Introduction

Every so often I hear a teacher, or read them on Twitter, saying that they are running a course in which the students decide what they want to be taught. The “students” being either primary school kids or secondary school adolescents.

These ideas are not exactly new. I recall them doing the rounds when I started teaching in the 70's. I'll even confess to having a go at putting them into practice, with a group of adults. In the context of adult ed, the idea was known as androgogy, which is pedagogy applied to adults. The thinking was that as adults come to a class with lived experience of the world, and different kinds of expertise and skills, they have a lot to bring to a class. That being the case, why not let them in on devising the syllabus?

It all sounds very sensible and logical, but in my opinion it completely misses the point, the point being to teach them stuff they came here to learn. I didn't think such ideas worked 40 or 50 years ago, and I don't think they work now.

As I see it, the model is fundamentally flawed for the following reasons:

Subject essentials

Many subjects have a particular body of knowledge associated with them, and what we may call key concepts. In Economics, for example, most economists would regard the concepts of opportunity cost and the margin as fundamental elements in the framework of economic theory. Interestingly enough, even though Chris Anderson regards the so-called long tail as a manifestation of the economics of plenty as opposed to scarcity, he acknowledges that scarcity, and hence by implication opportunity cost, is still present.

In a similar way, are there certain things that you need to know about how to write in order to be able to write? If so, what is the point of students wasting an entire semester or year discovering them?

This, to me, is a crucial point. If you know, say, that in order to become a great writer, or even a good one, you must know a, b and c, then surely it's your duty to tell the students exactly that in their very first lesson. That would enable them to spend the rest of the course applying those techniques and discovering what kind of writing they're good at. Discovery learning is not the same as constructivist learning. It's a waste of time. At least, it’s a waste of time where there is a commonly accepted body of knowledge and universally shared knowledge, and the point of the activity is to arrive at the correct answer.

(In fact, I’ve long thought that the approach is usually intellectually dishonest. Suppose a student, having looked at all the evidence in a particular set of data or notes provided by the teacher, comes to the conclusion that some commonly accepted truth is wrong. The teacher, understandably, will assume that the student has made a mistake. But they might have discovered an alternative interpretation of the data that is equally valid. If you’re going to do discovery learning, then at least either be open minded about what students might discover, or use the “wrong” conclusions as an opportunity to explore misunderstandings.)

Unknown unknowns

People don't know what they don't know. How are students expected to make any useful decisions about what to learn, except by accident? A good teacher, using a well-constructed syllabus, will ensure that there is plenty of opportunity for students to bring their own life experiences to the table, and to discover and nurture their special interests. But that has to be within a framework which it is the duty of the teacher, as the expert, to disseminate.

I suspect that that is part of the problem. Perhaps not specifically in Ganley's case, but as a general observation it seems that the notion of the teacher as expert is frowned upon. It is undemocratic. It does not allow for student self-expression. The guide on the side is preferred to the sage on the stage.

Imagine if that approach was applied to military training, or driving lessons.

Where would you draw the line? I had a parent once who insisted that I should be teaching his child, along with all the other students, how to construct and take apart and then reconstruct a computer. The fact that these skills were not on the syllabus and would have no bearing at all on almost anything in the future had not occurred to him. I know that these days constructing computers is regarded by many people as a good way to learn programming skills, but I still think it’s a hell of a long-winded way of achieving the end result. (See Derek Blunt’s article on this website: Making and coding.

In an adult economics class, a student insisted that the root cause of every problem was the balance of payments. As far as he was concerned, I should have been teaching the balance of payments alone throughout the entire course.

I took the view that I had a duty to teach the students the key concepts of Economics so that by the end of the course they would be economically literate enough to be able to interpret the statistics and half-baked explanations that politicians delight in throwing about. I did, however, ask them if they would like to spend the course exploring what they thought were the important issues.

They were unanimously against it.

I have to say, if I turned up to a course to be told that I was expected to help the teacher construct the syllabus, I'd ask for my money back. The only analogous situation I can think of is my experience as a teacher in the 1980s in England. There was a fashion for people running teacher professional development training to always answer a question with a question.

So you would ask the trainer, who was the acknowledged expert, "What would you do in such-and-such a situation?", and back would come the reply: "What would you do?", or "That's a great question. What does everyone else think?".

My view then, and now, is that here was a person who was being paid to waste my time. If he knew the answer, why didn't he just tell me? And if I wanted to hear what everyone else thought, I'd have asked them in the coffee break. If you've only got one day in which to get to grips with a new initiative or a new approach, you don't want to spend half of it "discovering" your own solution which may or may not be a workable one.

“Guide on the side”, “discovery learning”, “facilitating” — they’re all ways of democratising the curriculum. But in my opinion the most important and useful thing a teacher can do is lead the students towards loving the subject, thinking like a professional practitioner of it, and preventing them from wandering into intellectual cul-de-sacs because they don’t know any better.

See also

Teachers? We don’t need no teachers!