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LIFE | of the mind Teachers Who Question by Timothy Glander Iassume that you are like me, and that from time to time you find yourself thinking about your years in school and the many teachers you encountered there. Like me, you might also find yourself asking why some teachers were able to have such significant and enduring influence on you, what attributes they possessed and what core values motivated them in their work. While I am certain that the differences among your teachers span the entire human panoply, I am willing to wager that one constant trait among them remains: The teachers whose impact has been most profound and lasting are those teachers who question. teachers refuse to see knowledge as inert, or to treat learning as something to be “delivered” to students. Rather they demand that the student be an active participant in the learning enterprise, and that a student’s achievement in any particular domain of knowledge is never complete or finished. They know, too, that while real learning is always an arduous task, it seems effortless once this questioning ethos has been adopted and internalized. And the best of these teachers know, as well, that all students are capable of, and deserving of, this kind of learning even as it proceeds at a pace and in form unique to each individual learner’s needs. We all know them, and each of us is fortunate to have had many such teachers in our educational lives. They are the teachers who know their discipline so thoroughly that they know, too, how much they do not know. They are constantly on the quest to learn more, to pose further questions to advance their understanding. Their ability to see the world through the eyes of their students—who are able to empathetically recall what it was like to be five years old, 13 years old, 19 years old—enables them to pose questions that connect curricula to the developmental needs and experiential levels of their charges in ways that are meaningful and personally relevant. They are the teachers who encourage and legitimate each individual student’s own questions by treating them seriously, compelling the student to continue to ask authentic questions, and to seek out answers, long after the formal instruction has ended. Yes, we know these teachers and we know that this disposition for questioning cuts across all disciplines and grade levels. These If we are able to identify many such teachers in our past it is because this kind of teacher is not altogether rare. Indeed, in my own experience in working with several thousand undergraduate and graduate students preparing to be teachers at Nazareth College, I have found it to be perhaps the most widely shared value among them and perhaps the most important value in shaping their decisions to become classroom teachers. Teachers, as a group, are firmly anchored around this educational value, and this critical, questioning spirit is at the very heart of how they imagine the best models for their work to be. I am proud to be part of a tradition of teacher education at Nazareth College that celebrates, honors, and fosters this kind of teaching. But if this disposition to question and to encourage others to question is essential for good teaching, it is also true that this disposition is often at odds with many of the prevailing institutional values and practices found in today’s schools. There should be no mistaking the fact that we have inherited schools for which docility, conformity, and efficiency have been dominant values. 22 CONNECTIONS | WINTER 2010/2011 www.naz.edu
And while no one today publicly admits to supporting schools for these purposes, the institutional practices spawned by these values remain with us and continue to be advanced by unthinking politicians and educational policy makers. Consider, for instance, the increasing calls for more high stakes standardized testing, now utilized so ubiquitously and with so much punitive power. With pre-determined questions and “only one best answer,” the multiple-choice format of these tests is in fundamental opposition to the orientation toward questioning of all good teaching. Premised naively on a narrow and largely repudiated behaviorist theory of learning, these standardized, multiple-choice tests were first used in the early 20th century to “measure intelligence” and crudely sort students into various educational and occupational tracks. Teachers were quick to understand the negative pedagogical implications of these tests and joined others throughout the 20th century in raising questions about their validity as well as the cultural, economic, and gender bias inherent in their use. Teachers recognized that, with the possible exception of assessing the simple recall of information, these tests were of very little value. When utilized excessively, these tests tended to deaden the learning experience by sending a damaging message to students that learning was nothing more than the process of regurgitating pre-packaged information about a seemingly already known world. To make matters worse, the tests were silent on why a student chose one particular response over another, enabling students to choose the “best” answer for very wrong reasons or to choose the “wrong” answer for some very insightful and creative reasons. In this way, many thoughtful teachers shared Banesh Hoffman’s perspective in his 1962 critique The Tyranny of Testing, in which he argued that standardized, multiple-choice testing actually rewarded students who tended toward conformist thinking and penalized students who tended toward creative and critical questions and problem-solving. Although teachers have been well aware of the shortcomings of standardized testing, many politicians and policy makers increasingly view the results on standardized tests to provide the very definition of academic achievement, if not the primary purpose for schooling itself. In their view, the role of the teacher is to prepare students to do well on these tests. Teacher “effectiveness,” then, increasingly becomes equated with how well students do on these tests, with merit-pay and teacher evaluations efforts tied to test results. It follows from this way of thinking that teacher education becomes the acquisition of a set of simple classroom management techniques and test preparation drills, reflected now in the emerging alternative, on-the-job training routes to teacher certification or the five-week summer crash course provided to Teach For America candidates. Under this regimen, people preparing to be teachers are not encouraged to question the meaning of academic achievement, the social context and purpose for schools, or to see value in engaging their students around such questioning. In my nearly 30 years in education, I can recall no time when the gap between the interests of politicians and policy makers and the real needs of students and classroom teachers has been quite this wide. In their demand for quantifiable and comparative data to satisfy various accountability schemes, these policy makers are increasingly at risk of destroying what is left of the potential for authentic and transformative teaching in our schools. Here, again, the children growing up in our poorest neighborhoods, and attending schools where these accountability schemes are most stringently enforced, are most at risk. Currently, our educational policy is moving us in exactly the wrong direction even while the popular media continue to scapegoat teachers for the larger, intractable problems of our society. Fortunately, however, a solution is at hand if we are willing to listen to teachers talk about their craft and empower them to construct environments where real learning can take place. Rather than treating academic achievement as an abstract goal to be measured, educational policy should begin at the classroom level and focus on how best to enable teachers who question to engender this disposition in their students. And more than anything else, as a society we need to ask what purposes we would like our public schools to serve today. Teachers should play a key role in posing this question and informing the debate with their understanding of the optimal classroom circumstances for further questioning. Timothy Glander, Ph.D., is Nazareth’s dean of the School of Education. The School of Education can be found on Facebook and at www.naz. edu/education. Visit Dr. Glander’s blog at http://blogs.naz.edu/ glander/. www.naz.edu CONNECTIONS | WINTER 2010/2011 23
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