Making Student Learning Central to Teaching!

This excerpt was taken from SEDL, formerly known as the Southwest Educational Development Library.





Making Student Learning Central to Teaching



Every dedicated teacher is concerned about student learning. However, the day-to-day pressures of teaching, much of the dialogue about educational ills and improvements, and professional training tend to push attention toward what teachers do rather than toward what students learn. We see that it is critically important to make student learning the central focus of instructional decision making. This involves a thoughtful examination of the process of learning. Carol, a seventh grade teacher, wrote in her journal,


"It still amazes me when you think you have taught a concept so well and still a couple of kids bomb a test. Is it that they are just bad test-takers? That they don't seek assistance when they have no clue? That they are not developmentally ready to grasp the concept? That I am not really teaching what I think I am teaching? That they need more practice to really learn the concept? It could be all of the above. It depends on the student and the situation. Seeing their work and making them talk about their work and their understanding of the concept gives the teacher vital information as to what next step should be. . . . Teaching the same thing [over again] in the same way will not necessarily produce successful learning. I must target the specific problem."


Carol has begun to question the relationship between her teaching and her students' learning. However, teachers' views of how children learn often go unexamined. As Bruce Pirie, an English teacher and author, says,


For most of us, our teaching has been formed by a few influential teachers from our own schooling, a handful of respected colleagues, readings from books or journals, and the push and pull of classroom realities. From this, we assemble a practice that keeps us going, but which has not always been scrutinized in its assumptions or challenged for inconsistencies. (1997, p. 6)


Most of us focus primarily on the methods of practice and pay less attention to the foundations and directions. Examined or not, those ideas that constitute the foundations (such as views of how children learn and the purposes of schooling) impact our decisions about instructional practice.