Learning-Teaching Styles

On Wednesday, Leila Christenbury asked “When is it time for teachers to leave their comfort zone?” (http://goo.gl/aRWT4) in a thoughtful invitation to educators everywhere. It reminded me of a favorite saying, “There’s no learning in the comfort zone, and no comfort in the learning zone” (I can never find an attribution for this quote). It has been used for years to inspire teachers to think about the affective component to learning. As I read and re-read Leila’s post, my mind tried to merge these two ideas together. After all, I have always believed the best teachers are life-long learners themselves. Certainly lifelong learners push themselves outside of their comfort zone as they continue to learn, grow and adapt….especially in this age of fast-paced change. Sure we all have a learning style and a teaching style….but do we have a learning-teaching style?

A learning-teaching style means there is a connection between how we learn and how we teach. At first blush that seems like a tenable thing to which one could subscribe. Of course, how we learn impacts how we teach! Right?

But can you learn and teach at the same time? What if your learning-teaching style is a toggle switch…while you are in the one mode you cannot be in the other? Think about it…if you are learning something new, don’t you have to reach a certain point of mastery before you can switch gears into a teaching mode? Or even more to the point: in learning, we are open and receptive to information and stimuli and experience, while in teaching we  are…hmmmmmm…is the converse true? And if it's not, in an age of quickly-changing information, shouldn’t teaching mode also require us to be open and receptive to information and stimuli and experience, even as we are teaching?

I propose we modify the truism I stated above to “There’s no teaching in the comfort zone, and no comfort in the teaching zone” (apologies to the anonymous originator of the phrase). How does that sit with you? If you infer from this statement what I do, your mind is now processing questions like:

• If I learn out of my comfort zone does that mean it should be easier for me to teach out of my comfort zone? Feels like that doesn’t necessarily follow…
  
   
• So…as an excellent teacher in this day-in-age I should constantly be pushing myself out of my teaching comfort zone in order to model 21^st century skills for my students?
  
   
• And…I shouldn’t be too comfortable with the strategies, methodologies and resources with which I have been successful in the classroom?
  
   
• Finally…does that mean the most appropriate way to meet the needs of each student is to leave our comfort zone to meet them in each of theirs? Or do both teacher and learner need to be uncomfortable? Whose comfort zone is it anyway?!

There are a lot of implications that need to be meted out, but this much is certain, the role of teacher is changing. Twenty years ago constructivism pushed us to move away from being the disseminator of knowledge to being the facilitator of learning. In today’s world that simply isn’t enough. Beyond facilitation teachers today need to be modelers of learning, understanding, synthesizing, creating and problem solving right in there with their students; everyone inquiring and discovering and building meaning together….no one in their comfort zone, but everyoneacclimated to learning, thinking and working outside of their comfort zone. Talk about Piagetan disequilibrium…!

Yes….let’s talk about that…