Educational beliefs I have let go of

Before becoming a teacher, I used to assume that kids couldn't know things unless they were taught them. I really thought that a comprehensive curriculum and rigorous tests were the way to ensure a quality education. Every time I encountered kids who seemed to struggle with basic numeracy, I would mumble something about the school system lacking rigour. In this post, I want to list some of the beliefs that I no longer hold.

Here are four beliefs I used to hold but no longer do:

1. Students learn what we teach them
   It is a well-established fact that students construct their own learning and that this construction is influenced by many factors, including what teachers say or demonstrate. I know many teachers, myself included, who finish correcting their students' papers and exclaim: "I told them ...." or "was I even in the room when we discussed this?" At times, I still express my frustration this way but I am no longer surprised when students do not internalise what I said in class.
   
   
2. Students cannot learn what we don't teach them
   Once I give my students room to explore, they often discover knowledge I do not possess. One small example is a year seven student who taught herself to build a Scratch game that interact with the user through the laptop's camera. I did not even know that such a feature had been added to Scratch.
    
3. All students need to be taught the same content
   Many teachers fear that, if students were allowed to learn different things, they would not all have the prerequisite knowledge for the following year. Experience has shown me that students don't retain much of what they have learnt from one year to the next. Sorry, they don't retain much of what they have been taught from one year to the next. Why? Because students don't learn what we teach them!
    
4. Knowledge is sequential
   I have found that students understand the decimal system (base 10 numbers, even whole numbers, are meant here) much better when they realise that it is not the only one on offer. In fact, "variation theory" holds that, for us to understand "green" we need to see a number of objects coloured green as well as objects of different colours. Without the first condition, we might associate the colour with grass only and fail to realise that it can be property of apples and bell peppers. Without the second, we wouldn't need a name for the colour since the world would be monochrome.

This post raises the question: What beliefs have come to replace the four mentioned above? I think that I can answer this by telling the story of a year 10 class I had the pleasure of teaching last semester. I do need to tell that story as a way of saying "Thank you" to the 17 students in that class but this will need to wait for another post. In the meanwhile, please leave a comment on the educational beliefs you have relinquished.