The Skillful Teacher

Maxim 4: Be Wary of Standardized Models and Approaches
Teaching and learning are such complex processes, and teachers and
learners are such complex beings, that no curricular model or
instructional approach will ever apply to all people in all settings.
Not surprisingly, peddlers of such things would have us believe oth-
erwise. Their pitch is that if we just adopt their model or approach
we will rid our teaching of ambiguities, problems, and contradic-
tions. It ain’t necessarily so. The truth is that a lot of fruitless time
and energy can be spent trying to find the holy grail of pedagogy,
the one way to instructional enlightenment. No philosophy, the-
ory, or model can possibly capture or explain every single aspect of
the idiosyncratic reality that is your own experience as a teacher.
You can, of course, draw much that is useful from models and
approaches that are out there. Indeed, most practice is a stew of
hunches and activities in which a pinch of Freire, a drop of Horton,
a soupçon of Marcuse, a splash of Fromm (you can substitute your
own influences in this sentence) are blended together, mixed with a
generous tablespoon of your own, experientially-based insights, and
then served up to your learners. When it comes to good teaching,
there is no such thing as stealing. Or if there is, it is a morally jus-
tified theft in the cause of student learning. For once, ends justify
means. In the cause of improving student learning, it is quite 
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permissible for us to be nicking (as we’d say in England) ideas, tech-
niques, and activities from books, workshops, and colleagues. More-
over, when we nick a good idea from someone we should feel no
compunction about rejecting parts of it or changing other parts.
Again, if this idea doesn’t work out as we’d hoped it would, we
shouldn’t worry about dropping it. Practices nicked from other
sources can be useful starting points for our own teaching, but they
don’t relieve us of the necessity to make endless choices and judg-
ments about what works best and why. Making such judgments—
sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly—is at the heart of teaching.
No model of practice will allow you to abdicate this responsibility.