Perfecting the Saints — One Lesson at a Time
It is satisfying at the end of a class to sit back and think how well I covered the material for the students. Teachers love to cover things and to say things like “we covered that really well in class today and the students are all ready for the test….
This morning I was reminded of a dinner my wife and I went to with another couple some years ago. This was a young couple, newly wed maybe 2-3 years and not yet with any children. During the course of the evening the husband made this statement: …
We cannot learn new things unless we can connect them to something we already know. That’s why we use metaphors and similes and analogies in our speaking. If someone is trying to get you to eat frog legs and you have no idea if you will lik…
For a number of years I worked off and on in the construction industry, mostly as a plasterer. Construction work is satisfying in a different way than teaching. At the end of the day you, and everyone else, can see very specifically what you accomplish…
When you are a teacher, everyone knows what you do, right? You teach! Everyone has a mental picture of a teacher standing in front of his classroom talking, pacing, writing on the board, grading papers, peering over the tops of his glasses, etc. Those are standard actions of a teacher in his habitat.
But beyond the actions, what are you trying to a accomplish? What is your goal? At the end of the day, how will you know if you were successful?
Below is a quote from Dr. Rolf Kerr (Google him – highly successful and influential educator). Notice the 4 things that he says needs to happen in an educational exchange:
“The acquisition of knowledge is merely the first level of learning. This must be followed by our students’ coming to a clear understanding of that which they have come to know. Even knowledge with understanding is not enough. Those we serve must rise to a level of belief that makes learning meaningful and operable in their lives. They must recognize that what they have come to know, what they have come to understand, and what they have come to believe should change their lives, bringing happiness and the blessings of heaven in this life and through the eternities to come.”
Think about the relationship of those 4 things. If we are studying the Gettysburg Address and I teach about the context of when and where it was delivered, then have my students memorize it, I can probably say they know it. But I also want them to understand it, so we delve deeper and come to see the motivations and reasons for its delivery. At the end of a class like that you may be tempted to think your job is finished. “They know it and understand it.” But tomorrow you could do similar things with the Communist Manifesto and then all that your students have is knowledge of two documents without the ability to differentiate between them. The know and understand them equally well.
But I want this knowledge to change their lives in some way, or else it is just knowledge stored away for the test. In order for the change to happen a student needs to be given the opportunity to believe – believe in the goodness or badness of a thing. I want them to see it, know it understand it, then weigh it out and come to believe it or discard it.. Only in that way will there be enough motivation to make a change.
When I watch teachers teach I see as one of the consistently weakest parts the ability to help students believe something. I see lots of really good ways to help them get the content and the context into their minds. I see very creative ways to help them understand what they are studying. What I see far less is an invitation to believe something, and this is what I think is the missing ingredient: passion for the subject.
My 6th grade teacher let us all make wooden rifles to teach us about some aspect of American History. I’ve forgotten the reason for doing so but I have never forgotten his excitement and urging as he watched us plan and create our little masterpieces. And I still have a great love for American History. I had a high school geometry teacher who made angles seem alive and exciting, and……I still love people who love geometry. I remember different religion teachers who made the scriptures come so alive that I couldn’t wait to dig in deeper on my own. These and others were all teachers filled with passion for their subject. They weren’t detached and they weren’t haltingly cool. They loved what they did and they knew I would too if I would dive in and start to absorb it. My life has been changed and enriched by encounters with great literature because of teachers (and my mother) who loved literature. Finally, understanding the scriptures has changed and improved my life forever and it was passionate and talented teachers (and my father) who lit the fire.
I see a lot of wonderful technicians in the classroom but some days I long for passion. I picture a teacher grabbing a student, staring intently at them and bubbling forth with “This is true – it will change your life – believe me!” (I never suggest the grabbing part, but I do suggest the bubbling forth part). Sometimes passion is loud and demonstrative, sometimes quiet and evocative, but it is always real, not feigned. However you feel it and express it, you’ll have a better teaching experience – and your students will have a better learning experience – if you interject some of it into your lessons.
About 10-15 years ago a colleague handed me this little essay and asked me to read it. He got it from a website (criticalthinking.org) and was intrigued by it. He gave it to me right before the start of a meeting. Well I stayed physically in the meeting but mentally I was in this paper. It shook me in a good way and has caused me from then til now to think about the role of questions in teaching and constantly re-evaluate how I use them. I go back and re-read this every so often and it still inspires me, so I thought I would share it with ‘you’ (whoever ‘you’ may be out there). Consider it an October 8th gift.
The Role of Questions in Teaching, Thinking, and Learning
One of the reasons that instructors tend to overemphasize “coverage” over “engaged thinking” is that they assume that answers can be taught separate from questions. Indeed, so buried are questions in established instruction that the fact that all assertions-all statements that this or that is so-are implicit answers to questions is virtually never recognized. For example, the statement that water boils at 100 degrees centigrade is an answer to the question “At what temperature centigrade does water boil?”.
Hence every declarative statement in the textbook is an answer to a question. Hence, every textbook could be rewritten in the interrogative mode by translating every statement into a question. To my knowledge this has never been done. That it has not is testimony to the privileged status of answers over questions in instruction and the misunderstanding of teachers about the significance of questions in the learning process. Instruction at all levels now keeps most questions buried in a torrent of obscured “answers”.
Thinking is Driven by Questions
But thinking is not driven by answers but by questions. Had no questions been asked by those who laid the foundation for a field-for example, Physics or Biology-the field would never have been developed in the first place. Furthermore, every field stays alive only to the extent that fresh questions are generated and taken seriously as the driving force in a process of thinking. To think through or rethink anything, one must ask questions that stimulate our thought.
Questions define tasks, express problems and delineate issues. Answers on the other hand, often signal a full stop in thought. Only when an answer generates a further question does thought continue its life as such.
This is why it is true that only students who have questions are really thinking and learning. It is possible to give students an examination on any subject by just asking them to list all of the questions that they have about a subject, including all questions generated by their first list of questions.
That we do not test students by asking them to list questions and explain their significance is again evidence of the privileged status we give to answers isolated from questions. That is, we ask questions only to get thought-stopping answers, not to generate further questions.
Feeding Students Endless Content to Remember
Feeding students endless content to remember (that is, declarative sentences to remember) is akin to repeatedly stepping on the brakes in a vehicle that is, unfortunately, already at rest. Instead, students need questions to turn on their intellectual engines and they need to generate questions from our questions to get their thinking to go somewhere. Thinking is of no use unless it goes somewhere, and again, the questions we ask determine where our thinking goes.
Deep questions drive our thought underneath the surface of things, force us to deal with complexity. Questions of purpose force us to define our task. Questions of information force us to look at our sources of information as well as at the quality of our information.
Questions of interpretation force us to examine how we are organizing or giving meaning to information. Questions of assumption force us to examine what we are taking for granted. Questions of implication force us to follow out where our thinking is going. Questions of point of view force us to examine our point of view and to consider other relevant points of view.
Questions of relevance force us to discriminate what does and what does not bear on a question. Questions of accuracy force us to evaluate and test for truth and correctness. Questions of precision force us to give details and be specific. Questions of consistency force us to examine our thinking for contradictions. Questions of logic force us to consider how we are putting the whole of our thought together, to make sure that it all adds up and makes sense within a reasonable system of some kind.
Dead Questions Reflect Dead Minds
Unfortunately, most students ask virtually none of these thought-stimulating types of questions. They tend to stick to dead questions like “Is this going to be on the test?”, questions that imply the desire not to think. Most teachers in turn are not themselves generators of questions and answers of their own, that is, are not seriously engaged in thinking through or rethinking through their own subjects. Rather, they are purveyors of the questions and answers of others-usually those of a textbook.
We must continually remind ourselves that thinking begins with respect to some content only when questions are generated by both teachers and students. No questions equals no understanding. Superficial questions equals superficial understanding. Most students typically have no questions. They not only sit in silence; their minds are silent at well. Hence, the questions they do have tend to be superficial and ill-informed. This demonstrates that most of the time they are not thinking through the content they are presumed to be learning. This demonstrates that most of the time they are not learning the content they are presumed to be learning.
If we want thinking we must stimulate it with questions that lead students to further questions. We must overcome what previous schooling has done to the thinking of students. We must resuscitate minds that are largely dead when we receive them. We must give our students what might be called “artificial cogitation” (the intellectual equivalent of artificial respiration).
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