L.R. Rittenhouse
Ask yourself, “if someone accused me of being an effective teacher, could anyone find enough evidence to reward me?” You’ll never know unless you have an operational hypothesis about what defines an effective teacher. It is my thesis that many of us go into the classroom with a very strong conviction of what we think should be taught. But, I doubt we have established, a priori, an effectiveness hypothesis, nor do we know which data should be collected to test it.
The classroom is an uncertain environment. Students come to us with varying experience with natural resources, different course work background, different value and belief systems, different goals, and different motivation and learning styles. The challenge of the learning environment makes the subject matter seem almost insignificant.
I would like to propose the following hypothesis and present a tentative model for consideration, feedback and debate.
Hypothesis: effectiveness is a steady state among the components of the procedural learning process.
My viewpoint is that effectiveness as educators is a result of purposeful facilitation of the learning process. The most important thing we do in the classroom is help a student build an initial model to explain variability and then develop a manner for intervening in managed systems. The model is illustrated in Figure 1. [need Acrobat Reader to open this .pdf file]
If the goal in teaching is facilitation of learning and critical thinking, then this model shows “effectiveness” as an equilibrium among basic components of that process. That is, if a student is taught such that she becomes responsible for her own destiny, then she will feed back to content through her becoming a genuine, self-actualized, exploring person who has learned the manner (model) of selecting and analyzing content, finding a method of learning that works, learns both new and specified content and adjusts the model configuration to be consistent with current understanding of facts and current level of experience with natural systems.
It follows the basic premise that teachers teach some content to students in order to attain some purpose (reference). Our goal is to produce educated, life-long learners. But, isn’t that the goal of all teachers? The key word is “effectiveness” because that translates into “life-long learning.” We will tentatively define an educated person as a confident, self-actualized, exploring person who has developed a model(s) of their natural world that works for them, that is, it explains variability and allows for a manner of intervention in natural-system processes and feedback. Equally successful models can be based on mythology, science, experience or all of the above. An educated person remains critical and continuously revises their model(s) and manner. An educated person is a life-long learner. An educated person is well-rounded physically, spiritually, socially and intellectually.
Effectiveness could be viewed as an end-point, or a process. Should we choose to view effectiveness in terms of individual student the success over a lifetime, the data-set we use to analyze effectiveness will be biased and incomplete. How should we characterize success? How many students had to be successful for us to claim success? Which part of their success can we claim? The feedback from such analysis is not very useful, because it occurs on time-scales irrelevant to careers or the present classroom. We cannot partition success. However, should we choose to view effectiveness as a process, we can organize the classroom with the summary objective of creating a learning environment specifically to build that initial model and then show students how to develop a process to intervene in systems for desired outcomes.
The student becomes a life-long learner by continuously cycling through the process and finding new steady states. System principles apply, i.e., negative feedbacks in a system dampen change and organize the system toward a steady state; positive feedbacks remove barriers to disorganization and the system transitions to a new state. As the student gains new insight, gains experience, specified content, changes goals or shifts purpose, content changes. The model needs to be modified to accommodate new sources and kind of variability.
The teacher, empowered students and the discipline will set the initial content. The content will be reflected in available textbooks, reference books, teacher training, experience, personality, belief system, values and goals. Efficiency in the classroom assumes some minimal common model and students must be willing and motivated to learn and be open-minded. The teacher facilitates the initial iteration.
In the long-run, does it make a difference how the first iteration is managed? Intuitively, you know how important that must be. Once out of the formal classroom the student is empowered and responsible for inputs that move the system to a new, steady state. Our job is to help students build that model in such a way it serves as the basic decision-making structure for the rest of their career and life. We have been effective teachers if we do that in a way that makes it easy to modify the initial model and for the model to remain dynamic.
Additional reading:
Fensternacher, G.D. and J.F Soltis 1992. Approaches to teaching. Teachers College Press, Columbia University, New York