I recently met with my school principal to talk about my teaching methods. I was nervous and skeptical about what he was going to say. It started off like this;

“One thing you need to work on is Framing the Lesson. You need to tell the students what you are attempting to teach. I always like to use this analogy; suppose you are taking a trip in the car. If you said, “Everybody get in the car”, nobody would want to get in the car because they don’t know where they are going and they aren’t sure if they want to go. On the other hand, if you said, ‘We are going to take a trip. We are going to take a trip to Washington, DC. We are going to the Smithsonian Institute, The White house and The Capitol’, then they would want to get in the car. That is what we mean by Framing the Lesson. It sets the stage for the rest of the class. Brain r research tells that students will lose focus if they don’t know where they are going intellectually.”

Maybe that principal was right but I would prefer to look at this a different way. Suppose a student walks out of his house and sees three cars with a driver standing outside the car. The first one tells him, “Get in the car. We are going to take a trip.” The second one says, We are going to take trip to Washington, DC. We are going to visit the Smithsonian Institute, The White House and The Capitol.” Outside the third car is a driver, leaning on the fender. He is staring into the air and has a happy look on his face. This student walks up to the third driver and says, “Where are you going?” He looks at the student and says, “I got some ideas but where do you want to go?” Which car would you get into? Let’s look at the merits of each.
For the first car, the driver is a take-charge guy. He doesn’t care what the riders want. He has an unspoken agenda and he is going to pursue it, no matter what. The rider has little ownership or choice. On the positive side, the rider needs to make no decisions. As long as he does what he is told. Not much pressure but not very interesting or fun.
As for the second car, the driver has a very clear vision what he is going to do. His plans are very precise with a clear objective. First of all, to me, he sounds a little weak. It is almost as if he will be judged if he doesn’t tell the rider exactly what he is doing. In addition, he is a little more open but the rider has just as little ownership when he is compared with the first driver. On top of that, he still seems a little stiff. Clearer agenda but rather stiff. I feel a little more comfortable with this guy because he has revealed his agenda. This is still not a scenario that would not make me run into the back seat of his car.
Then there is the third car. No apparent agenda and the driver seems to be enjoying himself. Enjoying himself when nothing is apparently happening. He has an idea what he should be doing but he is willing to do just about anything, short of violating some core values. We might make it to DC or we may end up watching foot traffic in a park. Either way, you will end up in a place where there is potentially much to learn. If the driver is of decent integrity, you probably learn as much, if not more, than the people who made it to The White House and Capitol. On top of that, you probably had a really great and interesting time learning it.
If you are not sure of this last driver, Hollywood has banked on this character for years. The most lovable characters in many movies are these kind of guys. If this wasn’t the case, Bill Murray and Tom Hanks would have had very short movie careers. My wife have had many experiences in social events where one of us got stuck at the “boring” table and the other experienced the “fun” table. On a more serious note, the “fun” table is a great analogy of how famous psychologist Carl Rogers viewed the therapeutic relationship, as opposed to Fritz Perlz.

Why am I questioning this approach? Because, I feel, that it is not about education. In 2000, I was a new teacher. The administration, after observing my methods, decided that I needed to introduce the lesson better. As a result, they stressed having a class opening; a few problems to help transition into the lesson. Late, they asked me to write the standard down where the students can see it. Since then, administrators have stressed ‘framing the lesson” in many different forms. However, as I have gained experience teaching mathematics, I have learned that a framing can be easily replaced by a trusting relationship between the students and the teacher. In my study of psychology, I have learned that this is very similar to the therapist-client relationship.
Despite that, every new principal I have had has tried to move me (and other teachers) back to “Framing the Lesson.” So it makes me conclude that it is not really about education but about control. I mean…I don’t remember any college math classes that were forced to go through this kind of distraction. I have even taught some remedial math classes at a community college and nobody has asked me to do anything similar to this.
Another aspect of modern teaching in America is how mechanical it has become. Medicine has become more mechanical. Major sports are less about flow and more about Analytics. Western education has fallen into that trap as well. Education is no longer seen as an art form and now is seen as a science. I have always felt that, when you are dealing with human behavior, it is always an artform disguised as a science. Music is very logical and mathematical but the true masters of music are artists. The same can be said of education. The truly great teachers are artists and performers, not logicians with great precision. But mechanics are safe. They are repeatable. They can be put in a box and said that the teacher is masterful. I wonder (and am scared) if the Rock N’Roll Hall of Fame induction will ever be decided by a mechanical template. Musicians got to that level because they saw they way things should be and they were fearless. I am not sure if the same hing could be said of most educators.