Teachers' Guts
It seems silly for anyone to suggest that educational 'laypeople' suffer from some kind of debilitating ignorance that 'professionals' have overcome.
From the chapter Teachers' models of children's minds and learning (1994), by Sidney Strauss and Tamar Shilony. In this chapter, the authors investigate how teachers intuitively understand the ideas of teaching and learning:
Students who have finished their high school education have been in formal learning situations for 12 years. Over a considerable period of time, then, they have practiced what they and others think it takes to learn. In the sense that they have not studied formally about the mind and learning in, say, psychology courses, they can be considered laypersons. But it is a big stretch to call them laypersons and holders of a naive psychology after they have been in places where learning is the main goal and where they have been reflective about what that learning is.
This strikes me as a gentle correction to a widespread overcorrection. For a long time now in education, we have become accustomed to arguing that mere participation in the schooling process tends to provide people with false, naïve, and ineffective ideas about teaching and learning. But this goes too far, for two reasons alluded to in the chapter. The first reason is that teaching and learning are still poorly understood—a fact which can turn even relatively mundane assertions about instruction into extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence:
Psychologists of the stripe who do work in the area of learning have come up with a number of ways to describe what learning is; however, there is little consensus about which models best describe it. There is no agreed-upon set of principles, rules, or laws of learning, and there does not seem to be one in the offing. So, as much as theoreticians and experimentalists have made progress in understanding learning, their work is still controversial. And, unlike the work on teachers' conceptions about domains, such as physics where there is agreement about its laws, we cannot speak of misconceptions when investigating teachers' understandings of children's minds.
The second reason for being attentive to the implicit or intuitive models of mere participants in schooling is that, as we have seen in this space, teaching and learning are things humans have been doing for eons—they didn't begin with the invention of education schools—and there is good reason to believe they are closely tied to the development and refinement of human communication in general (Daniel Dor refers to communication as "instructing the imagination"):
Teaching others may be seen as a place where communication takes place. Reddy (1979) [PDF] offers an intriguing and helpful understanding of two models of communication. The first is what he calls the conduit metaphor of communication, which he believes is the dominant metaphor in our society. It suggests that messages and ideas are objectlike, and are transmitted across space from one person and are received by another. Reflect for a moment on the meaning of these metaphors: "I finally managed to get my ideas across to my students today." "Play around with your thoughts so that they'll come out different." "He didn't quite catch on to it." These metaphors convey a sense of ideas as being tangible and external to individuals, and communicating them means passing them along channels to receptive others who take them in and understand them as they were intended.
It seems silly, against this backdrop, for anyone to condescendingly suggest that educational 'laypeople' suffer from some kind of debilitating ignorance that 'professionals' have overcome. Indeed, it is entirely possible at this point for the reverse to be true—our pretheoretical, intuitive notions about instruction, honed over tens of thousands of years of biological and cultural evolution, may provide a smarter foundation for education studies than the johnny-come-lately sophistic machinations of psychologists and philosophers of the early 20th century.
The model [teachers hold about children's minds and learning] we found resembles some information processing models of memory and learning (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968). What is remarkable about this is that these teachers were never taught about information processing approaches in their educational psychology courses; they were generally taught about Piaget and sometimes about Vygotsky. So what we discovered is a mental model that teachers have constructed from something other than courses taken in their teacher preparation. Or, to put it more strongly, the mental model we discovered in teachers may have resisted formal instruction.
"Resisted formal instruction" is a clever way of suggesting that people's intuitive notions about teaching and learning must be removed and replaced with the 'correct' information, but, again, given how little we know, "we cannot speak of misconceptions when investigating teachers' understandings of children's minds," and given how long teaching and learning have been with us as a species, it is unwise to simply write off intuitive notions of these processes as irrevocably naïve.
The authors provide more detail about the mental model of teachers that they uncovered in their studies:
The mental model of the child's mind and learning belies an engineering vision on the part of teachers. In their view, the object of pedagogy is to get external subject matter into the place in the mind where knowledge is stored. That is one engineering problem. To solve it, one first serves up knowledge that is initially external to children's minds in such a way that it can enter it. A second engineering problem is to get that new knowledge to a place where it will be stored. After the knowledge enters it, the teacher does things external to children's minds (teaches), believing that if children were to do what the teacher requests, then the new knowledge would be passed in the child's mind from the place where it entered to the place where it will be stored. We elaborate on this a bit.
When teachers spoke about how they would teach children certain content, they typically began speaking about learning in terms of the subject matter they wanted to teach. They believed that knowledge in various disciplines differs in kind, abstraction, and complexity. One of their chief concerns about these differences was about how to package content knowledge for their pupils so that it can be learned.
In order for that to occur, the content has to enter children's minds, and teachers conceive of the mind as having openings of a certain size that allow information to enter. Their notion of "opening size" recalls the notion of working memory capacity. Teachers believe that good pedagogy involves serving up knowledge in chunks that can "get through" the openings. For example, teachers said that if ideas in the subject matter were too complex, they won't even be able to get "in."
Even if the material is the right complexity, it may never enter the mind if children's affective states are not motivated to receive the content. Conceived of metaphorically, the entrances to children's minds have "flaps" that are open when children are attentive. If children are uninterested or unmotivated, the flaps go down, and material cannot enter the mind.
Teachers believe that once content "gets through," it must somehow connect up with already-existing knowledge by means of analogies, associations, familiar examples, and so on. This corresponds to an "elaborative processing" model. Accordingly, teachers believe they should facilitate connection making between new and old knowledge. If there is no already-existing knowledge to get connected to, the new knowledge can be driven into memory through repetition, rehearsal, and practice.
How does new knowledge affect the structure of prior knowledge? Teachers have beliefs concerning what happens to old knowledge when new knowledge finally gets to the place in the mind where it is remembered. Among the changes teachers mention are those in the amount and organization of previous knowledge; broadening and generalizing previous knowledge; higher levels of abstraction than what was in previous knowledge; and more.
This model is certainly not a sophisticated scientific theory, but I suspect that anyone reading it would relate to it, making it a good foundation for further thinking about instruction. Contrast this outline with the more typical fare from education:
Reddy suggests that a metaphor of the tool-maker may be more appropriate for describing communication. This metaphor suggests that individuals are always in the process of sense making, and that our messages, thoughts, and so on are being constructed by others, and invented anew as we attempt to grapple with their meanings. This view is akin to the one teachers were taught when they learned Piaget's theory. What happened between what they were taught and what they believe implicitly about the mind and learning is a question that those of us involved in teacher education ought to try to answer.
Is this how you conceptualize communication: that you are 'constructing' other people's thoughts and messages, that you are "inventing them anew"? Who thinks this way naturally? Thus, the answer to the question about why intuitive ideas about instruction tend to win out over formally taught ones may be as simple as that the formally taught ideas make little sense and offer teachers little to work with (except more student struggle) to improve their classrooms. Teachers have no problem regurgitating formal talking points and then shutting their doors and teaching to their intuitive models. Because they work.
This [intuitive] model is also implicit. Teachers are not aware they hold it. In other studies we conducted, when we asked them what they think learning is, we were told what they were taught in their educational psychology courses. But in the present study, we asked teachers to tell us about what and how they would teach subject matter of their choice and, in telling us that, they revealed their implicit models of what children's minds look like and how learning takes place because the purpose of their teaching was to foster learning in children.
