Teaching and Learning or Learning and Teaching?

There was a time in the 1990s when a clever manoeuvre happened. Schools were admonished for having a Teaching and Learning policy. Mocked even. What they should have had, obviously, was a Learning and Teaching policy.

And to be fair to those who led this crusade, the change did cause some reflection on the relationship between the two. But not that much.

It’s no more accurate to speak of learning-and-teaching than the by-then unacceptable teaching-and-learning. Both have a limited conception of human interaction. Let me explain by way of a quote from a book on systems thinking.

“We are used to understanding the communication between teacher and learner as the teacher teaching the learner. Seen like this, it looks a one-way, linear relationship, defined by role. But we could look at it another way. The teacher could not teach without feedback from the learner’s response. The learner’s questions, answers, and expressions, both quizzical and satisfied, let the teacher know how to proceed. So the learner elicits from the teacher exactly what they need to learn. The better the learner does this,  the more skillful the teacher appears. In that sense, the learner ‘teaches’ the teacher how to teach. And the teacher ‘learns’ from the interaction.”

So when you understand the interaction that goes on in a classroom in terms of systems thinking, the fight to have one term precede another rather misses the point. It’s a chicken and egg situation: teaching–learning–teaching–learning–teaching–learning and so on.

References: Joseph O’Connor & Ian McDermott, 1997, The Art of Systems Thinking, Thorsons