I work (as a computer lackey) in a research psychology lab where we're studying the way young children learn words. We have an experiment where we get parents to teach the names of some toys to their toddlers. After the parents teach for a while, we test which names the child has learned.

We used to tell the parents that their child would be tested. When they knew this, they "taught to the test"---they wiggled a toy at their child, saying its name over and over, before moving to the next toy and repeating the process. Logical, right? But it didn't work. The children hardly learned anything.

When the mention of the test was taken out of the text read to the parents, they paid much greater attention to their children, and interacted with them, dropping the name of the toy the child was already interested in, rather than trying to bend the child's attention to their will. These children performed far better on the test.

Even though these tests don't mean anything for the child's future, when the parent knows that the test is coming, they try to help their children out. Who wouldn't? But their attempt at helping in fact hinders their child's learning process---playing works much better. How much more pressure is there on a teacher who is trying to provide for their students' futures, and save their school district from ruin at the same time? When people's minds get filled with goals and pressures, they lose a lot of their ability to adjust to what is actually happening. (for example, did you ever have a really good question in class, and completely lose track of what was happening because you were trying to ask the question?)

Schools that are in trouble under no child left behind sometimes force their teachers to use detailed, "scientifically based" prescripted curricula, in return for getting federal funding ( http://findarticles.com/... ). The teacher literally reads from a script, and sometimes even the teacher's responses to children's questions are scripted.

When I learned about these results in our lab, I started to connect the dots. Are you really teaching when you read from a script? How much of an agenda can you have, and how much pressure can you be under, and still notice how your students are doing? Teaching and learning are social processes. Who do you trust to manage a social process---someone who is right there, with all their intuitive awareness of what is happening? Or someone thousands of miles away, profiteering on the problems of inner-city schools by selling them scripts for turning their teachers into robots?

Power to the teachers!

Thanks for reading my first diary!

(edit: title changed)