Teachin' Ain't Learnin'

A friend and colleague used to tell his team, “Sayin’ ain’t doin’,”

He was right of course. However lofty a goal or elegant a plan, unless it gets executed it’s still only a lofty goal and an elegant plan.

His words struck me and have stuck with me. I’ve repeated them often. And because I think so often about teaching and learning, I realized that with a little literary license and slight rewording, the phrase expresses a truth every teacher should take to heart. It’s this: “Teachin’ Ain’t Learnin’.”

As I began writing this post, I imagined myself back in my freshman year. (I will not tell you how many years ago). It’s 7:55 a.m. I am sitting in a cramped seat as two hundred-plus groggy students file into the large lecture hall. A few minutes later a side door opens, and the professor walks in, trailed by a TA. He slowly climbs the stairs to the stage, steps behind the podium, and from a weathered briefcase removes a folder from which he takes a sheave of yellowing handwritten pages. He pulls a pair of half-framed reading glasses from his jacket pocket, sets them astride his nose, and reads for the full 50 minutes of the class. In memory, I don’t recall him raising his eyes from his notes, which I suspect haven’t been revised since he began teaching the course.

It’s obviously a caricature. Still, it’s how I remember too many of my college courses and symbolizes what I mean when I say that “teachin’ ain’t learnin’.” I realized years ago that large-section lecture-based courses are more about economics than education. Put as many students as you can in front of one faculty member and you significantly reduce the unit cost of teaching. Not a bad idea if efficiency is your goal. But “what if “learning” were the purpose of education?”

That, by the way, is the title of the last chapter of “Innovation in Professional Education: Steps in a Journey from Teaching to Learning,” Published in the early 90’s, by Richard Boyatzis, Scott Cowan, and David Kolb, it chronicled the reengineering of Case Western Reserve University’s MBA program—and it was one of the eye-opening texts that helped guide my development as an educator.

“It is a mistake to assume that teaching and learning are the same thing: What you teach is not necessarily what I learn, and what I learn may be other than what you teach. Our view is that education has tended to focus on teaching, often assuming learning rather than promoting it,” they wrote. “Most educational innovation begins by assuming the very structures and processes that should be questioned: the course, class, grades, examinations, classroom, credit hours, lectures, and so on.”

Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon made the same point. Teaching and learning aren’t synonymous. “Learning,” Simon wrote, “results from what the student does and thinks and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing what the student does to learn.”

The best teachers understand the job isn’t about teaching. Anybody can teach but teaching for learning is hard. (As I wrote that phrase, in my mind I heard the voice of Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own. “Of course it’s hard. It’s supposed be hard. If it was easy, everyone would do it”.)

Great teachers work hard. They think about their students and about learning. They think about who they are, what they already know, and what might motivate them to learn what they need to know and be able to do. They struggle over whether or not they’ve created the conditions that allow students to learn. They understand that learning is both solitary and social; that motivation follows believing that someone cares about them and is serious about helping them learn.

I want to think it’s gotten better in the years since.

But still I have to ask: What if learning were the purpose of education?

That is the question.

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Boyatzis, R.E., Cowan, S.S. and Kolb, D.A. (1995). Innovation in Professional Education: Steps on a Journey from Teaching to Learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Simon, H.A. (2002). What we know about learning, http://civeng1.civ.pitt.edu/~fie97/simonspeech.html