The relationship between teaching and learning

How does teaching relate to learning? There are two primary ways to look at this question. I want to address both.

The first way to look at this is by viewing teaching and learning as equal concepts. The only way for this to work is if you accept that teaching can be internal. In other words, people can teach themselves. There are ways to dig deeper into this concept and acknowledge that there is a substantial overlap between learning and teaching yourself. An argument can even be made that teaching and learning actually refer to the same process.

The other way people look at this issue as an external process. This viewpoint rejects the concept of people teaching themselves. This should not undermine internal processes. The bulk of the work is still coming from the learner. This perspective makes teaching and learning definitively unequal. Learning would be substantially more important than teaching. When people are asked to talk about teachers, they are not being asked to talk about themselves. This is the predominant viewpoint that people embrace.

Years ago, I bumped into an article about lectures. The article made the argument that we shouldn't just have students learn to their strengths. Teachers should be allowed to teach to their strengths. Aside from the numerous problems with lectures (teaching all students the exact same thing the exact same way at the exact same time in a manner that is more suitable for low-value memorization rather than practical learning), this article seemed dependent on a misunderstanding of how teaching relates to learning.

Admittedly, this argument was better than what I encountered when I was in school. My teachers viewed absolutely everything as being about the teachers. This argument treated external teaching and learning as equal. This is absolutely not true.

External influence is not even close to learning in importance. Learning is a more direct concept, and this argument completely undermined the internal aspects of the educational process. It doesn't matter how good you are at lecturing if this is incompatible with how a student learns.

I'm not saying that teachers should ignore their strengths. I truly believe that we have a tendency to fixate on weaknesses at the expense of strengths. Regardless, I would much rather have teachers utilize their strengths to help students learn rather than override strengths of learners in favor of their own strengths.

Again, there are different ways to look at the relationship between teaching and learning. Unless you embrace a viewpoint that equates the two, learning is clearly the dominant component of education. Teachers need to stop undermining the role that their students play in this process. They need to stop acting like what's best for them is magically what's best for their students.