My expectation is that any theory that encourages educators to pay attention to individual nonhierarchical differences among their students will have good results relative to any theory that encourages educators to treat all students either as identical or as stratified, simply because teaching is a social relationship among humans and social relationships tend to benefit from mutual respectful attention.
So I’m reluctant to choose one theory over another solely on that basis.
Hear, hear. The difficulty of that is not to be underestimated, though. I had a teacher once that I liked a lot—I found his explanations really clear and interesting, and he was a funny and nice and interesting person himself. Chatting with some of his other students outside the classroom, I found that everyone I talked to said something along the lines of, “I feel like he teaches in just the right way for me to understand.” So either he’d found the magic teaching style that works for everybody, or he was simply giving us the same information in several different ways throughout the class, and each of us only remembered the one that worked. It was pretty cool, and I have tons of respect for that guy.
(For what it’s worth, what I remember best about his classes was how visual and hands-on they were, despite being about relatively abstract topics. For example, when we were learning about ext2 filesystems, he put pieces of paper with file, directory, or inode contents on the various desks, and had us scurry around tracking down specific information in files—basically, learning how to be a shell! Or, similarly, when discussing standard i/o filehandles, he held up a physical box with one wire going in and two wires going out. It didn’t matter that the box itself wasn’t actually doing anything; seeing it made the metaphor crystal clear.)
My expectation is that any theory that encourages educators to pay attention to individual nonhierarchical differences among their students will have good results relative to any theory that encourages educators to treat all students either as identical or as stratified, simply because teaching is a social relationship among humans and social relationships tend to benefit from mutual respectful attention.
So I’m reluctant to choose one theory over another solely on that basis.
Hear, hear. The difficulty of that is not to be underestimated, though. I had a teacher once that I liked a lot—I found his explanations really clear and interesting, and he was a funny and nice and interesting person himself. Chatting with some of his other students outside the classroom, I found that everyone I talked to said something along the lines of, “I feel like he teaches in just the right way for me to understand.” So either he’d found the magic teaching style that works for everybody, or he was simply giving us the same information in several different ways throughout the class, and each of us only remembered the one that worked. It was pretty cool, and I have tons of respect for that guy.
(For what it’s worth, what I remember best about his classes was how visual and hands-on they were, despite being about relatively abstract topics. For example, when we were learning about ext2 filesystems, he put pieces of paper with file, directory, or inode contents on the various desks, and had us scurry around tracking down specific information in files—basically, learning how to be a shell! Or, similarly, when discussing standard i/o filehandles, he held up a physical box with one wire going in and two wires going out. It didn’t matter that the box itself wasn’t actually doing anything; seeing it made the metaphor crystal clear.)