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LEARNING-TEACHING-MODELING
By Lon Woodbury
lon@woodbury.com
A long-standing debate in education and mental health
has been how best to help children learn what they need to know to
become functioning, contributing adults. Actually, the debate has been
going on throughout recorded history, and is one of the most important
concerns each society has to tackle. Without an effective system in
place to raise their young, a society's future is in jeopardy. To be
effective, the system needs to insure that children learn both
specific academic content, as well as proper behavior and motivating
emotions.
A lot of debate in this country stems from an apparent confusion between
the nature of learning and teaching. Sometimes it seems
these concepts are almost used interchangeably, with the assumption
that increased learning automatically occurs the more one emphasizes teaching techniques
and methodology. However, common sense would remind us, just because
someone is actively teaching, does not mean the material is
actually being learned. We need to remember that learning is
the goal, and teaching is a tool. Learning is what the
child does; teaching involves an adult imparting knowledge.
The problem becomes even more complicated with special needs children
who have behavioral and emotional problems as well as academic needs.
When a serious pathology is also present, it complicates the situation
even further.
The standard answer in this country in our era of mass education has
been to decide what content the children need to know, and the sequence
in which it needs to be learned. A curriculum is developed that
essentially designs the intervention, consisting of a series of classes
that teach the knowledge deemed to be necessary. The teachers subsequently
carry out the centrally developed intervention plan, which is based
on the assumption that knowledge is acquired as a result of the student
successfully completing the classes. The primary intervention is teaching;
readiness to learn is either assumed, or, if needed, remediation
hopefully helps the students become ready to learn.
During the 20th century this approach has been fairly successful in
the mass education of academic subjects such as Math, English and History.
However, recent demands for extensive high stakes testing, such as
the requirement in President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" legislation,
is an obvious recognition that the old system is breaking down even
in the academic area. The high-stakes tests are a clear indication
of the official view that in order for the traditional system to continue
working, it needs this system of additional measurement and motivation,
on top of everything else schools are already doing. The focus of this
new directive does seem to be on learning, but without interfering
with the complicated teaching methodology that has developed
over the last century.
In traditional education, the school addresses behavioral problems
with punishment. However, if the problem behavior becomes too serious,
the student might be referred to a rapidly growing system of juvenile
detention facilities and juvenile courts, which essentially have been
developed to "teach them a lesson!" Again, the emphasis
is on teaching, rather than learning, and the high recidivism
rate in juvenile facilities strongly shows that learning is
not anywhere near the level we had hoped.
When the behavior problem is determined to be a mental health problem,
the solution often is a referral to a counselor. The counselor essentially
chooses the DSM-4 diagnosis that best fits the student’s behavior,
and then targets the treatment intervention accordingly, as though
following an unspoken mental health curriculum. This sounds very similar
to the process of teaching, which involves someone imparting
pre-determined knowledge. Unless the therapist uses a good dose of
common sense in obtaining a social history, vital situational factors
can be missed, resulting in treatment that is carried out based on
a misdiagnosis. When the therapist misses vital environmental causes,
the child might not learn anything because he or she doesn’t
think the interventions are relevant.
Emotional Growth schools have found that they cannot teach behavior
and the underlying character that drives it -- at least not in the
traditional way, with teachers imparting knowledge in a classroom,
following a centrally developed curriculum. When working with special
needs students, Emotional Growth schools found they need to emphasize
the students’ learning, with the teachers acting like mentors.
In other words, the students learn better behavior, and develop
the character that drives it, by modeling the adults who are
working with them.
While students might "blow-off" formal approaches to teaching character,
as dictated by a particular curriculum, they are more likely to learn right
behavior and character by imitating their adult mentors. This, of course,
assumes quality staff who themselves have high personal standards worthy
of imitation, and an intuitive understanding of what students with
problems need and how to respond to them. This happens best in a solidly
structured school where behavioral consequences are immediate and appropriate.
Many alternative academic schools in both public and private sectors
seem to have grasped the idea that we should start with what the child
needs to learn, and focus on that. One of the interventions
used might include teaching, or providing knowledge, but these
schools have found it is more important to provide good staff to model
and mentor what the child needs to learn, than to emphasize conventional teaching methods.
This might be summarized as, “the teacher is the lesson!”
In seems our society heavily promotes professional training, credentials,
and professionalism for the staff in our schools, mental health and
juvenile justice facilities, yet seems to overlook the purpose for
the training and credentials: it is to help the children learn what
they need to learn. While the teacher might be the lesson,
he or she is not the reason for the existence of the institution.
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