Teaching

日期 : Mar 2015 - 现在

The word teach is unhelpfully ambiguous. It can refer to our all-encompassing job as educator in the broadest sense (we are all teachers). It can refer to different kinds of approaches (teach by questioning, teach by telling). And it can imply a range of purposes (inform, expand awareness, develop performance ability). It can even refer to isolated teacher behavior, irrespective of the results, as in the old joke, “I taught them, but they didn't learn.” So how should we best clarify the job of the teacher? Backward design suggests one answer. The teacher's role, behavior, and strategies must stem deliberately from established mission and goals, the curriculum, and agreed-upon learning principles. In other words, the particular approaches, methods, and resources employed are not primarily subjective “choices” or mere matters of style. They logically derive from the desired student accomplishments and our profession's understanding of the learning process. We teach to cause a result. Teaching is successful only if we cause learning related to purpose. More specifically, we can distinguish mandatory from optional teacher roles and approaches by recalling the categorization of intellectual goals mentioned in Chapter 1 (academic excellence, understandings, key competence, habits of mind, mature conduct). Mortimer Adler, in The Paideia Proposal (1982), presents us with three broad categories of instructional roles for teachers related to these intellectual goals: (1) didactic (or direct) instruction, (2) facilitation of understanding and related habits of mind, and (3) coaching of performance (skill and transfer). (See Adler's The Paideia Program [1984] and follow-up volumes for further insight into the rationale for the three categories and how to decide what kind of teaching best suits what kind of objective.)