eamesBot/ Shutterstock
The future is uncertain, and our students will need to consider new facts, learn new things, and adapt their thinking. In a way, our primary job as teachers is to make ourselves obsolete.
When students arrive, it is our job to guide them. “No, that isn’t true, and here is a better source.” “Yes, that essay is ready for publication.” But, by graduation, we hope that they will have learned more internal regulation. I do not want students texting me in years to come asking if some new fact is true or not. I want to teach them how to figure out for themselves what is relevant, important, and verifiable.
The centrality of change and independent thinking in education is hardly a new idea. As Einstein put it: “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”
Einstein is hardly being controversial, but would time in our great universities or libraries, to say nothing of what is most visible in politics or in our media, really make it clear that change and self-regulation are central to learning? Few of us would disagree with Einstein’s claim, and yet we still have a terrible time letting go of any of our (personally meaningful) content. Even as we proclaim our value as teaching students how to think and not what to think, we continue to “profess” and focus on content. (Is your syllabus still largely a list of topics you will “cover”?)
We currently measure learning with “credits” and “seat-time.” Are we giving the degree to the wrong part of the body, then? What would happen if we suspended our loyalty to content for a graduation test like the one F. Scott Fitzgerald proposes: The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
Neither Fitzgerald nor I are arguing that content is unimportant, but more content is a bit like giving students more fish. Useful in the short-term, but ultimately life (and democracy) demand graduates who know how to fish for themselves. We need to find a better balance between teaching content and process if we truly want students to learn to think for themselves.
There is a lot of new research and science on what situations and designs lead to learning and change in students (some of it in my new book, “Teaching Change: How to Develop Independent Thinkers using Relationships, Resilience, and Reflection“), but the difficulty of learning something new is an old problem.
Socrates, at least, had the courage of his convictions and taught in line with his assertion that “I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.” Our subjects and content matter — it is how we learn to think. But when we say “I teach history” and not “I teach change,” we perpetuate the idea that school is about learning “stuff.” If we really want graduates who can think in unique and individual ways (something else we say a lot), then we need to design education with this as a primary purpose.
Galileo acknowledged the difficulty of this: “You cannot teach people anything. You can only help them discover it within themselves.” Again, anyone who has ever attended a pedagogy workshop knows that discovery is a much more potent form of learning than our default mode of telling. We have all experienced moments when evidence, data, statistics, and facts failed to change minds. And yet we persist in telling.
Einstein sums up the problem this way: “I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.” The best we can do as teachers is to design a learning environment where students are more likely to discover new truths for themselves. This process of self-discovery is also the engine of change: in discovering something new for ourselves, we also learn that we can change and even regulate the process of our future change.
These design issues are similar to those in fitness: watching someone else do push-ups (even intellectual push-ups) is not as useful as doing them yourself. Our design goal as teachers is to get students to do more of the work that only they can do.
Most academics find fitness instructors a bit odd: they clearly like the gym and exercise a bit too much. They go to the gym, just for fun! (In the same way that faculty do not need any incentive to visit the library?! How odd!)
As faculty, the classroom is our home: we like school so much, we are still here. But to ordinary students, this probably appears a bit strange. In the gym, I look for a good coach, who will set up motivating conditions that will get me to work harder (not the one with the biggest muscles). In the classroom, I think of myself, as a “cognitive coach” rather than a “professor” of content.
The results are not guaranteed. Not everyone who goes to the gym really sweats enough, but a better coach or teacher creates conditions that increase the odds for success. While it feels like we are doing something for students when we focus on content, we are just doing the intellectual push-ups for our students, but no one can exercise or learn for us.
Like teachers for generations, we want to increase student ability to change and become self-directed. The lesson from the pandemic is that we, too, can still change and adapt. How we balance content and process can still change, and we can bring our teaching practice in line with our highest ideals of teaching students to think for themselves.
