iklan

Three Approaches to Teaching

The first approach, the teacher as executive, views the teacher as a manager of complex classroom processes, a person charged with bringing about certain outcomes with students through using the best skills and techniques available. Carefully developed curriculum materials and methods of teaching backed by research are very important to this approach. They provide the teacher with techniques and understandings to use in the management of the classroom and the production of learning. Jim Barnes probably was using this approach.

The facilitator approach is the second of the three approaches. It places a high value on what students bring to the classroom setting. It places considerable emphasis on making use of students’ prior experience. The facilitative teacher is typically an empathetic person who believes in helping individuals grow personally and reach a high level of self-actualization and self-understanding. Humanistic psychology, learning theory, and existential philosophy are some of the fields of scholarship that underwrite thisview.1 Nancy Kwong exemplifies this approach.

The liberationist approach, the third and final approach, views the teacher as one who frees and opens the mind of the learner, initiating himor her into human ways of knowing and assisting the learner in becoming a well-rounded, knowledgeable, and moral human being. The classical idea of a liberal education underwrites the mainstream version of this approach. Roberto Umbras appears to be engaged in this approach. Although there is much to learn about these different approaches to teaching, it is, of course, possible to teach without thinking about one’s approach. Just as one can be a lover or a parent without giving much thought to the meaning of love or the responsibilities of parenting, one can teach without engaging in deep reflection on the nature and purpose of the activity. But we believe that teachers become professionals only when they reflection and choose a stance toward their calling that guides and sustains them in the important work of educating persons. We also believe that, in this instance, knowledge is power. Possessing an understanding of different approaches to teaching provides you with a basis for reflection on and appraisal of your work. Even more rewarding, it gives you the power to choose ways to teach that will help you achieve one of the noblest goals to which human beings can aspire: assisting the young in becoming thoughtful, competent, and caring adults. The amazing-glasses metaphor captures well the use of the three approaches as ways to study and reflect on teaching. However, to bring the three approaches closer to home, we also treat them as if they were styles of teaching for you to try on. Our purpose here is twofold. First, to provide you with a means with which to analyze and reflect upon the teachers you observe, and second, to provide you with an opportunity to ponder a style of teaching that seems right for you. This dual use means that you will sometimes find us using the three approaches as devices for analyzing the activities of teaching and other times treating the approaches as teaching styles that you might adopt as your own.

Even though the three approaches are not, in each and every respect, completely separable from one another, we present them in ways designed to highlight the differences between them. As will become evident, the three approaches share quite a few features, despite their differences. In the following three chapters we will present the approaches by highlighting the maximum contrast between them. The book concludes with a chapter devoted entirely to cases and disputes. As you complete your reading of each chapter, we urge you to make extensive use of these cases and disputes to stimulate and focus your thinking about important issues and applications of the three approaches. For example, the case”Go Fly a Kite“
Will you please turn to it now, so that you have an idea of what we are talking about?
As you will see from your reading of the “Go Fly a Kite” case, the cases are a very important means for you to dig more deeply into the ideas behind each of the three approaches as well as to discover where you stand relative to the different approaches. Thinking them through before discussing them with fellow students will assist you in sorting through your own points of view; subsequently, discussing them with fellow students will enlarge both your understanding and your perspective.

The Common Framework: MAKER
Before we turn to examining each of the three approaches in depth, it will prove helpful to have a means to compare and contrast the different approaches. What we are calling the MAKER framework serves this purpose. This framework consists of the five core elements of teaching. They are Method, Awareness of students, Knowledge of the content, Ends that describe the purposes and ideals for teaching, and the Relationship that exists between the teacher and students. These five elements are common to all teaching. No matter what level you teach, or where and how you do so, your work can be described using these five elements. As a guide to memory, we have arranged the first letter of these elements to form the acronym MAKER

Each of the three approaches to teaching—executive, facilitator, liberationist— has its own MAKER profile. That is, each approach has its own variation on two or more of the five elements. It is worth our while to spend a few moments exploring each of the five elements.
The first element, Method (M), pertains to the skills and techniques teachers use to assist students in gaining the knowledge, understanding, and skill that teachers intend their students to achieve. Included within this dimension are such things as how lessons are planned, how the classroom is organized, how tasks and duties are devised and assigned to various students, how new material is structured and conveyed and old material refreshed, how student work is judged, and how these judgments are communicated to students and to their parents. You may have noticed that the dominant word in this list of examples is how. For the most part, Method

pertains to how you teach (the fourth element, Ends, pertains to why you teach as you do, but more on that in a moment). Awareness (A) is the second in the framework of common elements. It is quite straightforward, for it refers to what the teacher knows about his or her students, including such things as their interests, talents, and concerns; their personal histories and family backgrounds; and their performance in previous years of schooling. Awareness, in this context, is not about “real time” awareness, such as when a teacher becomes aware that a student is about to do something he or she should not do. Awareness as we use it here refers to what and how much the teacher knows about the students. The third element, Knowledge (K), covers what a teacher knows about how well does she know science? How firm is her grasp of the important concepts, theories, and facts? Is she comfortable with the methods of inquiry that are common to the various disciplines within the sciences? Is her understanding of the subject matter sufficiently deep that she can explain it using metaphors and analogies that make the content more accessible to students without distorting its integrity and validity? Ends (E), the fourth element, are the purposes a teacher has for his teaching and for his students. Ends are revealed in the answers to such questions as the following: What do you want your students to know and be able to do? What are you trying to accomplish as a teacher? What are your ideal educational aims? Although all five of the MAKER elements can be slippery to interpret, Ends is perhaps the trickiest. That is because we often draw a distinction between the ends of education and the ends of schooling. Did that last sentence cause you to pause, wondering what we could possibly mean by distinguishing schooling from education? The difference between the two becomes increasingly important as we move from executive to facilitator to liberationist.

In this book, when we write of the ends of education, we refer to the grand and noble ideals that we seek for the children and youth who attend the nation’s schools. These ends should be distinguished from two other phenomena with which they are often confused. The first of these are the goals of schooling, which are the specific outcomes we hope schooling will accomplish. The second are the actual consequences of schooling, which may or may not be congruent with either the goals or the ends. This three-way distinction may seem a bit confusing at first, but it is well worth your while to master it. Ends are the high ideals we hold for the education of the young; goals are the specific outcomes we hope the young will attain as a result of their schooling; consequences are the actual results obtained from the experience of schooling. As an example, a community might hold ends that include the cultivation of critical thinking, moral rectitude, and exemplary citizenship. It may set as the goals of schooling learning to read, write, problem solve, and master bodies of knowledge from different subject areas. The consequences of schooling—what children actually take away from the experience—may be considerably different from either the ends or the goals.
The importance of the distinction between ends, goals, and consequences is that they can nestle harmoniously with one another or they can be in opposition to one another. The desired state of affairs, of course, is to have all three aligned with one another, such that they are mutually reinforcing.

Such a state of affairs is far from easy to obtain, as our exploration of the various approaches to teaching will make clear. Unfortunately, it seems that it is more often the case that the ends, goals, and consequences work against one another. As we examine the various approaches, we will illustrate how this tension arises and what would be required to resolve it. The fifth and last element, Relationships (R), covers the kind of connection that teachers forge with their students. Do you, for example, believe that student mastery of subject matter is the paramount consideration and that this mastery is best obtained by your remaining somewhat aloof from students’ personal interests and concerns? Perhaps, by contrast, you believe that you cannot be the teacher you want to be without becoming a friend and caring guide to your students. From yet another perspective, you might have the sense that to succeed with your students, you will need to “get inside their heads” to see how they think and respond, so that you can better assist them to become powerful critical thinkers and moral deliberators.
Each of these represents a different way to develop relationships with your students, ways that you will find featured in the different approaches to teaching.

Using MAKER with the Approaches
As each approach is presented, you will see that some elements are prominent features of one approach while other elements are less so. The elements are like dominant and recessive genes: Some are dominant in one approach to teaching but recessive in another approach. If you happen to play bridge, you can think of the elements as suits in the deck, with some being trump in one approach but not in another. For example, M and K are dominant in the executive approach, while A and R are dominant in the facilitator approach. It is our hope that this way of comparing the approaches will deepen your understanding of them. One last thought before we turn to the executive approach: Another value of the MAKER framework is that all the elements are under your control. For example, you make the decision of how thorough your understanding of Method will be; you also decide on the various skills and techniques you will employ in the classroom. You have the option to decide how Aware you will become of the life experiences and character of your students and how this understanding will affect your teaching. You have control over how thoroughly prepared you will be in the subjects you teach, and how you will represent your Knowledge to your students. You have considerable freedom to adopt Ends for your teaching, and to pursue them in your classroom. Finally, the kind of Relationship you have with your students and how this Relationship complements or detracts from your efforts is very much up to you.


Think of MAKER not only as a framework for comparing and contrasting approaches to teaching, but also as domains of expertise, such that the more knowledgeable and proficient you become in any domain, the better teacher you are likely to be. The three approaches to teaching presented here offer different perspectives on what elements or domains are crucially important to good teaching and on why it is important for you to master these elements.  Approach Mismatch.” Doing so will give you a chance to examine your own predispositions toward the different approaches as well as help you see how a teacher’s approach to teaching might conflict with school policy and cause problems. We hope you will also get the sense that doing serious thinking about the different approaches is not just an academic exercise; it is crucial to helping you become the kind of teacher we are sure you want to be.

0 Response to "Three Approaches to Teaching"

Posting Komentar