Yes, a teacher asked me this recently. While her question seemed mostly an expression of frustration at what she saw as a loss of control over her teaching, it is also a question that educators should consider seriously. After all, education proceeded quite well for thousands of years without SLOs. Socrates never referred to them, nor did Jesus, the Buddha, or any other well-known teacher you could name.

A few years ago I was taking classes at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, just for intellectual stimulation and to meet people I wouldn’t otherwise meet. I signed up for a few classes taught by a remarkable teacher, Michael Koran, who taught classes in poetry, drama, religion, and other fields. One class in particular was intriguing. It was called “Reading Aloud.”

In Reading Aloud class, a small group of us (all men, it turned out) read short stories aloud and discussed them. That was the class. What is remarkable, in light of today’s fixation on SLOs, is that not only were there no stated outcomes for this class, but that the name of the class itself described the process, and not the product, of the class. What Michael Koran understood was that by engaging in this process with a group of people, something would result, learning of some kind would happen, but that it could not be defined in advance.

I don’t know what the other participants in this weekly class got out of it, but one of my big takeaways as a teacher was the value of reading aloud in the classroom, an activity that had been shunned as ‘unrealistic’ by misguided proponents of the communicative approach to language teaching. Reading a text aloud puts the words out into the public space of the classroom, where they can be discussed and analyzed. After that class, I incorporated reading aloud back into my classroom. I found that it also offers the teacher a chance to hear students speaking in a controlled form and to offer correction or group practice of challenging words or phrases. None of this was expressed as a student learning outcome in Michael Koran’s class.

Today most schools are held to a standard of public accountability that requires them to justify their quality claims through defining, assessing, recording, and publishing student outcomes. Most of this has nothing to do with the teacher’s art, which is about process, atmosphere, experience, and attention to each student as an individual. This gap between what some teachers would rather  focus on and the accountability measures they are being asked to fall in line with underlies the question that started this post.

We cannot get rid of SLOs, and we probably shouldn’t, given that education is expensive and people want to know what they are getting for their money. But it would be nice if we could turn some attention back to the quality of the educational experience and understand that not all outcomes can be planned in advance.