Joanne Yatvin, now retired, wrote the following commentary in 1990, almost 25 years ago. It was published in Education Week. It remains as pertinent today as it was then. In fact, with the Common Core adopted by most states, it is even more pertinent today than it was in 1990. Special thanks to Education Week for granting permission to reprint the article in full.
Published: September 19, 1990
Let More Teachers ‘Re-Invent the Wheel’
By Joanne Yatvin
As a young teacher, I served from time to time on committees charged with writing curricula and selecting new materials for teaching language arts and reading. Often, during committee deliberations, someone would come up with an idea that involved having teachers produce their own classroom strategies and activities. There was something very appealing about many of these ideas–at least to me–and we would spend a lot of time exploring their possibilities.
Invariably, however, some old hand on the committee would haul us up short and remind us that Faraway Publishers had already produced the kinds of materials we needed and that Next Door School District had already developed an efficient method for teaching what we wanted to teach.
“Let’s not re-invent the wheel,” Old Hand would say, and we wild-eyed visionaries, sobered at last, would agree. We stopped talking, adopted the publisher’s materials, accepted the other district’s method, and went our separate ways.
Nowadays, I am not so compliant. Maybe that’s because I have become an old hand myself and an administrator to boot. But I prefer to think it is because I have learned something along the way: You have to re-invent the wheel, whether you want to or not, because nobody else’s wheels will work on your wagon.
I recount this personal reflection now because it bears on a key issue in education today: Should we use “top-down” or “bottom-up” models for improving our schools? Which way works better for school districts, particularly large and troubled ones where a few people at the top are bright, capable, dedicated, aware of the newest research and theory, and well paid; and the masses at the bottom may not be any of those things?
Under such circumstances, wouldn’t it be better–no, the only way–to give those folks at the bottom a well constructed6wheel, teach them how to use it, and make them accountable? Of course, some clods would never catch on but, at the very least, every teacher would be using a proper wheel, so the kids would be sure to get some benefit.
My answer to the question is swift and unequivocal: No, dammit! For three good reasons. The first has to do with the so-called “Hawthorne effect” that all those bright, well paid types may have heard about in graduate school but, in my opinion, didn’t quite understand. In that famous experiment in an Illinois manufacturing plant, dimming the lights so it was harder for workers to see was found to increase production.
Many graduate students (and unfortunately, some of their professors) think that the Hawthorne anomaly illustrates the fact that human subjects who know they are part of a scientific experiment may sabotage the study in their eagerness to make it succeed. What it really shows is that, when people believe they are important in a project, anything works, and, conversely, when they don’t believe they are important, nothing works.
The second reason for championing greater creativity for all is that, through the process of inventing, people learn to understand what their inventions can and cannot do. They learn how to fine-tune them for optimum performance, and, maybe, figure out what changes are needed to produce even better models in the future. In short, they acquire the intimate knowledge of object, system, and use that makes an invention truly their own.
The third reason is simply that a big part of teaching is inventing. Good teachers invent successfully all day long, every day. They invent better ways to explain lessons, to entice reluctant learners, to bring unruly classes under control, and to fire children’s imaginations. When teachers won’t or can’t invent, believe me, the kids will–100 ways to shoot their teachers down. If we want good teaching at the bottom of the pyramid, we’ve got to let all teachers learn their craft.
But given the structure of schools and school districts we now have, changing to an inventing mode is extremely difficult. The model of school operation in use for more than 50 years rests firmly on premises of industrial efficiency, institutional uniformity, whole-into-parts logic, and worker obedience that are completely antithetical to the concept of invention. That model never takes into account the fact that the people who make up the mass of the school pyramid have professional and personal needs that–however we try to suppress or sublimate them–will screw up efficiency and logic every time.
Ultimately, the only way to improve American education is to let schools be small, self-governing, self-renewing communities where everyone counts and everyone cares. Yet the people who have the power to make that happen–legislatures, state departments of education, superintendents, and school boards–will not. Convinced that they are the only intelligent, competent, and caring people around, they fear those barbarians in the classroom, teachers and children, who, if allowed, would dissipate all our public treasure of time and money hacking away at rough stone wheels as our nation sank into chaos.
They are, of course, dead wrong. But even if they were right, those rough stone wheels, forged by people who needed to use them, would roll and carry the load of learning, while the smooth round ones sent down from the central office would languish in classroom cupboards.
Joanne Yatvin, a former elementary-school principal and classroom teacher, is now superintendent of Clackamas County School District 107 in Boring, Oregon.
Update: Yatvin is a former teacher, superintendent, and president of the National Council of Teachers of English. She is retired but remains concerned about education issues.
This is so well said and so true!! When I first started teaching, I had a curriculum that was broken down into thematic units with “outcome statements” /standards that told what students should be able to do with the material they learned. i was befuddled because there was no text that aligned with all the units and the only text available was really outdated. I spent an awful lot of time my first three years “re-inventing the wheel”. I attended workshops, read research about the most effective ways to present material and cut, pasted and drew all weekend long. Somewhere in my third year in the classroom I was able to pilot and purchase textbooks that were better than the ones I had. However, I was now able to better evaluate the materials my school ultimately purchased, and I knew that the text was only a small portion of the resources and tools available to me. If I had been handed materials that I was told “fit” and that I had to use, I would have never developed the skills I did and I would never have understood the “art” of teaching the way that I did. I used to tell newer teachers that they had to “cut their own path” in the forest. The rest of us were there to guide them and offer tools, resources and advice, but ultimately they would be happier and more effective teachers to find the methods that worked best for them. I still believe this to be true. Good teaching is an art that can be informed by science, research and data, but not replaced by one-size fits all methods with formulaic and robotic strategies that EVERYONE must employ in the same manner.
Am I right or wrong in assuming…..when she says she is now an old hand…..she is talking about 1990?
You’re right, Joe. But the “old” in “old hand” just means experienced. Anyway, I’m still around and still writing about education.
This part is key: The “Hawthorne effect” … shows that, when people believe they are important in a project, anything works, and, conversely, when they don’t believe they are important, nothing works.
For one perspective, an excerpt from an LATIMES editorial, 9-18-2014, last paragraph of “The Bad-Old Days at LAUSD”:
“The school board, most of whose members seem to have genuine concern for the well-being of students, should be asking itself how well off those students will be if Deasy feels pressured or micromanaged into leaving or is fired. How well off were they when almost nothing happened in the district without the approval of UTLA?”
Link: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-lausd-utla-teachers-union-superintendent-dea-20140918-story.html
So when you lead the charge into the totally avoidable and predictable $1.3 billion iPad fiasco you shouldn’t be micromanaged or feel pressured—poor fella might get fired or feel compelled to quit!—but when it comes to teachers:
Not only shouldn’t they be trusted to DO the right thing, they can’t be trusted to ever LEARN to do the right thing.
John Deasy: as many bites at the apple [or Apple] of autonomy and growth as he wants, whether anything good ever results from it.
Teachers: not even one bite. Because of their congenital inferiority they need to be micromanaged by the leaders of the self-styled “new civil rights movement of our time.”
Just ask Ms. Patrena Shankling.
😎
P.S. As the old [?] definition goes— mental midgets: “education reformers” that think that students and teachers are widgets.
Joanne Yatvin’s comments are indeed as valid today as they were a quarter of a century ago. They reminded me of two comments I learned early in my teaching career from older, more experienced teachers.
The first was from a math teacher who viewed all the various approaches, techniques and “tricks” he had accumulated during his career as arrows in his quiver of “things that worked”. He was open to new ideas and concepts etc that he was exposed to through varying types of professional development, but was careful in adding an arrow to his quiver just because it was new and novel. For him, the value of the “new arrow” had to be better than something he was already doing as there was limited space in his quiver – it did not have an unlimited capacity. In order to adopt something new, it had to be be an improvement over something that was to be displaced. The lesson was not lost on me. There is a limit to how many aspects of teaching that a teacher can be expected to utilize fluently. Like the repertoire of musicians, it is limited, however comprehensive and expansive it may seem.
The second was from one of my organic chemistry professors. Due to the nature of the carbon atom’s valence (outermost) electrons, carbon can never form more than four bonds with other atoms. In order for it to form a new bond with a different atom, it must break a bond with one the atoms or groups of atoms it is already bonded to. That atom or group that is displaced is called a “leaving group.” The point of the analogy is not that teaching requires just four skills, but rather, regardless of how many of those skills are essential and valuable, in order for a teacher to adopt some new strategy, technique or ideology, there must be ” a leaving group”. Something else has to go.
How sad that in order to add the requirements demanded by adoption of RttT and other aspects of the current corporate reform, the “leaving group”contains those things that work – their pedagogical value supported by experience and theory, and by perhaps most importantly, common sense – which is not as common as one might hope.
“That model never takes into account the fact that the people who make up the mass of the school pyramid have professional and personal needs that–however we try to suppress or sublimate them–will screw up efficiency and logic every time.”
Yes, people are not robots on an assembly line.
The grand irony, paradox and hypocritical deceit in all of this is: we learn in graduate school about organizational systems, constructivism, and the reality/need for input and feedback from stakeholders, so that the system can improve, correct, remediate, “reform” itself.
Yet, in practice we have become a top-down draconian “ivory tower” mandate-driven empire, controlled by those that have no practical pedagogic experience or wisdom (all they want is for us to buy their new and “improved” products).
The head (admin and upper level management) is not connected to the brain (teachers) and all we get is endless cycles of poorly derived “reform”, which can really be called educational “deform”.
If I may add to the “grand irony, paradox …”
Willfully joining a KNOWN Top/Down Bureaucracy expecting
AUTONOMY.
Pretending the Mother of all Bureaucracy (Gov.) created a
sub-bureaucracy of greater power.
Blasting “tests, sorting,and grading” while viewing the “tests, sorting,
and grading” of certification, as sacrosanct.
Wow.. that’s a GREAT one. There will ALWAYS be people out there to tell us everything we’ve been doing is all wrong! (remember the ITA alphabet? )
“when people believe they are important in a project, anything works, and, conversely, when they don’t believe they are important, nothing works.”
Good to see this great lesson from the Hawthorne effect revived. Thanks to the author, Diane, and EdWeek.
One of my earliest memories, is of my mother and her sister, both rural school teachers in Nebraska in the 1930’s, discussing the advantages of the one-room school and lamenting consolidation. A single teacher had almost total atonomy over the entire operation of the school, with only an occasional visit by the county superintendent. Students worked at their own pace. Everyone was on an individual program although it did not require meetings and pages of paperwork/computerwork. Those one-teacher schools turned out well educated, well socialized and well disciplined students. (Just take a look at an 8th Grade Math textbook from that era; you will be surprised at the level of achievement and practicality. For many, at that time, 8th Grade was the end of their formal education so it had to be “rigorous”.)
Today we are facing the prospect of both teachers and students being treated like robots to be programed and constantly monitored and recorded electronically for compliance by the masters of the universe.
Folks, this is not about Education; this is about CONTROL.
While I too recoil from the prospect of mandated curricula and methods that are inane, I think there’s something tragically inefficient about expecting every teacher to “reinvent the wheel”. I have often dreamed of a rich communal lore for this or that course being preserved and passed down from master teachers of the past to the teachers of today. It’s sad that each teacher has to deliver first and second-draft quality courses, when, by standing on the shoulders of those who came before us, we could be delivering the equivalent of a beautiful, polished fiftieth draft. But I’d want this lore to be held by the profession, or the state, not by a corporation. Sadly that’s where the intellectual property of our profession seems to be migrating.
Ponderosa
I agree with the idea of not having to reinvent the wheel. But I also think each generation of teachers should be intellectually aware of how well-honed lessons, courses, and conventional knowledge have been shaped and become a legacy to build on or to reject.
I am in favor of young teachers being introduced to the histories of ideas that have become “lore” in the sense of being taken-for-granted truths for the present, and too often regarded as merely practical things to do, disconnected from larger systems of value.
This is to say that I favor informed eclecticism as the basis for practice. Teaching can morph into indoctrination. simplistic silver bullet thinking, and cheerleading for the latest game-changing innovation.
It is rapidly becoming a job where compliance with endless rules, ridiculous expectations, and arbitrary decisions made by others are the norm.
There is big difference between authoritarianism and having authoritative knowledge, the latter a combination of academic” knowledge and practical wisdom.
The critical commentary on this and other blogs is sustained by an acute sense of the authoritarianism in this era, evident in the flood of one-size-fits all policies in combination with audacious claims about the need for evidence-based decisions and a conspicuous disdain for authoritative knowledge, especially from experienced teachers.