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"To imagine that content matters more than process is to imagine
that the car is more important than the road."
November 2007
By Maryellen Weimer
Now, there’s a story headline you might read in the educational
equivalent of the National Enquirer. Are you aware that your
material prevents instructional growth? How can that be?
I think it might work like this. When teachers are totally, even mostly,
focused on course content and the need to get it covered, that generally
means the process side of teaching is being ignored or is getting short
shrift. It’s like focusing all your attention on developing the right
side of your brain while pretending that the left side doesn’t matter.
In fact, development of one side only serves to accentuate lack of
development on the other side.
Teachers do need to know their material, and they have a professional
responsibility to keep up with developments in the field. Moreover, this
is not about denying faculty an intimate connection with their content.
A love of the material and a willingness to convey that to students only
enhances learning. The problem is when the content becomes the be-all
and end-all of the teaching process, when the content matters more than
anything else. When content is that important, faculty are prevented
from using methods that enhance how much students learn. In this case
the content orientation of faculty hurts students, but the argument here
is that it also hurts teachers.
When teachers think the only, the best, the most important way to
improve their teaching is by developing their content knowledge, they
end up with sophisticated levels of knowledge, but they have only
simplistic instructional methods to convey that material. To imagine
that content matters more than process is to imagine that the car is
more important than the road. Both are essential. A fancy car with a
fast motor and a great suspension isn’t much good on a gravelly road
peppered with potholes. What we teach and how we teach it
are inextricably linked and very much dependent on one another.
Even though both are tightly linked and interdependent, they are still
separate and discrete. Development of one doesn’t automatically improve
how the other functions. So you can work to grow content knowledge more
and more, but if the methods used to convey that knowledge are not
sophisticated and up to the task, teaching may still be quite
ineffective. It may not inspire and motivate students. It may not result
in more and better student learning. Because teachers so love the
content, they almost never blame it. No, it’s the students’ fault. They
aren’t bright enough. They don’t study enough. They don’t deserve to be
professionals in this field. Teachers are very good at getting their
content off the hook.
But teachers who teach courses in which large numbers of students
struggle and routinely fail are not generally positive about teaching.
They are more often cynical, rigid, and defensive. It takes work to
justify methods that are this ineffective. The truth about how much
isn’t being learned in these courses is hard to ignore, no matter how
routinely students are blamed.
Knowing content and being able to teach it involve separate skill sets.
The typical college teacher has spent years in courses developing the
knowledge skill set and virtually no time on the teaching set. This way
of preparing professors assumes that the content is much more complex
than the process, when in fact both are equally formidable. Marrying the
content and the process requires an intimate and sophisticated knowledge
of both, if the desired result is learning for students. Some kinds of
content are best taught by example, some by experience. Other kinds are
best understood when discussed and worked on collaboratively. Other
kinds need individual reflection and analysis. Besides these inherent
demands of the content itself, there are the learning needs of
individual students, which vary across many dimensions.
We’ve known it for years; we can all point to examples. The best
teachers are not always, not even usually, those teachers with the most
sophisticated content knowledge. The best teachers do know their
material, but they also know a lot about the process. They have at their
disposal a repertoire of instructional methods, strategies, and
approaches—a repertoire that continually grows, just as their content
knowledge develops. They never underestimate the power of the process to
determine the outcome. With this understanding, content is not a barrier
to teacher development.
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