Tim Allison:  A Virtual Portfolio

Time Management -- Knowledge or Process?

Metareflection:

    Is it necessary that students understand processes?  Clearly, it is.  What about the content?  Not only is it important that they understand it, but it is our job as teacher to teach it.  But is it possible to do both?  This issue is one which I believe each teacher must settle, in order to run his or her classroom in an efficient, effective, and enjoyable manner, for both the teacher and the students.  The reflection below addresses this issue.

    In addressing the issues around this question, one must propose the following:  that content can be learned through the process, thus avoiding the worries about covering both.  This is the goal, I believe, behind inquiry-based learning, in which students learn the content to some extent through doing an activity related to it.  This conforms to Gallas' proposition (p. 16), that "the very private musing of a child...may eventually be transformed through reflection, dialogue, and finally collaboration into a question, and, ultimately, a theory about the world."  In short, process begets content knowledge.  Millar and Driver suggest that this sort of learning “[involves] pupils in such activities as observing…classifying, hypothesizing…inferring, experimenting, problem-solving…modelling….” (p. 56); this is process, and students can learn content through it.  In the same way, in Volkmann's article, the contrasting views of the two science teachers (Juan and Luke) are split along the lines of content vs. process.  Juan, the new teacher, prefers to teach process (although there is some debate over whether his students are learning the necessary content); while Luke, the more experienced teacher, prefers to teach content, but risks having his students lose interest in science.  There is a fine line which must be walked, here, as it is clearly important that we, as teachers, cover the content, but at the same time, our students should be interested in what they are learning.  Finally, Yager (p. 3) suggests that we encourage students "to test their own ideas...[and engage in] self-analysis, collection of real evidence to support ideas, and reformation of ideas in light of new experiences and evidence."  If we do this, as he suggests, our students will be able to learn the material through the process, an we will be able to teach both efficiently in our science classrooms.
 

Melissa’s concern for the college-bound students scattered throughout her class shows that she has justifiable concerns about covering content….Addiction to coverage, however, is dangerous because it tends to produce a false dichotomy between content knowledge and process knowledge.  When knowing what takes precedence over knowing how as it typically does when preparing students for standardized tests pressures teachers to cover a wide variety of topics in an inadequate space of time, students are deprived of the opportunity to learn how bits of knowledge fit together and generalize to other areas of the curriculum or to real life.  In short, students are denied the kind of instruction that leads to active and independent learning.  (Alvermann & Phelps, pp. 4-5)

     This passage discusses a couple of ideas that have come up in several classes, and which appear to be issues of some debate in the teaching profession.

    First, is it more important to cover all of the material required by the provincial curriculum or to ensure that students understand all of the material?  On one hand, if the material is not entirely covered, (i) students might face difficulty in the following academic year, whether this be in high school or at university; and (ii) the teacher of the next level (if it is at the same school) might not be impressed that a critical piece of information was missed.  The solution would seem to be to cover all of the “important” material and to make sure that the students understand it all.  It is likely, however, given time constraints, that this is much more easily said than done.

    Second, is it more important for students to have content knowledge or process knowledge?  For a standardized test, the former is clearly more important.  However, in the “real world,” it is far more important to know how to do something than to simply know what it is.  One can study the theoretical aspects of acidity and alkalinity for hours on end to acquire content knowledge.  However, if one cannot perform a proper titration, the lab supervisor is likely to be thoroughly unimpressed.  While it is generally possible to learn some content through the process, time is, again, the most important consideration.

    Undoubtedly, these concepts will continue to cause debate between those who favour content coverage and those who favour learning-based process coverage; with time being the major issue, as it is time that is the limiting reagent in classroom learning.

Source cited:
Alvermann, D.E. and Phelps, S.F.  (2002).  Content Reading and literacy:  Succeeding in
    today's diverse classrooms.  Boston:  Allyn & Bacon.