Teaching Beyond the Transmission of Knowledge

«Teaching to the test at the expense of teaching to the heart is wrong and reduces education to a very superficial acquisition of knowledge and values. Standardized testing for measuring knowledge, skills and attitudes goes against learning styles and individual differences.»

«One of the most important rules of teaching is to preach by example. Are all faculty in teacher preparation programs practicing what they preach?»

«Education is to mould the human being for ongoing change and for the eventual crisis that might arise as a result of the transition.»

It is our belief that the aim of education should be to build in each student strong theoretical foundations, to help future teachers to be educated rather than trained, to be capable of understanding the complexities of the organic society «Gemeinschaft» rather than just the reduction of people to human material «Massenmensch». We have always been uncomfortable with labels, recipes and linear models for preparing teachers at all levels. While we appreciate their need to develop and to learn teaching methodologies, we must always remember the dependent relationship between theory and praxis; both should be interrelated. There is no applied scientific discipline if there is no discipline to apply. In teacher education programs we often emphasize the learning of methodologies, content information, and skills in the detriment of what constitutes the core of education which is learning to be. Very little learning is related to the dimensions which require an understanding of ourselves, of others and of the world in which we live and, most importantly, in the world in which our students are going to live. In general terms, education is to mould the human being for ongoing change and for the eventual crisis that might arise as a result of the transition.

Besides these important social and cultural factors, educational systems should change the present institutional culture. We need to evolve towards a society for learning based on the idea that all members are constantly learning, each being helped by the other. Today’s education is overly centered on the “administrative person” and the “teaching person” rather than on the “learning person”. Good and responsible teachers must allow the learning community to create an environment in which students learn from the teacher, the teacher from the student, and everyone from each other. Centering education on the learner modifies the teacher’s role to one which is in harmony with future demands for a learner, a facilitator of learning and a helper in the affective development of people. More stress should be placed on such domains, which intrinsically relate education to psychology, sociology, health, anthropology, arts and philosophy.

In addition to mastering knowledge, thinking critically, and being problem-solvers, teachers should learn tolerance, ethical behavior, aesthetic sensitivity, and moderation of superfluous elements. We must help future teachers to be free from prejudices, where learning to care, learning to share, learning to grasp the whole and act on the parts, learning to be, and learning to carry on learning should be part of society’s main objectives. Such variables are my major concern. We must infuse these cognitive and affective dimensions into the core of all teacher education programs. Whether the future will be more humane than our past can be determined only by our future efforts. We need to try in our courses to educate for such a future by helping our students to develop knowledge and sensitivity about the complexity and the multiplicity of elements within the sources of education as a science and to understand their relationship to the “learning person” in constructive partnership.

In summary, the goal is to support students as they master a particular body of knowledge, including modes of thinking, problem-solving methods, essential facts, theories, and ideas, and the culture and ethics specific to the disciplines that we teach. We want to help students learn about the subject matter appropriate for the course, we want to help them to grow as learners, and we want to help them to grow as people. This means also, to build-in intercultural concepts and inter-ethnic harmony to reduce ethnocentrism and social encapsulation. Members of the university community exercise participation in knowledge-building within the context of a collective consciousness which leads them towards an extra-territorial and extra-cultural commitment. i.e. universality in the sciences and the arts.

Students belong to a diverse society in all respects. Students learn in many different ways; thus we need to try to help them in multiple ways in approaching new material. We must do our best to be flexible and to provide them alternate routes to knowledge and understanding, even though not always with success because the burden of connecting does not rest entirely on the teacher. The choice of appropriate tools and techniques is dependent on the nature of the student and on the specific aims of the course. For instance, readings and lectures can motivate and outline material; research, technological instrumentation, homework and simulations can help students develop a deeper understanding; newsgroups, cooperative learning and discussions can facilitate student interaction and awareness of the affective domains of learning; libraries, databases and the Internet can provide access to current information, while student papers, exams, presentations, and projects can encourage critical thinking and effective communication.

However, not all students will respond to the same teaching techniques. Some may learn well from traditional lectures, while others may respond better to discussion groups, group projects, written exercises, creative tasks or demonstrations. It is our belief that it is important to use a combination of these and other methods to guide different students toward subject proficiency in the way most natural for them. We need to offer ourselves to our students as individual mentors, helpers, guiders, especially with college students and graduates. We need to be available to students face-to-face, by phone or Internet and we need to encourage them to share with us any issue, achievement or failure that they experience during the learning process. Further, we believe that students need to feel confident gaining new information and making it their own. They learn when they are engaged. Teaching is most effective when students are actively participating in the process when all pull together in cooperation, not in competition.

As teachers, we have done and will continue to do almost anything that is effective to help students learn. One of the most important rules of teaching is to preach by example. Are all faculty in teacher preparation programs practicing what they preach? We must model what we teach and move words into action. We learn ethics, freedom, and tolerance by behaving ethically, being free, tolerant, and flexible. This does not mean that we lower our standards for students. We always need to set high standards, but then we need do everything we can help students reach them. This philosophy is translated into actions such as never grading on a curve or standardized testing, which we believe only discourages students who feel they can never win. The use of curves undermines confidence and does not foster a positive non-competitive learning atmosphere. In large classes, we need to make a particular effort to be available for individual attention and try to maintain a mix of our teaching and advising responsibilities. At the same time, we do not see participatory learning as a distinct methodology. It is an underlying principle for all types of effective instruction. Even in large lectures, there is room for some form of participation. Whenever possible, we should use real-world examples and detailed case studies. When the nature of the material or enrollment requires us to lecture, we must go beyond textbooks and content discussions. Moreover, we should always incorporate interdisciplinary aspects which allow students to explore the relationship between different fields to be capable of understanding the whole before they can approach its parts.

We believe that being a teacher involves much more than just imparting facts and methodologies; our major challenge lies in inspiring students and facilitating their efforts to become self-educators. Learning as we said before, is a lifelong process that does not end when a class is over or a degree is conferred, particularly for future teachers. We must do our best to motivate them toward such a goal. To this end, we need to allow students to practice that experience of self-learning by interacting with other dimensions and then by teaching the teacher, the professor, their newfound interpretations. These types of strategies help students foster the ability to search for information, as well as to select and interpret that information. Given the demand for quality teacher education, we should not measure excellence in terms of the amount of knowledge that has been accumulated, but rather the capacity to evaluate the possibilities and limitations of that knowledge. This is one of the reasons we must use a wide range of evaluation techniques to reduce, as much as we can, the inevitable subjectivity of measuring learning and the most difficult task of formal teaching. Teaching to the test at the expense of teaching to the heart is wrong and reduces education to a very superficial acquisition of knowledge and values. Standardized testing for measuring knowledge, skills and attitudes goes against learning styles and individual differences. It values short-term learning processes instead of an attitude toward lifelong learning.

We as teachers can use multiple techniques: guided research, live-in learning-work courses, guided didactic conversations, lectures, field seminars, negotiation games, individual or small group projects, true or simulated experimentations, distant, e-learning and programmed techniques, and so on. But above all, we have to learn that we need to evolve every single moment to keep innovation as part of our teaching; to practice research as a way of improving our strategies, being updated and searching for knowledge; to help the learner to be prepared not only for certitudes but for uncertainty, to behave more as a learner than as a teacher; to help students develop objective criticism and search for new channels for a more enlightened future; to teach learning to learn without boundaries.

Thus, the best learning strategies that we have to experience are to teach interactively the search for knowledge, to practice the highest ethical standards, to treat students with respect and concern for their achievement, and to be dedicated to our profession with love and full commitment. However, we can never be fully satisfied for what we are doing since the life of a responsible teacher is always searching for ways to improve the cognitive, affective, and ethical domains of the learner.

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©2018 Miguel Angel Escotet. All rights reserved. Permission to reprint with appropriate citing. Re-edited, from my article My Teaching Philosophy 2015-2018.