Why IRE is not for me (or, yet another ball analogy)

There’s this great video on YouTube that really gets to the heart of what Hull’s article was about regarding Maria and June’s student-teacher interactions.

The vlogger even refers to a fantastic TED Talk by Sugata Mitra, which I suggest watching if you have 20 extra minutes to spare.

And here’s the link to The Knowledge Network for Innovations in Learning and Teaching (KNILT)’s page about why the Initiate-Response-Evaluate method of teaching and questioning doesn’t work.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about IRE and why it’s bogus. When I was five, I was on a little league softball team. During the first game of the season, I was up to bat, swinging it wildly as the ball came at me (Initiate). When I hear the crack of metal hitting leather, I ran- fast. Unfortunately it was the wrong way. I headed towards third base, and my run didn’t count (Response). You know what my coach did after the game? He yelled at me. I heard my teammates complain that I had lost them the game (Evaluate).

You know what that made me want to do? Quit. To the sport there was only one answer, to run right and not left. I was in the wrong. People got mad at me, at a beginner, for choosing a different path. They got mad at me for learning, for trial and error. For my half-formed thought that was just “RUN TO THE BASE”, because that’s what I had been told to do.

My left-right issues haven’t really been solved. A friend of mine once told me it’s a form of dyslexia, and although I haven’t looked into it beyond their word I do consider it a problem when I’m being given driving directions. I guess what I’m getting at here is that some people just have to think a little before they act, but that doesn’t mean they’re “stupid” or “lacking in order”. With Maria, June shut down her half-conceived thoughts because her evaluation only had one clear-cut answer, like a multiple choice test, and Maria’s stumbling over her words had been like choosing C over B. What June should have realized is that, as a teacher, she needed to RE-evaluate her own preconceived notions and considered that C could also be right, or on the right track, or even on the different side of the tracks in a whole new realm of thinking. Maybe then she would have seen that Maria was not in need of “remediation,” but instead in need of help and guidance to bring her thoughtful ideas out into the world in her speech in the same way that they shone in her writing.

Wow, that was a long and probably obvious rant. But man, standardized tests are BOGUS. The I-R-E system is bogus, too; teachers need to encourage their students’ train of thought so that they can better educate themselves, because teachers DON’T teach- they inspire. Great teachers do, anyway. You can’t take a 5 year old and tell them to run towards the base, then yell at them for doing just that, albeit in a roundabout fashion. And you can’t dismiss a student’s comments just because it isn’t a subject that you initiated. If a student goes beyond what you asked, doesn’t that PROVE that they’re really thinking and cranking their brains?