Teaching+and+Learning

**One of our biggest obstacles is that we tend to teach the way we were taught.**
From the time we were small children, we learned what "teaching" consists of. Many of us played "school" as children -- playing "teacher" meant telling our "students" how to behave and making them do their "work." This subconscious paradigm of teaching is very powerful. (see Stigler and Hiebert's wonderful book on the subject, //The Teaching Gap//). "Pajares (1992) concluded that beliefs about teaching are well formed by the time a student begins college. These behavior-impacting beliefs were proposed to be self-perpetuating and persevering, even in the face of contradictions caused by reason, time, schooling, or experience. Because students have experienced thousands of hours of their teachers' classroom behavior before entering preservice teacher training programs (Tabachnick & Zeichner, 1984), preservice teachers enter teacher preparation programs with well established filters for what constitutes effective teaching based on an "apprenticeship of observation" (Lortie, 1975, p. 65)." (in Walls, Nardi, Minden, Hoffman (Winter 2002). //Teacher Education Quarterly//)

We also tend to teach the way we like to learn.
We social studies teachers are self-selected. Often, we were the students who most enjoyed the excellent college lecture. Often, we took good notes or learned well by listening. Or perhaps we were able to self-teach by reading and making sense of the textbook. For many of us, our instinct is to teach the way we were most successful learning. We tend to be verbal-linguistic learners; we tend to be auditory learners. Yet MOST of our students are not wired that way -- they come to us with multiple intelligences and learning preferences. In our eagerness to teach the way our best teachers taught us, we can unintentionally create a profound gap between the way we teach and the way most of our students learn.

Martin Haberman identifies 14 basic teaching acts that have come to comprise teaching in many urban classrooms, practices that are not necessarily effective but have become entrenched over time due to old paradigms about what urban children need.