The Skillful Teacher

Level of Required Learning Is Inappropriate
It is easy for teachers to misinterpret students’ levels of learning
readiness, particularly if there has been no attempt to use some kind
of classroom assessment tool to find out what and how students are
learning. Even in the most benign of classrooms, people are under-
standably unwilling to admit they are confused about content or
don’t understand instructions. If the teacher interprets a lack of stu-
dent questions as a sign that learners are in full command of the
material, she may well set assignments that are pitched at too
advanced a level. Resistance will also likely arise if the language
used to describe new learning activities is too abstract or conceptu-
ally sophisticated. Teachers in love with their subjects and caught
up in the passion of communicating the elegant beauty of scientific
reasoning, literary insight, or historical theorizing can easily over-
estimate how far students have progressed. Enthusiastic teachers
who travel too far, too fast for their students, and who don’t check
in regularly to see if students are keeping up with the pace, can eas-
ily leave learners behind.
One of the most common mistakes teachers make in this regard
is to ask students to take responsibility for organizing and conduct-
ing their own learning before they are really ready to do this. To the
teacher this seems like a laudable attempt to work democratically
that students should welcome. To the student, however, this is an
unreasonable attempt to force them to make learning decisions in
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a confusing vacuum of misinformation and lack of knowledge. Not
surprisingly, it can be perceived as a deliberate trick setting them up
for failure. Many times in my own teaching I have made this mis-
calculation of asking students to design their learning activities
before they had a full grasp of the learning terrain they were tra-
versing and have then been surprised when students didn’t thank me
for my efforts to respect their intelligence. In their place, however,
I would have had the same reaction. My feeling would be that with-
out a thorough grounding in the grammar of the subject—an aware-
ness of the criteria used to determine legitimate knowledge, an
understanding of the chief concepts studied, and a grasp of the build-
ing blocks of content—it would be ludicrous to expect me to plan
my own learning. How on earth could I make an informed choice?
I would anticipate that being expected to design my own learning
plan before I was familiar with the content was only priming me for
the public humiliation I would inevitably endure as I floundered
around in an unfamiliar subject area making a fool of myself.