How would you have dealt with the differences between Jan and Frank, supposing that you were a mutual colleague of theirs? It will not do simply to ignore one person's views about teaching and learning and listen to another's; this strategy not only risks offending a colleague, but also keeps you from learning from that colleague. Neither will it do simply to adopt one teacher's ideas about teaching and learning uncritically and completely. Chances are that the ideas will be based on experiences somewhat different from yours, and therefore will neither fit your past nor support your future adequately. Your only option will be to develop your own personal perspective on teaching and learning, one tailored to your own particular experiences and goals. Ideas from others can help you do this, of course, but ultimately you will have to form your own opinions, claim ownership of a perspective of your own, and be ready to explain yourself to teachers and parents who may disagree with you. Learning to do this in a way that maintains mutual respect between you and others can be a challenge, but it can be done. This book is meant to help you with that challenge, by stimulating your thinking and dialogue about the issues involved in teaching and learning.

Dialogue is indeed a key to dealing with differences in viewpoints about teaching and learning. Dialogue helps whether you are a student, a new teacher, or a veteran teacher.

Not only teachers and students, but also observers of education agree on the value of thoughtful conversation, dialogue, and other forms of give-and-take about educational issues. That is essentially what Virginia Richardson, professor of teacher education at the University of Michigan, is saying in the adjoining "Voices" box: Be thoughtful, but be sure to share your thoughtfulness.

You probably already have significant knowledge about teaching and learning. You may not recognize it as such, though, because some parts consist of assumptions you hold about these activities, and because some parts may be expressed in terms not typical of educational dialogues (Seifert, 1992; Seifert and Handziuk, 1993). To see what I mean, consider with me a number of topics about which you probably already have views:

Chances are that you already have views about these topics, each of which has a lot to do with teaching and learning. What do you think children and young people are like? How do they change over time? What do you mean when you say they "learn" or "think"? You may even have views about whether these are the most important questions to ask in the first place. When you stop and think, one question may seem more important than another; or you may feel that one topic or question should be phrased or stated differently. Before you go further in reading the chapter, therefore, you might take a moment to reflect on how you would respond to each question. Or if possible, talk to a friend or classmate about your views. Your ideas will be your particular starting point in constructing a psychology of teaching and learning. The ideas from classmates, from teachers, and from this book will probably not be your ending point, however, but will assist you in deciding on directions in which to take your beliefs further.

The Nature of Children and Youth

Underlying any ideas about teaching and learning are assumptions about the nature of children and of young people: beliefs about human nature. One assumption, for example, is that children are capable of making decisions for themselves. In some situations this is obviously true: ask an eight-year-old to choose a flavor for her ice cream cone, and she will almost surely be able to decide. But in other settings, a child's decision-making ability is more suspect. Is a kindergarten child capable of deciding whether to attend school each day? Is a ninth-grader capable of deciding whether to engage in sexual intercourse? Between the extremes are decisions that are ambiguous in status. Can a third-grade student decide whether to spend more time reading a novel or learning science? Teachers, parents, and even students themselves disagree in answering this question. There are various reasons for the disagreement, but the reasons all get back to assumptions about a key issue: whether or not children can indeed make decisions for themselves.

Another assumption about the nature of children has to do with their inherent stability: do children have an "essence" that is basically fixed and stable, or one that is changeable? Obviously some things about a child do change--they grow taller, for example, may shift from day to day, and their skills grow (hopefully) from year to year. But are these changes merely superficial, or do they signify deeper, more profound alterations? To take an example that concerns teachers, think about this: if a student improves in reading skill dramatically during the course of schooling, does this mean the student is becoming essentially more intelligent with each passing year, or merely more skilled? Perhaps "intelligence" does not grow simply because verbal skills grow; perhaps it remains constant in spite of changes in academic or knowledge. Or perhaps not. Teachers (and members of the public) disagree about these possibilities. The disagreement may appear to be about the nature of intelligence, but it is really about something more, the fundamental stability of human beings. Are you the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow? You probably already have something to say about this matter.

How Persons Change as They Get Older

The problem of stability and change suggests a related area where you probably already have beliefs and assumptions, which has to do not with whether persons change as they get older, but how or by what process. Obviously older persons can do some things than younger persons cannot; with age, you learn to talk, catch a ball, read a book, and (perhaps) invite a friend to visit. But how do such changes come about? Is each change a response to specific events and relatively unrelated to other changes? Sometimes this must surely be true: it is hard--though perhaps not impossible--to imagine how learning to catch a ball will influence learning to read a book. The two changes seem rather unrelated, at least on the face of it. But how about learning to talk, learning to read, and learning to write? Those activities seem more related; maybe therefore they have some underlying cause, and developing talent in one might improve talent in the other. But only up to a point. You may have met someone who talks better than he or she writes, or who writes better than he or she talks. In fact maybe you are one of those people yourself.

In any case, you probably make assumptions not only about what changes happen with age, but also about how the changes happen (Overton, 1991). One common assumption, for example, is that change is like the growth of a seed or plant: it does not happen in discrete bits, but in complex interlocking patterns, as when a seed sprouts or a flower blossoms forth. Learning to talk and learning to read, from this perspective, might be parts of a larger process of change, one that is part of a general pattern of language development and that unfolds in a predictable way. An alternative, but also common assumption is that human change is like the functioning of a finely tuned machine--perhaps a clock or a computer. Separate changes (like talking, reading, and writing) may only appear to be related; in reality they may happen together because of specific, but separate influences. The chime on a grandfather clock, for example, often runs off of a different spring than the minute- and hour-hands on the clock; the hands may trigger the chime periodically, but each could in principle run without the other. In a similar way, a student may learn to talk, read, and write separately, even though one skill may trigger or make use of the others some of the time.

Even if you have not thought explicitly about how persons change, you may have used ideas like these already when you think or talk about teaching and learning. When you speak of a student being "ready" for a new learning experience, for example, you may be assuming that change happens by a process of patterned growth--to say that Joe is "ready" to begin kindergarten or that you are "ready" to begin university, for example, is to say that a number of changes have happened simultaneously and somewhat predictably. When you speak of "improving your writing skills," on the other hand, you are more likely to be assuming that discrete, separate skills exist, could have been acquired separately, and can now be fine-tuned and performed separately as well. It is common, in fact, to speak of human change one way on some occasions, and another way on other occasions. Such "inconsistency" is not a problem in thinking about teaching and learning, as long as you are aware of its happening. The real challenge is to make yourself aware of your own diversity.

The Nature of Learning and Thinking

When you or I speak of learning, we are likely to have a metaphor in mind, a comparison of learning to a familiar object or activity (Bullough, Knowles, and Crow, 1992). Sometimes learning is compared to a telephone network: you learn when you "make connections," as if multiple phone calls were criss-crossing the brain. Sometimes learning is compared to a bank: you "add to your storehouse of knowledge," making deposits and withdrawals as needed but otherwise letting your knowledge remain dormant and unused. Or sometimes learning is like a job: you learn if there is pay-off or reward, like course credit or praise from the teacher. Or like eating: you "digest" ideas. Or like combat: you are "challenged" to "master" the curriculum. These and other images serve different purposes in dialogues about learning; they are used with reference to different learning situations, curricula, and students. Maybe you can think of other metaphors or likenesses that you sometimes use. Some are probably shared with your friends and classmates, but others may be unique to you. Learning, it seems, does not mean the same to everyone.

Likewise, you probably already have views about thinking. Stop for a moment and consider this term. You may believe from experience, for example, that thinking is essentially equivalent to language; you often think silently in words, or even openly talk to yourself when you are thinking hard. Or you may believe that thinking is visual; sometimes you think in pictures, imagining an event or place or person. "I'm trying to picture myself as a teacher," you might say for example. Or sometimes thinking seems equivalent to physical action, like when you play a tune on the piano or dodge quickly out of the way of a student running in the school hallway. "Quick thinking," you say as a compliment, as if thought were a matter of being nimble. Thinking, like learning, is like a chameleon, changing colors to fit its surroundings.

You may also regard thinking as a process that happens "inside" you. Most of us speak of "my" thoughts and "my" plans; yet it is hard not to notice how much my thoughts and plans are shaped by other persons or events outside myself. In the morning, you think about what to buy a friend for a birthday present, and decide to get something that day. But events at work--or more precisely, the people there--distract you. You forget to go shopping after work. The next day you write yourself a note as a reminder to go shopping. This succeeds in reminding you, except that the store clerk shows you something better than you had planned on buying--but also more expensive. You hesitate, and end up not getting anything that day. That night you are so tired from the extra shopping that you forget to write yourself another reminder note, and as a result you forget to act on the birthday-present "problem," as it has now become, for two more days. Time is now running short, so you settle for something less desirable and less expensive than you had first planned. You end up annoyed with yourself: you seem forgetful and poor at planning! In taking responsibility for forgetting, though, you assume that your plans have been "in" you all along, rather than also "in" the daily world in which participated. You therefore experience the distractions and delays as invasions, instead of as transactions for which you are only partly responsible. You assume exclusive ownership of your plans, yet the plans have led a very communal existence, changing focus and importance in response to events and other people, and not just in response to you. In a very real sense, then, the thinking that went into your plans "belonged" to everyone, and not just to you.

Taking Your Existing Beliefs and Knowledge Seriously

I intend to take your existing beliefs and knowledge about teaching and learning seriously. I will do so in three ways. One is by continually inviting you to reflect on what you know, and on the reasons for your beliefs. A second is by making an effort to express my own knowledge and beliefs as explicitly as possible. I will try, of course, to be fair to viewpoints other than my own, but I will also not try to pretend that I have no views of my own, or that this book offers a "God's-eye view" of teaching and learning. A third way that I will take your beliefs and knowledge seriously is by deliberately presenting a range of ideas, concepts, and theories about how learning occurs and how knowledge is constructed. These will vary in how much they either support or challenge your existing views about teaching and learning. Simply by showing you the variety, though, I hope to communicate a respect for differences of opinions--differences that should include yourself. Whatever else you gain from reading this book, therefore, I hope that you will discover that psychological and educational research is itself a human creation--a systematic one, perhaps, but not one that is eternally fixed.

In the rest of this book, I will explore the major themes or topics that bear on the ideas of teaching and learning. But my explorations will make sense only if you participate in them: it is a journey that we must make together. For that reason I have designed this book to invite your thoughtful response. I hope that you take up my invitation.

Explorations

The topics which I will explore come from issues and problems as experienced in classrooms and other situations, but they also grow out of various published research and theories. In Part 1 (Chapter 2 to 4), I look at how people change, both in their minds and in their hearts, and over both the short-term and the long-term. In Part 2 (Chapters 5 to 7), I look at the relationships surrounding children and young people, some of which go well beyond the classroom, and at how they influence notions of teaching and learning. In Part 3 (Chapters 8 to 10), I broaden the focus on relationships to include students' ties with their culture of origin, and with that special "adopted" culture called school. In Part 4 (Chapters 11 to 13), I look at the deeply moral and evaluative character of classroom life, and at how teachers' desires to encourage what is good and right fill every moment of every day, and are not confined to specific lessons on citizenship or to the specific events of testing. In Part 5 (Chapter 14) I return more fully to you again: inviting you to reconsider the nature of teaching and learning, but this time in the light of your increased awareness of others' views on these matters.

Invitations To Respond

As you read about these topics, I invite you to respond in a number of ways. The most obvious is by asking you questions as I go along: prompting you to think about your own views about to the major problems of teaching and learning. Sometimes I embed one of these questions in the text itself, and other times I highlight it in a special box called "In Your Own Voice." Where I place the question, though, is less important than whether you take up the invitation to respond. Unless you grapple with issues of teaching and learning, you cannot construct a useful framework for your later work as a teacher. Remember: inside my questions are issues, not simple facts. Reasonable people, including yourself and others like you, can expect to disagree about the issues.

To help you to form considered opinions about teaching and learning, I frequently also invite you to keep a written journal or portfolio of your ideas and reflections, as well as stories about your experiences as a student or teacher. In other, ancillary publications, I have offered detailed suggestions about how to organize such a document (Seifert, 19xx; Seifert, 19yy, etc.). The exact content or format of your writing matters less, though, than your effort to reflect; a regular format only makes the job more convenient.

A third way that I invite you to participate is by providing commentary from various teachers and researchers about many topics in this book. You will see their comments highlighted periodically in boxes called "Multiple Voices." You will also see that the people commenting vary widely in background. Some are widely published and known in the field of psychology or education, while others are well known primarily to the students in their own classrooms. Their variety contains a message, and it is this: that useful, expert knowledge comes from many sources, only one of which is educational research. Useful knowledge also comes from successful teaching and honest reflection on teaching practice. In this important sense we are all--yourself included--responsible for constructing the psychology of teaching and learning.

Other ways in which I invite your participation operate more indirectly. At the beginning of each chapter, for example, I have included a concept map showing how key ideas or themes from the chapter fit together. But I intentionally leave the concept map sketchy or incomplete at the beginning of the chapter, and invite you to fill in its gaps or even rearrange it fundamentally. At the end of each chapter I present the concept map again, but this time with my version of how it might be made more complete. As you will see, there is often be more than one way to complete a concept map; mine will be only one of them, though hopefully it will be a thoughtful one.

Finally, I extend an indirect invitation through a stylistic feature of this book, its heavy use of narrative or "stories" about teaching. I have deliberately included more narrative than typical for textbooks, especially for texts about educational psychology, because I believe narrative is how most of us actually think about teaching and learning (Bruner, 1990; Phillips, 1994). The stories are based on real-life concerns about teaching and learning, but do not describe real people, nor incidents which actually occurred. To an extent, therefore, the line between fiction and fact will be blurred for these stories--just as it often is in memories of real life.

Like many stories, the ones in this book often have more than one interpretation. Most of the time, I have tried to indicate the interpretations which I intended. But since other meanings may lurk in the wings, I often invite you to explore alternative meanings, and how they relate to your own views on teaching and learning. Indirectly, then, the stories end up inviting participation; they ask for a kind of dialogue between you, me, and the characters in the stories. I do hope that you join that dialogue.