My students are not learning about eutrophication and how it relates to decreasing biodiversity. They're not delving into mathematical calculations of how pollutants bioaccumulate up the trophic levels in ecosystems. They are not learning about the different biomes, they are not calculating population densities, and they are missing out on learning what detritivores are. All of this started weighing on me, making me feel like a bad teacher, doubting if I was really doing what's best for my kids because they weren't experiencing these tiny little ecological nuggets.
But then I had to remind myself to snap out of it. Because more is not better. And I couldn't possibly teach everything the State of Illinois says I have to anyway without making myself even crazier than I am. That's why we develop our own I can statements derived from the Illnois Learning Standards that weed out the "nice to knows" and focus on the "need to knows," or the concepts that will come back again and again to tie all of the content together into one meaningful whole.
All of that wonderful science stuff my students were "missing out" on wasn't in those I can statements we developed together, anyway. Connected to them, yes....on the fringes of those learning targets, but not near the bullseye. So why were they being taught? From where was this compulsion to have students know every little thing about a topic coming, even though our teachers have been told time and time again that content coverage isn't what's needed for students to learn?
I think it comes from a fundamental philosophy of learning that views good teaching and learning by using the content as learning. Content is still king in some classrooms, content acquisition being seen as the ultimate goal of school. (And standardized testing has only made this worse. )
This drives me nuts, because the focus isn't on students; it's about content for content's sake. It's about supersaturating students with information in the name of education, and the more information to which they can expose students is seen as giving students a better education. Exposure to content should never be a goal in the classroom, in my opinion, because "exposure" usually means students hearing it and then forgetting it quickly. I don't want my students to forget. If they do, I haven't done my job and have wasted a lot of valuable class time.
What should be a primary goal is the flip side of this "content is king" philosophy: using the content for learning. This is where teaching content is secondary (but still seen as necessary) to the ultimate goal of teaching students how to learn. In these classrooms, content is used as a vehicle to teach students the process of learning, and learning how to learn. Using content for learning sees the ultimate goal of education as helping students learn the cognitive skills they'll actually need when they graduate.
I'm not saying that content is not important. I'm saying that its importance and use in classrooms needs to be re-evaluated, because making kids memorize mindless minutiae is not meaningful. When planning for learning, teachers need to ask themselves, "Why am I teaching this? Why do students need to know this? How will this be useful in helping students make connections between concepts in later units?"
We need to examine exactly what we're teaching and why we're teaching it. Use content for learning, not as the learning.