Obstacles to Learning

The potential obstacles to education are numerous, but these four should be easy enough to recognize and avoid that most every teacher should be innocent of them.

Coercive Learning

The wisdom of recognizing that you can lead a horse to water but can’t make him drink is so remarkable it has become cliché. But so is the response that you can surely salt his oats. Perhaps few initiatives have been more damaging to real education than compulsory education laws. Yet, equally obstructive to real education is the teacher who doesn’t recognize desire, wonder, and curiosity are the best kinds of salt for students who need to drink.

Grade-based Motivation

It’s true that grades can serve as a fairly helpful measuring tools for evaluating a student’s progress on a subject. But real learning is immeasurable. The best thing grades can do is reflect a student’s effort in completing an assignment or passing a test. It doesn’t measure long-term recall and it certainly doesn’t measure a student’s ability to cognize, categorize, and apply what he has learned to real life. Furthermore, using grades to motivate students to learn not only undermines their intrinsic desire to know but it also often entices the teacher to stoop to paltry methods like teaching to the test.

Unpreparedness 

Winging it is for the birds; students and teachers can’t fly effectively this way. Clear assignment objectives and instructions alongside ample time for a student to do adequate work is paramount to a good recitation experience. This is true for the teacher as well. Even if the teacher goes off-script or the class discussion digresses to a topic not originally planned, preparing an outline and all the potential resources one may use to teach ahead of time is non-negotiable.

Distractions

Of course it would be impossible to eliminate all the possible distractions that could hinder learning for students but curtailing what you have power to curtail will go a long way; so will encouraging students to avoid the potential distractions within the realm of their authority. For example, a teacher can establish rules for his or her classroom that minimizes distractions (i.e., no cell phones or unnecessary electronic devices, in an online setting no babysitting siblings during class time or having their music playing, etc.). But even more distracting for a student is the distractedness they create for themselves by conditioning their attention spans with inordinate amounts of time spent on social media, videos, and games.