FACTORS IN THE TEACHING/LEARNING CONUNDRUM

Before I go any further here, I want to present a framework for my posts. It's very broad and I can't say that there's a specific goal, but my sense of order tells me that something useful might come out of it.

I want to look at each of the factors that affect teaching and learning. What I know of the history of education in America is that it has been a series of popular approaches. One method catches on for a while and then is supplanted by another which is then replaced by whatever strikes the fancy of the politicos and school administrators: Learning Objectives, Learning Styles, Multiple Intelligences, Cultural Literacy, Writing Across the Curriculum, Experiential Learning, etc. etc. and now the Common Core.

It's as if you were to walk into a room with the goal of identifying what's in there and focus on a chair and declare. It's the chair! But after a few minutes you see a bookcase and say Wait! No! It's the bookcase! Only to turn and see a window and shout "The window! That's it! The room is a window!" But of course, it's none of those and it's all of those.

So I'm looking into the room we call education and I'm asking, as a scientist might when studying any phenomena, What are the variables? And then we can take it a step further and ask To what extent do they affect the outcome? And finally: Which ones can I control? In other words (to wring more from my analogy), when a student enters that room, what can we do to get the student we want when he or she walks out?

So far the variables include the student's peers (friends, classmates, acquaintances), the class materials (textbook, syllabus, computer, graphics, etc., white/blackboard), the classroom (age, size, physical appearance, comfort control, etc.), the teacher, the student's background (home life, interests, physical limitations, etc.). And there's lots more, of course.

It's a crap shoot, isn't it? And given the conflicting forces trying to control the whole thing, it's a wonder anyone emerges from it with any sort of education. When I try to assemble it into something coherent, I'm tempted to say just teach them to read and write and turn them loose. We'd likely still end up with an Adam Lanza at one end and Neil deGrasse Tyson at the other.

So pick one of those elements and roll the dice. In the meantime, as other related matters come up we can conduct some autopsies and try to fit them into the mix.