Musings: Teachers not knowing what students have learned

MUSINGS

Teachers not knowing what students have learned

I had an insight about my experience of education recently. In all the time I’ve been in education, there wouldn’t have been one teacher, lecturer or instructor who could have told you what I had learned by the end of any lesson. Not one.

When I understood this fact clearly, the scales fell from my eyes. My experience of education is that it was a sham. People who shouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near young people were given the responsiblity of educating them.

So what I devote myself to now is trying to figure out how to become the kind of teacher who does and will know what people have learned by the end of the lesson. My ambition is to become the kind of teacher who will not use numbers as an excuse and say “Oh, it’s too hard to know what so many people are learning.”

The first step in knowing what your learners have actually learned is to care about whether or not learning is actually happening. None of my teachers did. They were too busy “going through” (whatever that means) a lesson plan or covering a syllabus or getting what needed to be done – done.

So I plan on getting my learners to self-report what they know, to establish and define the limits of their learning, to identify gaps in comprehension and then to set targets regarding their learning deficits. And then following that, I plan to activate learners as learning resources for each other so that the learning process becomes shared and social.

That’s what 2025 will be about.