Things I Wish Were Different About Teaching: Number 3 More customisability on behalf of the student

The ‘mug and jug’ method of teaching is cited during training as being a poor way of going about things. You are advised to ‘facilitate learning’ and let them discover things by themselves. I’m not convinced that that is completely embraced in the current system though.

Students can customise everything around them, their phone ringtones, their hairdo, what they chose to do outside of school. I can’t see any customisability going on in learning at all, aside from some choice in terms of subjects.

I’m convinced that the fact a student can’t choose their own learning enough is a cause of a lot of the lack of motivation and interest in students today. Imagine if a student could chose their own learning objectives for the day, and you could build a lesson around that. I still feel like a jug at the front of the class saying, “This is the lesson for today,” and that makes students switch off completely.

Yes there would be complications in terms of teacher to student ratio and preparation time, and what would happen if they wanted their lesson objective to be, ‘nothing’? I still think that if reform is going to happen, this is the area it should be in.


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