set of goals in their teaching, Table 3-2 contains ideas for assessing student outcomes that are appropriate for a variety of instructional goals.
Our course goals, the corresponding methods used to help achieve them, and evaluations of the outcomes produced are interconnected. And, each of the latter components should relate to an underlying intellectual base that guides and directs what goals, methods, and evaluation processes are selected. Figure
Figure 3-1: Elements in a conceptual base for teaching.
3-1 illustrates the basic components of a conceptual base to teaching. The role of evaluation processes in this scheme are outlined in Figure 3-2.
Table 3-2
Instructional Goals and Outcome Measures
General Goals
Student content achievement, including factual knowledge, competencies in using various skills, and ability to meet specific course objectives
Variations in learning styles of students
Quality of student life in the classroom
Developing skills students can use in occupational and other settings Testing Service and other sources.
Professional board exams in fields like architecture and health sciences.
Instructor observations and self-reports of students on their behavior in class.
Use of collaborative, independent, participatory and other learning style measures [e.g., GRSLSS in Chapter 4].
Use of questionnaires and/or interviews that assess students' responses to the classroom environment, including course procedures, instructor behaviors,
textbooks, other course materials and resources, relevance of course to their programs of study, overall satisfaction.
Comments of employers on students' progress in jobs that specific classes trained them for.
Evaluations of students from people familiar with their accomplishments.
Significant achievements in later life that various sources agree are related in part to particular instructors or programs.
Classroom exams that stress application of concepts and principles.
Performance of students on simulation exercises that use course concepts.
Performance of students in practicum experiences as rated by supervisors.
Brief in-class reaction papers.
Term papers, lab reports, essay tests, literature reviews, position papers, short-stories.
Outcome Measures Ability to think creatively and to
improve problem-solving and decision-making skills
Variations in values and self-concept and career changes as a result of instructional processes
Collaborative skills
Quality of instructor's life in the classroom Use of new classroom procedures and methods to accomplish instructional goals
Developing critical thinking skills
Classroom and/or standardized tests for creativity and problem solving skills.
Ratings by peers, instructors, employers, or other sources of students' ability to develop new solutions to problems.
Performance in classroom simulations and role-playing activities that demand such skills.
Self-reports of students.
Information from standardized measures of values and occupational preferences.
Observations of student performance in classroom simulations, role plays, and other activities that have students use personal values, beliefs, and career-related interests and skills.
Group tasks and projects [cf., teaching strategies in Chapters 7 & 8].
Self-reports on perceptions of satisfaction with aspects of one’s classroom role.
Included here are new courses that were added to a curriculum, recognition the school received because of a particular course offering, willingness of people to select majors due to the quality of the instruction, and teaching methods and courses that led to outside funding.
Use of self-reports or peer observations.
Use of teaching style measures discussed in Chapters 1 and 4.
Descriptions of course designs, syllabi, the materials used, and the evaluations of their quality and usefulness.
Comparisons of teaching methods before changes with those used afterward.
Class projects that emphasize analysis of information, identifying problems,
Consciously Identifying Your Conceptual Base
It would be fair to say that a conceptual base is at least implicit in whatever teaching style someone adopts. The problem is that not everyone is aware of it. A philosophy of teaching only becomes useful when we can identify its components and then decide what aspects of it we want to keep, modify, or perhaps drop. In the process, we can then choose additions to the principles of teaching and learning we would like to see in our teaching. There are certain advantages to consciously identifying, modifying, and adding to our conceptual base. They include:
• Consciously identifying and selecting principles of teaching and learning to guide our selection of teaching processes makes their selection more than a personal whim. Thus, when challenged about why certain processes are used, a response other than “I like to teach this way” is possible. One can now say, for example, “Students learn best when they are actively involved in the material and can discuss their ideas with other students. This discussion technique I’m using gives me a vehicle to use the latter principles in my teaching.”
• Basing our teaching style on a clear conceptual base allows us to go beyond the content when designing a course. If one assumes, for example, that learners possess a variety of learning styles, then
Figure 3-2: Relationship of evaluation processes to each element in a conceptual base for teaching. All of the elements listed above are interrelated.
course design must reflect more than considerations of what content to teach. At a minimum, one would have to address the issue of how to teach content to learners with independent, collaborative, visual, and auditory preferences. Creative solutions to such problems make the design and implementation of classroom processes much more exciting.
• Consciously basing our teaching style on a conceptual base allows us to challenge personal beliefs about effective instructional practices. An experience with a faculty member I worked with illustrates this point. He taught a political science course using a lecture-discussion process. He was aware of research findings showing that students who engaged in active-learning processes such as small group discussion and problem solving activities were more satisfied and had higher levels of achievement in the classroom. “What I realized,” he said to me, “ was that my current teaching style was incompatible with the concept of active learning.
Lecturing is a wonderful active learning experience for me but does little for the students in that regard. I must find a way to bring the same benefits to my students.” Exploring principles of teaching and learning allowed him to make thoughtful comparisons to his own teaching.
• Consciously identifying and selecting the conceptual issues that underlie our teaching styles helps us to overcome “mindless” ways of designing courses. In her research program, psychologist Ellen Langer [1989a; 1989b] defines mindlessness as processing information without attention to details in a familiar, routine, and predictable manner. It appears in our actions anytime we do the following:
a.] Using categories or distinctions learned from past experience as rigid guides for current behaviors.
b.] Behaviors are initiated without giving much conscious thought to questions such as, “Why am I doing this?”
“What is the purpose of my teaching this way?” “What am I really trying to accomplish in my teaching?”
c.] Acting from a single perspective or mindset and failing to consider alternate perspectives on issues [e.g., “What other options for thinking about the design of this course and
c.] Acting from a single perspective or mindset and failing to consider alternate perspectives on issues [e.g., “What other options for thinking about the design of this course and