Teaching Evolution

The old schoolhouse on the hill isn't what it used to be...

Feature article from the Fall 2020 issue of Sacred Heart University Magazine

Talking at a person is not the same as communicating with them, just as throwing a ball in someone’s direction is not the same as playing catch. If you’re a parent teaching a child the fundamentals of the game or a major league outfielder hoping to make the play at home, you tailor your throw to the person on the receiving end. If you want to communicate, you need to consider your audience.

The same goes for teaching.

For the longest time, school was the place children went to accumulate knowledge—to learn their times tables and vocabulary and to memorize their dates in history. But the times have changed.

“That 19th- and 20th-century model of sit-and-get just isn’t useful as a standalone means of education anymore,” says Michael Alfano, dean of the Isabelle Farrington College of Education. “In truth, it probably never was. We’ve learned a lot more about the process of learning, and our work in the teaching profession is becoming much more aligned to contemporary society as a result.”

In other words, we’re getting better at understanding how people catch—or drop—what’s thrown their way, and we’re tailoring our pitches accordingly. This shift in our understanding—that the nature of education is a vastly more complex relationship than the old-school models of good behavior and memorization—has been driving some significant changes to teacher preparation over the past few years.

For a start, it’s become abundantly clear that there is no one-size-fits-all modality when it comes to learning. Individuals learn differently from other individuals. Different cultures have different value structures. Different socioeconomic strati have different resources and expectations. “All of which impact how people learn and, more importantly,” Alfano says, “how teachers should be teaching.”

Furthermore, that traditional rigidity doesn’t reflect the changing world today’s young people inhabit and will inherit where adaptability is key. “Curriculums are now being built with developmental appropriateness and cultural relevance in mind so part of education is learning how to navigate a social world. We’re engaging kids as innate problem solvers now, tapping into their creativity with STEM tools so that more than anything they’re learning how to think.”

Thus, education becomes more about the mind’s pliability—the practice of thinking. Hard facts still have value, of course, but they are increasingly valued as tools and not as an end in themselves.

Perhaps the most exciting element of this paradigm shift is the potential it creates to move education towards a better place of equity and social justice. “The accident of birth of bright young people is a truth frontline teachers witness every day,” Alfano says. Meaning intelligence does not preselect opportunity, and in many impoverished communities, opportunity is decidedly thin on the ground.

Alfano is not daunted.

“Social justice is nothing new to the teacher-ed program,” says Alfano. “To be honest, it’s one of the reasons I came to SHU. A social mission is core to the work we do here. We look to become part of the solution.”

One way that can happen is recognizing that, while human nature seeks instant gratification, the social and educational issues teachers seek to address take decades, if not generations, to fully realize change. In communities that already place a high value on education, that timeframe is less critical. In under-resourced communities, however, with fewer after-school or summer programs to help learning take root, or where there are fewer models to exemplify the importance and benefits of persevering in education, finding a means to answer that craving of gratification is imperative to its success. Here, altering the emphasis from what you don’t know to what you can do makes education much more about the carrot and much less about the stick.

“I’m cautiously optimistic,” Alfano says, which really is no surprise. Teachers are the parent profession of all other professions, the very nature of their job is to every day invest once again in the future, and they have always been—just like a parent tossing a ball to a child or an outfielder making that long throw home—optimists by nature.