Vol 10 No 2 - February 2015

International Journal
of
Learning, Teaching
And
Educational Research
p-ISSN:1694-2493
e-ISSN:1694-2116IJLTER.ORG
Vol.10 No.2

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International Journal of Learning, Teaching and
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VOLUME 10 NUMBER 2 February 2015
Table of Contents
Factors that Perpetuate Test-Driven, Factory-Style Schooling: Implications for Policy and Practice .........................1
Karl F. Wheatley
Teachers’ Perspective of their Role and Student Autonomy in the PBL Context in China ........................................ 18
Huichun Li and Xiangyun Du
Is a Rubric Worth the Time and Effort? Conditions for Success .................................................................................... 32
Hiroshi Ito
The Art of Teaching: Instructive, Authoritative and Motivational ................................................................................ 46
Diana Martinez, PhD
Intercultural Understanding in the New Mobile Learning Environment ....................................................................60
Daniel Chun
How Home Economics Teachers in Norwegian Lower Secondary Schools Implement Sustainability in their
Teaching? .............................................................................................................................................................................. 72
Else Marie Øvrebø
WelWel: Proposal for a Collaborative/Cooperative Learning Model in the Cloud ................................................... 84
Luis Garcia and Maria João Ferreira
User Behaviour on Google Search Engine ...................................................................................................................... 104
Bartomeu Riutord Fe

© 2015 The author and IJLTER.ORG. All rights reserved.
1
International Journal of Learning, Teaching, and Educational Research
Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 1-17, February, 2015.
Factors that Perpetuate Test-Driven, Factory-Style
Schooling: Implications for Policy and Practice
Karl F. Wheatley
Cleveland State University
Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A.
Abstract. This article analyzes the factors that perpetuate test-driven,
factory-style schooling, despite evidence challenging the efficacy of that
approach. Both empirical and anecdotal evidence are presented to illustrate
the failures of test-based accountability in the U.S., including the failures of
specific policies to improve student outcomes, as well as evidence of
collateral damage resulting from those policies. Factors that perpetuate test-
driven, factory-style schooling include personal and institutional inertia,
ignorance of the historical roots of factory schooling, ignorance of
alternative educational paradigms, and The Overton Window—a narrow
range of acceptable discourse that precludes discussing more productive
alternatives. Other factors perpetuating factory-style schooling include
misleading language and media coverage, bureaucratic tendencies, the
profit motive, self-fulfilling prophecies regarding student motivation,
traditional academic objectives and linear curricular sequences, and flawed
and misleading research. Accountability policies and practices are discussed
as a strategic political initiative that benefits wealthy and powerful members
of society in multiple ways. Based on extensive experience with progressive
education, the author presents eight suggestions for helping others
transcend the factory model of schooling.
Keywords: educational reform, paradigm change, accountability movement,
progressive education, school organization
Introduction
Thousands of years of history suggest that the schoolhouse as we know it is
an absurd way to rear our young; it’s contrary to everything we know about
what it is to be a human being. - Deborah Meier, vii, in Littky, 2004
There are multiple indicators that the policies that have gripped American
education for the last decade are backfiring. These test-based accountability policies,
despite being touted as “real reform,” have actually intensified the most

2
problematic features of traditional, factory-style schooling. In this article, I survey
evidence that our current policy approach is backfiring, and provide a conceptual
analysis of the many factors that perpetuate test-driven, factory-style schooling.
The Failures of Test-Based Accountability
People who haven't darkened the door of a public school in decades have no
idea how “accountability” has robbed those institutions of vitality, of zest,
and of the intangible elements that make children want to succeed. There's
only so much brow-beating, only so much drilling, only so many test-prep
worksheets a small mind can endure without zoning out. Later, when the
option is availed, that uninspired child will drop out.
- John Young, Waco Tribune, 10/23/05
Evidence of Failures
As a parent, countless other parents have complained to me that the high-stakes
testing and increasingly standardized curricula and methods of the accountability
movement have made their children’s schooling more stressful and less meaningful.
Valuable activities such as play, project-based learning, the arts, and even science
and social studies are being crowded out for more test preparation, often focusing
only on reading and mathematics. Parents say that “everything is about the tests,”
not real learning. With remarkable regularity, parents’ comments about what is
happening in schools begin with “It’s crazy.”
As a teacher educator, and as I have reported elsewhere (Wheatley, 2015a), when I
now show my students videos of good teaching, their response has increasingly
become to say, “I know that this is good teaching, and that this is what is best for
children, and I would love to teach this way, but if I teach this way, I will be fired. I
have to follow the mandated curriculum and teach to the tests.” This situation
seems not only unacceptable, but also unethical.
From a research perspective, graduation tests have not yielded any clear benefits
(Musoba, 2011), high-stakes testing has increased student and teacher stress levels
enormously, and reports abound of turned off learners and burned out teachers.
Faced with seemingly-impossible performance demands, some teachers and
administrators have even turned to cheating. Even for those with enormous faith in
the meaning of test scores, in 2008-2012, during the most intensive period of test-
driven schooling in U.S. history, the long-term trend scores for 17-year-olds on the
National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) were flat in reading and
mathematics, for both genders and all racial groups (National Center for
Educational Statistics, 2013). And that lack of any discernible improvement came
despite of, or perhaps because of, sacrificing other subjects and meaningful
activities to focus narrowly on test preparation in two subjects. Making matters
worse, creativity, often cited as the most important student outcome in the 21st
century economy and world, has been declining since the beginning of the

3
standards movement (Kim, 2011), with the sharpest declines in the elementary
years. Furthermore, student-initiated activities that allow students to practice the
initiative and executive functioning required of adults in a participatory democracy
and entrepreneurial economy have disappeared from many schools.
Meanwhile, experiments to use student test scores to reward teachers have failed in
Florida, Texas, Chicago, New York, and Nashville (e.g., Springer, et al., 2010), and
psychometricians and professional societies have repeatedly pointed out that so-
called value-added assessments are not intellectually defensible and should not be
used to rate or reward teachers (Amrein-Beardsley, 2014). Aware of the harm that
these policies are doing, and the lack of progress even on narrow indicators of
traditional academics, the prestigious National Academy of Sciences has scolded the
policymakers for basing these test-driven accountability policies on ideology, not
evidence.
None of these failures should surprise anyone broadly versed in educational
research. There is voluminous research on the ways in which high-stakes testing
backfires for students while fundamentally distorting education (Madaus, Russell,
& Higgins, 2009; McNeil, 2000; Nichols & Berliner, 2007). Also, evidence of the
distorting effects of high-stakes tests goes back centuries, to the civil service exams
in China (Madaus, Russell, & Higgins, 2009). Furthermore, China, Singapore, and
Korea, three countries with the most intensive high-stakes testing, are currently
trying to escape the grips of such testing, because of the harms that testing has done
to student learning, creativity, initiative, and mental health (Zhao, 2009). Moreover,
for teachers, decades of research shows that merit pay does not improve
performance in complex professions such as teaching (Perry, Engbers, & Jun, 2009).
These findings call into question the core assumptions of accountability policies.
Thus, there is ample evidence that America’s current policies, characterized by test-
driven curricula within factory-style schools, are not merely unsuccessful, they are
counterproductive on multiple fronts. These negative results could have been
predicted from previous research and theory in educational psychology,
motivation, curriculum, and comparative education. Indeed, many researchers and
educators predicted these results before the accountability movement began.
Understanding the Repeated Failures to Correct Course
When one accountability policy after another failed to improve education, U.S.
policymakers seem to merely double down on the same approach, while educators
and the public, despite believing that something is clearly wrong, often seem at a
loss to propose coherent alternatives. Why? If, as the popular axiom says, “insanity
is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” then
why does American education seemed locked in a vicious cycle of repeating the
same mistakes over and over again?

4
As a researcher and teacher educator, much of my time over the last decade has
been spent trying to provide empirical answers to this broader question, and this
research has identified three important sub-questions. First, why did so many
Americans initially go along with education policies that make schools even more
like factories, with even greater authoritarian control, much greater standardization
of curricula and teaching methods, and marked intensification of high-stakes
testing? Second, what sustains those policies and practices, even where their failures
are apparent? Third, what can be done to change this situation, and to steer
American education in a healthier direction? I have addressed the initial acceptance
of traditional schooling elsewhere (Wheatley, 2015b), and primarily focus here on
the second question, with some attention to the third question. To better understand
these questions, during the past decade, I read over a hundred books, hundreds of
research articles, thousands of news reports and blog posts, and have observed and
participated in live and on-line discussions and debates. During that time, I posted
over a thousand blog responses regarding educational policy. Based on this earlier
broad-based research, I developed advocacy tools that I tried out with my early
childhood teacher education classes and also used in public advocacy work, and I
have reported on the results elsewhere (Wheatley, 2012, 2013).
So, given this research, what explains the tendency of the American public and
American educators to stick with test-driven, factory-style schooling even when its
failures have become obvious—and perhaps even painful—to those directly
involved in education? Numerous interconnected factors explain our continued use
of a model of education marked by authoritarian control, factory-style organization,
increasingly standardized goals, curricula, and teaching methods; and an almost
singular focus on raising scores on high-stakes standardized tests in a few subjects.
Factors that Perpetuate Factory-Style Schooling
The difficulty lies not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.
- John Maynard Keynes, 1935
It is evident that the factors promoting factory-style schooling are
overlapping, reciprocal, and sometimes operate on a psychological, sociological,
and political level. These factors are also deeply rooted.
Inertia
Individuals and institutions have great inertia—they usually continue doing what
they have always done, and one of the simplest explanations why American schools
are organized like factories and focused on test scores in 2015 is that this is how they
have been operated for a long time. Thus, unless some significant failure or
epiphany creates the disequilibrium necessary to provoke a profound change,
individuals and institutions only make incremental changes.

5
The role of alignment in recent policies is critical for inertia. The more that
educational goals, curricula, teaching methods, assessments, and other policies are
tightly aligned, as they are with current policies, the more difficult it is to change
any aspect of education, such as teaching methods. This dynamic exists because any
changes in one part of the system bring it out of alignment with other parts of the
educational system (e.g., assessments), which generally elicits pressure for
everything to become aligned again.
However, while the tightly aligned model of factory-style schooling creates
enormous pressure for individuals to conform and not attempt meaningful changes
in any aspect of education (e.g., stopping giving mandated tests), this feature also
suggests the potential for rapid, transformative change. That is, if a tightly aligned
system fails dramatically, it is easier to imagine people saying that we don’t just
need to tinker with this or that aspect of the system: we need an entirely different
approach to education. In this sense, better educating the public about the many
ways in which the test-driven, factory-style schooling is backfiring for children,
families, and the nation may well nudge the public to a tipping point at which they
demand something substantially better.
Ignorance of Historical Roots
Largely lost in the mists of history is the fact that our factory model of K-12
schooling was never designed to educate students for creativity, critical thinking,
problem-solving, “21st century skills,” let alone for handling shared challenges such
as terrorism or climate change. Rather, our school model was largely designed to
assimilate disparate immigrants into a cultural uniformity and to educate the
masses for dirty, mindless, and often dangerous factory work.
Here is William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906,
in The Philosophy of Education (1893), describing the purposes and effects of formal
schooling:
Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in
prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not
accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined,
is the subsumption of the individual.
There’s also a troubling analysis in Gatto (2006), that reports that the historian Henri
Remarque blamed the carnage of World War I on “the tricks of the schoolmasters,”
while German theologian Dieterich Bonhoffer said the Nazi atrocities were “the
inevitable by-product of good schooling”—Prussian-style schooling designed to
subvert moral judgment and action. In my experience, only a small minority of
people knows of these obedience-oriented origins of our current education model. If
more people were aware that our current factory model of school was intentionally
designed to inculcate mindless conformity and train for factory work—rather than
promote the broader goals we have for children and society today—we might be

6
more inclined to abandon the factory model and adopt a model better suited to our
goals and modern world. Of course, there’s another built-in obstacle. People
educated in schools that were custom-designed to promote obedience often struggle
to think outside of the box, and if they do think such thoughts, were never educated
in how to take decisive action to challenge the status quo.
Ignorance of Alternatives
Suggestions were made in the previous section about conditions that might lead the
public to demand better education, but another obstacle to this occurring is that the
public knows very little about truly alternative educational approaches. Thus, while
I’ve observed countless people over the last decade speak articulately about what
they dislike about high-stakes testing or the Common Core State Standards (CCSS),
most get pretty quiet when asked to describe what we should be doing instead. At
best, most propose only minor tweaks in the traditional model (e.g., less or different
high-stakes testing), not fundamental changes in how children are educated.
The American public’s knowledge of alternatives to factory-style schooling may
well be becoming more limited over time. While some truly innovative alternative
approaches to education were moderately common in the 1960s-1970s, most of the
people who experienced those years are retired or even passed away. Constructivist
approaches to subject matter teaching and authentic assessment made some
inroads in the 1990s, but these advances were mostly washed away by the
advocates of traditional instruction, and then were largely eliminated by the wave
of test-driven policies beginning with the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Thus,
with every year that passes, fewer citizens and prospective teachers know about the
very successful alternatives to traditional schooling. Having only experienced test-
driven schooling, they find it difficult to imagine any other possibilities.
Trapped Within The Overton Window
Because Americans are most familiar with test-focused and factory style schooling,
and also have limited knowledge of alternatives, it is not surprising that more
Americans cannot articulate a clear alternative to this approach. Furthermore,
because our own education prized conformity, it is perhaps also unsurprising that
when Americans know of such educational alternatives, they often do not advocate
vigorously for them. But what is truly remarkable is the degree to which public
discussions of education stay confined to an incredibly narrow range of educational
alternatives. When an intense focus on academic content standards for two decades
brings no clear successes, we hear more discussion of the need for better content
standards, not a discussion of the possibility that we are simply thinking about
education goals in the wrong way, or that perhaps content standards alone cannot
improve education. When high-stakes testing fails to improve our educational
trajectory, people discuss how maybe we need different or better tests, but rarely
mentioned is the possibility that perhaps the very idea of high-stakes testing is
counterproductive. When programs to reward teachers for student test scores fail
repeatedly, we hear discussions of how these incentive systems need to be

7
modified, instead of discussion of the fact that such incentive systems reliably
backfire. When $6 billion spent on implementing supposedly “evidence-based”
reading instruction methods yielded no improvement in reading comprehension
(Institute of Educational Sciences, 2008), and created substantial collateral damage,
we heard from policymakers that the problem was that teachers weren’t doing quite
enough of the recommended practices. Why didn’t we hear instead discussion of
the possibility that perhaps our whole conception of reading instruction is flawed,
and our approach to researching educational effectiveness may be similarly flawed?
The simplest explanation for all this is that America’s discussion of education is
trapped within the very narrow confines of the Overton Window, a phenomenon
identified by Joseph P. Overton (Lehman, 2014): In brief, the Overton Window
refers to the limited range of ideas that are considered acceptable for discussion in
politics at any given time. Despite frequent exhortations for all of us to “think
outside the box,” those who introduce ideas outside of the Overton Window are
routinely ignored, ridiculed, or punished. Although initially used to discuss policy
proposals from a conservative/libertarian perspective, the Overton Window has
taken on a broader meaning in recent years.
As an active participant in many educational debates over the last decade, I have
experienced how the Overton Window works firsthand. For example, for about five
years, I regularly read and participated on the Flypaper blog, the education blog of
the conservative Fordham Institute, an organization that played a pivotal role in
promoting current market-oriented, and test-driven education polices. Interestingly,
the Fordham education commentators were determined to keep the debate focused
on what worked best to raise reading and math test scores fastest or what was the
most efficient way to carry out factory-style, test driven education. When
challenged about the very validity of test scores as evidence of educational
effectiveness, or when it was suggested that test-driven, factory-style schooling was
perhaps a less effective model overall, they seemed eager to not let the discussion
go there. Why? These questions would expand the Overton Window dramatically,
and shift the discussion to a range of issues they did not want to discuss, perhaps
because the evidence regarding those issues was not on their side.
To illustrate other ideas outside of our current Overton Window in education,
imagine if someone suggested that we would improve education by strengthening
teachers’ unions, reducing formal reading instruction by 50% in the primary grades,
ending homework in elementary school, ending all high-stakes testing, and
increasing play and student-initiated learning. Those ideas all fall well outside of
the currently acceptable boundaries of educational discourse. However, all of those
proposals were education reality in the 1960s-1970s in America, and there is
substantial empirical evidence that those approaches work better for children,
families, and the nation. If this claim is correct, then this suggests that America’s
current Overton Window is not well aligned with empirical reality. This raises the
interesting question of how we got to this point.

8
Misleading Language and the Media
He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument,
but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the
power of sense. —Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, 1900
Language is power and politicians and the business community marketed our
current education policies to us by using language that first described “failing
schools,” and then demanded “higher standards, academic rigor, measurable
objectives, objective testing, data-based decision-making, performance incentives,
sanctions, performance pay, evidence-based practices.” The language of
measurement and control implicit in these terms steers our thinking and actions
towards traditional schooling, with top-down control, factory-style organization, a
narrow focus on testable academic knowledge and skills, and rewards and
punishments to ensure compliance. Notice how differently we might think about
education if we said that the main problem with our schools was that they followed
“an outdated factory model,” and that the ways to improve them included “whole-
child goals, real-world curriculum, substantial child-initiated learning, healthy
intrinsic motivation, authentic assessment, and teacher autonomy.” This shift in
terminology would take one’s thinking in an entirely different direction, but the
business community, sympathetic politicians, and the media have repeatedly used
the former set of words to describe what is wrong with schools and how to fix them.
This intentional and strategic use of conceptual framing (Lakoff, 2004) trains the
public to think about education in a certain way, a way that happens to fits very
well the agenda that the business community and some politicians have articulated
for education and America. As Lakoff noted, it is the acceptance of particular frames
and the rejection or neglect of others that establishes the boundaries of our thinking:
“Rigorous academics” and “whole-child education” simply frame educational
solutions in very different ways.
Significantly, while the business leaders and politicians involved in educational
policymaking are usually aware of how framing works, many educators,
researchers, and the public at large are not. Thus, and quite ironically, many
educators and parents who strongly oppose test-driven, factory-style schooling
have gone along with the recent re-framing of educational debates, and now
regularly use the very language that was designed to market the ideas they oppose.
Lakoff noted that to counter misleading framing, one must stop using the
problematic frames entirely, and design new frames for critiquing the ideas you
oppose and promoting the ideas you favor. To give some sense of just how much
new framing can influence our views on education, imagine if instead of referring to
test-based accountability as being about “raising standards,” everyone talked about
test-based accountability as being about “lowering standards”—given the tendency
of standardized tests to emphasize lower level knowledge and skills (Madaus,

9
Russell, & Higgins, 2009). It’s difficult to imagine test-based accountability gaining
traction with the public if it were widely viewed as being about “lowering
standards.” Whatever language they choose, to be successfully in their advocacy
efforts, those who oppose traditional test-driven schooling would need to replace
the current language of educational policy and practice with an entirely new
vocabulary that concisely communicates their values
Bureaucratic Tendencies
One of human’s basic psychological needs is to feel a sense of control (Ryan & Deci,
2002). Reflecting that, many teachers feel a need to control their students, and many
bureaucrats also feel a need to control teachers, and educational policy often reflects
bureaucrats’ need to control educators (Ravitch, 2010). Meanwhile, one of the most
familiar complaints about bureaucracies is that they tend to respond to mundane
problems with an ever-growing list of rules and regulations. Although
understandable, a growing mountain of rules and regulations can become more
problematic than the problems those rules were written to solve. Many believe that
we have already reached that point with test-based accountability.
Of course, in cases like regulating pollution, substantial regulation may be
warranted, because the profit motive doesn’t naturally motivate corporations to
ensure they are not releasing toxic chemicals into the environment. However,
humans and hard-wired to learn, and the primary motive for teachers to go into
teaching is to help students learn and make a positive difference in students’ lives.
Thus, if policymakers recognized these distinctive features of education, perhaps
they would be more willing to reduce the controlling pressures and regulations that
have ramped up during the accountability movement. However, it would first be
necessary to persuade policymakers that no broad failure or malfeasance by
educators has occurred, because as long as the aura of general educational crisis and
failure persist, bureaucrats can be expected to respond with tight oversight, which
would most likely mean a continuation of test-based accountability.
Profit Motive
Another powerful factor sustaining test-driven, factory style schooling is the profit
motive. As documented a decade ago, (Emery & Ohanian, 2004), the business
community played a major role in the accountability movement. Significantly, test-
based accountability transformed education in a way that is more profitable for
corporations, because it restructures curricula, teaching, and assessment in ways
that are much more heavily dependent upon corporate products than was true
before. Standardized tests and related test preparation materials have made
corporations hundreds of billions of dollars over the last decade—but to do things
that teachers used to do for free.
Significantly, and in terms of political gain, current reforms have remade education
in the image of corporations. We see this shift in the way in which education, which

10
used to be about developing strong individuals, and citizens, and workers, is now
frequently discussed by policymakers as only being about training for jobs so that
America can be more economically competitive. We also see this shift in the way in
which business language has displaced education terminology, including the
language of “benchmarks, performance incentives,” and even calling
superintendents “CEOs,” while calling students “customers.” Making schools more
market-oriented benefits corporations politically because schools have traditionally
been a source of ideas that pose challenges to the corporate worldview of the
purpose of life and the proper organization of society. By increasingly taking over
education, market forces are essentially removing one competitor. As Slouka (2009)
commented regarding market-oriented, test-driven schooling:
That education policy reflects the zeitgeist shouldn't surprise us; capitalism
has a wonderful knack for marginalizing (or co-opting) systems of value that
might pose an alternative to its own. Still, capitalism's success in this case is
particularly elegant: by bringing education to heel, by forcing it to meet its
criteria for 'success,' the market is well on the way to controlling a majority
share of the one business that might offer a competing product, that might
question its assumptions. (p. 33)
Just as they successfully sell so many things, the business community persuaded the
public that the type of reform education that America needed was based on market
ideals, factory-style organization, commercial testing and test preparation materials,
and an emphasis on job training and economic competitiveness (but not
citizenship). It seems unlikely that this was a coincidence. Thus, for those who
believe that test-driven, factory-style schooling is counterproductive, high-stakes
tests are not merely an isolated practice to change. High-stakes tests and other main
features of current accountability policies are part of an overall reconceptualization
of education, a strongly market-based reconceptualization that has also taken over
substantial control of our politics (Hacker & Pierson, 2010) and our economy
(Stiglitz, 2012). Thus, while there is growing opposition to current education
policies, challenging current policies can be expected to elicit considerable and well-
financed political pushback. Furthermore, successfully challenging test-driven,
factory-style schooling may require a more comprehensive overall challenge to the
idea that market-based thinking is an appropriate basis for education reform. Sachs
(2012) has begun this discussion, documenting extensively how the heavy reliance
on market thinking in the U.S. has created vast inequality, economic stagnation, and
social dysfunction, while countries that have avoided being taken over by market-
based thinking have fared much better. However, educators opposed to the
application of market-based thinking to education would need to make a parallel
case regarding the deleterious effects of market thinking in education.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecies Regarding Motivation
Just as the human body has an internal drive to keep itself healthy, given
appropriate sleep, exercise, and diet, the human mind is hard-wired to learn, to

11
make sense of experience, and to master challenges (Hirsch-Pasek & Golinkoff,
2003). However, just as unhealthy eating and lack of sleep or exercise short-circuits
the body’s healthy-promoting capacities, an unhealthy psychological environment
and failure to meet basic psychological needs can short-circuit individual’s natural
motivation to learn. Unfortunately, traditional schooling is not usually based on
intrinsic motivation, but rather, assumes that motivation is something teachers do to
children through rewards and punishments. Research reveals that when
educational systems are based upon the assumption that children have this innate
motivation, then students’ intrinsic motivation and positive attitudes are sustained
(Walberg, 1986). However, research is also quite clear that under conditions of
traditional schooling, there is a steady erosion of children’s intrinsic motivation
(Lepper, Corpus, & Iyengar 2005; Walberg, 1986; Wheatley, 2012). Recent
experimental research also confirms that, compared to more student centered
approaches to learning, traditional teaching yields reductions in children’s curiosity,
creativity, independence, and initiative (Bonawitz, et al., 2011; Buchsbaum, Gopnik,
Giffiths, & Shafto, 2011).
Because very traditional schooling creates conditions in which initiative, intrinsic
motivation, creativity, and healthy independence are unlikely to be observed,
teachers in such schools understandable claim that “these children aren’t
motivated.” Once children’s natural motivation for learning has been squelched and
is no longer a viable driving force for education, it is quite understandable that
educators think they should arrange the learning in a logical order, set up
inducements to motivate children to learn it, and set out to directly teach it to them.
Of course, this teacher-directed and one-size fits all approach often fails to elicit
much student engagement (as documented above), and even engenders some
student resistance, and thus the assumptions of traditional schooling seem to be
confirmed to teachers following that approach. This is especially true at the upper
grades, whose teachers may see students so long after most apparent passion for
learning has been dimmed that claims of innate motivation to learn may seem like
fiction. However, having taught children of all ages in a variety of settings, and
without using rewards or punishments, I have experienced a very different self-
fulfilling prophecy, one that reveals that children have enormous motivation to
learn—motivation that can be a driving force for education. Nevertheless, to tap
into this powerful force, educators must first take a leap of faith and design and
implement education based on the assumption that this underlying wellspring of
healthy student motivation exists just beneath the surface.
Traditional Academic Objectives and Linear Curricular Sequences
Just like the subdivision of larger tasks into discrete steps in factories, traditional,
factory style schooling divides life into subjects, divides those subjects into
hundreds of objectives, determines one sequence for learning those objectives, and
then assumes that better learning is indicated by faster learning of the prescribed
sequence of target objectives. All of this is simply assumed, but once one defines
education as being about mastering discrete academic objectives in a pre-

12
determined order, accepting traditional factory-style schooling may be inevitable.
Why? Even the most intrinsically motivated learners, under optimal conditions,
would not learn school subjects in the pre-specified order found in American
textbooks or academic content standards. Those learning to read in a more interest-
based way will still learn to read, and are more likely to love reading, but their
learning will not follow a standardized and prescribed skills sequence. Indeed, I
know children who learned to read without any formal reading instruction at all
(Wheatley, 2013), and they love reading and read very well, but they did not learn
in the order specified by our reading content standards. In fact, I discovered upon
closer examination that two of these skilled and passionate readers (at ages 10 & 12)
had learned to read without ever learning some of the grade-level targets that
America’s new Common Core State Standards (CCSS) claim are essential reading
knowledge for kindergartners! Of course, learning in such non-standardized and
learner-initiated ways direct conflicts with the assembly-line logic of academic
standards, textbooks, and high-stakes tests. Thus, education organized around pre-
determined learning sequences and high-stakes tests (as in the Common Core
initiative), typically fosters a factory-style organization of schooling, one that is
tightly focused on the academic objectives that appear on the tests.
Significantly, the assumption that educators need to tightly focus instruction on
linear learning sequences does not hold up well when viewed from the perspective
of broad, long-term educational effectiveness. For example, effectiveness is defined
as faster short-term acquisition of testable reading subskills, linear, factory-style
direct instruction targeted to the reading skills on reading tests is clearly superior
(Institute of Educational Sciences, 2008). However, if the research question is what
works best in the long run for simultaneously achieving reading comprehension,
love of reading, writing, positive conduct, and cross-curricular learning, then the
answer appears to be progressive and non-linear approaches such as whole
language and free voluntary reading (Coles, 2003; Krashen, 2004, Wheatley, 2015a).
Similarly, if we compare academic and play-based kindergartens, of course
academic kindergartens targeted at a list of pre-specific objectives do better at
boosting test scores on those objectives than do play-based kindergartens that reject
the very idea of traditional objectives and linear, standardized instruction.
However, if we research what happens overall in the long run, we get a different
answer, as Germany discovered in the 1970s. Contemplating a switch from play-
based to academic kindergartens, two sets of German researchers studied the long-
term effects of the contrasting approaches on similar children. Interestingly, the
children from the play-based kindergartens did better than the children from
academic kindergartens on every single indicator by age 10—social outcomes,
cognitive outcomes, language outcomes, and industriousness and creativity (see
Tietze, 1987). This is a pattern observable across studies of comparative
effectiveness, with traditional linear instruction appearing superior when
effectiveness is defined narrowly in terms of short-term test scores, but progressive
education approaches appearing superior when effectiveness is defined in terms of
broad and long term effectiveness, (see, for example, Chamberlin, Chamberlin,

13
Drought, & Scott, 1942; Walberg, 1986). In sum, the very acceptance of traditional
objectives and learning sequences sets in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy that
pressures educators to adopt a linear, factory style organization of schooling
arranged in to mirror those objectives, a tendency that is amplified by high-stakes
testing. However, once we abandon the idea that we must have such numerous and
carefully sequenced learning targets, the perceived need for such linear instruction
may be reduced sharply or even eliminated.
Misleading Educational Research
Significantly, as is also true of traditional, factory-style schooling, most educational
research assumes that faster short-term learning of testable pre-specific academic
objectives proves greater educational effectiveness. The criteria for scientific
education research focus overwhelmingly on technical details of studies (sample
size, validity of research tools, acceptable statistical analysis), but are silent on the
issue of broad and long-term developmental systems effects. This steers educational
research in the direction of a reductionist stance in which educational methods can
be judged to be evidence-based if they reliably make one testable academic skills
better in the short run, even though they might make many other valued
educational outcomes worse in the long run. That is, methods can be judged to be
effective even if there is good evidence that, overall, they do more harm than good
in the long run. As noted earlier, traditional teaching methods are better suited to
achieve narrow, short-term academic test score gains, while progressive alternatives
appear better suited to achieve broad and long-term educational effectiveness. Thus,
current definitions of scientific education research implicitly but unintentionally
bias educational research to overestimating the true effectiveness of traditional
instruction and underestimating the overall effectiveness of progressive
alternatives. Given this intellectual context, there is a vast array of research findings
that appears to support traditional, factory-oriented, test-driven instruction, and
thus, the phrase “research says” has reinforced the American tendency to organize
schooling along factory lines.
Discussion and Implications
What happened in American education over recent decades is a perfect illustration
of the shock doctrine. That is, as Klein (2007) documented, in many countries in
recent decades, free market advocates and sympathetic political leaders used real
crises or manufactured crises as a pretext for pushing through a series of
controversial and sometimes exploitative policies. Distracted by the emotions or
demands of the crisis, people were too busy, uninformed, or too weary to mount
any opposition to such policies. Companies and wealthy individuals have clearly
learned how to profit financially and benefit politically from these real or imposed
crises (Freeland, 2012).
In the case of education, the educational accountability movement can be viewed as
a systemic political initiative—an initiative that simultaneously achieves multiple

14
political and organizational goals valued by the business community. Specifically,
the accountability movement has been profitable for education corporations, has
weakened the teachers’ unions that are one of the biggest supporters of Democratic
candidates, and has re-made education more in the corporate image. Perhaps most
significant for the wealthy and powerful, claims of “failing schools” and a “skills
gap” have been used as a pretext for a weak economy, high unemployment, weak
wages, high and growing economic inequality, outsourcing jobs, and a sharp
reduction in social mobility in America. Thus, the mantra of “failing schools” has
been employed strategically and frequently as a rhetorical tool that distracts many
citizens from the real causes of America’s current political and economic struggles.
Specifically, as documented by political scientists (Hacker & Pierson, 2010) and
economists (Sachs, 2012; Stiglitz, 2012), the specific problems above result directly
from policies that the rich and powerful have pursued and achieved over recent
decades, including lower taxes; weaker regulations, unions, and worker protections;
and liberal policies governing globalization. Reflecting its harmful effects on
workers, nations, and the environment, Sachs (2012) simply referred to this cluster
of policies as a “race to the bottom.” However, these policy changes have made the
super-wealthy far richer and more economically powerful, as illustrated by the
Oxfam report that the 80 richest people on the planet (who could squeeze onto a
single school bus) have as much wealth as do the 3,500,000,000 poorest people on
the planet (a group that, if holding hands, could stretch around the earth roughly
100 times). What would happen if the public as a whole were to conclude, as many
researchers have, that it is not the quality of education, but rather public policy that
is the overriding cause of these negative changes in most American’s life
circumstances? One distinct possibility is that the public would come to see
substantially raising taxes on the wealthy and more strictly regulating corporations
as the most likely route to improving the economy and social mobility in America.
If that were to happen, the rationale for current accountability policies might
evaporate. However, given all of the foregoing factors that promote test-driven,
factory-style schooling, one can imagine that teachers and administrators would still
feel enormous pressure to continue using a factory model of schooling. Educators’
language, types of objectives, research results, and view of motivation all steer the
field in that direction. Also, the framing of education debates and their lack of
awareness of alternatives seemingly leave them without viable alternatives to test-
driven schooling, and pressure from the media and business sector also strongly
pressure education in that direction.
If, as was argued here, progressive education models are broadly superior in the
long run for the range of goals parents, society, and employers value, then what
might be done about all these factors that pressure educators and the public to
think, talk, and act in ways that perpetuate test-driven, factory-style schooling?
Having taught over 2000 teachers and prospective teachers, I have studied the
factors that seem to facilitate or obstruct change in my students, and have
experimented extensively with trying to educate them about progressive

15
alternatives to factory schooling. In my experience, there are eight main factors that
promote such changes in thinking and actions: 1) challenging the “failing schools”
mantra, 2) re-framing the problems with American schools as one of “being on the
wrong mission,” 3) grasping the impact of out-of-school factors on students, 4)
embracing broad, long-term effectiveness as the standard for judging quality
education, 5) observing and experiencing progressive alternatives, 6) learning a new
language for framing educational discussions, 7) learning to let go of control and
share control with leaners, and 8) studying and documenting the long-term, whole-
child benefits of progressive education.
Thoroughly discussing each of these factors is beyond the scope of this article, but I
provide here a quick snapshot of each. First, when my students learn that U.S. K-12
pupils are doing pretty well in terms of test score outcomes once our much higher
rates of child poverty are taken into account, they stop believing media claims that
U.S. public schools are generally failing at their assigned mission, Second, my
students know that schools often aren’t very impressive, but when they understand
how factory-style schooling creates learning and development problems, they re-
interpret many of the disappointments they observe in schools as resulting from
schools pursuing the wrong mission. Third, once students realize that out-of-school
factors can account for 60-100% of the variance in test scores, and that tests are not
real measurements of what matters most in education, they stop taking tests so
seriously as indicators of quality learning and teaching. Fourth, once people think
about it, and when they understand how methods that work in the short term often
backfire in the long run, they agree that teachers, research, and policy should focus
on broad, long-term effectiveness. Fifth, seeing videos, hearing stories, and
observing progressive classrooms helps my students understand the practices and
possibilities of progressive education, and also unearths misconceptions and details
that need to be cleared up in order for them to be persuaded. Sixth, when people
stop using accountability language such as “measurable objectives, sanctions, and
greater accountability,” and start using progressive language such as “meaningful
outcomes, healthy motivation, and mutual responsibility,” an entirely new
discussion emerges. Seventh, teachers and parents new to progressive methods
need to practice and become comfortable with letting go of control and sharing
control with leaners, and discovering that everything will still be OK. Eighth, by
studying broad and long-term research and documenting the healthy progress their
own children and pupils make when progressive approaches are used, my students
become persuaded in the most important and powerful way.
The challenges in overcoming factory schooling are psychological, social, political,
economic, linguistic, emotional, and experiential. Even our stress and lack of time
make new learning that is needed more challenging. However, just as America is
rapidly learning that the best foods are natural ones that are not made in factories,
we might also realize something that I repeatedly tell the future teachers I teach,
“Kids are not cars, and learning is not manufacturing, and great education is only
possible if we don’t get confused about that.”

16
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© 2015 The authors and IJLTER.ORG. All rights reserved.
International Journal of Learning, Teaching and Educational Research
Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 18-31, February 2015
Teachers’ Perspective of their Role and Student
Autonomy in the PBL Context in China
Huichun Li and Xiangyun Du
Department of Learning and Philosophy
Aalborg University, Denmark
Abstract. The traditional role of the teacher confronts many challenges by an
increasing number of educational initiatives that highlight student-centered
learning in China, since the teacher’s role is in great need of transformation
from instructor to facilitator. Therefore, it is quite necessary to examine how
teachers perceive their role within a context in the process of making
educational innovations. This study relies on two Chinese universities which
are changing their educational approach from lecture-based learning to
Problem Based Learning (PBL). We examine how the teachers perceive their
role in a PBL context. In particular, we are mainly concerned with teachers’
attitudes towards student learning autonomy in PBL contexts. The data is
mainly relied upon in-depth interviews of the teachers who participate in PBL
practice from the two cases. When focusing on how teachers perceive student
learning autonomy, we can note three major patterns. In general, Chinese
teachers have a tendency to maintain high interference in student learning
process even though they admit the value of giving student learning
autonomy. This study further indicates a dilemma between teachers’ intention
to encourage students to learn on their own and their tendency to maintain
their directive role in the educational processes.
Keywords: Teacher’s role; PBL; student autonomy; Chinese context
Introduction
Many educational initiatives worldwide have emerged in recent years in order to
enhance student learning motivation, facilitate student engagement in learning
process, and produce more competent graduates (De Graaff & Cowdroy, 1997; Bowe,
2007; Wang, 2008). One major characteristic of these initiatives is the use of more
student-centered educational approaches, such as Problem Based Learning (PBL). At
the institutional level, many educational institutions in China are currently in the
process of implementing PBL, which are widely considered as a student-centered
educational approach. On one side, these initiatives are concerned with student
learning outcome rather than teacher instruction. That is to say, education should set
its focus on learning rather than teaching (Barr & Tagg, 1995). On the other side,
education is becoming increasingly concerned with learning process. Within PBL
context, student-directed (participant directed) learning is highlighted (Barrows, 1986;
De Graaff & Kolmos, 2003). Students are expected to direct the learning process on
their own; teachers are expected to act as facilitators to provide support when
necessary, rather than as instructors giving them direct guidance. In general, student-

19
centered learning indicates to give students more learning autonomy. Student
autonomy is important since it is conducive for student learning motivation and
learning achievement (Stefanou et al., 2004).
Student learning autonomy is closely linked to how teachers perceive their role. By
examining PBL implementation in real educational context, many studies show that it
is rather difficult to transform teachers’ role from traditional instructors to facilitators
(Barrett & Moore, 2011). Teachers are so accustomed to traditional educational
approach that they are rarely willing to lose their high control over education. A
general recognition is that teachers’ sense of security is more likely to be challenged in
a student-centered learning context (Li &Du, 2013). The emphasis on knowledge
acquisition may also enable teachers to maintain their traditional role. Most
importantly, the difficulty to restructure teacher-student relationship can be attributed
to teachers’ perception of their roles. Although many studies suggest that teachers
should act as facilitators in a PBL context, the term of “facilitator” has not been clearly
defined. Moreover, since teachers’ perceptions of their roles will impose considerable
impact upon their teaching practice, their perceptions of their roles in a PBL context
deserve much research attention, which is far from being sufficient. Currently, though
there are many discussions on the role of the teacher in a PBL context, student
autonomy, teacher-student relationship (Savin-Baden, 2003; Stefanou, Perencevich,
DiCintio, & Turner, 2004; Li & Du, 2013), little has been studied on the teachers’ voices
regarding these issues (Jiang, 2013). That means, there is a lack of teachers’ perspective
of how to be a teacher or a facilitator, how much freedom students should have in a
PBL context, and so on. Teachers’ perceptions are quite essential in understanding the
challenges of making educational innovation since their perceptions have a significant
influence upon their educational practice.
Therefore, our research questions are thus formulated as below:
1. How do Chinese teachers perceive their role of being a teacher in a PBL setting
compared to their traditional role?
2. What are the challenges that the Chinese teachers meet in the transformation
towards PBL?
This paper is based on a study on the change to PBL in China in various different
aspects such as curriculum innovation, leadership and management change, students’
perceptions, learning processes and performance, among others. In this paper we
focus on teachers’ perspectives in the change process-what do they think of the role of
being a teacher in a PBL context and what do they think of student autonomy in the
Chinese context. Empirically, this paper draws upon two Chinese universities which
are in the process of introducing PBL elements into their own curriculum system.
Concepts and Issues Related to Problem Based Learning
1. Teachers’ perception on their roles in learning/educational research
Teachers’ perceptions of their role have a considerable impact upon the educational
practice field in terms of teacher-student interaction, quality of teaching, or even
teacher identity. Teachers who hold a traditional view of teachers’ role are likely to
adopt a teacher dominated educational approach whereas those who support a
student centered notion are more likely to grant more freedom to students. Therefore,
the overall transformation from a teacher centered educational approach to a student

20
centered educational approach calls for a conceptual change of the teachers. It is
widely suggested that the transformation from teacher-centered teaching to student-
centered learning will eventually lead to a conceptual change of the entire
organization (Kolmos & De Graaff, 2007). A radical educational change merely
focusing on technical dimension rather than value (such as teachers’ perception of
how to be a good teacher) is more likely to lose momentum in the long run. Teachers’
reluctance for the conceptual change may be accounted by many factors, such as their
loss of authority and security, old educational beliefs, institutional support. The
perception of teachers regarding the role of the teacher and the teacher-student
relationship is heavily affected by various factors. Tradition comprises the basic
context which largely conditions the perception of the human being (Gallagher, 1992),
in particular, the teacher. How teachers perceive their role is also influenced by the
institutional factors such as the evaluation policy. A critical factor affecting teachers’
perception is teacher education, or the staff development, and therefore significant
implications have been made on teacher professional development.
2. Teacher’ role within PBL context
As a newly developed educational approach with a history of over four decades in
higher education, Problem Based Learning (PBL) emerged in the
medical field at Mac Master University Medical School in Canada in the late 1960th as
an alternative to the traditional education approach (Savin-Baden & Major, 2004). One
major characteristic of PBL is that within a PBL context, students play a direct role in
the learning process. They have much more right to design learning objectives, select
learning materials, and choose learning activities, and so on. In other words, students
have high learning autonomy when they learn in a PBL context. This is in contrast to
traditional lecture based learning that students have little learning autonomy and they
should conform to their teachers’ instructions. It is documented that PBL approach can
produce high learning motivation and high learning achievements in terms of
problem solving skills, group work skills and self-study skills (Dolmans & Schmidt,
1996; Bowe & Cowan, 2004; Strobel & van Barneveld, 2009), compared with non-PBL
counterparts.
Within the context of PBL, teachers are not instructors; rather, they are expected to
become facilitators to offer supportive learning atmosphere and to scaffolding
students learning process. From the organizational perspective, many educational
institutions, such as Aalborg University in Denmark, Victoria University in Australia,
or China Medical University in China, have abolished some lectures and replaced
them with problem/project work which is mainly directed by students. Teachers are
not always at presence in problem/project work. At a more micro level, researchers
have developed many techniques to enable teachers to better act as a facilitator while
supervising students (Savin-Baden, 2003). For example, teachers should not offer
direct answer but illuminate students when they have questions; or teachers should
know how to manage group dynamics when facilitating group work. Although these
techniques are quite diverse, they share a commonality, that is, as a facilitator, the role
of teacher should be changed which has further implication for a conceptual change of
the teacher.
3. Student Autonomy in PBL

21
When facilitating students, teachers always deal with the issue of student autonomy.
For many researchers, autonomy can be conducive for student learning attitude and
academic achievement (Stefanou et al., 2010). Students are more motivated to learn
when having more autonomy than those who having less autonomy. Stefanou et al.
(2010) clarify three types of student autonomies: organizational autonomy, procedural
autonomy and cognitive autonomy. Organizational autonomy is more concerned with
student choices over environmental procedures, such as negotiating deadline,
selecting group member, and so on. Procedural autonomy refers to student choice
over the media to present ideas such as how to make a picture to illustrate a concept.
Cognitive autonomy is concerned with cognitive processes such as justifying an idea.
Stefanou et al. (2010) further argue that although organizational and procedural
autonomy are necessary for students to have ownership of their learning process,
cognitive autonomy is more likely to facilitate student learning motivation and
outcomes.
Student autonomy varies within a PBL context. In general, PBL encourages student
autonomy in all three types. Participant directed learning is highlighted to provide
students with the right to make decisions over learning objectives, procedures,
activities, or even assessment. However, Teachers’ attitudes towards student learning
autonomy are highly influenced by their perceptions of their role. A teacher who
positions himself as a traditional instructor tends to reduce student learning
autonomy, while a teacher who sees himself as a facilitator is more willing to grant
students more freedom to learn on their own. Currently, though student learning
autonomy has been well studied (Barillaro, 2011), teachers’ attitudes towards student
learning autonomy are still in great need of research.
4. Teachers’ role in Chinese context
The role of teachers is high relying upon its context, in particular, the national context,
as indicated by Hofstede (1986). In China, the role of the teacher is largely affected by
Confucius tradition that highlights teacher dignity and superiority. Traditionally,
teacher lies in the center of the whole pedagogical practice. The teacher is seen as
having multiple functions: he is a carrier of ultimate truth to illuminate students, a
moral model that student should emulate, and a father that students should treat (Li &
Du, 2013). Students are expected to respect and conform to their teachers’ guidance.
Respecting teachers and conforming to them is widely regarded as beneficial not only
for education, but also for the maintenance of societal order.
Currently, although tradition has been weakening, its influence on the role of the
teacher can still be recognized from several different perspectives. Firstly, teachers
play a dominant role in defining educational objectives, learning content, learning
activities as well as the assessment method. Students are encouraged to conform to
their teachers’ guidance, since their teachers are believed to know more and better
about the learning process. Further, there is still a moral dimension of education
which requires students to act in the proper path (Shim, 2008). This dimension can
only be secured by following the instructions of their teachers. Teachers are expected
to act as moral models which can be emulated by students. The moral dimension also
has implications for pedagogical practice in general. The moral dimension requires
teachers to be a good learner, who know more and better than students, and therefore
they are worthwhile to be emulated by students. Thirdly, teachers are expected to
fulfill a parental responsibility which indicates that teachers should not only focus on

22
teaching tasks, but also need to concern the whole development of the student.
Commitment, dedication, and sacrifice are wide societal expectation for the role of
teacher (Zhou, 2009). In pedagogical practice, this means that a teacher is expected to
treat student affair as his own business to some extent.
Within this context, the teacher-student relationship in China is highly hierarchical. A
cross national study (Hofstede, 1986) on the teacher-student relationship notices the
large power distance between the teacher and the student in some East Asian
countries including China.
 stress on personal “wisdom” which is transferred in the relationship with a
particular teacher (guru)
 a teacher merits the respect of his/her students
 teacher-centered education (premium on order)
 students expect teachers to initiate communication
 students expect teachers to outline paths to follow
 students speak up in class only when invited by the teacher
 a teacher is never contradicted nor publicly criticized
 effectiveness of learning related to excellence of the teacher
 respect for teachers is also shown outside class
 in teacher/student conflicts, parents are expected to side with the teacher
Due to the recognition of teachers’ role and the hierarchical teacher-student
relationship, student learning autonomy in Chinese context is quite limited. Students
are expected to follow their teachers’ guidance rather than to learn on their own.
However, with the societal development, there is a growing awareness of the
importance of the student subjectivity, and therefore many educational theorists and
practitioners suggest that student learning autonomy should be respected. However,
they are not without disputes. Although some researchers support to establish a
student-centered learning approach, others maintain that a student-centered learning
approach should also be directed by teachers (Wu, 2010). The value of maintaining
teacher’s directive position is to secure the order and the effectiveness of the
educational process (Zhao, 2011). Without the instruction and guidance from the
teacher, students are believed to be not able to grasp the “correct learning methods”.
Many researchers insist that in a student centered learning environment, teacher
authority should still be maintained (Shao, 2007). The authority of the teacher should
also be transformed: the teacher authority is conventionally relied upon tradition and
institution; however, in future, it should be more relied upon teacher’s professional
expertise and charisma. In mainland China, although there are a great many
discussions on the role of the teacher, little has been conducted regarding how
teachers perceive their roles and student learning autonomy at the empirical level.
Methodology

23
1. Research sites
Empirical study for this paper was conducted at two universities in China. University
C, a medical university located in northern China, and University G, a technical
university located in southern China. Both universities are traditionally teaching
universities bearing a long history of traditional lecture-based learning, or teacher-
centered teaching. In recent years, both universities have introduced PBL into their
educational system as an alternative approach to learning. At University C, the top
manager level initiated an institutional wide plan to introduce PBL in a number of its
faculties and departments. Meanwhile, the staff members had the freedom to make
their own explorations of what PBL is under the umbrella of PBL concept. At
University C, PBL was also initiated by the managers who are enthusiastic of
implementing PBL. In general, they are using cased-based PBL, which is commonly
used in medical education. A group of around 10 teaching staff were sent to a medical
school in U.S to learn how to tutor in a PBL setting for a few months. And this group
of teachers taught their peers after their return.
University G is a comparatively young university in China with around 50 years’
history. Situated in an industrialized region in southern China, the university has the
mission of providing graduates that can meet the needs of regional industry. Being a
key provincial university, university G has received sufficient support from the
provincial government to develop educational innovation. Since 2008 the university
leaders have started different approaches to implementing innovative pedagogy
methods in order to increase the quality of teaching and graduates. As one of the
major efforts for making educational innovation, PBL (mainly project based learning)
was introduced to this university in the late 2008. In the past years, PBL development
at this university has been carried out in diverse methods: inviting international
experts to organize PBL seminars and share experiences, sending staff to observe PBL
practices by visiting two PBL universities (Aalborg University in Denmark and
Victoria University in Australia), and supporting interested staff to implement
localized PBL methods with the university teaching practice. Until 2013, around 100
teaching staff have participated in PBL workshops, 5 delegation short visits were paid
to Aalborg University (each consisting of a vice president and 4-5 deans) to learn
about PBL experiences, 8 teaching staff paid one month visit to Aalborg University for
PBL related pedagogy development.
2. Research methods
This study is conducted in a qualitative manner. This study is mainly concerned with
the perception of the teachers at two Chinese universities which, in the past few years,
have been in the process of introducing PBL. The use of two cases is not intended to
make comparisons but to complement each other to produce a more validate claim.
Interviews are employed as the major method to collect data. The interview is
essentially powerful when researchers explore the human’s experience and their
understanding of a particular event or phenomenon. Semi structured interviews are
conducted in this research to explore in-depth, the interviewees’ insight of a particular
phenomenon or process, as opposed to the closed-end interview (Cohen, Manion &
Morrison, 2007: 353). Further, observation is conducted as complementary means to
triangulate the validity of the data. The use of observation is to cross-validate the
teachers’ perception by offering evidence of how they act in real classroom situation.

24
According to the principle of triangulation (Creswell, 2009: 191-192), the validity of an
argument can be further increased when it is confirmed by difference data sources.
The interviewees are the teaching staff at both universities. Each interview is
conducted between 45 and 60 minutes. The interviews are centered on several general
themes such as teachers’ background, their understanding of PBL, how they conduct
PBL in their own courses or classes, how they deal with students, their conceptual
change of being a teacher after introducing PBL, the challenges for them to conduct
PBL, and their reflections on their practice.
In total, this study is composed of 32 interviews (22 from University C and 10 from
University G). Since not all the teachers at the two universities are involving in PBL
implementation, we require two universities to provide a list of those who
participating in PBL practice. Afterwards, we randomly choose one interviewee from
each department at each university. Mostly, the interviewees are PBL participants who
during the past years have experienced in developing PBL courses and supervising
PBL groups.
After data collection, all interviews are transcribed and manually coded. After several
reviewing rounds, the comments and quotations are categorized into different themes
and translated into English. Afterwards, the key conceptions are highlighted in each
category and correspond with each teacher’s perception of the teacher-student
relationship. Further, by making a cross-category and cross-case analysis, we are able
to identify the patterns across interviews.
Findings
Our interviews are centered on how teachers perceive their role in the educational
processes in the PBL context, particularly, how they support student learning
autonomy. Three major patterned are emerged based on our data as below:
Table 1: Patterns of teachers’ attitudes toward student learning autonomy
University C University G
Support large student autonomy 2＊
1
Support limited student autonomy
while maintaining strong instruction
14 6
Support teacher-centered approach 6 3
＊
The number indicates the number of the teacher
1. Supporting giving students large autonomy
Although PBL highlights the value of student autonomy, quite a few teachers support
giving students too much freedom. As one a young teacher commented,
“Chinese students are highly dependent on their teachers, and it is only by giving them
freedom that they learn how to learn on their own.”
“Of course, the ultimate goal of education is to cultivate students, propel them to grow
and develop, let student to learn on their own is indispensable…”

25
“Give them the space and let them develop, that is the best way to make students
independent and self-responsible, that was the way I developed myself, I believe that it is
the best way. “
Considering the objective of the education, the value of giving student freedom to
learn is partly recognized by teachers. However, as expected in the next section, rather
few teachers support giving student high autonomy from both universities, since the
majority of teachers have other considerations in education.
2. Insisting giving students limited autonomy and maintaining instruction
A lot of teachers acknowledge the value of giving students freedom to make their own
explorations while still maintaining the value of strong instruction. Maintaining strong
teacher instruction comes from various motives.
Some teachers highlight the value of the knowledge contents for student development.
Some teachers maintain that teachers’ guidance could help students to learning more
efficiently. They suggest that teachers, since they have many years of teaching and
learning experience, know the learning methods better than students do. They suggest
that it is better for students to follow teachers’ instructions since students might learn
in a rather slow manner if they make their own explorations.
“Students could avoid being trapped in the winding course if they follow our teachers‟
instruction.”
“They (students) are young and immature. They do not know much about the medical
field. They do not know how to learn the medicine in an efficient way. If we allow them to
learn on their own, they may waste a huge amount of time on the non-important things.
In this sense, teachers‟ instruction can be a faster way to help them to learn.”
“Some knowledge content is quite difficult to understand or to learn by oneself, especially
for the students who have no medical experience in real life. But we teachers can, we know
the meaning of the knowledge content as well as it relevance to real life. We can make it
quite explicitly in, maybe half an hour. If students learn on their own, it may take them a
whole day, or, forever.”
“Many of us engineering teachers are working very close with industry, so we know what
is happening there, but students don‟t. if we don‟t tell them how they shall behave, they
will risk failing from the beginning. Therefore, experiences from us can be a shortcut for
their future development in companies…”
In some occasions, students may expect their teachers to give them instructions.
“There are some students coming to me after the class, saying that “sometimes we can
learn on our own, but sometimes we would like to see some powerful guidance from
teachers, to make it explicitly about what knowledge contents are important for us. If
teachers leave us alone, we cannot learn quite well…”
In this sense, teachers’ instruction can serve as a means to secure that students could
learn in a correct manner. The reason is that teachers have gathered many years of
learning experience, so they believe that they know the right path of learning, the
possible mistakes happening in the learning process, as well as how to avoid
mistakes. By following teacher instruction, students could learn in a more efficient
way. In many cases, teacher instruction may also meet student expectation. If there is a
lack of instruction, students may feel insecure.

26
Further, teachers have a sense of responsibility to motivate students to learn, and
safeguard students to learn in the right manner, as stated,
“As a teacher, I always have a sense of responsibility for students. We cannot totally
leave them alone, that is too risky, they may not learn, or they may not learn correctly. As
a teacher, you have to make them to learn…”
„They are still young and inexperienced; following good experiences can save their time
winding around in the troubles…‟
“Although as teachers we, the ones who would really like to make a difference in teaching
practice, want the students to be independent in conducting research and be responsible
for their own learning, it is rather difficult to give them full freedom since our students
grew up in China, as you know, they were used to being protected by parents at home and
being guided by teachers in schools, unlike those western students who grow up with
independence...”
A few teachers suggest a strong interference in the group work process. As a teacher
noticed,
“Chinese students are not quite used to learn on their own. You can see that in many
groups, students cannot raise questions, or formulate their own problems, or share with
other students. In this case, teachers have to force them a little bit. In my class, I
sometimes ask students questions to stimulate students to learn or to maintain the
dynamics…”
Another teacher, who is highly enthusiastic of PBL, describes how she conduct the
group work,
“The design of a problem really costs me a lot of time and energy since I need to include
all the “knowledge points” that students need to mention in their discussion. When they
discuss a medical problem in the class, firstly I let them discuss on their own. If their
discussion has covered all the “knowledge points”, that is good. But normally, students
are not able to cover all the points. In this situation, I will illuminate them to identify all
the prescribed knowledge points by asking them questions.”
In this sense, although the teacher does support student freedom in the learning
process, she maintains a control of the learning outcome. That is, student learning
outcome should be corresponding to her prescriptions.
Many teachers mention the concern of the assessment method as influencing the
relationship between the teacher and the student. They noted that the current
assessment method is mainly concerned with the acquisition of the knowledge in the
textbooks or from the lectures, teachers have to direct the educational process to help
student perform in the assessment procedure. As some teachers expressed,
“We know the importance of giving students freedom and encouraging them to make their
own explorations, but what can we do if the assessment is confined by the knowledge-
dominated test? We have to make sure that the students could memorize all the needed
knowledge content and that they can get a good score in the examination….”
3. In favor of teacher-centered approach

27
Some teachers think that it is better to use a teacher-centered educational approach in
some particular courses, such as the fundamental course. In their minds, which type of
educational approach is used is largely dependent on the educational objectives of a
particular course or a discipline.
“Definitely, PBL is more proper to be employed in the clinical course. You know, students
have a lot of opportunities to work at the hospital in the clinical course. They have the
chance to meet the real life situation there at the hospital. …however, for our fundamental
courses, we are primarily concerned with equipped students with medical knowledge
content, and therefore it is better for us to use lecture based learning here.”
“In the field of chemical engineering, no matter PBL or not, students are demanded to
master many basic knowledge before they are able to apply them in doing project work. For
the knowledge master part, teacher can play an important role to instruct them, since it is
not just memorizing things as they are. There are techniques to do things.”
The teachers who insist strong guidance in the educational processes are more likely
to stick to traditional educational objectives such as the acquisition of knowledge
content. Of all three categories, most teachers belong to the second category: they
acknowledge the value of student autonomy; however, they have a tendency to
maintain high interference in student learning process.
Discussion
PBL requires a transformation of teachers’ role from a traditional instructor to a
facilitator, and thus encourages teacher to give student more learning autonomy
(Barrows, 1986; De Graaff & Kolmos, 2003). However, it is not easy to do so, as
suggested by Barrett & Moore (2011), Li &Du (2013). Based on our empirical work, it
can be noted that teachers’ perceptions of their role and the range of student
autonomy supported by teacher vary significantly. A few teachers are supporting
giving student sufficient freedom to learn. Within the Chinese context, although most
of the teachers have realized the value of student-centered learning, they still prefer
teacher’s strong direct and guidance in the educational process. Teachers have
different perceptions of student learning autonomy. A few teachers realize the value
of student learning autonomy for student growth; however, most teachers are more
conservative of student autonomy.
Teachers’ conservative attitudes towards student learning autonomy can be attributed
by many practical considerations. In general, they insist to maintain high interference
in student learning because they are attempting to help student avoid mistakes, avoid
learning irrelevant content, save time, and grasp the right learning method. They are
concerned with both learning outcome and learning process. On one side, high
student learning autonomy cannot secure the learning outcome. The teachers are
afraid that the students may not learn the needed knowledge content as the
educational objective is still concerned with the acquisition of the knowledge content.
On the other side, the teachers worry students, who learn on their own, may learn
rather slow, or may be more likely to make mistakes. Therefore, teacher interference is
regarded as necessary. Here, the effectiveness is a major concern for the majority of the
teachers. Many teachers hold that self-directed learning is not an efficient learning
method in a medical context where students have quite limited medical working
experience. However, we argue that although effectiveness should be taken into

28
account in educational practice, how effectiveness is interpreted needs further
exploration. In our empirical work, the notion of effectiveness seems to be closely
linking to knowledge acquisition. However, learning objectives cannot be reduced to
mere knowledge acquisition since it also involves students’ skill development, attitude
change, and so on. In particular, if we are willing to encourage students to become
independent learners, to develop self-learning abilities, and to cultivate their critical
thinking, sacrificing effectiveness is a necessary cost to a certain degree.
Further, Chinese teachers’ reluctance to offer students more learning autonomy is
highly influenced by Chinese particular social and moral tradition. Li & Du (2013)
argue that in Chinese tradition, teachers are generally expected to fulfil parental
obligation. Hence, teachers have the tendency to protect their students since many
teachers see their students as immature and inexperienced. Therefore, in some
occasions, they are more likely to give students direct guidance in order to avoid
mistakes, irrelevance, or low-effectiveness, rather than let them make explorations on
their own. However, to respect student autonomy, we should not only give students
freedom to make their own progress, but also respect their right to make mistakes, or
to learn in their own way (even if it is low efficient). In this sense, the focal point is
not whether learning is better or faster, but who takes responsibility of the learning
process. Learning is not emulating the teacher; rather, it is a self-directed growing
process. Within the Chinese context, teachers have a strong tendency to view students’
learning as their own business, and therefore they are likely to secure the learning
outcomes by making students follow their instructions. To facilitate student-directed
learning, teachers should be detached from the view that they are completely
responsible for students’ learning outcomes, since students should be responsible for
themselves.
Here, a paradox emerges in teachers’ perception of their role and student learning
autonomy. On one side, teachers are hoping students to develop a set of skills (e.g.
self-learning skills) and become independent learners in a PBL context, as shown in
many studies(De Graaff & Kolmos, 2003; Savin-Baden, 2003). In order to do this,
students should be given sufficient freedom to make their own explorations. One the
other side, however, due to many considerations, such as their recognition of
educational objectives, alongside many other institutional factors, teachers tend to
view that student self-learning should be directed by them. To put it in another way,
teachers’ intention of facilitate students to grow and learn, and maintaining their
dominance in education, are in a paradox. Partly, the paradox is formulated since the
teachers have to struggle between a set of conflicted educational intentions. On one
hand these teachers are willing to participate in teaching innovation and make a
difference for students. On the other hand, they feel responsible to ensure that
students should master the knowledge content in the text book in order to build up a
solid knowledge foundation or prepare for the examination. They also need to
encourage students to construct their own knowledge. This dilemma can also be
manifested in many Chinese studies (Song, 2009) which attempt to maintain teachers’
authority while creating a student-directed learning atmosphere. Therefore, change of
teachers’ beliefs takes longer time than the curricula change. It involves challenges and
identity struggling for these groups of teachers. In order to facilitate the establishment
of PBL, it is necessary to facilitate these teachers who are actively involved in teaching
innovation with continual reflection upon their experiences and how to further
develop their innovations.

29
To introduce PBL, the change of the teachers’ perception of their role is indispensable.
However, this transformation is fairly challenging since their perception is influenced
by many factors. The first one is their preference for the effectiveness for educational
practice. The concern to education effectiveness leads teachers to highlight the
importance of the knowledge acquisition rather than the development of the students’
self-learning abilities, since self-learning might be time-wasting and low-efficient.
Therefore, to establish PBL, theorists and practitioners need to make reflection on their
basic education motives.
Confucius tradition highlights teachers’ moral modeling function and their
responsibility for students (Wu, 2010; Li &Du, 2013), and it imposes significant
impacts upon teachers’ perception. A moral modeling function of the teacher (Li &
Du, 2013) has implications for both teachers and students. It requires a teacher to
endeavor to be a good learner in terms of both knowledge content and learning
process. Students therefore should obey the instruction of their teachers and emulate
them, since they are good learners that worth modeled. In this sense, teachers’
intention of instructing students is not simply based on their intention of pouring
knowledge content to students, but also because these teachers expect that their
instruction can serve as an exemplary practice of what good learning is. They believe
that if students do not follow their instructions, students do not only have problem in
memorizing the knowledge content, but, most importantly, are likely to have
difficulties in developing the right learning approach.
A student-centered approach does not only mean giving students more freedom to
learn but also mean giving students opportunities to take responsibilities on their
own. However in China, due to the social expectation of teachers as having parental
responsibility (Li &Du, 2013), the student affair is not only the student’s business but
also the responsibility of the educational institution and the teacher. Therefore,
teachers should take the responsibility of student whole development. Teachers do not
only need to convey the knowledge content to students, but also need to assure
students to learn in an appropriate and efficient manner. Given this consideration,
teachers are quite reluctant to give student too much freedom; rather, they would
prefer to direct student learning process, not only because they want to secure the
educational process but also because they want to be more committed. In this sense, a
transformation of teacher perception should also induce a reflection on the
identification of the teacher’s responsibility.
Many studies suggest that the relationship between the teacher and the student should
be transformed in an equal, democratic, or even dialogical manner in the Chinese
educational context (Shao, 2007). However, for many researchers, the goal of this
transformation is not to establish a democratic teacher-student relationship, but only
to respect student subjectivity while maintaining teacher authority. The value of
maintaining teacher authority is to secure the educational order and process, since for
many educational theorists, the loss of teacher authority will inevitably lead to the
increase of educational disorder (Song, 2009; Zhao, 2011). However, we should admit
that there is an internal conflict between the intention of respecting student
subjectivity and maintaining teacher authority. To some extent, they cannot coexist.
Respecting student subjectivity needs the weakening of teacher guidance and teacher
authority while maintaining teacher authority is more likely to result in student
conformation to their teachers. Therefore, how to deal with the tensions of these
conflicted educational initiatives needs further investigation.

Vol 10 No 2 - February 2015

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