The following is an excerpt from a manuscript currently in search of a publisher
Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.
We have all heard this statement expressed many times by intelligent individuals, individuals who themselves are successful in fields other than teaching. I find the sentiment most insulting and misleading-- insulting because it demeans and devalues the efforts and achievements of past and present teachers, scholars, philosophers, and theorists in the field of education, and misleading because it carries the implication that intelligent people choose not to teach because teaching does not require intelligent “doing.” Furthermore, the statement can only be based upon the experience of the speaker, and that experience is, of necessity, based only on personal experiences and interactions with a small and particular set of teachers. The sentiment expressed bears only on the substantive personal knowledge those teachers possess. Yet, there are broader intellectual components of teaching that are often overlooked or ignored because they are rarely discussed with students or, indeed, with those not intimately involved in public or private education. For instance, many teachers spend countless hours thinking about the learner and activities that promote “learning” in an effort to determine how to best, or most effectively, stimulate the mind of students to store, retrieve, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate information.
The first step in intelligent doing occurs when teachers analyze and assess various theories of learning. As teachers sort through competing theories, they then spend years translating educational theories. Some then spend years translating these theories into practical applications that seek to “unlock the intellectual potential of the students.” When I say we seek to “unlock students’ mathematical potential,” I mean that students come to a class with a store of knowledge and their potential-- yet are often unaware that they possess this knowledge or that their existing knowledge of mathematics is part of a larger system. Enabling students both to recognize the knowledge that they possess and to relate that knowledge to new information should be the goal of a curriculum. An effective curriculum should provide situations in which students experience this recognition and internalize these relationships. The ones I describe in this book provides a working example. I call this kind of thinking and curriculum development “intelligent doing.”
I think that it is fair to assume that most non-teachers would at least acknowledge the fact that teaching is done in a social context that is complex. And, they would agree that the intellectual potential that teachers strive to unlock is sometimes easily accessible and sometimes not. Moreover, most would agree that some students possess intellectual abilities that require a qualitatively different kind of “unlocking” than those whose potential is not easily accessed.
How, when, and whether teachers get to the stage in their teaching where they actually think about teaching and learning is still not well understood. I believe that some teachers go through what I call a pedagogical transformation that occurs as a result of direct as well as indirect interactions with the cultural framework of their schools, that is, with the implicit and explicit values, traditions, beliefs, patterns of behavior, and assumptions that are held by the various constituencies of the community. It is within this context that teachers develop their approaches to teaching and determine the degree to which they satisfied, or dissatisfied, with their pedagogical, or instructional practices. It is within this context that the “doing” of teachers is intelligent.