'Teacher-Pleasing,' Traditional Grading--and Learning? A Collaborative Qualitative Study.

This study examines whether students' constant focus on meeting teacher expectations might cause students to see themselves as producers of products for someone else, rather than as learners. Four researchers asked elementary, middle, high school, and university students to describe their experience of classrooms, listening for patterns that would reveal how the need for teacher approval makes them feel about each other and about their work. The researchers also engaged in systematically trying out methods of teaching and assessing learning in which the teacher's role is primarily that of facilitator and in which students evaluate themselves. Findings suggest that participation in "teacher pleasing" interferes with genuine student intellectual, social, and moral growth. Students operate under pressure to please the teacher rather than construct their own meaning out of the classroom experience. They become competitive with each other as they carefully stay within the safe boundaries of right answers. Weaning students from those concerns seems to be harder in direct proportion to the number of years of socialization in "teacher pleasing" and harder if the paradigm shifts only in one class. Implications for teacher educators are discussed. Appendixes contain guidelines given to university students, and university students' definitions of "good" and "bad" as they relate to the classroom environment. (Contains approximately 90 references.) (JDD)