It is summative season once again. IB Exams are in progress. Summative teacher evaluations are due. Report cards are on the horizon, and schools are scrambling to get the last bits of data that will inform the next academic year’s instructional goals, both for children and adults.
During this summative season, when we are reflecting on the actions that have been enacted and continue to be until the last day of school, do we ever consider how much of what we do actually builds a culture of self-directedness?
In the Twitter chat on self-directed learning, collaborating minds raised the following points.
The views from the Twitterchat on Self-Directed Learning suggest what Costa, Garmston and Zimmerman pose as a guiding principle of self-directed learning, that “the gates of learning are only opened from within and that motivation to learn or change cannot be externally coerced” (2014, p. xvi in Powell & Kusuma-Powell, 2015).
I left the Twitterchat with more questions.
If schools want self-directed individuals, how do we reconcile the reliance on external assessments of learning with our aim to promote self-directed learning? When the assessments of learning are significantly anchored to someone outside of the self, how do we shift learners toward internal motivation?
Asking these questions in their latest book Teacher Self-Supervision; Why teacher evaluation has failed and what we can do about it (John Catt, 2015), Powell and Kusuma-Powell present schools with the task of examining our assumptions about self-directedness and how the adult learning structures as they exist might use a lot more reflection.
Assumptions guiding teacher evaluation
Powell and Kusuma-Powell (2015) suggest the following assumptions guiding current practices in teacher evaluation:
- External feedback systems gives teachers ways to improve instruction and hence student learning.
- Student learning is like an algebraic algorithm and deficits can be addressed technically as in the equation, if x then y must follow.
- Schools can be operated like factories.
- Relationships, especially trusting relationships, are not significant aspects of schools as learning organizations.
- External rewards and punishments are necessary to coerce teachers to be better at facilitating learning.
- Teachers need to be praised and affirmed by someone else all the time.
- Principals and supervisors are the best source of knowledge about teaching and learning.
- One principal can mentor 40 or 50 teachers at a time and be effective at it.
- Compliance is more important than personal investment.
- If you cannot reduce something to an algorithm or a quantity, it does not exist.
The above assumptions, if they guide teacher evaluation, direct us to a culture wherein:
- Teachers are infantilized.
- Internal motivation is not a resource for school development.
- We waste a lot of time, and we do not guarantee that teachers learn how to facilitate learning better for our students.
Patterns are the best teacher, suggests Wellman (2013). If school patterns of behavior hinge upon the premise that the adults in the school learn best with external coercion, how will those adults facilitate self-directedness in themselves and in their students?
We need a new set of assumptions if our schools are to create cultures of self-directedness. What if we created our schools based on these assumptions?
- That each person, including teachers, learn best when they are motivated internally.
- That each person has the capacity to self-assess, self-monitor and self-modify.
And what if we created systems in our schools, which honor and respect the learner within each individual?
References
Garmston, R. & Wellman, B. (2013). The Adaptive School: A sourcebook for developing collaborative groups. NY: Rowman and Littlefield.
Powell, W. & Kusuma-Powell, O. (2015). Teacher Self-Supervision; Why teacher evaluation has failed and what we can do about it. Melton, Woodbridge: John Catt.
Photo Credit: Toutes direction By Dyon Joël (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
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