ELT News Think Tank

This Month's Think Tank Panel

Marc Helgesen

Curtis Kelly

Panelists: Marc | Curtis
Date: October 2001

Topic: "To what extent should learners be given choices when they engage in classroom activities?"

Curtis Kelly

Give learners choices? What a notion.

Education is after all, "filling a bucket, not lighting a fire," and letting learners decide what they need to know is like, well, letting people decide who to marry or what religion to believe in. Please! Leave it to us experts!

Giving learners "choices" is the basis of creating autonomous learners (which, by the way, is part of a recent Monbusho directive). In fact, in my field, Adult Education, there is a whole pedagogy based on learner autonomy called "andragogy." At its heart is the notion that children are by nature, dependent, teacher-directed learners, whereas adults are independent, self-directed learners. It was developed by Malcolm Knowles during the adult education boom in the West when it was found that programs for adults were experiencing horrendous dropout rates, of about 50 percent. Teachers were using the same test-driven, teacher-directive pedagogies that have been in use since 1100 A.D. (and still reign in Japan), and their adult students were dissatisfied.

Adults tend to be autonomous, self-directed learners with specific, life-centered reasons for engaging in study. Therefore, the traditional model of knowing teachers pouring their own experience-based knowledge into the empty vessels of their students' heads does not, and cannot, apply to adults. Nor does the motivational approach of defensive learning: "Pass this test or I'll fail you." Adults, facing tasks according to their own sociological situations, are motivated to learn in order to succeed at these tasks. Therefore, an appropriate pedagogy for adults includes group discussion and problem solving rather than lecturing, and allowing learners rather than the instructor to determine and satisfy their own learning needs.

Just a minute! "Allowing learners rather than the instructor to determine and satisfy their own learning needs?" Nice in theory, but in practice, it sounds like a horror movie for teachers. But this is just because we are still caught in the teacher-centered pedagogy for children. There are methods that support learner autonomy, such as learning contracts, which I am increasingly using in my own college classes. In a learning contract, the student determines what must be learned, how, by when, and what proof will be given to show mastery. The instructor becomes more of a learning "manager" - or as we like to say, "facilitator" - than "teacher." Likewise, our pupils become "learners" rather than "students."

It works. I know. I am currently engaged in satisfying the requirements of a learning contract myself. My facilitator is an Internet expert in Wisconsin, and without even a peep from him, I am doing far more serious study than I have ever done before.

Therefore, from the perspective of Adult Education, giving students "choice" in their studies is not just something "nice" to do for them, it is mandatory. It is the basis of the only pedagogy that works for adults. In fact, the theories behind this pedagogy can explain the increasing level of malaise in today's college and high school classrooms. Whereas in the 1980's an eighteen-year-old was still a "child", adulthood comes a lot more quickly to the youth of this millennium, and with it, that all-consuming need for self-direction.

Give learners a choice? Absolutely. It is immoral not to. The notion that one person has the right to determine what another must know is absurd. On a more positive note, though, their making choices serves our ultimate mission, the building of better human beings. As Brookfield writes in The Skillful Teacher (1990, p.95):

"When people who are not used to having to having their ideas granted any public credibility find that they are being listened to carefully and seriously, this is an astoundingly powerful experience. It can precipitate major changes in their self-images...and personal lives."

Panelists: Marc | Curtis

Curtis Kelly, Heian Jogakuin University

Author of Writing from Within

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