17/09/2020
Throughout my schooling I did not experience Tyler’s rationale a lot, because I was an average student, therefore the curriculum worked well for my learning style. I do acknowledge that this was not the case for everyone in my class. Tyler’s rationale was to group everyone, which does not work well because you will never get a group of students that are the same. One experience I had in my schooling with Tyler’s rationale was that some of my teachers only used one way of learning in their classrooms, which was extremely beneficial to students that learned this way but damaging to those that did not. For example, some teachers would just use lectures to teach us subjects or read out of a book. This would be a great way to instruct auditory but since there were no resources for visual learners they would not succeed to their best ability. This also may have pushed non-auditory learners to begin to conform to auditory learning, which can damage their learning because it is not the way they traditionally learn.
There are some limitations to Tyler’s rationale. Since everyone is being grouped and is assimilating to what the curriculum is pushing them to be, it can cause more students to fall behind and possibly quit their learning altogether. If an educator was constantly pushing a student to assimilate to the mainstream way of learning or to learn the way that they are teaching and no way else, it affects their learning in a very negative way. This rationale makes it impossible to have diversity in the classroom, and without this diversity, we would just be creating tiny copies of students that would all be good at a select amount of skills. This means that very few would be successful in careers that stray away from these skills and the majority of students would all go into the same careers because their skill sets are all the same. The goal of a teacher should not be to create everyone the same but to create a space that encourages different ways of learning and help each student succeed in their style of learning.
One thing that educators should be taking away from Tyler’s rationale is the need to give students skills that will support them in the future. Tyler’s rationale gave students the skills they needed to work in factories. These skills are not commonly used in Canada, but if we start to support students and give them skills in careers that interest them this would help with their future employment opportunities. For example, if a student is set on going into engineering we can try and focus their learning in math and science classes, while still allowing them to work on other courses so that if they change their mind they can easily switch into another path.