You can force a man to dig a hole at the point of a gun, but you can’t force a student to learn.  All higher level thinking tasks, in fact anything beyond rote learning as in simply memorizing something to be reproduced on a test or exam,  requires for the learner’s will to be engaged in the activity.  Real learning does not take place under compulsion, and this is why the Care and Growth framework developed by Schuitema  is the single most important intervention required in the education sector in this 21^st Century.

 

The basic structure of today’s schools designed for mass education was first developed in the middle of the 19^th century in Europe. Its purpose was to develop low level administrators for the growing European empires of that era. The need was for developing people who could follow order and had basic reading and writing skills necessary for correspondence and record keeping. In this model the previous approach of one-to-one, or even small group instruction where the teaching was designed for the learners needs and ability went out the window.

Demands for the 21^st Century work force are completely different. Our goal is to develop young people who have initiative, who can think independently and critically, and can sort though vast amounts of information available  and make sense of it.  The focus on strict discipline and do as you are told because I say so, no longer works on today’s young people who are growing up in a different world. For reasons of practical economics, mostly student teacher ratio, we are stuck with the same19th Century  model with one teacher teaching 30 students of the same age group, regardless of ability or commitment to learning.

 A teachers role in today’s learning environment is to get the learner to function in the upper end of Bloom’s Taxonomy;  which means the student must be engaged in activities that require analysis, integration and evaluation.  A teacher must therefore create a learning environment  where a student’s attention is on the activity and where his will is engaged.  Real learning, as defined above, cannot take place in an environment permeated by fear or anger.

Unfortunately, most of today’s classrooms require teacher’s to first  “control” thirty odd rebellious teenagers who don’t really want to be there. This control is usually achieved by some degree of threat or intimidation and therefore fear, resentment and rebelliousness are the two dominant feeling tones that define most middle and high schools.

The Care & Growth model teaches us that when the “little one”, in this case the student, no longer experiences the teacher as being there to get something from him, and instead perceives him as someone who is there to give something to him, the whole dynamics of the classroom changes.

We have all experienced classrooms where tough,  mean  looking,  teachers spend most of the class period screaming at children to sit down, or be quiet.  We have all also experienced classrooms where soft, gentle seeming teachers have burly teenagers completely absorbed in the activity planned for them.   In my experience as a school administrator I have found the difference is Care and Growth.  Even the most unruly fourteen year old, and yes I am firmly convinced that 14 is the bottom of the barrel in terms of Classroom behavior, is willing to do anything for the teacher he believes genuinely Cares for him and want to Grow him.

When a student does an assignment because he “has to” he does the minimum required which at best leads to mediocrity.  It is only when we do something because we “want to” that we can achieve the excellence required of today’s schools.

Tags: Add new tag, Care and Growth, Care and Growth Leadership, Education, Shahpur Jamall

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 9:13 pm and is filed under Care and Growth Leadership, Education, Shahpur Jamall. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.