A brief course in the teaching process

by George D. Strayer

When children have become conscious of the meaning of the aim or problem as an element in successful study, and when their practice is guided by this consciousness, they will meet with another difficulty in learning how to secure the data adequate for the solution of the problem. Before leaving the elementary school, children should know how to use dictionaries, encyclopedias, gazetteers, year books, and the like. It is passing strange that college students often seem not to know the purpose either of the table of contents or of the index in the books which they use. It is pitiful to see a person leafing through a book trying to find information on some question at issue, when in a minute he could find in the index just the page or section in which this topic is treated, and so spend the time gathering data instead of wasting it in a random search for the information desired. It is necessary to teach children to consult the indices and tables of contents of books, and to give them frequent practice in work of this kind, if they are commonly to employ this device or method.

Another help to the collection of data might very well begin to be used in the intermediate grades of the elementary school; it is the practice of noting, when more than one book or source of information is used, just where the information is to be found, and something of its nature. If the pupil consults more than one authority, the one read last may raise questions which must be answered by a return to those used earlier, and one ought to be able to turn directly to the sources formerly consulted. Or it may be that a similar problem, or one having much in common with it, will arise a week or a month later, when a record of the sources of information consulted before will lighten the work by half. A record of this sort could be kept in notebooks, or, as is done by older people who know how to work, in a card index. Of course work of this kind presupposes the use of some books other than a single textbook; and to go very far in giving children the command of the technique of study we shall have to provide ourselves with more than a single book for a subject.

Another way by which children can be greatly helped is teaching them how to take notes and how to annotate. There is no exercise more valuable to the student, so far as his future work is concerned, than practice in writing in a very few words the gist of a paragraph or page. As they reflect later, they may want to know the argument of this authority or that, but they must have it in condensed form or they will be little better off than when they began their work. A very helpful exercise is to have children to abstract, either orally or in writing, a page or two of a book which they are studying, and to compare results. In this work the problem is that which confronts the thinker at every stage of his work, the selection of that which is relevant and the discarding of that which is less significant. If we think logically, among the mass of possible data we must always choose that which in our judgment is relatively most valuable for our purpose. The teacher in the organization of material for presentation in any subject is confronted constantly with the problem of relative values. Not all can be presented, even though relevant to the issue involved; hence, choice must be made. And just so, if the child learns to study, to conduct his own investigations, he must be made conscious of this need of discrimination, and he must be given practice in its exercise.

Adequate study demands not simply that an abundance of data which bear on the problem be secured, but that the validity of the data be brought into question. Children ought not to accept blindly the statements of books or even of the teacher. The one thing which characterizes the student is his search for truth, his attitude of inquiry as opposed to an appeal to authority. It is well for children at times to question the statements found in their books when experience suggests the doubt. It is equally important, of course, that they be willing to acknowledge their mistake, should proof be forthcoming in support of the book. If a child really studies, he must, even as an adult, find statements of fact, the records of observations or experiments, which are at variance with the evidence which he already possesses. It is just in this particular that the student differs from ordinary men who allow others to do their thinking for them. The student may not be able to settle the question, and so forms a judgment which is frankly tentative. Children ought to have the experience of finding that there are some questions to which a definite answer cannot, in the present state of knowledge, be given. They should be shown, wherever possible, how the conclusions of men on some of the most important problems that have been studied have changed from time to time. They can at times be made to realize the folly of overhasty generalization.

No one has learned how to study who has not been trained to reflect upon his experience, whether the experience has been recently acquired with the express purpose of solving his problem, or is some more remote element in experience which may shed light on the question in hand. A skillful teacher can guide in this process of reflection, and will later tell them what is meant, and demonstrate for them something of the value of the practice. It is quite worth while for a student to know when he has concentrated his attention upon a problem, and just what is meant by reflection. Many older people deceive themselves into thinking that they are exercising themselves in these directions when a slight acquaintance with the elements involved in fixing attention or in reflection might awaken them to the futility of their practices. There need be nothing occult or hard to understand about the practice of study. It is not a matter of terminology nor of a systematic course in psychology, but rather consists in guiding the individual in his practice of the art, and then making known to him the elements in his experience which have meant success or failure. It may be enlightening to compare the emphasis upon careful examination of data, the formation of tentative rather than fixed judgments, the guarding against hasty generalizations, and the emphasis upon reflection with the steps of presentation, of comparison and abstraction, and of generalization in the inductive lesson, and with the corresponding steps of the deductive lesson. The conviction will probably be deepened that when the teacher instructs the student in the art of study she is making available for him the method which she employs in instruction. This must be the relationship; for the teacher can do nothing more than take account of the way the child learns, and adapt her method to his possibilities.

The habit of verification is one of the most important from the point of view of learning how to study. The questions which the student must constantly ask himself are: “Can the conclusions be applied?” “Do they always hold?” “Does it work?” Fine-spun theories are of little avail, however much satisfaction the originator of them may have found in deriving them. At every step in the progress of his thought the conclusions must be tested by an appeal to known facts. The teacher cannot too frequently insist upon this step as the criterion of the worth of the thinking which has been done. And the insistence will be necessary, for it seems natural for human beings to become so enamored of their theories that they hesitate to expose them to the test which may prove them false.

Teaching children to memorize: Throughout the school life of the child, memorizing is a regular part of his work. If practice alone were necessary, every child should soon learn how to do this kind of work in the most economical manner. The great difficulty is that often neither teacher nor pupil has given any thought to the method employed, their attention having been wholly engrossed with success or failure in achieving the result. It is a well established principle of psychology that the possibility of recall is conditioned by the system of ideas with which that which we wish to recall has been identified. The more associations made, or the more perfect our control of any system of ideas which involves that which we wish to remember, the greater the probability of bringing to mind the fact when we need it. As Professor James puts it: “Of two men with the same outward experience, the one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into the most systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.” And along with this fact is another equally important for the teacher: that we may not hope to increase the native power of retentiveness. The child whom we teach may be endowed by nature with little or much power of this sort, and we cannot change it; but we can improve his method of memorizing.

The first step in memorizing is to understand. If we try to commit to memory the words of a book when we do not fully comprehend the meaning, we are depending very largely on our desultory memory, i.e. upon our ability to remember the things because they have been once present in mind; and our efficiency will depend wholly upon our quality of native retentiveness. But, unfortunately, for want of knowledge of a better method, children are frequently satisfied that they are doing adequate work when they are repeating over and over again the words which they have made little attempt to comprehend.

Even when the sense of the words to be memorized is fairly clear, it is uneconomical to employ this method of accretion. The child who studies the poem by saying first the first line, then the second, then the first and second, then the third, then the first, the second, and the third, depends upon mere repetition, not upon thinking, for the persistence of the impression. It has been demonstrated that on the basis of the amount of time required this method is uneconomical. Add to this the fact that after the first complete repetition, later successful recall depends upon the efficiency of the system of associated ideas which have been established; and there can be no doubt of the folly of such a method of procedure. It is no wonder that children who commit to memory in this way forget so readily. They may have understood what they said when they first repeated the poem; but the method they employed almost precludes the building up of a system of associated ideas on the basis of careful thinking.

If the child has read aloud and understands the selection to be memorized, the next thing to be done is to analyze it into its principal thought units; and then each of these large units of thought may be again carefully scrutinized until a full appreciation of the thought has been accomplished. The thought of the whole may then be stated, using as far as possible the words of the author, and then each of the subdivisions or thought units may be examined in more detail in order to get the shade of meaning that is brought out by this or that word, by relationship of coördination or subordination of clause, or the modification indicated by this word or phrase. It will be necessary, as the work progresses on the large thought units into which the selection has been divided, to return constantly to the whole thought in order to keep clear the relationship of the part to the whole, and to establish the part in the system of ideas which we seek to build up. “All the evidence we have goes to show that the method of memorizing by wholes is most economical.”[12] If children were taught to work in this way, there would be little drudgery about memorizing. The careful, thoughtful study once completed, memorization has been accomplished. The energy and attention of the child have not been centered upon a merely technical process, but he has been concerned mainly in trying to appreciate fully the thought that he is to make his own. Memory work of this kind is highly educative, not merely because of the product, but also because of the process employed. Suppose, for example, you wish children to memorize Stevenson’s Bed in Summer:—