AUSSIE

Blog entry posted April 21st, 2009 by Mike Staunton

Imagine a foot race, the starter is ready, pistol in hand, the words ‘on your marks, get set’ are said … trigger is pulled, the sharp cracking noise as the gunpowder explodes and … nothing!   The runners are still there, watching, talking amongst themselves, idling.

Frustrated, the starter picks up a runner, carries him/her down the track, drops them over the finish line, races back up, picks up another, carries them down, etc.  

In many secondary classrooms, the above analogy is not too far removed from what I see as a consultant on a regular basis.  Thus, the teachers are the starters, encouraging their runners/students to line up and head off to the ‘other end’, be that 4 years or 40 minutes away. And for lots of reasons many students choose not to, but this blog is not an attempt to explore the reasons for that.

What I do want to comment on is the response of the ‘starter’ alluded to in the above analogy. Teachers are the ‘starters’, working desperately hard to get their students to the other end by trying to carry each one of them down the track.  Usually, this ‘carrying’ equates to the teacher adopting a largely chalk ‘n talk mode, in the belief that this is the best way to carry the student to the other end so that they ‘experience’ the full length of the track.  This is noble, it is also clearly counter-productive, and if the look on the faces of many students is anything to go by, it is not working.  

The analogy of a running track is germane here, as the etymology of the word ‘curriculum’ is currere, Latin for ‘running track’ (a noun).   But the word ‘curriculum’ also has as its root curro, the act of running (a verb).  Thus, for a curriculum to be truly a curriculum there must be both the running track – prepared by the teachers or the city etc – and the act of running – done by the students.  

Thus a key question for a teacher in any lesson design is, ‘for this lesson, how can I ensure that the students do the work?’  There are many well established, pre-existing answers to this question (e.g., inquiry learning, problem based learning, the Effectiveness in Teaching Framework, the work of Neumann and associates, etc).  But how ever a teacher chooses to design and deliver a lesson, the suggestion is this … in the full sense of the meaning of curriculum, the best curriculum course in the world is weakened considerably if the students don’t do the work.

   --Mike Staunton, AUSSIE Consultant