Bill Braun (medprac@hlthsys.com)
Tue, 22 Jun 1999 11:47:56 -0500
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 11:47:56 -0500 From: Bill Braun <medprac@hlthsys.com> Subject: Re: What matters in teaching
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>Kevin wrote: What matters is that students achieve what they want to achieve
>
>I would say: "What matters is that students achieve the RIGHTthings to
achieve."
>This presumes that not all learning has equal value. It also presumes
that students
>are not always the best judges of what they should learn. Isn't that one
of the
>things that teachers are for? ... to show what ought to be learned? ...
and then to
>motivate students to make them want to learn it?
All generalizations will fail at some level of scrutiny. With that said,
I'll weigh in with mine. Russell Ackoff gave a talk at Villanova University
in March. A brief excerpt.
"The educational system is not dedicated to produce learning by students,
but teaching by teachers - and teaching is a major obstacle to learning.
Witness the difference between the ease with which we learned our first
language without having it taught to us, and the difficulty with which we
tried to learn a second language in school. Most of what we use as adults
we learned once we got out of school, not while we were in it, and what we
learned in school we forgot rapidly - fortunately. Although we learn little
of use by having it taught to us, we can learn a great deal by teaching
others. It is always the teacher who learns the most in a classroom.
Schools are upside down. Students should be teaching, and teachers at all
levels should learn no matter how much they resist doing so.
A student once asked me in what year I had last taught a class on a subject
that existed when I was a student. A great question. After some thought, I
told him 1951. 'Boy', he said, 'you must be a good learner. What a pity you
can't teach as well as you learn.' He had it right."
Bill Braun
The Health Systems Group
- Physician Leadership Training
- Simulation Modeling for Healthcare
http://www.hlthsys.com
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