5.3.2 Ideal Teaching Methods and Teacher
Isolation


The purpose of education has fundamentally changed in the last 50 years. The school used to be the purveyor of information. School's had scarce information that they gave to students to write down. But today, information isn't scarce at all. We have more information around than we can possibly use. Yet schools act as if information is scarce. That's just one illustration of how we have strayed from the non-ideal situation. Part of the reason is because we are still learning about what is ideal. Passive, not active student learning is the mode. Just sitting and reading like you are
now is passive. Some feeble attempts have been made to make learning more active. Passive learning is the mode, active learning is the standard because the neurology of the brain tells us that you learn things and transfer them into long term memory much better in active learning than passive. Passive learning is not ideal.

Secondly, we have self-contained, isolated teachers. The problem now is that once you become a teacher you go inside your classroom and close the door and you're on your own. And you stay on your own for the next 25 years. Rarely will anyone intrude on the grand isolation of your classroom. Think back on all of your classes; how often has someone come in to your class to give feedback? The two ways people change are from feedback and reinforcement. If the teacher is isolated in the classroom, where does the teacher get feedback from? The teacher doesn't get any feedback. The teacher keeps doing things the same way. What kind of reinforcement or encouragement do you get for what you are doing or changing? With teacher isolation, there is no feedback or reinforcement so you keep doing things the way you always have and you end up with twenty times one years experience instead of twenty years of
experience. That is not ideal. Teachers need feedback. They need to know whether what you are doing is perceived well by students. Clever teachers can do some things to get feedback. You can distribute evaluations to
your students, you can question them. You can figure out how to get feedback formally and informally from your students but its still limited. Its not ideal. The ideal situation would be where teachers constantly visit each other, give them advice, feedback, encouragement, suggestions as to how to improve, and criticism in terms of the things that aren't working. Do you see how different that process would be? Hardly an ideal process.

What would be the ideal situation when it comes to feedback, reinforcement, and encouragement?
Mrs. Cross is a math teacher as well as the math department head in a nice, suburban high school. She notices that her department has the highest failure rate on the SOL tests this past school year. When she holds a meeting and this topic is brought up, the other members of her department ask her how they can prevent this from happening in the future and what they can do in terms of feedback, reinforcement, and encouragement for their students. What should Mrs. Cross say to the members of her department regarding the best or ideal ways to handle these subjects in their classrooms?