Change Your Metaphor

No more plug and play education. It’s time for more blossom and grow! Okay, so the metaphors aren’t really parallel. I guess it should be plant and grow, but that’s not as catchy. The difference between the two metaphors, though, it spot on for what we need to pursue for effective instruction.

I wrote about educational metaphors for NCTE’s Inbox blog this week. I wasn’t really thinking about the different ways of thinking about education until I read the PDF of Chapter One from Rebecca Bowers Sipe’s Adolescent Literacy at Risk? The Impact of Standards.

The agrarian metaphor for the educational system that Sipe outlines suddenly clicked perfectly with the “growth mindset” that I read about last fall in the article“The Truth about Grit,” published in The Boston Globe. (You can read more about that article in one of my Bedford Bits blogs from last October.)

The words we use always matter. In the case of metaphors, they can matter more than we may realize. The industrial metaphor for education has brought us a classroom where the strategies and information can be uniform. There’s no accounting for the differentiation of the students. Every student is the same. Teachers just plug in the units, and students are ready to go.

Course, in the real classroom, every student is different. That’s why plug and play strategies don’t work—and why we need to shift the way we think about education back to a more agrarian model that relies on strategies that help students blossom and grow.