• Introduction
• Taking Learning Seriously
• The Scholarship of Teaching
• The Context of Public Discourse on Teaching
• The Language of Teaching
• Student Expectations and Faculty Ideals
• The Character of Knowledge
• Expectation and Assessment
• The Development of a Language of the Scholarship of Teaching
• The Value of Moral Language
• A Common Public Language
• Conclusion
• Notes and References
• Printable Text of Article

© Copyright 2000 by Hugh Sockett (hsockett@gmu.edu). The right to make additional exact copies, including this notice, for personal and classroom use, is hereby granted. All other forms of distribution and copying require permission of the author.

This instructional design-by-objectives model is clearly antipathetic to the kinds of instructional design Shulman has in mind. For the model, and the institutional organization that supports it, carries the pervasive assumption that everything to be learned is a topic for mastery, not for speculation or reflection. The true character of knowledge (its messiness, confusions, uncertainties, and contradictions) is hugely distorted. 

Students come to treat everything they are taught as information, as a bunch of certainties to be mastered. Moreover, if they don't get the information (in the various senses of "get"), it is the fault of the teacher. Under this model, there are no poor students, as Solzhenitsyn wrote of Soviet schools, only poor teachers. Typically, when presented with a conflict, students will not relish it, but (instrumentally) demand to know who's right, or, more important for the grade, whom the teacher thinks is right. 

Scottish educator Lawrence Stenhouse articulates the problem wonderfully well: such a model of instructional design "…..gives the school" (or teacher, or system) "an authority and power over its students by setting arbitrary limits to speculation and by defining arbitrary solutions to unsolved problems of knowledge" (p. 86). The teacher is then seen by the student primarily as an examiner to be thwarted, not as a critic whose judgement is trusted. 

Moved by the scholarship of his or her discipline, the teacher would like to be seen as a critic: institutional norms determine that s/he be seen as an examiner. Trying to teach a discipline coherently, the teacher is encountering the contrary student expectations developed through a doctrine of instructional design into which the student has been socialized over years of compulsory schooling.