Before reading Linda M. McNeil’s writing on the relationship between knowledge control and classroom control, I never would have thought that the two classroom issues could be so interrelated. However, I think she makes a very good argument for the substitution of more challenging course content with simpler lessons as means of keeping order in the classroom. Within her writing about defensive teaching, I think that some of the central issues of the article are the effects of defensive teaching on the ability of the students to get anything meaningful out of their time at school. Most obviously, students will not be challenged to think in different ways if they are not doing projects or writing papers that require the integration of knowledge from the classroom with creative thinking. Another problem is the separation between the personal knowledge of the student and the content of material presented in class. If students never have the opportunity to openly question course content with information or experiences of their own, not only will they learn not to trust information presented at school as McNeil suggests, but they will also lack the opportunity to form connections between what they already know and the new information being presented. When this type of meaningful learning cannot take place and is actually subtly discouraged, the students will probably not remember anything they were taught past the time they need to repeat it on a test.
Finally, if teachers feel the need to withhold information (either through fragmentation, omission, mystification, or simplification), students will not be presented with the foundation on which to build a further understanding of the course topics in the future. Of course, I am not blaming any one person, whether student, teacher, or administrator for the practice of defensive teaching; rather, I agree with McNeil’s assessment that there are a number of forces that have shaped the way teaching is done, including cultural/ historical influences, the basic need to keep order in classrooms, and the pressure of standardized testing. My point is that, regardless of how it came about, defensive teaching is not a strategy that is conducive to a meaningful classroom experience.
A secondary issue brought up in McNeil’s writing is the incidence of teacher burnout. From her research, it seems that many teachers become tired of dealing with unruly students, goals for standardized test scores, meetings about discipline, and complaints from students about projects or difficult assignments. The reason I want to briefly discuss this is because burnout, or simply not being about to put up with so many pressures any more, is something that I think we all may have to face at some point in time while we are teaching. While some of the teachers interviewed for this article chose the defensive teaching strategy as a way to deal with these pressures, I wanted to try to brainstorm some alternate ways I might deal with burnout when I am teaching. The first thing I might try to do is look to my closest resources, my fellow teachers, and ask if they have found any successful strategies for classroom management. I might also try to adjust my classroom management practices slightly, possibly by looking to the suggestions made by Weinstein in our last reading. I may also have to think about how I am scaffolding the work of the students because I may need to give more support to the students. If they are feeling completely lost and become disengaged from the topic, that would cause more discipline problems and more pressure.
