Yesterday I posted a clip of students at Nashville Prep chanting the answers to questions. I should have mentioned that chanting the answers to questions was a common practice in mid-nineteenth century schools. Students would chant their geography lessons, for example, singing out the names of continents or mountains or oceans. They did not necessarily knew where to find them on a map, but they knew the words to the chant.
Peter Greene reports that this chanting is today called “whole brain teaching,” and is associated with someone named Chris Biffle.
Greene says that WBT has a website, and its goal is to put “organized fun” into the classroom.
But he takes a dim view of this chanting:
“Some of the groupiness aspects are recognizable to anyone who was ever in band, choir, or the armed forces. And I have to tell you– given the youtube and on-line testimonials, and WBT’s persistence over fifteen years, there are people out there who love this. I can see the appeal if you are in a school mired in endless chaos, or if you’ve always struggled with classroom management, or if you’re Dolores Umbridge.
“All that aside, it is creepy as hell. Set your individuality aside, become part of the group, do as you’re told, sit up, lie down, roll over , speak (but only as directed). Just imagine what this would look like with someone more stern, more authoritarian, more Hitlerish, in front of the classroom. If you can handle it, you can find sample lessons all the way down to Kindergartners.
“But in a funny twist, per Ravitch’s post this morning, it turns out that Biffle was a man ahead of his time, because what Nashville Prep and others have discovered is that WBT is great for test prep. It turns out that subsuming your individuality, spitting out dictated exact answers on demand, and generally being a good little all-fit-one-size widget is excellent training for taking standardized tests.
“So if you find this little mini-re-enactment of the Cultural Revolution unappealing, the bad news is that this is exactly what high stakes standardized testing call for.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I think it is “indoctrination into the military” for poor people. You would NEVER see this approach in a private school.
This just in… Nashville Prep just deleted all the Comments from the video posted on YouTube (and the Nashville Prep YouTube channel)… and also disabled the Comments section so no one else can comment.
This included several months of comments—most of them negative… “This is disgusting” etc..
Here’s the video. Check out the new disabled COMMENTS section:
OMG ! Corporate reformers don’t make kids in charter schools engage in mindless chanting or repetition of the speaker..
If that Nashville Prep video wasn’t bad enough, check out the professonal development that Chicago Public Schools “corporate reform” management put their teachers through:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/02/28/a-video-that-shows-why-teachers-are-going-out-of-their-minds/?tid=pm_pop
I watched that video and found it creepy, too. When the teacher called on a student and everyone turned and stared at that student? I half expected the kids’ eyes to turn black, cackle, and then pounce on the poor student it he didn’t answer correctly. Not the kind of classroom I would want to be part of – as a student OR as a teacher.
PLUS, the teacher is teaching wrong information. As a history teacher, I would HATE to get a kid from this school (not hate the kid, of course, just hate the reteaching I would have to do), because my classroom runs so differently (we actually talk about the material and question it), AND because I would have to reteach information that may be drilled into the kid’s head.
Let me give you examples of the erroneous information in that six minutes:
1. King George III was NOT the King of England. He referred to as the King of Great Britain (which is MORE than just England, it’s also Wales and Scotland) in the Declaration of Independence itself.
2. This is a picky one, and a lot of people get it wrong: the Declaration of Independence was NOT signed on July 4, 1776. It was signed earlier by JUST John Hancock, the president of the Second Continental Congress, when it was voted on July 1. July 4 was the day that Congress accepted the Declaration. Most of the signers of the Declaration signed in late July or early August, 1776.
3. The Constitution was NOT passed by the Second Continental Congress (that was the Declaration of Independence). There WAS no Continental Congress by 1787, because the U.S. was by then a nation, and no longer a group of colonies. It was just called Congress. And Congress didn’t have anything to do with the Constitution–it was written by a special convention when the Articles of Confederation (which is “fast forwarded” in her chants) didn’t work out.
4. Amendments can be added to ANY bill or law, so the definition of “a change to our Constitution” is faulty.
5. The freedom of petition is left out of the First Amendment chant or song or whatever it is.
6. The federal level of the Judicial is ALSO the Circuit Courts, not just the U.S. Supreme Court. And she didn’t cover the levels of state and local governments in the legislative and judicial branches.
That’s not even discussing the teaching. When she finished, then they are reading an AR book???? Is anything history-related taught after these chants? Have the students READ these documents? Mine have–and written essays on what were causes of the American Revolution and comparing the Articles of Confederation (which is “fast forwarded” in her “lesson,”) and the Constitution. Now, mine are 8th graders, so it’s a little different, I guess. But there’s no excuse to teach erroneous information.
I just tried again, and I still can’t get the link to work. As someone who learns best by using my auditory memory, I get it. Recite something often enough, and it will stick. You might not be able to retrieve it except by saying out the whole rhyme, as for instance when I will still sing the ABC song to myself to remember the order of the letters, but it does stick, yeah.
Rote memorization isn’t much of a goal to have though. What kind of a future are we making for our country, creating a whole generation that’s able to recite the Great Lakes, or the capitols of all 50 states or whatever, but never having learned to think for themselves?
The “hole” brain technique. Memorize, don’t think, don’t learn what things mean. Just prepare for testing. Education? Indoctrination! Yes, Hitler could not have done it better. So – where are we headed? Do what the CEO says. Prepare for that kind of workplace.
BUT
don’t dare to think for yourself. “Leaders” know the answers. You follow.
Double speak. Education has become training. Animals are trained. People should be educated.
They are not applying that learning in any way. I can recite a passage from Shakespeare, I’m not sure I could tell you what it means. I read about this technique in the beginning when it was called “Power Teaching” and it was more a way to get kids through transitions with routine. I actually used some of the attention-getting strategies. I wonder if the creator of these strategies meant them to be used simply as the lowest level of learning when it came to content?
Exactly! There are a lot of things that should be covered in these lessons that aren’t. Why is James Madison the Father of the Constitution? How do checks and balances work? What are examples? Why did George III have so much power (by the way, he was the King of Britain, not England)? Why was the Bill of Rights added to the Constitution? Why was the Constitution written at all? These, and MANY other questions, should be covered in these lessons. Perhaps these concepts were covered in other lessons, but with the amount of WRONG information being taught, I sort of doubt it.
In Waldorf schools there is an assembly every Friday in which every grade gets up on stage and recites poems or passages that they have been working on that week (or does a skit or dance or play instruments). This is fine, but not as indoctrination but as part of learning and expression. Parents are not permitted as it is not for being on display or tested.
I myself went to an English overseas school for a while in sixth grade, and we chanted (or rather, recited in unison) the first verses of Tennyson’s “The Lotus Eaters” (I was so fired up that later I memorized all of the whole thing in my own time). We did the same with many passages from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Thomas Gray’s “Ode to a Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes”. I am glad we did because I remember these poems well to this day and I was inspired to memorize others for my own recreation. The teacher also dictated the poem to us, and then we wrote it in our “best” notebook in fountain pen. We never were put on the spot or tested, we just memorized it effortlessly together. In my high school (another school, this time in the USA) we used to recite in unison just for fun and without any involvement of the teachers poems in French by Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Apollinaire, while walking up and down the stairs in the halls.
At least if you are going to recite something, make it something worthwhile, but I doubt that is going to happen. I am afraid that if it were done thoughtlessly, it could be like North Korea or worse.
I just watched the video and it is truly horrible!
wonderful. memorization and recitation of poetry is of enormous value
Sounds more like No Brain Ed to me …
Reblogged this on aureliomontemayor and commented:
Brain-dead Blurting? Creepy Chorus? Test-Taking Tomfoolery?
Education suffers terribly from pundits in possession of a hammer who treat everything as if it were a nail.
There are VASTLY DIFFERENT KINDS OF attainments that one gets from schooling, and not understanding the differences between these leads to over-application of a single method–to using the wrong tool for the job.
IT WOULD BE DIFFICULT TO OVERSTATE HOW MUCH UTTER IDIOCY IN EDUCATION RESULTS FROM MISAPPLICATION OF A PEDAGOGICAL APPROACH APPROPRIATE FOR SOME KINDS OF LEARNING TO OTHERS FOR WHICH IT IS ENTIRELY INAPPROPRIATE. If there were ONE THING that I would ask people to carry away from a course in ELA methods, it would be this truth: You must match your pedagogical approach to the particular kind of attainment that you want to student to carry away with him or her.
People are often misled because the term learning is often used to refer to very, very, very different kinds of accomplishments. People make the mistake of assuming that because x is learned in one way, y and z are also learned in that way. In ELA, the most common mistake is to assume, falsely, that something that is not typically acquired via explicit instruction is acquired by that means. Well intentioned people say, we want the graduates of our high schools to have mastered the academic vocabulary that they will encounter in college. And then they make a list of academic vocabulary words and give kids ten of these a week to “learn” via explicit means throughout their middle-school and high-school careers, and they find that a few years later, having done that, the kids are not leaving school knowing any more academic vocabulary than they did before the intensive program of teaching of academic vocabulary. Why? Well, vocabulary is not, for the most part, learned via explicit instruction. In fact, far less than 1 percent of the vocabulary that you or anyone else knows was ever explicitly taught and learned!!! Linguist Ray Jackendoff writes:
“The standard estimate is that a five-year-old knows on the order of 10,000 words. This means that between the ages of two and five (three years, about a thousand days), the child has averaged ten new words a day, or close to one every waking hour.”
So, what’s happening? It turns out that people learn new vocabulary incidentally, in groups of semantically related words, in meaningful contexts that they are engaged in where those words are used, and ALMOST ALL OF THAT LEARNING OCCURS AUTOMATICALLY AND UNCONSCIOUSLY. The brain is set up to learn new words automatically in context when one is focused not on learning new vocabulary but upon some extended, meaningful context. So, for example, you take an art class at the Y, and in the course of a few weeks, without even being aware of it, you learn the meanings of filbert brush, gesso, titanium yellow light, stippling, tableaux, priming, and other painting-related terms because these were used in the course of your activity, not because anyone specifically taught them to you. And most of the “vocabulary teaching techniques” that teachers in training learn about and that are employed in ELA textbooks and that are explicitly mentioned in state and national standards, are LARGELY IRRELEVANT. These include context clues, etymologies or word origins, roots and affixes, and morphological rules. So, an enormous amount of time ends up being spent on vocabulary instruction that is largely irrelevant to the actual acquisition of vocabulary!!!!!! And this is so because people don’t attend to what science actually tells us about how vocabulary is acquired.
So, the lesson for those who would teach vocabulary is to prepare materials that are engaging for their own sake but that use, INCIDENTALLY, the vocabulary that you want the student to acquire.
But, again, one should not make the mistake of OVERGENERALIZING THIS insight into the learning of vocabulary. It would be a mistake to conclude that because of the forgoing, one should NEVER do any explicit teaching of vocabulary. There are exceptions to the general rule. One of these exceptions occurs with technical terms that are DEFINED OPERATIONALLY. So, the way to teach what the term “analysis” means is to do an analysis–to break something down into its parts and examine the parts and their relations to one another and to the whole. So, you look at a character’s physical appearance, habits of speech, socioeconomic status, educational background, friends, relationships, motivations, beliefs, values, actions, struggles, growth or lack thereof, and so on, and you go down that list of aspects of the character and talk about each and how they are related, and in the course of this, you say, “What we’re doing here is an analysis. We’re looking at the parts and how they are related to one another and to the whole.” And you can get away with this bit of explicit instruction in what analysis means because you have made it concrete.
The term “whole brain teaching” is a misnomer for many reasons, but the idea that Biffle was probably trying to get at in giving his technique this name was that of getting a couple different sensory modalities going at once, which can be an aid to some kinds of learning. When the ancients used the Method of Loci to memorize parts of a speech by associating each part with a physical place on some path or journey or when you learn the position of the notes on a staff using the Every Good Boy Does Fine mnemonic, such a cross modality technique is being used. Such a technique can work for simple factual recall and can be valuable for some attainments.
Consider, for example, teaching kids about rhythm in literature. Almost everyone has had English classes in which he or she learned, explicitly, the meanings of terms like “iambic pentameter.” But ask most people to write a simple iambic pentameter couplet, and you will get a mess. This is often true even of folks who are English teachers with graduate degrees in English!!!!
Why should that be so? Well, they learned the explicit definition for a test–an iamb is a metrical foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable–but that explicit learning was a method that worked to create a visceral, repeatable ability to produce work that follows an iambic metrical pattern.
If you really wanted to produce students who are sensitive to rhythm in language and who are capable of writing rhythmical prose or verse, then you would follow a completely different pedagogical strategy: You would recognize that the goal of the instruction is not recognition of a form but automaticity in ability to use the form, and you would teach meter and prosody in that same way in which a drumming instructor teaches someone how to drum. In fact, I highly recommend getting enough drums for the entire class and getting a bunch of music stands and putting a bunch of poems written in extremely predictable meter in front of them, with the stressed and unstressed syllables marked, and DRUMMING THESE WHILE CHANTING. Furthermore, this must be done often, over a period of several weeks, until students achieve automaticity at being able to do this with any line of regular metrical verse.
MA ry HAD a LITT le LAMB
Its FACE was WHITE as SNOW.
Is THIS the FACE that LAUNCHED a THOUS- and SHIPS?
And you keep doing this until every kid can do a COLD READING of the meter of a new poem put in front of him or her.
The appropriate technique for teaching sensitivity to the rhythms of language is more akin to what one might do in a MUSIC class than to what is typically done in English classes.
The pedagogical technique must match what is being learned, and it must employ the means that nature has created, in us, FOR THAT PARTICULAR TYPE OF LEARNING.
correction:
Why should that be so? Well, they learned the explicit definition for a test–an iamb is a metrical foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable–but that explicit learning was NOT a method that worked to create a visceral, repeatable ability to produce work that follows an iambic metrical pattern.
English education suffers terribly from people applying pedagogical techniques that are almost useless for the purposes for which they are intended.
For example, no amount of teaching students traditional grammar terminology and rules is going to reduce, dramatically, the number of errors in grammar, usage, and mechanics that occur in their speech and writing. And no amount of doing exercises on “comprehension strategies” is going to make kids into readers who can comprehend what they are reading.
Definitive scientific studies of the former (of learning parsing) were done as far back as the 1930s!!!!! But, as recently as last week, I read on the Thomas B. Fordham Institute website a piece by Checker Finn in which he wrote that one of the reasons why we need the Common Core is because kids don’t “know” grammar.
Now, I happen to believe that there is value in teaching people an explicit grammar of the language. But if people think that explicit teaching of grammar is going to reduce, dramatically, the number of errors in student speech and writing, they are just wrong, and we know why. Consider, for example, the ability to tell whether a bit of language is a sentence fragment. People believe, falsely, that they distinguish complete sentences from fragments based upon application of a rule, and if you open a 7th-grade ELA text, you are likely to see, in a lesson on “Complete Sentences” or “Sentence Fragments” a statement like this:
A sentence contains a subject and a predicate and expresses a complete idea.
And that’s the sort of explicit, conscious rule that people THINK that they are applying to determine whether something is or is not a sentence. But it’s clearly the case that when people make the grammaticality judgment, they are NOT applying such an explicit rule. This is obvious if you think about: for the rule to be explicit, it would have to be algorithmic. It would have to be such that one could program a computer to carry it out. But imagine what that would entail for this rule: one would need to supply the computer with a look-up table for all possible forms that subjects and predicates can take AND with well-defined criteria for distinguishing complete ideas from incomplete ones. Clearly, you don’t do THAT when you decide that something is or is not a fragment.
What actually happens when people look at a string of words and decide that it is a sentence or a fragment is that the string is automatically processed by an internalized mechanism that constitutes an entire functional grammatical model of the language, and that internalized model makes an automatic judgment about whether the string is a well-formed formula for a sentence based on its rules. And the only way you get that complete, internalized grammar of the language is via a whole lot of automatic learning that happens from a whole lot of speaking and reading. The judgment as to whether a string is a complete sentences is not an explicit one, even when people think that it is!
Consider this phrase:
*the big book with the blue cover of poems
You KNOW that that phrase is ungrammatical, but UNLESS YOU HAVE STUDIED SYNTAX, the chances are that you HAVE NO IDEA WHY. There IS a rule that covers this, and the rule can be made quite explicit. You “know the rule” in some sense, because you can apply it, but again, unless you have studied syntax, you DO NOT KNOW IT EXPLICITLY. (The rule, BTW, is that a complement must be sister to an N.) Instead, you have an internalized model of the grammar of English that precludes forms like that based on rules of which you have no conscious awareness (unless, again, you have studied syntax).
And that’s the way it is, GENERALLY, with grammatical knowledge. Judgments of grammatical accuracy are made automatically by the brain based on its internalized model of the grammar of the language, and that model is acquired, not explicitly learned, and MOST OF IT you know nothing about, just as you don’t know which motor neurons are firing when you walk across the floor.
Interestingly, people who have learned a little traditional grammar FOOL THEMSELVES into thinking that they are making grammatical judgments based on the application of explicit rules when, in fact, their brains are automatically making those judgments and then, based on their limited knowledge of traditional grammar, they are making up a “just-so story” as an explanation of what they did.
And so the MYTH that learning traditional grammar affects the frequency of errors in people’s writing and speech persists. It’s widespread, even among English teachers and Edupundits who should have bothered to learn something about language acquisition
It persists because it gives people an illusion of control. But the situation is rather as though you had a planter full of marigolds and each day went out and waved a magic wand over them and believed that the fact that they grew was proof that your magic wand worked.
Again, here, people are confusing types of learning. The learning of the grammar of a language is almost entirely an automatic process. Linguists don’t even refer to this as learning. They call it acquisition. There is a machine in the mind that intuits grammatical structures from the ambient linguistic environment. If the structures that are intuited are to reflect a standard English model, then that environment has to be a standard English one. If people read a lot and converse a lot with speakers of standard English, then their brains will create, automatically, such a model. But that means that they have to be motivated to read and write and speak and listen a lot.
So, it’s by motivating people to read and write and speak and listen a lot that we actually teach grammar in the sense of the internalized rules for using the language properly. Again, those rules are not explicitly taught or learned; they are intuited by an internal neurological machine for doing that, and almost all explicit learning of grammar that one does is IRRELEVANT to actual production and comprehension–to actual reading, writing, speaking, and listening.
Now, I believe that there are other reasons for teaching explicit models of the language, but reducing errors in student writing and speech is not one of those reasons.
Nothing I am saying here is AT ALL controversial. It is accepted contemporary linguistic science. ANY LINGUIST WILL BE ABLE TO EXPLAIN THIS TO YOU.
That what I have had here is news to many professional educators is a sad commentary on the state of learning in the learning profession.
“*the big book with the blue cover of poems”
“…a complement must be sister to an N.”
I don’t get it. There are two prepositional phrases following the noun. Each taken alone makes sense following the noun but only the reverse order makes sense when both phrases are used. In the reverse order “of poems” becomes part of the whole, “the big book of poems” that allows us to further identify it as “the book of poems with the blue cover.” I do not understand how to translate that into the algorithm. You are right, of course, that we internalize these rules without being able to articulate them. I am just old enough to be curious about how to articulate what is unconscious.
with the blue cover is an adjunct phrase; of poems is complement. The complement has to occur with the noun. The same is true of complements of verbs.
Jill played the piano (complement) beautifully (adjunct)
is grammatical but
*Jill played beautifully the piano
is not.
My point was that people in a sense “know” such rules–they are part of their internalized grammars–even if they don’t know them explicitly. So, you know that
the green, great dragon is ungrammatical and that
the great, green dragon is grammatical
because you have internalized rules governing the order of precedence of adjectives in English, even though NO ONE TAUGHT YOU THESE EXPLICITLY.
And that’s true, generally, of grammar. The explicit learning that people do is mostly relevant for making up ex post facto just-so stories about why they made the grammatical judgments that they did.
It’s important for English teachers to understand this.
For years I have lived with and known to be true what you are saying about language acquisition and proper grammar usage. Having taught little ones, I always knew it “came natural” to those who lived in environments where proper standard English was heard, either from hearing others speak it or by being read to.
Important for all little ones, but especially those who did not grow up in standard English rich environments, is that in the classroom they hear a ton of good language and vocabulary spoken and have tons of books read aloud to them. Those that received that gift are able to recognize proper grammar when they see it written on language tests.
Interestingly, I find the former TFAers I work with do not write well or correctly. Perhaps their parents were too busy making money to talk or read to them.
What’s happening with proponents of traditional grammar is that they are falling prey to the psychological phenomenon known as an “illusion of control.” It’s well known that people tend to think that they have more control over matters than they actually do, and this is, I think, the primary reason for the persistence of the myth that explicit grammatical knowledge is the source of grammatical judgments.
People think that they are making grammatical judgments based on application of consciously learned rules when, in fact, they are making these judgments automatically and then attaching a just-so story to their judgment—an ex post facto explanation.
This can be quite easily demonstrated scientifically simply by comparing tests of people’s ability to make correct grammatical judgments to tests of their explicit knowledge of the rules underlying those judgments. In only a very tiny percentage of the cases, even among highly skilled writers and speakers, do people actually know the rule that they are unconsciously applying. They THINK that they know the rule, but if you ask them to articulate it, they screw it all up. They get the rule wrong.
Over the years, I have conducted this kind of experiment even with professional editors, who of all people should be most able to articulate the rule, and more often than not, even professional editors can’t articulate correctly the rule that they are actually applying! For example, you know that
*the red, big ball
is incorrect and that
the big, red ball is not
Even though a) you do not know the explicit rules for order of precedence of adjectives in English and b) you were never explicitly taught those rules.
Those rules, BTW, are as follows. These items stacked up in front of substantives appear in the following order:
1. Determiners — articles, adverbs, and other limiters.
2. Observation — postdeterminers and limiter adjectives (e.g., a real hero, a perfect idiot) and adjectives subject to subjective measure (e.g., beautiful, interesting), or objects with a value (e.g., best, cheapest, costly)
3. Size and Shape — adjectives subject to objective measure (e.g., wealthy, large, round), and physical properties such as speed.
4. Age — adjectives denoting age (e.g., young, old, new, ancient, six-year-old).
5. Color — adjectives denoting color (e.g., red, black, pale).
6. Origin — denominal adjectives denoting source of noun (e.g., French, American, Canadian).
7. Material — denominal adjectives denoting what something is made of (e.g., woolen, metallic, wooden).
8. Qualifier — final limiter, often regarded as part of the noun (e.g., rocking chair, hunting cabin, passenger car, book cover).
I could teach you those rules EXPLICITLY, but that’s not how brains are built tolearn the rule. Brains are built to construct, without conscious awareness on the part of the person that this is happening, an internal model of the grammar of the language based upon a lot of exposure to the data of the language.
In other words, people “know” the rules of the grammar of a language in the sense that they can unconsciously apply those rules, but they do not “know” the rules in the sense that they can tell you what rules they are applying, and that’s in the nature of the beast.
This should not be in the least bit surprising. Most human ability is like this. Unless you have studied the neurophysiology of perception, you do not “know” articulated equivalents of the functional rules your brain is applying in order to distinguish red from violet, but you can distinguish red from violet. You have an internal mechanism for doing that AUTOMATICALLY.
In the case of language, we are born with part of the mechanism in place, and the rest is BUILT by the brain based upon the ambient spoken language environment and, later, on reading as well.
What’s happening with proponents of traditional grammar is that they are falling prey to the psychological phenomenon known as an “illusion of control.” As a lot of research has shown, people tend to have greater illusory sense of
Thank you, bob. I may not have to know the rules cosciously, but I find it intriguing that people have taken the time to figure it out. I may even consciously learn them.. I am at least filing them away. 🙂
I do, too. I think that how language works is really fascinating, worthy of study for its own sake. But we must be suspicious of claims made for such study.
Experts in syntax, BTW, tend to be pretty lousy writers.
Sorry, Robert, my reply was a bit garbled in the cutting and pasting. Ignore the last paragraph. 🙂
Robert, I have posted an edited version of that post below, if you are interested.
cx: There are VASTLY DIFFERENT KINDS OF attainments that one gets from schooling, and not understanding the differences AMONG these leads to over-application of a single method–to using, often, the wrong tool for the job.
I love it when there’s a really long comment from this guy, followed by three more comments of him responding to himself.
Ah, a snide comment from the mysterious WT.
Sorry, I can’t respond, I fell asleep trying to read your other comments and responses to yourself.
I’m sharing information about methods for teaching English, WT, some of which is technical information. And you? Clearly, you intend to insult me. Please. Have at it. But do you have some other purpose here, Mr. anonymous “WT”?
And if you had managed to stay awake during these “comments” on comments, you would have discovered that two were corrections of typos and the third was a post on a different but related topic. And both posts have to do with pedagogical methods and get at the general point of this thread–which is the relative value of various methods for various purposes.
My general point, which I illustrated with specific examples, is that one makes a mistake by not recognizing that types of attainment in school differ from one another not only in degree but in KIND–are fundamentally, essentially different and require pedagogical approaches that are similarly FUNDAMENTALLY different.
I took the time to make these posts because this essential point is VERY COMMONLY MISUNDERSTOOD even by people who think of themselves as education professionals.
The stated purpose of this blog is to contribute to “discuss a better education for all.” That is what I am doing, WT. What are you doing, other than feebly attempting to insult me.
Don’t make me pull a Cyrano on you.
I don’t think WT is a teacher. A troll, yes. The best thing to do with a troll is ignore them. If you feed them, they feel a rush of excitement and then crave another similar fix. When someone responds to their trap, they get high, get a rush.
Nicole Sullivan’s definition of Troll: “People who seek conflict.”
Let the trolls have a stage here on this site, and they will do all they can to destroy the constructive conversations taking place.
And WT, if you HAD managed to stay awake during these comments, you might actually have learned something.
At any rate, I am sharing information about what is known, scientifically, about the acquisition of vocabulary and syntax. What is known scientifically about these matters is COMMONLY misunderstood, and that misunderstanding has enormous opportunity costs in classrooms.
People have actually studied how people acquire the vocabulary of a language. A great deal is known about this. And what is known bears little relation to how people go about teaching, and that gulf between our scientific understanding and our pedagogical methods is a serious one. Thus my posts, which are an attempt to address the gap.
As an English teacher, I sincerely love the “good Shepherd’s” long comments and postscript-type replies. Thank you, Bob, for your enlightening posts!
Bob,
Why think (WT) has no stamina. Ignore. Thanks for educating the readers.
What’s wrong WT? You need to use grit.
Here are some observations about following directions and the use of techniques associated with the arts to teach almost any subject.
First, shortly after releasing the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) with much publicity about international benchmarking, the CCSSO helped to fund a study that shows the CCSS are not, in fact, closely aligned with the standards of nations that score higher on international tests.
In mathematics, for example, the nations with the highest test scores—Finland, Japan, and Singapore—devote about 75% of instruction to “perform procedures.” The big surprise is that a significant part of “perform procedures” in mathematics and ELA is following directions and completing highly conventional assignments, free of elaborated analysis and generalization. These same nations give almost no attention to “solve non-routine problems. In other words, compliance with the conventions of schooling and following specific directions have a strong association with higher test scores. In other words, no-frills direct instruction works in favor of higher test scores. Porter, A. C. & Smithson, J. L. (2002, March 7). Alignment of assessments, standards and instruction using curriculum indicator data. American Educational Research Association Presentation. Retrieved from http://seconline.wceruw.org/Reference/PorterSmithson-AlignmentNCME02.pdf Accessed April 2, 2011.
Second, schools have become so barren and test driven that almost any form of aesthetically persuasive teaching strategy is aggrandized as innovative, even if it not new—chanting, call and response, choreographed movements, childhood ABC songs, choral reading, and the like.
The use of “arts integration” activities and programs for the purpose of raising test scores in other subjects has long been promoted by the National Endowment for the Arts, Arts Education Partnership, the Wallace and Dana Foundations (among others), and USDE’s Model Development and Dissemination Grants Program.
Since 2001, USDE evaluations of USDE grants for “model” programs in arts education focus on raising test scores in reading and math. Whatever students may learn in the arts is stripped of significance unless it serves that purpose. I think this is a pitiful policy. http://www2.ed.gov/programs/artsedmodel/performance.html
For a recent example of marketing songs to teach geography see http://www.4boysinc.com/teacherandtherockbots/lyrics_rockbots_world.html
Rote learning and indoctrination through “techniques” associated with the various arts have a long history.
Fascinating, Laura. Thank you.
So, back to the topic of this post.
Techniques such as the ones demonstrated in this video are useful for some very limited purposes. They can be used in lieu of bell work to get kids into work mode at the beginning of a class. They can be used for rehearsal of bodies of fact.
There was a time, about fifteen years ago, when I was traveling the country a lot, visiting schools. I was in urban public schools all across this country. Shockingly, in many that I went into, one could walk down the halls and see that class after class after class was simply pandemonium–zoos. I would not have believed this if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. I can imagine a school situation in which a new administration might implement such strategies as a corrective to a situation entirely out of control. However, as a long-term, typical approach to instruction, this doesn’t cut it, obviously.
One of the instructional shifts of the Common Core is supposed to be toward careful, critical examination of evidence gleaned from close reading of texts. Mouthing some words one has memorized is the exact opposite of that, obviously.
So, it’s useful to have STRUCTURAL means for maintaining sufficient order for learning to occur, but it’s a terrible mistake to turn students intro trained seals.
A liberal education is supposed to be the opposite of what is shown on this video. It is pathetic. I wonder if Obama would have sent his kids to a school like that.
Memorizing lyric poetry or beautiful expressive passages of prose or drama is one thing. This kind of memorizing slogans is something else and it is something that probably does not enhance learning, except in the very short term, and may even have highly negative consequences — like all forms of punitive, militaristic “training”. People, including children, need to have their dignity respected and not be forced to act like automatons.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140623142021.htm
Excerpt: While repetition enhances the factual content of memories, it can reduce the amount of detail stored with those memories, neurobiologists report following a recent study. This means that with repeated recall, nuanced aspects may fade away.
Thanks for the great link, Harold!
Is the Obama White House taking US public education full circle—to make sure that no one thinks for themselves? Except billionaires of course.
Squeezing out independent thinking was the core of the 19th century Prussian education system, and is again with President Obama’s Common Core.
Critical thinking must go. Children must be turned into computer programs. That’s why Bill Gates has been allowed to buy the U.S. public education system.
Lloyd,
thanks for posting this thought provoking video.
Being in band is similar to the Cultural Revolution ? OK, you’ve lost it.
Nashville should stick to country music.
I remember visiting a kindergarten classroom in 1999, where the youngsters were required to memorize the continents of the world. Their teacher led them through this exercise with a little ditty. Five-year-olds are just beginning to get to know their local communities: library, school, supermarket, park. Continents? What kind of a standard is that? I thought. And what about the value of this knowledge? Little did I know they were chanting in a hallowed tradition dating back to the mid-nineteenth century.
Organized fun and Whole Brain Teaching? Who are they kidding?
Again, it’s important for people to understand that we should match the pedagogical technique that we are using to what we are teaching, for the brain is set up to do differing kinds of learning or acquisition in vastly differing ways. A failure to understand this leads English teachers to think that teaching traditional grammar is going to reduce, dramatically, the frequency of errors in students’ speech and writing, but that’s not so.
What’s happening with proponents of instruction in traditional grammar is that they are falling prey to a cognitive bias known as “the illusion of control.” It’s well known that people tend to think that they have more control over circumstances than they actually have, and this is the primary reason for the persistence of the myth that explicit grammatical knowledge is the source of most of the grammatical judgments that people make.
In other words, people think that they are making grammatical judgments based on application of consciously learned rules when, in fact, they are making these judgments automatically and then attaching just-so stories to their judgments—an ex post facto explanations of what they did.
This can be quite easily demonstrated scientifically simply by comparing tests of people’s ability to make correct grammatical judgments to tests of their explicit knowledge of the unconscious rules underlying those judgments. In only a very tiny percentage of the cases, even among highly skilled writers and speakers, do people actually know the rules that they are unconsciously applying. They THINK that they know the rules, but if you ask them to articulate these, they get the rules wrong.
Over the years, I have conducted this kind of experiment with many professional editors, who of all people should be most able to articulate the rules they are using, and more often than not, even professional editors can’t articulate correctly the rules that they are actually applying!
For example, you know that
*the green, great dragon
is not grammatical and that
the great, green dragon is grammatical
You can make this judgment quite easily even if a) you do not know the explicit rules for order of precedence of adjectives in English and b) you were never explicitly taught those rules. I use this example because most people are never taught explicit rules for the order of precedence of adjectives and yet they follow these rules very precisely.
Those rules, BTW, are that the items stacked up in front of a substantive (an N) in a Determiner Phrase typically appear in the following order:
1. Determiners — articles, adverbs, and other limiters.
2. Observation — postdeterminers and limiter adjectives (e.g., a real hero, a perfect idiot) and adjectives subject to subjective measure (e.g., beautiful, interesting), or objects with a value (e.g., best, cheapest, costly)
3. Size and Shape — adjectives subject to objective measure (e.g., wealthy, large, round), and physical properties such as speed.
4. Age — adjectives denoting age (e.g., young, old, new, ancient, six-year-old).
5. Color — adjectives denoting color (e.g., red, black, pale).
6. Origin — denominal adjectives denoting source of noun (e.g., French, American, Canadian).
7. Material — denominal adjectives denoting what something is made of (e.g., woolen, metallic, wooden).
8. Qualifier — final limiter, often regarded as part of the noun (e.g., rocking chair, hunting cabin, passenger car, book cover).
(I took that list from a Wikipedia article and haven’t vetted it. Here’s a scholarly article on the topic: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/000329/current.pdf. Here’s an example illustrating the order: In the antique shop, I came across a perfect, beautiful, large, antique, black, American Bakelite rotary telephone.
I could teach you those rules EXPLICITLY, but the chances are good that you wouldn’t remember the rules, for that’s not how your brain is constructed to learn such rules. Brains are organized to create an internal model of the grammar of a language based data from the spoken and written linguistic environment, and explicit learning of those rules is largely irrelevant to that process.
As a result, people “know” the rules of the grammar of a language in the sense that they can unconsciously apply those rules, but they do not “know” the rules in the sense that they can tell you what rules they are applying, and that’s in the nature of the beast. That’s how the language machine in the brain works.
This should not be in the least bit surprising. Most human ability is like this. Unless you have studied the neurophysiology of perception, you do not “know” and cannot articulate equivalents of the functional rules that your brain is applying in order to distinguish red from violet. Nonetheless, you can distinguish red from violet. You have an internal mechanism for doing that AUTOMATICALLY.
In the case of language, we are born with part of the mechanism in place, and the rest is BUILT by the brain based upon the ambient spoken language environment and, later, on the written language environment as well.
So, you do not “learn” how to avoid dangling participles or “learn” how to avoid double negatives or “learn” a broad academic vocabulary in the same way that you “learn,” say, a new telephone number. Failure to understand that these very different kinds of “learnings” occur in very, very different ways has enormous consequences for our instruction. There’s enormous opportunity cost to using the wrong pedagogical approach for a particular job.
Some learnings are explicit. Some are not. They are acquisitions.
Some learnings are discretely enumerable. Some are not–they can only be acquired as a gestalt.
Some learnings are declarative (they are knowledge of how). Some are procedural (they are knowledge of what).
An ENORMOUS MISTAKE is made when people assume that learning to read and write and speak and listen and think is a like learning the facts and algorithms for elementary arithmetic and geometry. Those facts and algorithms can easily be put into a bullet list of discrete knowledge and skills, and one either knows them or one doesn’t. You either know what 7 times 9 is, or you don’t. And it’s easy to make up a bubble test question to find out whether you do.
Being able to “identify the main idea” in a given piece of prose or poetry is another matter altogether. This is NOT a skill like being able to carry out the algorithm for adding two multi-digit numbers. Neither is it a fact like 7 x 9 = 63. It is, in fact, DEMONSTRABLE that nothing like a GENERAL “identifying the main idea skill” exists!!!
So, when you see a list of the skills to be tested for math and the skills to be tested in ELA–that is, when you look at a list of “standards”–it’s important that you understand that there are very, very different KINDS of thing on those lists. These are not only as different as are apples and oranges, they are as different as an apple is from a hope for the future. They are different sorts of thing ALTOGETHER.
Let me illustrate the point about “the main idea.”
What is the main idea of the following?
“The ready to hand is encountered within the world. The Being of this entity, readiness to hand, thus stands in some relationship toward the world and toward worldhood. In anything ready to hand, the world is always there. Whenever we encounter anything, the world has already been previously discovered, though not thematically.”
Now, note that this passage would have a pretty low Lexile level. It doesn’t contain a lot of difficult (long, complicated, low-frequency) words. It doesn’t contain long or syntactically complicated sentences. But the chances are good that unless you are familiar with continental philosophy, you will have NO CLUE WHATSOEVER what this passage is saying. In order for you to understand the main idea of this passage, you would need, at a minimum, an introduction to the philosophical problems that Heidegger is addressing in the passage.
Now, what is the main idea of the following?
One of the limits of reality
Presents itself in Oley when they hay,
Baked through long days, is piled in mows. It is
A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene.
There the distant fails the clairvoyant eye.
Things stop in that direction and since they stop
The direction stops and we accept what is
As good. The utmost must be good and is
And is our fortune and honey hived in the trees
And mingling of colors at a festival.
Again, the language is not that difficult. One can easily define the less frequent words–enigmas, serene, clairvoyant, and utmost. But that’s not going to help you figure out what the “main idea” here is. For that, you will need an introduction to the kinds of concerns that Wallace Stevens took up in his poetry.
What is involved in figuring out the main idea of each is ENTIRELY DIFFERENT!!! Oh, sure, there are similarities. Both are passages in English. And both deal with a philosophical idea. Actually, they deal with philosophical ideas that are related. But there is NO ONE PROCEDURE–no one finding the main idea procedure–that I can teach you that will enable to you to determine what each passage means.
In other words, no instruction in some general “finding the main idea” skill is going to help you to find the main idea of either of these passages because THERE IS NO general “finding the main idea skill.” That such a thing exists is AN UTTER FICTION.
And, of course, attempting to test for possession of this mythical general finding the main idea facility is like requiring people to bag and bring home any other sort of mythical entity–a unicorn, Pegasus, or the golden apples from the tree at the edge of the world.
Now, the existence of a general “finding the main idea” facility is a fiction that people have come to by thinking that figuring out what’s happening in a piece of poetry or prose is a discrete, universally applicable skill like carrying out the algorithm for adding multidigit numbers.
It’s not.
And, of course, since there exists on general “finding the main idea skill,” there can exist no valid test of general finding the main idea skill.
Finding the main idea is context dependent in a way that adding multidigit numbers isn’t. It makes no difference whether you are adding 462 and 23 or 1842 and 748, you are going to follow the same procedure and draw upon the same class of facts. Not so with “finding the main idea.”
So, there treating basic mathematics and ELA as though they were the same sort of thing, with skills that can be similarly enumerated and tested, is a FUNDAMENTAL MISTAKE of the kind that philosophers call a CATEGORY ERROR.
And it’s a fundamental category error on which our lists of standards and our sumamtive standardized tests in ELA are both based!
Do you realize, Bob, that tonight i have saved two of your posts? It has been obvious to me that teaching my students a math algorithm was a different beast from that of teaching students to “Find the Main Idea.” For the life of me, though, I could not have articulated that difference. Thank you.