Pedagogy of the Oppressed

"Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated account. Worse yet, it turns them into "containers," into "receptacles" to be "filled" by the teachers. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teachers she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are.
Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat."

 I posted this section because I believe it is the most important for new teachers to understand. When we step into a classroom, this is an easy trap to fall into. Students are not containers to be filled, and the "good students" are not students who need to be filled and are good at following what the teacher wants. Our goal as teachers need to be to teach students HOW to learn, not just shove them full of information that isn't retained. We need to teach them how to question, how to read, how to write, and how to interact. Especially for our low SES/high-risk/ELL students, the way that these students become more confident and break the cycles of poverty is by learning HOW to learn. If at the end of the day, my students say "I learned how to write questions about texts before I read them" rather than saying "We read an article".
This reminds me of a discussion in my ESL courses. A long time ago, when students started being educated in ESL, teachers and professionals believed that it was better for students to be non-fluent and non-literate in their L1. They believed that if students were a "blank canvas", they would be easier to educate. But recent findings are actually seeing that students who are fluent and literate in their L1 learn English faster because they have the base skills already. Teachers are realizing that ESL students definitely aren't containers, and need to be educated to have skills to learn, just like other students.

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