Ever since my intership at a big time engineering company this summer, I’ve been thinking about the black box model for systems analysis (it sounds more technical than it really is). Basically, the model divides a system into three parts: input, process, and output.
What would the black box model look like for education? Specifically, what are the inputs to a classroom? What is the desired output of education? What do we output that isn’t desirable?
Education colleges and endless professional development workshops focus on the process of teaching (and to a lesser extent, learning and educational practice). Some educational leaders and thinkers are starting to speak more on the output of teaching in the United States, but these conversations seem to live on the fringes of the mainstream discussion. I don’t hear much about the inputs to teaching, nor their impact on instruction.
The following is a very incomplete list of the inputs that a teacher must process.
- attitudes
- beliefs
- motivations
- styles
- personalities
- baggage
- emotions
- intelligences
- history
- habits
- hang ups
- burns
- successes
- failures
- addictions
- obsessions
- standards
- expectations
- other teachers talk
- personal experience
- media reports
- movie teacher personas
- students
- resources
- theory (of varying degrees of maturity)
Additionally, many of these inputs come from several different stakeholders at once. Parents and administrators have expectations for my teaching, and sometimes these expectations conflict with the expectations of my students.
Developing an awareness of the salient and non-salient inputs to teaching may assist in fine tuning our output and the process that delivers this output.
