This is a tough thing to consider really. We are good people with good intentions. We want the best for our students. We trust in their innate capacity to strive and grow and accomplish. We understand and celebrate their resilient and hopeful natures. We get angry and emotionally involved when others do anything to harm them in any way. We are their advocates! And given our good natures and fervent hopes, it is especially difficult to turn a harsh light on the ways we work and allow ourselves to consider that, good intentions aside, we are limiting our students ability to thrive as learners to some degree.
I propose that one way we do this is by elevating efficiency to disproportionate levels in our thinking. What do I mean by efficiency? Maybe a simple and common teacher scenario can help us.
A teacher plans ten multiple-choice questions as a test. Let’s unpack the professional considerations here. Is efficiency the prime consideration in choosing this method of assessment? Is it because ten questions allows us to easily determine percentages? Are they multiple-choice because it is quicker to grade? Was at least equal consideration given to the rigor of questioning? What types of questions would yield more insight into student understanding?
By offering this single scenario, I am simply suggesting that there are consequential choices to be made in even the simplest of our practices. Whatever our impulses, motivations, or habits of thinking, we need to find ways to reconsider, even transcend, our most cherished assumptions in order to become more conversational and intellectually engaged with them. I certainly don’t mean to suggest that efficiency, in and of itself, is limiting. However, if we endeavor to teach in ways more limitless than limiting, I do think it is crucial to understand that a tension exists between efficiency and human endeavor in our professional choices.
Can we frame learning opportunities wherein students (and teachers!) experience a degree of freedom for critical learning processes to take root?...observing, approximating, correcting, developing theories, revising theories in light of new evidence, etc. Allowing these processes to emerge in students does fight against our well-developed capacity to narrow learning in order to achieve an efficiency that comforts us so.
I contend that the industry standard in these matter is to value efficiency far above important inefficiencies that are at the heart of quality learning experiences. I think that our dependency on efficiency is understandable, even defensible, given the industrial basis for how schooling is organized (its factory-like nature -- number of kids, subjects, and myriad demands). In such a demanding situation, making things as efficient as possible is certainly a necessary motivation.
However, our profession needs to come to terms with the imbalance. Moving forward, it is vitally important that we understand the tension between efficiency and learning. We need to critically self-examine in order to open up and balance the important need for efficiency with the critical need for human learning in all its complexity, both in its linear and tidier aspects, as well as its non-linear and fragmented mysteries.
Can you think of some ways to embrace certain inefficiencies in your practice?
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