Have you ever wondered what role the available learning resources in our schools play in preventing and/or promoting educational change? I have, and it’s more significant than you’d think.
From what I’ve observed, here’s what happens just about every day when teachers are preparing lessons and units for a new course.
You’re in a rush. You search the library, or the teacher prep room, or both. You find learning resources that are related to your upcoming lesson. There’s not many, so you pick …
teacher prep room
The book series your school purchased three years ago, or
You show the videos that your department head’s got locked up in the video cupboard, or
The extension questions everyone recommends from the state/provincial curriculum study guide, or
The neat internet lesson that you just saw in a workshop – but … oh wait! – the computer lab’s booked, so you go back and consider one of the previous ones.
Aaah! It’s late. You’re in a mad rush. The warning bell’s rung. Grab it! Grab it! Grab it! Grab what you can get.
This is the reality!
And then it’s a year, two years, five years later. You’re teaching the same course again. You’re busy and you think, “I’ve already prepped for that course. So I’ll just use that text, or video, or question pack and add a little of this and a little of that.”
The teaching and learning status quo – as perpetuated by the learning resources available to you and educators everywhere – remains!
This process, in my humble opinion, is maybe the biggest factors preventing educational change and promoting the status quo.
grabable learning resources
Most “grabable” learning resources promote the status quo because they dictate what teachers and students will be doing with
a) the course curriculum, and
b) with each other …
And teachers are too busy to grab learning resources that require them to learn beforehand new and different kind of pedagogy, so
The learning resource publishers produce materials that will be used teachers – ones that are “grabable.” It’s not their fault; they need to make money in order to remain in existence. They produce what sells.
They’re books.
They’re videos.
They’re things we teachers can fall back on in that last-second rush to “cover” our prescribed curriculum.
They’re resources that fit within the existing paradigm.
They’re ones teachers can use when in haste.
Ones we teachers can confidently say afterward, “What are you talking about? Of course my students covered those learning outcomes! They read pages 222 to 242, I showed them Video X, and they did these questions.”
Most teachers I know want to teach in exciting ways. But there’s just not enough time to find and/or create their own learning resources that shake the foundation of the status quo. So they use what exists and add their own tweaks and flavors.
Learning resource publishers know that teachers want simple-to-use products with minimal learning curves. Minimal learning curves in and of themselves promote the status quo because there’s no new pedagogical learning going on. So, given the realities of teaching, the most practically useful tools educators want – by default – are tools that prevent educational change and promote the status quo.
This is the reality in thousands and thousands of schools. The job is crazy. Teachers grab what they can get. And what they grab perpetuates the existing teacher-student paradigm, that paradigm that drives so many of us busy teachers crazy.
It’s a rat race that’s tough to get out of. And only few do.
