Good teaching requires abandoning fixed agendas to meet learner readiness

Evidence

One of the most intense aspects of liberatory pedagogical practice is the challenge on the part of the professor to change the set agenda. We all learn to make lesson plans, and want to stick to them. When I began teaching, I would feel panic, a sense of crisis, if there was a deviation from my set agenda. I think the crisis we all feel about changing agendas is the fear that we will not cover enough material. And in thinking this through I have to undermine my own “I ”; maybe the material I most want them to know on a given day is not necessarily what learning is about. Professors can dish out all the right material, but if people are not in a mind to receive it, they leave classrooms empty of that information, even tough we may feel we’ve really done our jobs. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 304

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to hooks’s own critique of the ‘banking system’ of education (Paulo Freire) developed earlier in this book, and to any reader’s notes on progressive pedagogy. — connects to: Generating classroom excitement requires abandoning fixed agendas and fixed authority — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 24; Teaching is continual reinterpretation rather than transmission of fixed content — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 267; Standardized prepackaged curricula suppress learners’ critical thinking about their own experience — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 191 (+3 more)
• SEED: An essay angle on how ‘covering material’ functions as an anxiety ritual in higher ed rather than a learning aim.

Broader Connections

• Generating classroom excitement requires abandoning fixed agendas and fixed authority #expands (0.85) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 24
• Transformative teaching requires teachers to become learners in dialogue with students #expands (0.80) — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 685
• Teaching is continual reinterpretation rather than transmission of fixed content #qualifies (0.75) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 267
• Standardized prepackaged curricula suppress learners’ critical thinking about their own experience #corroborates (0.75) — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 191