Who's Responsible for What?

In the classroom, a teacher teaches, and a student learns. But who is responsible for what? I'll give you the short answer: the teacher is responsible for teaching, the student is responsible for learning. This sounds pretty straightforward, but consider the implications.

The teacher teaches. This is an act of performance (see here), and the teacher is definitely responsible for the nature and content of his or her instruction. The classroom environment will reflect what the teacher does, what materials the teacher uses, what rules are set, but the teacher cannot control what students learn.

The student is responsible for learning. Whether and what the student learns is up to the student. If a student doesn't want to learn, he won't. If the student learns incorrectly, that's her doing. It might not be her fault however. Students learn different things at different rates, often in spite of themselves. Their brains are not yet mature, especially those frontal lobes. Yet the teacher's responsibility is to be aware of who is learning what, and to make appropriate adjustments. But for good or for ill, learning is up to the student.

An important implication of this fact is this: you cannot judge teaching by testing what it is students have learned. Every teacher knows this. Every teacher contents him or herself with the understanding that most students do the best they can most of the time. Every teacher adjusts what they are doing to what the students seem able to do. What would be the point of doing otherwise?

Since you can't honestly judge teaching by testing the students, you also cannot compare teachers against each other, even if they presumably teach the same class or material. Teachers will always adjust to the students they have, which will create differences from class to class, from course to course, in spite of attempts to standardize the curriculum or the grading policies.

But the difficulty for administrators, who need to understand what is happening in the building, is the time it takes to actually visit classes, watch what is going on, sit down and talk with teachers, and so on. In my current school, I get visited by administrators (whether they have ever taught or not) two, maybe three times in a year, for about 15 or 20 minutes per visit.

I can only imagine that the desire to standardize what happens in classrooms must stem from the sheer impossibility of their responsibility, which is to monitor everything.