Does slow and steady always win the race? The Tortoise would have us believe so, and backing this claim is our steadfast understanding that calm steady perseverance is a hallmark of success. The Hare’s hasty decision making tactics and assuredness are seen as a liability evidenced by the fact that he had not sufficiently calculated the risk in taking a nap during the race. In education we have encountered tortoises and hares, and even rocks that prove immovable, but we’ve yet to effectively harness the risk-taking qualities of the hare and the mindfulness of the tortoise in recognition of the entrepreneurial (philosophically, not monetarily) outlook needed to transform pedagogy and our notions of learning contexts.
After reading the TELE articles this past week, I have been both encouraged and discouraged by the models and instructional design presented in them. Encouraged because with each innovative learning environment, I can’t help but envision how these new approaches can be implemented in my classroom, but at the same time discouraged because these same approaches are not new to education at all, so why am I learning about them for the first time? Even though traditional approaches to learning are often criticized as leading to “inert knowledge that cannot be called upon when it is useful” (Whitehead in Edelson, 2001) due to its reliance on memorization and recall of facts, adopting new models of instruction that promote conceptual understanding progresses at glacial speed. After learning from Edelson (2001) that inquiry based pedagogy was first introduced during curriculum reforms of the 1950s and 1960s within the learning cycle framework, and the situated learning emphasized in the anchored-instruction model embedded within the Jasper Series was developed in the late 1980’s and 1990’s (Pellegrino, & Brophy, 2008), I can’t help but ask: What have we been doing in education? Either of these models would be a pedagogical improvement in many classrooms today, yet they remain predominantly untapped despite their decades of existence. Our dedication to what’s comfortable rather than what’s effective can be unnerving. As educators, we need to be cognizant of what can be learned from the tortoise and the hare and realize that true sustainable progress lies not in the presence of either extreme, but somewhere in the middle where sound pedagogy and reflective practice support risk-taking on the road to reform.
image: the tortoise and the hare by Jehsuk released under a CC Attribution – Noncommercial – No Derivative Works license
References
Edelson, D.C. (2001). Learning-for-use: A framework for the design of technology-supported inquiry activities. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 38(3), 355-385.
Pellegrino, J.W. & Brophy, S. (2008). From cognitive theory to instructional practice: Technology and the evolution of anchored instruction. In Ifenthaler, Pirney-Dunner, & J.M. Spector (Eds.) Understanding models for learning and instruction, New York: Springer Science + Business Media, pp. 277-303.
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