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Who'll Fill the Gap: continued
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The authors break teaching as a cultural activity into several components and compare only Japan and the U.S. First is the Nature of Mathematics.
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Sixty-one percent of U.S. teachers described skills they wanted their students to learn. They wanted students to be able to perform a procedure, solve a particular kind of problem, and so on… 73 percent of Japanese teachers said the main thing they wanted their students to learn from the lesson was to think about things in a new way, such as to see new relationships between mathematical ideas. (p. 89-90)
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The next cultural component is the Nature of Learning. Amazingly, in this section, American individualism is more "stereotypically Japanese" than "stereotypically American."
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[In the U.S.], it would seem to be understandable that mathematics is best learned by mastering the material incrementally, piece by piece... Confusion and frustration, in this traditional American view, should be minimized; they are signs that earlier material was not mastered… One can infer that Japanese teachers believe students learn best by first struggling to solve mathematics problems… Frustration and confusion are taken to be a natural part of the process, because each person must struggle with a situation or problem first in order to make sense of the information he or she hears later. (p. 91)
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The Role of the Teacher is the next cultural component. Look for "yourself" as you read this description.
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[American] teachers act as if confusion and frustration are signs that they have not done their job. When they notice confusion, they quickly assist students by providing whatever information it takes [emphasis mine] to get the student back on track... [Japanese teachers] often choose a challenging problem to begin the lesson, and they help students understand and represent the problem [emphasis mine] so they can begin working on a solution... Rarely would teachers show students how to solve the problem midway through the lesson. (p. 93)
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The cultural component of Individual Differences provides some very keen insight into our profession. To me, the Japanese ideas sound like past American educational rhetoric. Rhetoric we now put aside as not politically correct.
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U.S. teachers believe that individual differences are an obstacle to effective teaching. Meeting each student’s needs means, ideally, diagnosing each student’s level of performance and providing different instruction for different levels... Japanese teachers view individual differences as a natural characteristic of a group... Tailoring instruction to specific students is seen as unfairly limiting and prejudging what students are capable of learning; all students should have the same opportunity to learn the same material. (p. 94)
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The final cultural component discussed is the Sanctity of the Lesson. In Japan, lessons are so essential to learning that
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... a great deal of attention is given to their development. They are planned as complete experiences—as stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Their meaning is found in the connections between the parts… And they must flow along, free from interruptions and unrelated activities. It is clear why Japanese lessons we videotaped were never interrupted from the outside, not by P.A. announcements, not by lunch-count monitors, not by anyone [all emphases mine]... In the United States, lessons are treated differently... The activities within a lesson are more modular, with fewer connections between them... It might not be surprising, then, that we found almost one-third of the U.S. lessons were interrupted in some way. (p. 95-96)
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Sound familiar? While probably not the time nor place for a detailed discussion, I know I'd like to experience days on end of lessons without external interruptions. How about you?
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Science Education Reform Index
