Bruner & the Role of Teachers

In the previous two posts (here & here), I wrote about the early work and legacy of Jerome Bruner. Bruner's works calls us to take a closer look at the role and purpose of teachers.

Bruner called education a "social intervention" (22) and said that every generation needs to redefine the purpose of education for itself.  Because society is constantly re-inventing itself, so too must education continue to re-invent itself.

The natural world is the place for spontaneous, authentic learning - school is an artificial environment we have created for learning out of necessity.  But what does that mean for the role of a teacher?  Bruner says "Instruction should have an edge over 'spontaneous' learning" (44).  So the job of a teacher is to make sure instruction builds upon knowledge and skills at a faster rate than a student could on his/her own.

This is exactly the work of the Hattie study (2009).  Hattie's mantra of "Know thy impact" comes from his meta-study which compares the effect sizes of various instructional strategies on achievement.  A few strategies and policies had a reverse effect on achievement (a negative effect size), some are called "Developmental effects" (what a student would likely achieve without a teacher), "Teacher effects", and finally a zone of "Desired effects" - strategies that had an effect above the average effect size of 0.40 in the study.  This is Hattie's "hinge point".

It should not be surprising, then, that the highest ranking strategies in the Hattie study are foreseen 50 years ago in Bruner's early writings.  The words might be different now, but Bruner foresaw the strategies teachers needed to use to keep that "edge".  Here are some examples:
• Piagetian programs - Bruner was a strong believer in matching learning to Piagetian stages
• Formative Evaluation and Feedback - Bruner saw feedback as important not just for achievement in the moment, but also for connecting the student to his/her greater goals.  Calling this the teacher's "special role", Bruner says learners can usually recognize if his/her immediate efforts worked or not, but a teacher's feedback is needed to show students if their work is leading to the eventual goal (51).
• Acceleration - allowing students to move forward at their own pace, jumping ahead when possible
• Problem-solving - Curiosity is the first intrinsic motivator for learning according to Bruner.

The teacher's role is a "provisional" role in Bruner's words.  We teach to create independence from a teacher.  This means helping students discover the ability within themselves to continue to learn on their own - to transmit culture without aid.  To that end, Bruner says (96):

"For if we do nothing else, we should somehow give to children a respect for their own powers of thinking, for their power to generate good questions, to come up with interesting informed guesses."