This is a list contrasting Freire's concept of "Banking" and "Problem-Posing" Education.
To read Freire's Chapter 2 of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, go HERE
TSS Directory
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS
BANKING
A. Teacher follows text or curriculum guide by grade level and date.
B. Most of the time, all students work on the same task.
C. Teachers expect learning results to occur in a normal curve, “A” to “F.”
D. Teachers teach by “activities” suggested in the text or curriculum guides.
E. The current instructional program may be isolated from what happened the year before or will happen after this year. Instruction is based on “things to teach in this grade.”
F. The student’s grade is determined by testing done at the end of a sequence of learning.
G. Paper and pencil is the major mode of testing.
H. Primarily, only language skills and math are subject to rigorous attention and evaluation.
I. Lessons are usually designed to produce only one level of learning outcome.
J. Teaching to achieve independent learners with a “zest for learning” is incidental.
PROBLEM-POSING
A. Teacher identifies long-range objectives, analyzes tasks, and then proceeds as rapidly as students’ validated learning allows.
B. Students work on a task designed so that, with effort, each can realize satisfaction and success. Sometimes it’s with the whole group, sometimes with a smaller, prescriptive group.
C. Teachers expect all students to earn an “A’ or “B,” but the time to do so will vary.
D. Teachers teach to instructional objectives that task analysis has indicated are essential to achieving the long-range goals.
E. The instructional program is based on a Continuum that will lead to identified long-range goals.
F. Informal and inferential diagnoses, as well as formal testing, yield continuous contributions to instructional direction. The student’s grade is a synthesis of many observations and measurements.
G. Frequent signaled answers; daily, brief oral and written responses; and student products are much more prevalent than formal tests.
H. All facets of a student’s growth (intellectual, physical, academic, social, and emotional) are subject to rigorous attention and evaluation.
I. Lessons are designed with “educational wiggle,” so a total group lesson will accommodate students’ different “catch hold” points. If the lesson can’t accommodate them, students are not subjected to expectations that are ridiculously easy or impossible to achieve. Often, students will work in appropriate subgroups.
J. Teaching to achieve independent learners with a “zest for learning is a major outcome.
EXPECTATIONS OF TEACHERS
BANKING
A. Teachers focus on a one-year view of students’ progress.
B. The major record of students’ progress is the teacher’s grade book.
C. Teachers assume major responsibility for what students do to learn.
D. Staff development is optional.
PROBLEM-POSING
A. Teachers focus on a long-term, developmental view that transcends the current year.
B. Records become an individual student’s portfolio of anecdotal observations, products samples, tests, and self-analyses.
C. Teachers teach students to become responsible partners in their own learning.
D. Continuing staff development is a routine expectation.
EXPECTATIONS OF STUDENTS
BANKING
A. Students judge their own achievement by comparison with others in the class.
B. Students assume that if they’re younger than the majority of the group, they’re superior. If they’re older, they’ve “failed.”
C. Students feel little pressure for being responsible for their own learning. “Its the teacher’s job to teach me.”
D. Students feel little responsibility for self-direction.
E. Students accept that they will “pass or fail.”
PROBLEM-POSING
A. Students judge their achievement by comparison with their own past record or with comparable students who have the same learning task and probability of success.
B. Students are comfortable with students of different ages, with no ascriptions to their own competence.
C. Students realize that successful learning results from their own efforts in collaboration with teachers.
D. Students feel responsible for directing themselves, knowing when they understand, and, if they don’t, doing something about it.
E. Students know that they can learn if effort and necessary assistance are mobilized and that they are expected to do so.
