Response Paper: Spoon-feeding Learners
It has been identified that educators should not "spoon-feed" learners. Spoon-feeding means to me the act of organizing questions and assignments in such a way that the answers are provided or obvious to the learner, preventing the learner from having to think critically, do any research, or refer to reference materials. In essence, when a teacher spoon-feeds her students, the students only have to learn the topic in a cursory and superficial manner, because that is sufficient to answer the questions, which will have the correct answer embedded in them or provided outright. The students will not be required to learn the topic sufficiently to apply it in ways other than the initial way it was shown, nor to think through how or whether to apply it in other situations than the one in the example. Spoon-feeding can entail oversimplification of the material as well, which takes it out of context and causes it to lose its meaning (Edwards & Smith, 2005, p. 54). Moreover, spoon-feeding makes students passive, leading them to depend upon the teacher for lectures and instructions rather than embarking on a quest to discover information for themselves (Kwan, 2000, p. 1).
Answering a student's question rather than having him or her look up the answer is not necessarily spoon-feeding. The teacher is a legitimate resource in the student's quest for knowledge and understanding, and forcing the student to look up the information himself may blunt rather than sharpen the student's desire to continue the quest. Teachers do not need to refuse to answer questions or help students that are having difficulty in order to avoid spoon-feeding. Rather, they need to structure their lessons in such a way that the student is not obtaining all of the information from class lectures but rather getting some essential information from them that gives them the knowledge and impetus needed to find fur...