We know that teachers have a big impact on student learning and that great teachers inspire and shape learning in a meaningful way. I was however interested to read of science and maths after school programs in India where students who did not have qualified teachers guiding them, outperformed students who did and why this may have been the case.
The Avanti Fellows is an after school program set up to give poor students access to high quality education and uses a collaborative problem-based approach in its delivery. These innovative approaches to learning were shown to help students succeed but they found that they weren’t always able to attract qualified teachers due to funding restrictions. In these cases they employed social workers to facilitate the program. The surprising thing was that students who were involved in programs run by social workers, outperformed those with the qualified teachers.
Akshay Saxana, one of the program’s founders explained it as follows.
“Teachers, irrespective of how good they are, all want to teach. They assume a certain student level – often skewed towards the top or bottom of the class – and then lecture to this group. We’ve found that students gain very little from time they spend listening to lectures. The only option our social workers have is to let the students struggle to understand the material. And when we were able to get the experts into the classroom a few times a month, every minute of their time was spent clarifying misconceptions and not teaching. Where the social workers helped our students most was with their problems outside of the classroom, which for low income kids in India is the most important thing an adult can do for them.”
Two things that I’ve tried to apply from this scenario is to try not to ‘lecture’ too much or give lengthy explanations and my very favourite is to try and give the students more opportunity to work it out for themselves. “You’re the teacher, you’re meant to help me” is often the reply when I have said “for 5 minutes see if you can work hard to figure that out” maybe accompanied by a question or two. Generally, after three minutes have gone by a voice is heard “I’ve worked it out, no thanks to you!” And perhaps that is the way it should be?
To find out more
Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing our kids for the innovation era. (The school library has a copy of this book)
https://www.amazon.com.au/Most-Likely-Succeed-Preparing-Innovation-ebook/dp/B00P42WP7K
Crusoe Teaching Stories 