I had a great biology teacher in high school. He treated us like adults (so I felt). He probably taught in a conventional way. But he was wise and inspiring. Many of his thoughts stuck with me for 25+ years. For example:
- To learn something means to understand the process. It doesn't mean to memorize words. (Photosynthesis as an example, lots of complicated words which we didn't have to know)
- Only two students will get a grade that is just: the one who knows everything, and the one who knows nothing. All in between is lottery.
My feeling is that I learned the most from those people who were rich in knowledge, and therefore able to inspire.
I'm a physics professor. My love for physics survived years of bad teachers (very common in physics worldwide). What motivated me was my Saturday morning peer group where we met to solve tough problems. No grades, no extra credit to be earned.
I now see my 9yo chloroformed by math. He learned that he hates math (his teachers are into harsh, punitive grading) and as soon as something looks like math, he doesn't want to think about it. But if he approaches a problem through common sense, he can solve it. As a parent, I now dislike a lot about school.
I work in the museum field. Many years ago, I was writing labels for a paleontology exhibit, describing how the diets of prehistoric animals could be determined by looking at their teeth, and included the deathless line, "All horned dinosaurs ate plants." I sent the label around for review, and the educator assigned to the project crossed out that line and substituted, "All ceratopsians were herbivores," noting in the margins that I should "Use 'science words' to promote science literacy." I responded that, in my view, science literacy consisted not of memorizing Latinate words, but in understanding concepts and processes such as comparative anatomy. He was not amused, but my boss backed me up.
As always, I appreciate your invitation to think deeply about teaching and learning. So as to not suggest that all teaching is ineffective (which I know is not your intent), perhaps the phrase could be modified to say “Nothing worth knowing can be TOLD”.
I teach a conceptual physics course for elementary teachers online. Because it is asynchronous, but not self-paced, I had to think long and hard about how to design the experience so that it encourages inquiry, questioning, and curiosity.
The “content” covers the science of sound, and it includes articles to read and videos to watch. But we know that simply reading and watching is insufficient - and sometimes harmful. The problem with watching a youtube video or TikTok reel is that it may leave you with the mistaken notion that you THINK you know something. What you need is the REST of the experience.
In my course, the learning experience includes conducting simple experiments (we provide a kit of “stuff”), using a science notebook to record data and reflect on what’s going on, and lots of (asynchronous threaded) discussion.
Interestingly, it forced me to change my role as teacher from “telling” and “demonstrating” to spending my time as a “Thought Provocateur”. What would have been lecture content is now assigned reading/watching, so together we can instead focus on working out the meaning together.
After 20 years, I can say that this type of online learning really works. Teachers who take the course report being enthused, surprised, and enriched - and I have to admit, I rather enjoy teaching vs. telling…!
I’m a former elementary school teacher who went on to homeschool with my three kids and I’ll tell you who my best teachers were--my kids! They upended everything I believed about teaching and learning and taught me all the lessons you’re writing about here.
One of my favorite examples of this happened while taking dictation from my youngest, starting when he was about three and full of stories. I’d always sort of considered taking dictation a crutch for kids until they could write themselves but he flipped that for me. I began to see, as time went on, how much he was learning about the craft of writing through our little conversations about what I was writing down for him. We ended up doing this for years because we both enjoyed it. It’s hard to summarize quickly, but he picked up grammar and style and he really learned to think as a writer. I was simply a conduit and a peer and an adult who loved writing who was eager to share that love with him.
He did, along the way, learn to write himself, but I’d still take dictation from him when he had a lot to get down, until he was nine or ten.
He’s in college now and his professors constantly laud his writing. He has a real gift. Double majoring in history and comedy filmmaking, he can write excellent academic papers but he really shines at screenwriting. And he still loves doing it. 😊
(If anyone is interested in what I learned from this process with my kid, I wrote lots of posts on it on my blog in a section called “the dictation project.” I ended up sharing this technique with other parents via writing and at conferences and have received so much feedback from other parents about how effective it was in helping their kids love writing. Because it isn’t a *teaching* method--it’s an opportunity for a child to share their thinking with an enthusiastic adult, and to get their ideas on the page. Learning naturally follows from there.)
Thank you, Dr. Gray. Your work always fires me up!
I observe (and expect) that most responses are going to relate to the *teacher* and how they related/interacted with their students. No doubt a great teacher bridges the gap between teaching and learning. But is there a method for effective school-based education that doesn't depend on having a great teacher? In my experience, maybe.
Mr. Parker, Geometry at Palo Alto High School 1977-78. We were visiting CA for a year, and I was put into a sophomore geometry class as a freshman to align with the math curriculum back in Indiana so that I would return on track for Algebra II in my sophomore year.
Up to that point I related to school as solely something that you navigated to make it more tolerable while getting in less trouble. I got a D in the first term of 7th grade math because the teacher cared most about students neatly organizing their work in a notebook, which I found intolerable. After getting in trouble with my parents for that, I did enough notebook work to get a C in the second term. That was school for me.
Mr. Parker started the class with the basic Euclidian postulates and from there we created Geometry including conic sections and basic trigonometry. Over the last two weeks of the class we broke into groups and used a tape measure and sextant to answer questions starting with "how tall is the flagpole?" and ending with "how far is it from keyhole in the door to the principal's office to the lifeguard stand in the swimming pool?" to discover the power of what we had learned (a year earlier none of us would have believed that *we* would be able to accurately answer seemingly impossible questions like these).
School still occurred to me mostly like something to be navigated (at least until grad school) but now I could see how learning could create entirely new worlds and make unimaginable things possible. Anyone could have taught us geometry - Mr. Parker's class changed my life by giving me an opportunity to learn geometry. I actually don't know if he was a great *teacher* - but he was a great educator.
I have always been in awe of the numerical skills of certain people - darts players, snooker players and people who work on market stalls selling fruit and veg. They work out the most complicated things and permutations without any apparent effort. Yet I bet if you gave them the same calculations written down, they wouldn't be able to do them...
I completely agree that 'teaching' and 'learning' are not the same thing (see Sir Ken Robinson's lovely comment about Miss X being in Room 23, teaching - but if the students aren't learning anything, is she teaching? :)).
I think that very few of us remember much of the actual CONTENT of what we were 'taught'. Rather - we remember teachers we loved, teachers we hated, teachers who inspired us and how the whole school experience made us FEEL.
I think possibly the teacher who had the most effect on me at school was a Mrs Pollon, who only taught me English in my last year at school. English was the only subject that I was anything even NEAR 'good at', so I took it as one of my two 'A' Levels (the exam taken by 17/18 year-olds in the UK, at the end of a two-year course). Our teacher in the first year of the course was useless and everyone failed the end-of-year exam. Then Mrs Pollon arrived. She was a down-to-earth Northerner who managed to get sex into every lesson, and I have never forgotten her. Apart from my class teacher when I was 7, and my dancing teacher when I was 10 (both told my mum on separate occasions that I would make a good teacher), no teacher had ever seen that there was anything of interest or promise in me. But Mrs Pollon did. I felt like I'd woken up. When the exam results came out, I remember that they were 2 As, 9 Bs, 1C, 1D, 1E (E was the lowest pass grade). I was the D. Mrs Pollon called me. 'What on earth happened?' she asked. 'Oh, I just can't do exams - I hate them and I just don't know how to do them, I get scared and in a panic.' 'WHY didn't you tell me this?', she said. 'If I'd known, I could have done something to help you. I was expecting you to get an A or at least a B..'
I was so taken aback. ME - an A??? Someone else thought I could get an A????
I went to teacher training college with pretty much the minimum exam requirements - but I didn't have the maths pass that I should have had. When I went for the interview, they made me do a maths test, which I failed (it was of primary school standard). So I thought they wouldn't take me...but I had an interview with a senior tutor and I loved her - and she absolutely saw something in me that I didn't know was there. I ended up being one of the top 20 students in my year (out of 200+) - I learned how to 'do' exams - and have gone on to achieve the most amazing things in my field.
Apart from the inclusion of sex in every lesson (always going to be attractive to 17 year-olds leading a sheltered life in an all-girls' school), I don't remember any of the content of Mrs Pollon's classes. But I do remember loving King Lear, and the World War One Poets as a result, and voraciously read the classics in my spare time.
I was about 24 (teaching classes of 4-8 year olds) that I stumbled across the Kodály approach to music education, and my life began to change. From someone who considered herself 'not musical' to someone who is one of the three leading practitioners of the approach in the UK has been the most amazing and magical transformation. Along this path I have been privileged to have been taught by some of the most wonderful teachers (mostly Hungarian) - but although they did PRESENT certain concepts, skills, areas of knowledge and competency, you're right - they didn't TEACH them to me. Rather - they made me think about both the HOW I taught this to others, and the HOW I learned to do things myself. For the latter - they would introduce something and we would do it together in the class - then I would go away and work on it by myself, because I was hugely motivated to be able to do it - and to do it well. Every time I managed to do something well, my confidence shot up.
As a teacher - even now - I am extremely aware that, when I teach a group of (say) 6 adults on Zoom, every single one of them is going to take what I do in a different way - they're going to perceive it in their own way, according to their personalities, their prior experiences, how they're feeling on the day, if its something they find easy or harder, plus many other variables. I've always felt I was a facilitator rather than a 'teacher'.
Perhaps we need to start defining the words 'teacher' and 'learner' - 'teaching' and 'learning'....
My physics teacher would often drop the script and tell us stories from his time in the Navy working on radar systems. He would also predict future developments. Telling us in 1970 that one day we would have flat screen televisions and then explaining the science of it. What I remember most vividly is when he gave us all a wide open brief to design a conservation type project. I designed and created a system collecting and filtering rainwater from my shed roof. We met socially years later and he told me mine was the best project anyone had ever done . It wasn’t part of the curriculum there was no record of the mark achieved, there was no test score. It was just an inspired teacher facilitating learning.
I have real dyslexia (my visual system physically doesn't work like others), which was made worse by teachers trying to "teach" me how to read. But along the way I had several teachers who made a huge impact on me.
In 5th grade I was fortunate enough to be in a school that allowed the students to learn at their own pace. We went through the written materials on our own, and then had conversations with our teacher about what we were reading and learning. This was in the 60s, and it was an experimental classroom. It was the only time in my entire schooled life when I excelled at reading, because I wasn't punished for being too slow. Instead, I was encouraged for having ideas about what I had read. My teacher, Mrs Schmidt, planted the seed for me.
But the biggest impact came when I was in 10th grade and my French teacher, Mr. Schultz, tried to find the right French grade level for me. It wasn't 2nd year French, despite the fact that I had spent a year in French class in 9th grade. It wasn't 1st year French either, because I really do struggle with reading and language in particular. But he didn't just let me struggle and fail, he took me aside and learned that I was actually interested in Greek. So he worked with me during a free class period once a week and allowed me to study Greek independently. He didn't know Greek himself, so we learned things about it together. This man's willingness to show me that it's possible to follow an "out of the box" solution changed everything about my view of the world, and myself.
Neither of these teachers "taught" me their respective subject matter, instead they taught me that I am capable despite what the tests might say, and they encouraged me to pursue my own interests, creativity, and advocacy.
I hope my children will respond to your question in the comments. I am forwarding your essay to them right now. We educated at home with very little by the way of curriculum. They both ended up going to high school and both were academically successful. Honor students, college scholarship offered and all that. I’d say the theories you’ve talked about stood up well with my kiddos. They spent their young childhood playing. There were a couple of tries at school; once public, once private. Both offered an unhappy experience in comparison to what their life was at home and with friends. Nature’s classroom, playground classroom, books and info TV, board games, robotics, sports, even building their own computers
the list of fun things to do in which they learned is long. Thank you for your work Peter!
I loved learning and enjoyed school in general. In my career, I have taught from early childhood through college education classes. Hearing teachers' lament how they could not use methods for learning which veered away from teaching to the tests, I eventually committed to early childhood education where learning is foundational, the impact lifelong, and the measure of success is a healthy child. Learning difficulties that arise later often benefit from shoring up on the foundation - the physical and social-emotional aspects of learning. When we forget learning is an embodied process, not only a cognitive one, we don't serve the ultimate goal of developing whole human beings. When young children learn through play, they become self-regulating, active, and engaged learners rather than passive recipients of information. That's where it starts.
The best lessons in school for me were ones that taught me something about myself - my interests, quirks, talents, and weaknesses. Teachers who stood out are ones who created an environment conducive to learning including: a deep interest even love of their subject matter, a sense of humor or at least a feeling of lightness, a playful, adventuresome, and interactive approach, and a warm respect for the students as individuals. Rather than trying to control students and outcomes, this learning environment involves trusting the process and the students.
My hunch is that you bring these qualities to your teaching, Peter, and I enjoy engaging in this conversation.
《What concerns me is something entirely different, a good deal more like tree climbing. I have never heard of a school or college that gave a course in tree climbing. And human life is full of useful accomplishments and rewarding experiences, like tree climbing — like making a speech, for example, or being able to take care of oneself on a camping trip: abilities that seem to me at least as valuable as a knowledge of conjugations and the dates of battles — perhaps (if one is to become a self-sufficient well-rounded human being) much more valuable. What are those abilities, skills, or accomplishments, those extra-curricular proficiencies that every man should have in order to be rounded and self-sufficient, and when can he acquire them, and how?》—Robert Littell (Mar 1933), What the Young Man Should Know, Harper's Magazine, https://harpers.org/archive/1933/03/what-the-young-man-should-know/
Young men or women, —their indoctrination, training & education within a cultural milieu, i.e., are you preparing them for war or farm duty, is a complicated discussion, & most of us, like Littell, have a prioritized list. For pre-adolescents, there's probably greater divergence of thought.
For me, childhood should be an Eden of naps & play, of curious exploration & rambunctious movement, where teeming brain cells create synaptic connections with energetic muscles to develop into an expressive human.
Leaving aside, the "how, why, when, where, what" of that broad statement, there is an often overlooked aspect of what it means to become an individual: immunity. How does the body learn to recognize itself and distinguish external agents? By spending childhood playing outside, with animals, kids, pollens, dirt, bacteria, ...
In this review, we will discuss how the complex structure of thymus provides a unique microenvironment to orchestrate the differentiation of thymocytes and TEC, and educates T cells to recognize self from non-self. We will review how T cell development occurs in the thymus and the developmental checkpoints that thymocytes progress through to become mature T cells exported to the periphery. We will also discuss age-related regulation of thymic function based on results from mouse and human studies, and implications for immunosenescence and regulation.
I like to say we remember what is useful. I also like to say schooling is for socialization, not content knowledge. In school systems, we can only come to deeply know and understand the systems of schooling... which serves as a model for the systems of workplaces and society at large. (By socialization I mean the process of bringing new individuals into, and perpetuating, socital instutions).
The learning in schools isn't *fake*, as we learn what helps us navigate our lives, but the teaching of content knowledge is superficial, at best.
Even if the actual purpose of schooling was to learn specific content, most schooled learning is completely seperated from context and use that in will always prove to be ineffective compared to actual *doing*.
I am convinced that the only way schooling could be useful at teaching subject matter would to be to drop the emphasis on content and focus on what it means to actually do the work of any given field. Be a scientist, historian, writer, mathematician, etc. This focuses on the thought processes and reasoning that is useful to understanding those fields, which gives the student-practitioners the skills the need to learn the necessary content as they do the work.
I wrote about this self same thing recently: "Education has always had the status of a sacred institution right across the political spectrum. When Tony Blair came up with his “Education, Education, Education” pitch in the 1997 UK general election it seemed like just unassailable common sense. So what to make then of broadsides from radical deschooling intellectuals (see below) questioning the very basis of our whole education system. Broadsides like these: “Schools fail to teach what they pretend to teach. Most of their inmates spend years failing to learn things like Mathematics, Science and French”[1] ....and: “An illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is a result of teaching.”[2]....." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/teach-your-children-well
My own greatest teacher was my French teacher in high school, and what she taught me had nothing to do with French (which I hated, but it was required at my school). She encouraged my (English!) writing and poetry. Because of her, I kept writing creatively even in a school where creative writing outside of a very narrow "religious " purpose was not valued.
I suffered greatly under traditional mathematics education, so much so that decades later as we began homeschooling (which quickly became unschooling as my wickedly creative and independent 4 year old made a mockery of an expensive homeschooling curriculum and its schedules and checklists) I decided that I would do almost anything to be absolutely SURE my kid did not hate any aspect of math, music, art, or reading. So, we did not touch those Saxon math textbooks so beloved by many homeschooling families...
At nearly 22, she has all the math she needs for adult life. And she's not *afraid* of learning more if the interest or need arises. I am thankful.
Great piece Peter! I said the following on this topic: A performance requires both a performer and an audience. Learning does not require a teacher and a student. Humans achieve our most daunting learning challenges, learning to coordinate our bodies and to talk, without anyone teaching us how. We, like all other learning beings, learn by observing and interacting with our environments. Of course, we also learn through conversation and by actively making sense of our experiences and our conversations. As an Earth-centered educator, I do little teaching. Imprinting information onto others’ brains just never struck me as a thing to do. I also avoid curricula packaged in factories as I avoid food prepared that same way. On the other hand, I’ve always enjoyed conversations involving people really listening to each other. I also enjoy being a guide when I am in familiar territory, being guided when I am not, and sharing resources with others in both directions. Rather than teaching, I consider what I do as nurturing transformative ecological learning environments and communities. https://peterkindfieldphd.substack.com/i/142674367/education
Thank you, again, to point out and explain what feels like 'common sense' and what we observe in children if they are given the space and opportunity to do so.
For those who need research I am sure they will be satisfied with your evidence and invitations to dig deeper should they wish to...
The only teacher who contributed to my view of the world was a primary school Physics teacher with whom we had many practical lessons and carried out experiments. Until this day I remember the stages water go through to reach the point of boiling at 100 degrees Celsius.
I was hopeless with calculations and equations in Physics but the experiment proved to me that I can observe and understand physical laws around me without knowing how to calculate or explain them scientifically... 🙏
I had a great biology teacher in high school. He treated us like adults (so I felt). He probably taught in a conventional way. But he was wise and inspiring. Many of his thoughts stuck with me for 25+ years. For example:
- To learn something means to understand the process. It doesn't mean to memorize words. (Photosynthesis as an example, lots of complicated words which we didn't have to know)
- Only two students will get a grade that is just: the one who knows everything, and the one who knows nothing. All in between is lottery.
My feeling is that I learned the most from those people who were rich in knowledge, and therefore able to inspire.
I'm a physics professor. My love for physics survived years of bad teachers (very common in physics worldwide). What motivated me was my Saturday morning peer group where we met to solve tough problems. No grades, no extra credit to be earned.
I now see my 9yo chloroformed by math. He learned that he hates math (his teachers are into harsh, punitive grading) and as soon as something looks like math, he doesn't want to think about it. But if he approaches a problem through common sense, he can solve it. As a parent, I now dislike a lot about school.
With regards to complicated words...
I work in the museum field. Many years ago, I was writing labels for a paleontology exhibit, describing how the diets of prehistoric animals could be determined by looking at their teeth, and included the deathless line, "All horned dinosaurs ate plants." I sent the label around for review, and the educator assigned to the project crossed out that line and substituted, "All ceratopsians were herbivores," noting in the margins that I should "Use 'science words' to promote science literacy." I responded that, in my view, science literacy consisted not of memorizing Latinate words, but in understanding concepts and processes such as comparative anatomy. He was not amused, but my boss backed me up.
As always, I appreciate your invitation to think deeply about teaching and learning. So as to not suggest that all teaching is ineffective (which I know is not your intent), perhaps the phrase could be modified to say “Nothing worth knowing can be TOLD”.
I teach a conceptual physics course for elementary teachers online. Because it is asynchronous, but not self-paced, I had to think long and hard about how to design the experience so that it encourages inquiry, questioning, and curiosity.
The “content” covers the science of sound, and it includes articles to read and videos to watch. But we know that simply reading and watching is insufficient - and sometimes harmful. The problem with watching a youtube video or TikTok reel is that it may leave you with the mistaken notion that you THINK you know something. What you need is the REST of the experience.
In my course, the learning experience includes conducting simple experiments (we provide a kit of “stuff”), using a science notebook to record data and reflect on what’s going on, and lots of (asynchronous threaded) discussion.
Interestingly, it forced me to change my role as teacher from “telling” and “demonstrating” to spending my time as a “Thought Provocateur”. What would have been lecture content is now assigned reading/watching, so together we can instead focus on working out the meaning together.
After 20 years, I can say that this type of online learning really works. Teachers who take the course report being enthused, surprised, and enriched - and I have to admit, I rather enjoy teaching vs. telling…!
I’m a former elementary school teacher who went on to homeschool with my three kids and I’ll tell you who my best teachers were--my kids! They upended everything I believed about teaching and learning and taught me all the lessons you’re writing about here.
One of my favorite examples of this happened while taking dictation from my youngest, starting when he was about three and full of stories. I’d always sort of considered taking dictation a crutch for kids until they could write themselves but he flipped that for me. I began to see, as time went on, how much he was learning about the craft of writing through our little conversations about what I was writing down for him. We ended up doing this for years because we both enjoyed it. It’s hard to summarize quickly, but he picked up grammar and style and he really learned to think as a writer. I was simply a conduit and a peer and an adult who loved writing who was eager to share that love with him.
He did, along the way, learn to write himself, but I’d still take dictation from him when he had a lot to get down, until he was nine or ten.
He’s in college now and his professors constantly laud his writing. He has a real gift. Double majoring in history and comedy filmmaking, he can write excellent academic papers but he really shines at screenwriting. And he still loves doing it. 😊
(If anyone is interested in what I learned from this process with my kid, I wrote lots of posts on it on my blog in a section called “the dictation project.” I ended up sharing this technique with other parents via writing and at conferences and have received so much feedback from other parents about how effective it was in helping their kids love writing. Because it isn’t a *teaching* method--it’s an opportunity for a child to share their thinking with an enthusiastic adult, and to get their ideas on the page. Learning naturally follows from there.)
Thank you, Dr. Gray. Your work always fires me up!
Brilliant! Thanks for opening me up to dictation with my children. I had no idea!
It’s pretty amazing and I learned it from my kid. 😌 More about it here: http://patriciazaballos.com/the-dictation-project/
I observe (and expect) that most responses are going to relate to the *teacher* and how they related/interacted with their students. No doubt a great teacher bridges the gap between teaching and learning. But is there a method for effective school-based education that doesn't depend on having a great teacher? In my experience, maybe.
Mr. Parker, Geometry at Palo Alto High School 1977-78. We were visiting CA for a year, and I was put into a sophomore geometry class as a freshman to align with the math curriculum back in Indiana so that I would return on track for Algebra II in my sophomore year.
Up to that point I related to school as solely something that you navigated to make it more tolerable while getting in less trouble. I got a D in the first term of 7th grade math because the teacher cared most about students neatly organizing their work in a notebook, which I found intolerable. After getting in trouble with my parents for that, I did enough notebook work to get a C in the second term. That was school for me.
Mr. Parker started the class with the basic Euclidian postulates and from there we created Geometry including conic sections and basic trigonometry. Over the last two weeks of the class we broke into groups and used a tape measure and sextant to answer questions starting with "how tall is the flagpole?" and ending with "how far is it from keyhole in the door to the principal's office to the lifeguard stand in the swimming pool?" to discover the power of what we had learned (a year earlier none of us would have believed that *we* would be able to accurately answer seemingly impossible questions like these).
School still occurred to me mostly like something to be navigated (at least until grad school) but now I could see how learning could create entirely new worlds and make unimaginable things possible. Anyone could have taught us geometry - Mr. Parker's class changed my life by giving me an opportunity to learn geometry. I actually don't know if he was a great *teacher* - but he was a great educator.
I have always been in awe of the numerical skills of certain people - darts players, snooker players and people who work on market stalls selling fruit and veg. They work out the most complicated things and permutations without any apparent effort. Yet I bet if you gave them the same calculations written down, they wouldn't be able to do them...
I completely agree that 'teaching' and 'learning' are not the same thing (see Sir Ken Robinson's lovely comment about Miss X being in Room 23, teaching - but if the students aren't learning anything, is she teaching? :)).
I think that very few of us remember much of the actual CONTENT of what we were 'taught'. Rather - we remember teachers we loved, teachers we hated, teachers who inspired us and how the whole school experience made us FEEL.
I think possibly the teacher who had the most effect on me at school was a Mrs Pollon, who only taught me English in my last year at school. English was the only subject that I was anything even NEAR 'good at', so I took it as one of my two 'A' Levels (the exam taken by 17/18 year-olds in the UK, at the end of a two-year course). Our teacher in the first year of the course was useless and everyone failed the end-of-year exam. Then Mrs Pollon arrived. She was a down-to-earth Northerner who managed to get sex into every lesson, and I have never forgotten her. Apart from my class teacher when I was 7, and my dancing teacher when I was 10 (both told my mum on separate occasions that I would make a good teacher), no teacher had ever seen that there was anything of interest or promise in me. But Mrs Pollon did. I felt like I'd woken up. When the exam results came out, I remember that they were 2 As, 9 Bs, 1C, 1D, 1E (E was the lowest pass grade). I was the D. Mrs Pollon called me. 'What on earth happened?' she asked. 'Oh, I just can't do exams - I hate them and I just don't know how to do them, I get scared and in a panic.' 'WHY didn't you tell me this?', she said. 'If I'd known, I could have done something to help you. I was expecting you to get an A or at least a B..'
I was so taken aback. ME - an A??? Someone else thought I could get an A????
I went to teacher training college with pretty much the minimum exam requirements - but I didn't have the maths pass that I should have had. When I went for the interview, they made me do a maths test, which I failed (it was of primary school standard). So I thought they wouldn't take me...but I had an interview with a senior tutor and I loved her - and she absolutely saw something in me that I didn't know was there. I ended up being one of the top 20 students in my year (out of 200+) - I learned how to 'do' exams - and have gone on to achieve the most amazing things in my field.
Apart from the inclusion of sex in every lesson (always going to be attractive to 17 year-olds leading a sheltered life in an all-girls' school), I don't remember any of the content of Mrs Pollon's classes. But I do remember loving King Lear, and the World War One Poets as a result, and voraciously read the classics in my spare time.
I was about 24 (teaching classes of 4-8 year olds) that I stumbled across the Kodály approach to music education, and my life began to change. From someone who considered herself 'not musical' to someone who is one of the three leading practitioners of the approach in the UK has been the most amazing and magical transformation. Along this path I have been privileged to have been taught by some of the most wonderful teachers (mostly Hungarian) - but although they did PRESENT certain concepts, skills, areas of knowledge and competency, you're right - they didn't TEACH them to me. Rather - they made me think about both the HOW I taught this to others, and the HOW I learned to do things myself. For the latter - they would introduce something and we would do it together in the class - then I would go away and work on it by myself, because I was hugely motivated to be able to do it - and to do it well. Every time I managed to do something well, my confidence shot up.
As a teacher - even now - I am extremely aware that, when I teach a group of (say) 6 adults on Zoom, every single one of them is going to take what I do in a different way - they're going to perceive it in their own way, according to their personalities, their prior experiences, how they're feeling on the day, if its something they find easy or harder, plus many other variables. I've always felt I was a facilitator rather than a 'teacher'.
Perhaps we need to start defining the words 'teacher' and 'learner' - 'teaching' and 'learning'....
Thank you for another fabulous article.
What a beautiful story of inspiration, hope and resilience. I’m so happy for you and those in your classes.
Aw, thank you! :)
My physics teacher would often drop the script and tell us stories from his time in the Navy working on radar systems. He would also predict future developments. Telling us in 1970 that one day we would have flat screen televisions and then explaining the science of it. What I remember most vividly is when he gave us all a wide open brief to design a conservation type project. I designed and created a system collecting and filtering rainwater from my shed roof. We met socially years later and he told me mine was the best project anyone had ever done . It wasn’t part of the curriculum there was no record of the mark achieved, there was no test score. It was just an inspired teacher facilitating learning.
I have real dyslexia (my visual system physically doesn't work like others), which was made worse by teachers trying to "teach" me how to read. But along the way I had several teachers who made a huge impact on me.
In 5th grade I was fortunate enough to be in a school that allowed the students to learn at their own pace. We went through the written materials on our own, and then had conversations with our teacher about what we were reading and learning. This was in the 60s, and it was an experimental classroom. It was the only time in my entire schooled life when I excelled at reading, because I wasn't punished for being too slow. Instead, I was encouraged for having ideas about what I had read. My teacher, Mrs Schmidt, planted the seed for me.
But the biggest impact came when I was in 10th grade and my French teacher, Mr. Schultz, tried to find the right French grade level for me. It wasn't 2nd year French, despite the fact that I had spent a year in French class in 9th grade. It wasn't 1st year French either, because I really do struggle with reading and language in particular. But he didn't just let me struggle and fail, he took me aside and learned that I was actually interested in Greek. So he worked with me during a free class period once a week and allowed me to study Greek independently. He didn't know Greek himself, so we learned things about it together. This man's willingness to show me that it's possible to follow an "out of the box" solution changed everything about my view of the world, and myself.
Neither of these teachers "taught" me their respective subject matter, instead they taught me that I am capable despite what the tests might say, and they encouraged me to pursue my own interests, creativity, and advocacy.
I hope my children will respond to your question in the comments. I am forwarding your essay to them right now. We educated at home with very little by the way of curriculum. They both ended up going to high school and both were academically successful. Honor students, college scholarship offered and all that. I’d say the theories you’ve talked about stood up well with my kiddos. They spent their young childhood playing. There were a couple of tries at school; once public, once private. Both offered an unhappy experience in comparison to what their life was at home and with friends. Nature’s classroom, playground classroom, books and info TV, board games, robotics, sports, even building their own computers
the list of fun things to do in which they learned is long. Thank you for your work Peter!
I’m such a huge fan and proponent of homeschooling! I can’t wait to read your kids’ responses. I hope they share in the comments.
I loved learning and enjoyed school in general. In my career, I have taught from early childhood through college education classes. Hearing teachers' lament how they could not use methods for learning which veered away from teaching to the tests, I eventually committed to early childhood education where learning is foundational, the impact lifelong, and the measure of success is a healthy child. Learning difficulties that arise later often benefit from shoring up on the foundation - the physical and social-emotional aspects of learning. When we forget learning is an embodied process, not only a cognitive one, we don't serve the ultimate goal of developing whole human beings. When young children learn through play, they become self-regulating, active, and engaged learners rather than passive recipients of information. That's where it starts.
The best lessons in school for me were ones that taught me something about myself - my interests, quirks, talents, and weaknesses. Teachers who stood out are ones who created an environment conducive to learning including: a deep interest even love of their subject matter, a sense of humor or at least a feeling of lightness, a playful, adventuresome, and interactive approach, and a warm respect for the students as individuals. Rather than trying to control students and outcomes, this learning environment involves trusting the process and the students.
My hunch is that you bring these qualities to your teaching, Peter, and I enjoy engaging in this conversation.
《What concerns me is something entirely different, a good deal more like tree climbing. I have never heard of a school or college that gave a course in tree climbing. And human life is full of useful accomplishments and rewarding experiences, like tree climbing — like making a speech, for example, or being able to take care of oneself on a camping trip: abilities that seem to me at least as valuable as a knowledge of conjugations and the dates of battles — perhaps (if one is to become a self-sufficient well-rounded human being) much more valuable. What are those abilities, skills, or accomplishments, those extra-curricular proficiencies that every man should have in order to be rounded and self-sufficient, and when can he acquire them, and how?》—Robert Littell (Mar 1933), What the Young Man Should Know, Harper's Magazine, https://harpers.org/archive/1933/03/what-the-young-man-should-know/
Young men or women, —their indoctrination, training & education within a cultural milieu, i.e., are you preparing them for war or farm duty, is a complicated discussion, & most of us, like Littell, have a prioritized list. For pre-adolescents, there's probably greater divergence of thought.
For me, childhood should be an Eden of naps & play, of curious exploration & rambunctious movement, where teeming brain cells create synaptic connections with energetic muscles to develop into an expressive human.
Leaving aside, the "how, why, when, where, what" of that broad statement, there is an often overlooked aspect of what it means to become an individual: immunity. How does the body learn to recognize itself and distinguish external agents? By spending childhood playing outside, with animals, kids, pollens, dirt, bacteria, ...
● Thapa P, Farber DL. (7 Mar 2019) The Role of the Thymus in the Immune Response. Thorac Surg Clin. 29(2):123-31. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6446584/
In this review, we will discuss how the complex structure of thymus provides a unique microenvironment to orchestrate the differentiation of thymocytes and TEC, and educates T cells to recognize self from non-self. We will review how T cell development occurs in the thymus and the developmental checkpoints that thymocytes progress through to become mature T cells exported to the periphery. We will also discuss age-related regulation of thymic function based on results from mouse and human studies, and implications for immunosenescence and regulation.
I like to say we remember what is useful. I also like to say schooling is for socialization, not content knowledge. In school systems, we can only come to deeply know and understand the systems of schooling... which serves as a model for the systems of workplaces and society at large. (By socialization I mean the process of bringing new individuals into, and perpetuating, socital instutions).
The learning in schools isn't *fake*, as we learn what helps us navigate our lives, but the teaching of content knowledge is superficial, at best.
Even if the actual purpose of schooling was to learn specific content, most schooled learning is completely seperated from context and use that in will always prove to be ineffective compared to actual *doing*.
I am convinced that the only way schooling could be useful at teaching subject matter would to be to drop the emphasis on content and focus on what it means to actually do the work of any given field. Be a scientist, historian, writer, mathematician, etc. This focuses on the thought processes and reasoning that is useful to understanding those fields, which gives the student-practitioners the skills the need to learn the necessary content as they do the work.
I wrote about this self same thing recently: "Education has always had the status of a sacred institution right across the political spectrum. When Tony Blair came up with his “Education, Education, Education” pitch in the 1997 UK general election it seemed like just unassailable common sense. So what to make then of broadsides from radical deschooling intellectuals (see below) questioning the very basis of our whole education system. Broadsides like these: “Schools fail to teach what they pretend to teach. Most of their inmates spend years failing to learn things like Mathematics, Science and French”[1] ....and: “An illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is a result of teaching.”[2]....." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/teach-your-children-well
“One of the most consistent characteristics of our educational system is that it ignores good research when the findings don’t fit the prejudices.”
Is this not true - not just in regard to education - but in all areas of life involving long held fixed beliefs?
My own greatest teacher was my French teacher in high school, and what she taught me had nothing to do with French (which I hated, but it was required at my school). She encouraged my (English!) writing and poetry. Because of her, I kept writing creatively even in a school where creative writing outside of a very narrow "religious " purpose was not valued.
I suffered greatly under traditional mathematics education, so much so that decades later as we began homeschooling (which quickly became unschooling as my wickedly creative and independent 4 year old made a mockery of an expensive homeschooling curriculum and its schedules and checklists) I decided that I would do almost anything to be absolutely SURE my kid did not hate any aspect of math, music, art, or reading. So, we did not touch those Saxon math textbooks so beloved by many homeschooling families...
At nearly 22, she has all the math she needs for adult life. And she's not *afraid* of learning more if the interest or need arises. I am thankful.
Great piece Peter! I said the following on this topic: A performance requires both a performer and an audience. Learning does not require a teacher and a student. Humans achieve our most daunting learning challenges, learning to coordinate our bodies and to talk, without anyone teaching us how. We, like all other learning beings, learn by observing and interacting with our environments. Of course, we also learn through conversation and by actively making sense of our experiences and our conversations. As an Earth-centered educator, I do little teaching. Imprinting information onto others’ brains just never struck me as a thing to do. I also avoid curricula packaged in factories as I avoid food prepared that same way. On the other hand, I’ve always enjoyed conversations involving people really listening to each other. I also enjoy being a guide when I am in familiar territory, being guided when I am not, and sharing resources with others in both directions. Rather than teaching, I consider what I do as nurturing transformative ecological learning environments and communities. https://peterkindfieldphd.substack.com/i/142674367/education
Thank you, again, to point out and explain what feels like 'common sense' and what we observe in children if they are given the space and opportunity to do so.
For those who need research I am sure they will be satisfied with your evidence and invitations to dig deeper should they wish to...
The only teacher who contributed to my view of the world was a primary school Physics teacher with whom we had many practical lessons and carried out experiments. Until this day I remember the stages water go through to reach the point of boiling at 100 degrees Celsius.
I was hopeless with calculations and equations in Physics but the experiment proved to me that I can observe and understand physical laws around me without knowing how to calculate or explain them scientifically... 🙏