Module Four: Reading Three

Module Four

Reading Three: Process and Product Lesson Planning

A free-flowing, stimulating and friendly classroom is a wonderful byproduct of establishing such an educational environment. It naturally occurs when a master teacher matches the nature and development of the students with the content and expectations. It is further enhanced through valuing the individuality of each person and establishing and teaching healthy community and group process. Teachers who have found the match exult in the time spent teaching and express a great sense of fulfillment and pleasure. Students look forward to school and see learning as a normal extension of every life experience. Parents are gratified and delighted. Each parent sees the student as a gifted, challenging, unique treasure. With the school mirroring that vision in the way the parent and community members are treated the parents becomes great advocates!

The new frontier may not be outer space, or sea exploration, but rather evolving, articulating and developing the inner space of human understanding. creating an educational and human systems program that has the capacity to serve as a true personal development and society building system. Our understanding of astronomy and physical science has changed dramatically from the view proposed by Socrates. Much less progress has been made in furthering our understanding of human nature from what he understood and posited of human kind.

Like this illustration of a duck, there is a representational or Gestalt effect in education. For many years the focus in teaching and learning targeted observable, linear, cognitive outcomes. These outcomes typically measured the success of the school system, rather than the well being of the recipient, the student. As with the duck drawing, these are prominent features things we use to recognize, name and measure the duck. There are also a number of things that lead us to see and name a representation "duck" that are more elusive, often unrecognized, named or quantified yet crucial to "duckness."

Process and relationship are only now being revisited and valued. As in the representation of the duck, these essential components are typically unnamed, unmeasured, unstudied. Perhaps educators have them until recently because they have just been the background in our dealings. Our focus on quality educational systems may have blunted our vigilance with respect to the development and education of each person.

Though the process functions of education have not received much attention, they continue to be the primary interstices that hold the teaching/learning relationship together. As we return to acknowledge the importance of each learner and the power and impact of teaching that honors relationship, we will also see profound personal and societal amelioration.

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