Teaching to Learn, Learning to Teach

Two weekends ago, I went for training to become a certified Princeton Review teacher for the MCAT. Princeton Review is a for-profit company that helps students prepare for standardized tests. Friday night of that week, I learned a bit about company policy and how my role as a teacher is important for furthering the business prospects of the organization. It was drilled in my head that the training weekend was to be taken seriously, and I got a good taste of what it means to be a professional.

Being a professional means living up to the standards of a company. With the Princeton Review, I had to demonstrate knowledge of the teaching material and show my ability to convey information in a simple, logical, and structured way. Although this may seem like an easy task for some people, it wasn't for me. I struggled with conforming to the didactic teaching style of the company because, as a student on the receiving end, I know my own personal limits of this model. Lectures can be helpful for giving a brief overview of new material, but they hardly foster learning and retention at a deeper level. The problem with lecture-based classes is that they prohibit students from taking initiative in their learning because the lecturer decides what the students should know. Postman and Weingartner argue that it is more important to "actively investigate structures and relationships in one's learning process, rather than being passively receptive to someone else's (the teacher's) story" (1). Interestingly, problem-based learning aims to provide students with more control over their curriculum, so that an element of personal preference is factored in. At the same time, how do we know that our specific learning style (which we've grown quite accustomed to) is the one that best maximizes our productivity as learners? Comfort can be misconstrued as resistance to change. While I was thinking about this, I couldn't help but realize that conforming to a proscribed way of teaching challenged my integrity as a learner. My roles as a teacher and a student were at once in conflict.

There is a way to resolve this intrapersonal conflict. It starts with admitting that didactic learning has its advantages. For one, it's practical. At the undergraduate level, juggling a full course load plus any other extracurriculars is hard enough as is, so it helps make life easier if learning material is "fed" to us in a structured and sequential fashion. The same can be said about an MCAT prep course, where time constraints are imposed by juggling meaty subjects such as verbal reasoning, general chemistry, biology, physics, and organic chemistry. In addition, learning through a lecture format is helpful for acquiring a condensed version of a specific subset of knowledge. This can open the door to deeper levels of analysis that serve to compliment, rather than substitute, other learning styles. For this reason, it's no surprise that the Princeton Review stresses the importance of doing several hours of indepedent homework after class. I suspect that these reasons, and several others, challenge the effectiveness of using anything other than lectures to teach MCAT material.

So how does lecture-based learning prepare someone to score well on a standardized test (which is the main outcome of interest for test prep companies)? A standardized test almost always contains multiple-choice questions with one answer that is more right than the others. In a similar way, didactic learning promotes the acceptance of reaching a one-answer state because those things that have no answers (or even multiple ones) are not fun to teach and rather time-consuming.

Perhaps there is room for problem-based approach learning in the standardized test prep business. I don't know if there is a market for something like this at the moment, but I would suspect that there is little data to show how effective it is in this setting. As long as standardized tests play a role in establishing didactic practices as the dominant paradigm of educational learning, they will continue to stifle the growth of more open-ended, active, and motivational ways of learning.

WC

(1) "The Inquiry Method"
Postman, N. & Weingartner, C.
Teaching as a Subversive Activity