Mary Lou L. Narowski
Students learn best when they come to knowledge and discover an idea, skill, or concept for themselves. Consider the steps involved in learning to ride a bicycle. We can tell or explain to learners how to ride a bike or even show them a video, for example. But listening to an explanation or watching a demonstration is passive and merely introduces the skills necessary to ride that bike. It is important information, but it certainly does not represent all that is required to ride a bike. Students need to actually get on the bike and practice the skills of mounting, pedaling, and braking so as to stop the bike. This step furthers the students' ability but this still does not round out their total understanding of the skill of riding. For, what happens when a fellow rider suggests that they ride into town or to a friend's house? Mentally, the "novice rider" would question, probably with much trepidation, exactly what it would take to ride in traffic, turn at corners, and think about directions all while practicing this newly developing skill. It is only after all these actions are taken and also repeated, that a complex and multi-faceted knowledge and dynamic, responsive understanding begin to take hold. This description of the process of learning to ride a bike is the same process prescribed in the Paideia teaching method. It is what the city of New Haven refers to as authentic learning. It involves all the significant tasks necessary to truly learn a new concept inside and out.
Paideia teaching techniques are divided into three distinct columns or areas of instruction: didactic, coaching, and seminar. These steps thoroughly define effective learning by utilizing each stage of the learning process. The didactic feature consists of acquisition of factual information. Students are placed in a passive role as they listen to an instructor deliver a lecture, observe a demonstration, or watch a video. In essence, it is the "telling our students how to ride the bike" piece mentioned above. The educational assessment of this kind of instruction might take the form of short answer or multiple choice questioning. Many teachers employ this method as their sole means of instruction. Students do not have the opportunity to practice or experiment with the information they received. They are the passive recipients of only one third of the learning process.
Paideia demands that students use the modeling or coaching phase to acquire expertise in reading, writing, observing, and calculating. This is the "doing" phase. Projects and significant tasks are provided to the students so that they can: practice hypothesizing, consider alternative interpretations, analyze data, trace implications, and arrive at conclusions, even if this means doing it over and over again. Teachers, at this stage of learning, coach students by providing them with positive as well as remedial or corrective feedback. This is the "practice riding" phase. Educational assessments in this stage are accompanied by rubrics and consist of graphic organizers, recording data necessary for understanding, checklists, essays, and culminating projects. They have now encountered two thirds of the learning process.
The final stage in a Paideia classroom is the seminar in which students explore expanded understandings of concepts, skills, and ideas. This stage employs intellectual dialogue in the form of class discussion or independent expression. Here, opened ended questioning provides the forum for this collaborative dialogue. Its purpose is to expand the students' ability to apply what knowledge they have discovered in phase two. This is the "rider reviewing all that he has learned so that he can ride into town" phase. The student now has completed the final step in the learning process and has the skills necessary for comprehension and further appreciation. The higher order thinking skills come to the fore as students engage in this section. Inferring, analyzing, synthesizing, connecting, and evaluating are the complex cognitive abilities employed in this final phase.
When thinking about a time reference for these steps, we need to return to our bike example. The explanation phase, step one in the process, should be brief and comprise a mere ten to fifteen percent of the total learning experience. Explaining the process can become boring and redundant and, if not completed quickly, can even "turn off" students. They're eager to get on the bike and practice. The next segment, the coaching or practicing step, demands most of our time, approximately sixty to seventy percent. Here, they practice riding the bike. They will, most definitely, fall a few times and it will be our job as teachers to give further corrective or re-directive instruction as well as encouragement. The final stage, the seminar, is the area in which the students must apply what they have learned to new experiences not yet encountered, like going into town for the first time or in the case of this unit, crafting a comparative essay in which they arrive at a conclusive answer to our title question. An overall correlation can be made here to Bloom's Taxonomy, in which students' initial exposure to a concept or skill is knowledge and comprehension-based. They then moved through the understanding and application phase, and finally to analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.
This philosophic teaching method intends to address education as a personal, individual, and collective experience in which each student questions until he decides on an answer. Philosophers dating back to Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato understood the basic premise of Adler's thinking. But it also addresses the individual's role in society, in a democracy that, for our purposes, is called the classroom environment. Here, each student explores the questions that he raises both singularly and as a member of the class, in which the members of his group discuss and contribute to the overall learning process. This democratic thinking aspect might very well find it roots with Dewey. Adler would indeed be a collaborative colleague of Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, and Dewey in that educational forum of scholars through the ages! Stanislavski would as well.