Orientation
From UpdateNet English
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Provide Guidance
Let’s assume somebody drives to Paris, at night on the back roads. Suddenly they see a city limit sign coming up in the headlight. The driver doesn’t know that town but takes the map and finds the city they are in right now. They can see where it is, where the highway is and can make out how much further it is to Paris. In other words, the driver can orientate themselves thus providing reassurance in the situation.
Disorientation creates insecurity and insecurity creates anxiety that leads to dependency. This especially applies to learning. Learning should lead from dependency to independency, and that starts with the infant and should go on in school. School has to offer orientation for the students.
In antiquated school settings the orientation is around the teacher who says what has to happen and when. Who says what is good and what is bad. The central question which students have to ask themselves is: How can I satisfy what he or she wants from me? The resulting adaptive efforts to please are rewarded with good grades.
Following scenario: A student says he should have received a grade of five[1] but only got a four. For that reason he didn’t pass. If this student is asked what more he would have known or would have been able to do with a five he won’t have a quick reply. In school (and in the discussions about school performance in families) it is seldom about the subject matter. It is about substitutes for subject matters in the form of marks.
A curriculum sets the topics for all subjects. It determines what students have to go through, the books, chapter after chapter, and page after page. They are, together with the teacher’s preferences the secret curriculum. The teaching-to-the-test method is ingrained in culture to allow grade comparison across geographies and helps align test procedures. Students have to abide by external scripts. They have to sing what others have sung before them – karaoke learning.
The orientation on subject matter facilitates the build-up of knowledge. ‘Knowledge is the key to ability.’ (Stern 2007), and that doesn’t mean a collection of lifeless facts. ‘With such knowledge one can, if one’s lucky, survive a few rounds in a TV quiz, but apart from that, factual knowledge is useless. Certainly a bigger part of the knowledge gained in school looks like this: a few good pieces out of a big pile of garbage. (…) There is intelligent and less intelligent knowledge. The saying, knowledge connects, is, when it is about intelligent knowledge, inadequate. Intelligent knowledge can’t be transferred, like photocopying) from one head (the teachers) to another (the students). It has to be constructed by the student by tying newly acquired information to their existing knowledge. The more knowledge they have and the better it is structured, the easier they can accommodate new information.’ (Stern 2007)
Learning is an individual construction process. Students learn by themselves, it just happens. But, if we want to design our learning in a goal oriented way we have to be able to find orientation through subject matters. Students have to know what they would be able to know, they have to know where they stand, and they have to see their goals - all that has to happen on a basis of clear and transparent descriptions of contents. Competence oriented and self-efficient learning needs orientation in the form of reference values.
Self-efficacy can also be described as the opposite of the feeling to being at the mercy of the system. This feeling of dependency can easily develop in a system in which teachers, supported by curricula, mostly determine the subject matter and the dosage.
Self-efficient learning demands other arrangements. Students have to be able to be in charge of their own learning. One methodical approach is referencing.
What is referencing about? It’s about bringing individual achievements in relation to a reference value. This reference value and the subject matter basis build the so-called competence grid.
‘It is beyond dispute’, Anton Strittmatter says, ‘that from today’s fog of overcrowded curricula and diffuse and contradicting requirements in school we find out that the education mandate has to be more focused, in form of competence descriptions (like the European language portfolio) and standards of achievement. This approach only makes sense when the standards are able to be standards of achievement, and that is what the politics of ‘mastery learning’ requires.’ (Strittmatter 2006)
People need guidance. This orientation may be of a formal nature. Rules, regulations, arrangements, goal formulations. But much more crucial for the socialization of children and adolescents are the adults (and increasingly also the peer groups). With their behavior, they shape the reference values, through them conventions become perceptible. The teacher who is constantly late indirectly expresses that it is not important to be on time. That’s how rules form. This means: The culture of an institution is formed by the behavior of the values setting people in decision-making situations. This generates questions like: Will limits will be set, will there be resistance, will arrangements be demanded? And if so, how?
- ↑ In Switzerland the highest mark is a 6.
Sources, resources, links
Müller, Andreas: Mehr ausbrüten, weniger gackern. Denn Lernen heisst: Freude am Umgang mit Widerständen. Oder kurz: vom Was zum Wie. hep-Verlag. Bern. 2008
Stern, Elsbeth: In: Psychologie heute compact
Strittmatter, Anton: Grundzüge einer Heterogenitäts-Pädagogik. In: Journal für Schulentwicklung. 2/2006
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientierung_%28mental%29
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erziehung
http://www.psychologie-seiten.de/?Beobachtungslernen:Bedingungen_der_Vorbildwirkung
http://uni.istya.de/psychologie/node119.html
http://www.learningfactory.ch/downloads/dateien/artikel_referenzieren.pdf
