Traditionally, education has been viewed as a way to impart knowledge to new genereations. This way of thinking incorporates lists of skills, subskills, and facts that need to be passed down. This type of thinking is embraced by positivists. Behaviorists, still within this definition of education, rely on practice and reinforcement of new knowledge with a heavy emphasis on task analysis. However, education needs to be defined in a much broader sense. The students we teach today are much more a part of a global community than generations in the past. Education needs to be defined as a way to teach students to think for themselves. Education needs to be a vehicle where students learn how to integrate new knowledge and to apply that knowledge to confront new situations and problems.
The curriculum is the framework for the education process. It provides an outline of what needs to be learned and when. In Kentucky, there is a formal curriculum that all teachers within the state are expected to follow. The drawback to the formal curriculum documents is one of overload. There is so much to cover in any one grade level subject. I teach middle school math. The Core Content for Assessment and the Program of Studies for middle school math is extremely comprehensive. As much as we would like to think differently, the focus tends to stray to what is taught rather than what is learned. As teachers, we are expected to teach the set curriculum, to keep to a certain pace, regardless if the students have mastered the content or not.
This idea of maintaining a certain pace so that everything in the curriculum documents gets taught needs to change. The focus is so much on getting through everything so that our students do well on the high stakes tests. The consequence of this is that students are not learning the value of being a life long learner. They are not learning the value of learning something new simply for the sake of the learning itself. Instead, they are learning that they need to learn the new concept, whatever it may be, simply so that they will be able to answer the test questions correctly.
I admit that in my current teaching I use a curious blend of behaviroist and constructivist philosophies. My curriculum has a heavy emphasis on introducing new subskills in order to build toward more complex skills. There is a focus on formative and summative assessments to see if the students have learned the concepts. I am a constructivist though, at heart, and I try to get my students to talk about the math they are learning. I try to make them explain how to do something as much as possible. Most of my students simply raise their hand and want to give the answer. Instead, I tell them that I do not want to know the answer, I want to know how they got their answer. If there are a few minutes left in class, I will ask for a defintion. The students get frustrated when I won't let them recite the book definition. I try to get them to explain in their own words. By doing this, they have to synthesize the concept and construct a meaning for themselves in able to impart it to the other students in the class.
We do need a new approach. We need to develop and implement a new curriculum that allows more time to develop deeper understandings of the concepts being taught. We need a curriculum that allows a teacher to focus more on what has been learned than on what has been taught. As it stands, with pacing guides and highly structured curriculum guides, a teacher has so much time to get as many students as possible to learn as much as they can at whatever level they can. At some point, regardless of where the students are at, the teacher has to move on to the next concept.
The bottom line is that we need to teach our students how to think. We, as educators, need to teach this generation of students to be prepared for situations and problems that are not even in existence yet. That is how fast our world is changing at the moment. We need to ignite that spark that encourages a student to be a life long learner, not a great test taker.