Teachers who hold the transfer metaphor tend to view their central responsibilities as preparing material, organizing it, and being up to date. Such teachers tend to believe that what they say is what is learned. If the tea has been poured the cup must be full. Teachers holding the gardening metaphor will tend to be more interested in developing learning activities and experiences than in sharpening their speaking performances. They will especially be interested in experiential learning opportunities that enable students to explore their own attitudes and experiences about the subject matter.
Metaphors are surprisingly durable.
They change, but very slowly, in the face of persistent, contrary evidence. A metaphor expands because it is more encompassing than the one it replaces. It can handle all the phenomena that the previous metaphor could as well as phenomena that the previous metaphor could not. Although it is difficult to appreciate some phenomena in our own time, an historical perspective reveals the pattern. We appear to form our metaphors about teaching and learning from models of the mind that we observe in our environment.