College vs, secondary teaching

Hello everyone,

For most of us the transition from high school to college or university is a revelation. It is one of the most profound experiences of our lives.

Certainly, it is usually coupled with a new-found freedom that is--in and of itself--intoxicating, but the transition most often comes accompanied by the shattering realization that we didn't really know as much as we thought, and that the universe is much broader than our narrow teenage lives have been.

I think that it is partly because of the epiphanic events that surround college that we tend to think of our college professors and their style of teaching to be somehow superior to the teachers of our our childhoods.

Personally, I think the reverse is more often true.

I had terrific teachers throughout my education, from elementary school to graduate school. I have come to realize, however, that the tendency of professors--especially in the great research universities--is to lecture in class and teach only in private conferences or joint research projects.

Teachers in primary and secondary education learn early that that model is not usually effective in teaching children and adolescents.

Why then are our educational experiences so meaningful in college? The answer is obvious: We're ready for them. Our brains have developed more fully (they're finished at about the age of 25; our ability to grasp abstractions really begins to solidify in high school). We know that success in college usually means financial success in life. We are eager for the skills and knowledge necessary for that financial success. And I think we're impressed by the difficulty of the coursework--impressed and motivated.

The developmental stages we are going through in middle and high school require a different approach, however.

You might see where this is going.

As fresh, new teachers, we burst out of college eager to give our students the same life-changing experience we just went through, and we want to give it to them in the way we received it, and so we lecture them.

That, my friends, is not teaching. It works in college, sometimes, but it is not teaching.

Teaching is a give and take with the students; it is guiding them toward discovery; it is motivating them when they are not motivated and giving them what they don't want to receive; it is making the difficult easy (college, you may remember, is more of making the easy difficult); it is making do with what you have, which is much less than they have in the university; it is prestige deferred, and work often unrecognized (the best teaching happens, often, when the pupil thinks that he or she has discovered something alone, with little consciousness of having been led to it).

Teaching is not, and has never been, not even in the days of Socrates or Buddha or Jesus--it is not giving speeches. It is not lecturing. Lecturing is preaching. Lecturing is reading aloud. Lecturing is introducing material, not mastering it.

By all means, honor your college professors. Just be careful about how much of their teaching style you ought to emulate.

How much is really teaching?

Jeff Combe