aboutlearning

Teachers and Their Ability/Inability to Conceptualize Content

In the teacher training we do in our About Learning organization, we find teachers often have difficulty creating significant content concepts, so their students get the big picture.  Teaching success is based on the ability to conceptualize content, to cut through the mounds of details to find and use the concept that captures the content essence that best connecta to the students personally.

Students continually proceed through math courses for instance, without understanding the meaning of the mechanics of what they are doing and why they need to do it and why on earth they even need to know it. They work at it because they have to pass the test and the test after that test. It is a pointless ritual detrimental to learning.
Einstein had the same problem:

“ But in physics I soon learned to scent out the paths that led to the depths and to disregard everything else, all the many things that clutter up the mind and divert it from the essential. The hitch in this was. of course, the fact that one had to cram all of this stuff into one’s mind for the examination, whether one liked it or not.”

This inability to conceptualize is not just the math teacher’s problem. It is endemic to teaching. It is the crucial problem in all content delivery. Teaching the details without connecting them conceptually results in memorized information without meaning. The “Why?” question is not approached, much less answered. 

F. James Rutherford is the founder of AAAS's (Advancing Science, Serving Society) Project 2061, a long-term effort to reform Science education in the United States. He also works in Harvard’s Project Physics and Project City Science, and is Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation. He puts it this way:

“Textbooks are written in over 800 pages with 2,400 to 3,000 terms or symbols. The average high school text introduces seven to ten new concepts per page. In a school year of 180 days, 20 concepts must be covered every page, or 2 minutes per page.”

The only way to manage content, not only for the sheer immensity of it, but also for its connections to other content, is to conceptualize it, to go to its most significant core and match that core to one’s particular students, in the particular time in which they are being taught,and in the particular place where they live.

A literature teacher in the Bronx might choose Malamud’s National Book Award winner, The Fixer, a fictionalized account of a notorious anti-Semitic incident. Willa Cather might be the choice of a teacher in Kearney, Nebraska. In a Honolulu school, the choice might be The Secrets and Mysteries of Hawaii: A Call to the Soul. If teachers are competent, each would be working with the same required rigor for reading and understanding literary context and content at meaningful levels, but they would conceptualize that content according to the most pertinent meaning for their students,  divining  the concepts and delivering external content in a way that feels internal to the learners. The teachers’ choices for concepts depends on multiple skills:

Their understanding of what concepts are.
Their ability to engage the students at the outset with an experiential activity that overarches the content conceptually.
Their level of content knowledge and the specialized way it needs to be taught.
Their skill at choosing the most significant and pertinent concepts for learner connections.
The vision they have for success in transferring the learning into the student lives.
Their belief in what the students can become or be able to do if their teaching is successful?
Their ability to design instruction to do all of the above, including developing image strategies to help students form the concept visually.

The ability to form concepts is bihemispheric, the right mode forming the visual image, 
the left, the semantic relationship. The combination produces a total concept.
–D. Frank Benson, Professor of Neurology, University of California

This is no small task. It takes experience and practice and skilled coaching over time.
How anyone can accept the notion that a content knowledge person with a textbook in hand can move into successful teaching (as in the Teach for America  program) with only five weeks of preparation.

“Each incoming corps member attends a rigorous five-week summer training institute.” —Teach for American website description of their teacher training.