The Personal and Learning Cost of Paradigms

I keep pondering the issue of the Instruction Paradigm versus the Learning Paradigm in Higher Education. In this vein, I was reading an article by Jane Tompkins, an English professor. She writes about her own movement away from the traditional teaching model in the classroom to a student-engaged model, but she made this change after a moment of personal epiphany, not because she was exposed to discussions about the Learning Paradigm. Tompkins describes, and discredits, the instruction or "knowledge transmission" model that has been heavily criticized. She states that few professors endorse such a model of teaching today. Then she notes, "But what we do have is something no less coercive, no less destructive of creativity and self-motivated learning", and she calls this the "performance model" (p.24).

Tompkins admits that she has, essentially, been lying to herself for years, telling herself that she had been concerned with helping students understand Melville or deconstruction when, in fact, she has been concerned all along with demonstrating to students her intelligence, her knowledge as an expert, and how well she is prepared for class. In other words, she has been performing for students so that they will have a good opinion of her rather than actually being concerned with helping them learn. She theorizes that she, like many academics, developed this intuitive approach partly due to organizational structure but also due to her childhood. She notes that most professors were good "performers" at home and at school growing up, imitating adult behaviors in order to receive praise and feel good. She posits that this emotional trajectory, a fear of disapproval, continues into our careers and shapes our desires for both peer and student approbation and shapes teaching behaviors. She also acknowledges that a fear of pedagogy was a powerful socializing force in graduate school where she learned to look down on schools of education as the "lowest of the low", the place where only those who couldn't really cut it in Higher Education were able to find a position. This bias against pedagogy and teaching theory began to hamper her, and she slowly came to realize it. "In this respect, teaching was exactly like sex to me -- something you weren't supposed to talk about or focus on in any way but that you were supposed to be able to do properly when the time came" (p.25). She then describes how she began changing her courses to shift responsibility for presenting course content to students and how this dramatically changed the energy level in the classroom, invigorated her own teaching, and led to gains in student learning. She concludes by noting that "what we do in the classroom is our politics" and that if we are, in actuality, focused on performance, then we are leaving a similar legacy in the minds of our students.

I found this article thought provoking and useful. I know that in my own teaching, I had to overcome my own pleasure at telling stories that I believe communicated important truths, that I had to learn to give up the stage, the performance, in order to put students on the stage so they could learn their own truths. In working with other faculty, they have shared similar stories, so I believe that Tompkins is onto something important here. At the same time, and she acknowledges this, her own story also points out the very real nature of the Instruction Paradigm. Part of the desire for approval is driven, in academics, by fears regarding contract renewal and tenure; part of the approbation we seek from peers is practical and tied to these issues which are part and parcel of the Instruction Paradigm College. Assistant professors worry about student ratings and for good reason; tenure committees in the past have made decisions largely based on student input, partly because there is usually no clear definition of effective teaching or effective measurements of student learning outcomes because the institution is focused on delivering instruction. There is a very real, a very practical, cost that is personal to all of us as faculty, and to our students in terms of lost opportunities for learning. The solution is to shift our focus from ourselves, away from performance, and to focus on how to help students learn, and how to organize our institution to accomplish that mission.
-- Anton Tolman

Tompkins, J. (Aug, 1991). Teaching Like It Matters. Lingua Franca, pp.24 - 27.