[quoting Mitchell, 3 Mar 97] I'm wondering if we agree that the schools have the wrong educational culture because of the teachers and students. I am also wondering if our concepts of "classroom" and "lab" are so correct that we can know they won't work until teachers "change their way of thinking.
I think there are a number of issues here, Bill:
(1) There is a substantial argument that TBT really does create a range of options for systemic change (Charlie Reigeluth has been writing about it for some time). A corollary, I believe, is that the largest "payoff" for the investment in TBT can be achieved only with systemic change. The evidence is that there are a number of settings where for one reason or another there was no system to be changed, and the TBT application was put in at the "ground floor." For example, some alternative schools, and some industrial training applications. In those cases, the "payoff" of the TBT investment seems to me to be much larger than in most of what we see in conventional classrooms.
(2) I also think that teachers generally are captives of the system. To quote Joe Harless, "pitch a good person against a bad system, and the system will win every time."
(3) I once tried to "reverse engineer" the stereotypical "traditional school" to discover the principles of teaching and learning which would have to be true if school as we know it were, in fact, the optimum solution. Try it some time--it's an interesting exercise!
(4) I don't think teachers within the current system will be the source of change, nor do I think it's likely that the current system will actually change much. An equally plausible scenario is that alternative systems will grow up in parallel with the present dominant model. The growth could be either inside or outside the public school establishment, depending on politics. But, eventually, these alternatives will look so credible and attractive that people will vote with their feet, wallets, and taxation votes, and starve the current system down to one of many alternatives--probably not even the main one.
Lots of these alternatives are already out there in various niches, and the growth rates of many are astonishing (see my opening paper for an overview).