It’s tempting start implementing the Prime Directive piecemeal, to consider making changes to one or two classroom strategies, while continuing to work within the Curriculum Transfer Model overall.  Unfortunately, such efforts almost always fail to deliver real change because the beliefs of students and teachers about why they do what they do haven’t been touched.  

For example, putting students in cooperative groups should improve student success by increasing the amount of conversation learning taking place.  But all too often, such efforts founder because successful students, still in the thrall of doing school, feel like they are having to do the work for struggling students, and they resent it.  And struggling students, who have internalized years of failure, are uncomfortable exposing that failure to others. As a result, they cannot learn from their mistakes through conversational learning, an essential strategy in the classroom.  

Then there is the question of differentiated instruction: an attempt to have every student work at the appropriate level of challenge.  This, too, is an excellent idea that may founder without proper philosophical underpinnings. The teacher often remains in control, making decisions about what each student should do, leaving the student in a passive role.  Unfortunately, this approach leaves unchallenged the ubiquitous problem that teachers are telling students what to do all day long, which is a common source of resentment among students. Even worse, the opportunity of students acquiring the skills of self-directedness has been wasted.

Wave after wave of such well-intentioned reform strategies have washed over schools, only to dissipate over time and be replaced by the next well-intentioned effort.  If a teacher stays in the profession long enough, he is likely to find himself saying, “Oh yes, we did something very similar to this twenty years ago.” It is deeply discouraging.  It leads many experienced teachers to become cynical about the very idea of change.

Implementing strategies in isolation doesn’t work.  What is needed is not a change in this strategy or that, but a change in the very foundation of what happens in school.  What is needed is a paradigm shift. Changing why we do what we do changes everything.  The way people behave within any organization is shaped by that organization’s fundamental philosophy, whether they are aware of it or not.  Embedded within every philosophy is an interpretation of human nature.  It is precisely in this regard that the Curriculum Transfer Model and the Student Agency Model are utterly incompatible.