The Teacher's Role and Diversity
The Teacher’s Role and Diversity
How a teacher provides an experience
- The learner must carry on the action that is basic to the experience.
- The teacher sets up the environment and structures the situation to stimulate the desired reaction.
- The teacher controls the experience by manipulating the environment, not the learner.
Why this raises, not lowers, responsibility
- The learner’s own reaction determines what is learned.
- Each learner has a different experience even in the same environment.
- The teacher must build a rich situation or vary experiences to reach every learner.
If learners learn from what they do, not from what the teacher does, a fair question follows: what is left for the teacher? The answer is that the teacher’s role changes shape but does not shrink. It may even grow harder.
How a teacher provides an experience
A teacher cannot have the experience for the learner. The learner must carry on the action that is basic to the experience. So how can a teacher provide an educational experience at all? By working on the environment instead of the learner directly:
- By setting up an environment.
- By structuring the situation so it stimulates the desired reaction.
To do this well, a teacher needs to understand the kinds of interests and the background learners bring, so they can make predictions: how likely a given situation is to provoke learners to react, and what kind of reaction is essential for the desired learning. The teacher’s method of controlling the learning experience is through the manipulation of the learning environment, arranging conditions that stimulate the learner toward the desired behaviour.
By manipulating the learning environment, not the learner directly
The teacher sets up and structures the situation to stimulate the desired reaction. The learner must still carry on the action, but the teacher arranges the conditions that provoke it.
Why this raises the teacher’s responsibility
It might seem that handing the action to the learner lets the teacher off the hook. It does the opposite. This theory of learning does not decrease the teacher’s responsibility, because it recognises that it is the reaction of the learner that determines what is learned. The teacher is responsible for designing an environment good enough to provoke that reaction. If the environment fails, the learning fails, and that is on the teacher.
The responsibility grows heavier still because of diversity. Each learner in a class has a different experience, even though the external environment is the same. This puts a large demand on the teacher in one of two ways:
- Set up a situation with so many features that it is likely to evoke the desired experience from all learners.
- Or vary the experiences, so that something in the mix is likely to be significant to each learner in the class.
This reframes the whole task of selecting learning experiences. It is the work of determining the kind of experience likely to achieve a given objective, and of setting up situations that will provoke learners to show the desired experience. The teacher designs for a room full of different reactors, not one average learner.
The teacher must build a situation rich enough for all, or vary experiences to reach each learner
Because each learner has a different experience in the same environment, the teacher designs for a room of different reactors, not one average learner. This is part of why selecting experiences is hard.
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