Nancy Bailey reviews the impact of No Child Left Behind and its ill-fated “Reading First” component. NCLB came to be a hated law yet stayed on the booksfrom 2002 until 2015, when it was replaced by the slightly less odious “Every Student Succeeds Act.” As if a federal law could make every student succeed.
Bailey writes that the demand that every child should learn to read in kindergarten is developmentally unsound and unrealistic.
The combination of NCLB, Race to the Top, and Common Core is frightful for young children.
“Teachers and their ed. schools are blamed when kindergartners don’t show up in first grade reading. Yet in years past we never expected kindergartners to read.
“It is developmentally inappropriate! We have monumental research by early childhood developmental researchers that goes back years. We know what is developmentally important to teach at what times.
“It’s important to remember too that students were never doing badly as indicated by NCLB proponents. Poverty was the real culprit when it came to student achievement.
“As far as learning to read goes, language develops from the moment a child is born, and there are many wonderful ways to promote the joy of reading.
“Some children easily acquire reading skills without formal phonics instruction. They are curious about words and are able to sound letters out as they listen to and enjoy picture books. They may read well before they start school.
“Other children learn a little later. And some with disabilities may need extra assistance with a formal phonics program.
“Repeatedly testing young children to find out how they read at such an early age would be better spent reading out loud lovely, funny, engaging picture books, and letting children develop their language skills through play!”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
People who are NOT certified teachers have NO BUSINESS telling us what to do. They have NOT ONE CLUE.
It’s easy to sit back with no knowledge and make up stuff in order to bash teachers in order to use kids for their pocket books.
After all, Donny Jr. just told the world that he thinks teachers are “losers.” Well Jr. is the loser. What Jr. did is called PROJECTION.
Where are the mental health professionals? Why hasn’t Donny been subjected to a psychological evaluation by several psychological / mental health providers?
I truly think we have a mental health crisis in this country and it is getting worse.
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NCLB not only ruined the joy of reading, it ruined the joy of learning in a content rich environment. NCLB promoted reductionist thinking in only two subject areas, reading and math. Real learning is deep and content driven where students can think expansively. Rich learning is context related. It encourages students to understand more about the world including history, science, social sciences and the arts. Peter Greene recently posted an article about “reform’s” sudden awareness that content and information matter. Public schools have understood the value of content forever! It is totally ridiculous that these wealthy privatizers repeatedly blunder and destroy in the name of “reform.” Now we should appreciate that these amateurs see that content matters. Trained professional teachers have known this forever!!! Yet, the people with money and sycophant politicians get to impose their miseducation on America’s young people for twenty years in order to collect data, not educate. http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2019/02/speedbumps-on-road-to-curriculums.html#comment-form
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Amen. Yes! Yes! Yes!!!!!!
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collecting data over education: the entire mess in four words
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There is always a Hidden Curriculum. In the earliest school experience, that curriculum needs to be teaching that this learning business is one hell of a lot of fun. That’s because the prime directive for educators needs to be to produce intrinsically motivated, lifelong learners. Yes, direct instruction in phonics in elementary school works for most kids. But the learning to love learning has to come first. This is essential.
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This debate about early childhood education raises what I think is the key problem with the whole Ed Deform agenda. These Ed Deformers don’t understand the importance of intrinsic motivation,.
When I think back on those teachers who made an enormous difference in my life, they were always ones to whom I connected emotionally because they
were deeply learned in the subject they taught;
had become deeply learned because they were passionate about that subject;
believed that their students would live fuller, richer, and, in some cases, more productive lives if they knew the subject;
and
put in the time and effort to make sure that that connection happened.
In all these cases, I bought in. I received the windfall of that teacher’s passion. I gathered the fruit that fell from that tree, and I wanted to become, myself, like that person.
In every case, the teacher became a mentor, someone I looked up to and wanted to be like because of his or her vast knowledge and understanding. In every case, the teacher was a model of what an intrinsically motivated, life-long learner was like, and this modeling was THE MOST IMPORTANT THING.
All the problems that I have with Ed Deform stem from the Deform model not making possible what I’ve described above.
First, because education is about a human connection, it can’t be done through machines alone. Depersonalized learning won’t cut it. And that’s why online courses and educational software modules have such extraordinarily high failure rates. People should have learned this lesson from the failure of programmed learning and language lab-based instruction back in the 1960s. Education is transactional—it happens because a person connects to a person. Ed Deformers tend to be extremely self-oriented folks whose lives are NOT about personal connection. They’ve succeeded in the world because they are extremely aggressive and pushy and often got their way, and so they don’t grok this. They are Steve Jobs screaming at a technician because Jobs’s T1 line hasn’t been installed a day after it was ordered. They are all about the outcome they want, and the personal relationship is irrelevant.
Second, passion for a subject is highly idiosyncratic. This woman teaches American history, but what she really knows and cares a LOT about is not the whole of the subject but, say, the interactions between the Puritans and Pilgrims, on the one hand, and the indigenous peoples around them, on the other. This man is an English teacher, but he also writes short stories, and what he really knows and cares a LOT about is how a good story is put together—how the machine of a story works, whether it be a folktale reworked into one of the tales in the Arabian Nights or a story in this month’s New Yorker. Ed Deformers tend to have a rage for order and thoroughness. They love checklists, and they have a lot of hubris. They think that they have, because of their superior ability, the right to tell everyone else what matters and what doesn’t. They are autocrats who want to do the thinking for everyone else, so autonomy and idiosyncrasy drive them crazy. So, they don’t understand this key thing about learning—how idiosyncratic it is. And they don’t understand that what matters is not that a student mastered all the items on some bullet list but, rather, that he or she caught the bug of that teacher’s passion and became, himself or herself, an intrinsically motivated learner as a result of that. Why is this important? Because no course of study can teach you enough. Learning has to be a lifelong process. That computer language you learned in school won’t be the ones that people are programming in 30 years from now, and, in fact, programming itself will have changed in character dramatically by then. Only the lifelong, intrinsically motivated learner will be able to keep up. And one learns to be like that from a human model, from a person who has taken a deep dive into some part of a subject, over many years, because he or she cares about it.
Ed Deformers typically want for their own children the kind of education I’ve described above, but they don’t think that children of proles can benefit from such education. They think that prole children need training in doing precisely what they are told for extended periods of time—in having the “grit” to persevere in the alienating task. They don’t understand that nothing much happens, in the longterm, without motivation and that only intrinsic motivators work for cognitive tasks. And they don’t understand that deprofessionalized, scripted teachers, without autonomy, won’t be intrinsically motivated and won’t be models of that for their students. They want autonomy for those in their caste but not for their inferiors.
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Sorry that that response was so long-winded. Here’s the thing, in a nutshell. The kid who learns, in preschool, that school is a place where one can learn about octopuses from books and that octopuses are cool has learned THE ESSENTIAL THING–that learning is wonderful, in and of itself. THAT MUST COME FIRST.
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The wealthy believe that a cognitive education taught by passionate professionals is important. However, the children of the working class and poor should be treated like rats in a maze. Why should we except the rationing of intellectual access? This intellectual class warfare. Lots of “big ideas” come from someone that is not a member of the 1%. We must continue to fight equitable cognitive access. All students deserve the right to be inspired by passionate professionals. Great post, Bob!
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This is intellectual class warfare. Precisely. You nailed it, retired teacher.
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A really instructive example of what I’m talking about here is Khan Academy. It’s started out as this quirky site in which a passionate teacher, Sal Khan, made videos and shared stuff that really, really interested him. The site took some heat for occasional errors, but it was a great delight. Khan was a wonderful teacher, and his passion for what he was doing was really contagious. Then the Gates money started pouring into Khan Academy, and with it, all this command and control. It was as though it became an occupied state, doing the bidding of the Emperor. It became a place where someone passionate and quirky and brilliant like Vi Hart couldn’t stand to work. Sal Khan’s wonderful, quirky videos got buried under mountains of Common Core bullet list-aligned pretests and post-tests and check tests, and pretty soon, this beautiful thing became an excruciatingly dull nightmare.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
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I think that’s what happened with han Academy and Hart. I don’t know this for a fact. It’s just a suspicion.
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AMEN! Well said!
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I love the long response Bob, it’s musito my ears.
One quibble: “People should have learned this lesson from the failure of programmed learning and language lab-based instruction back in the 1960s.”
Those programs were/ are are a helpful adjunct for govt for-serv trainees, and students taking those crash-lang-learning college courses [8cred/ semester] (along w/small intensive conversational sections). In other words, they continue to be helpful for highly-motivated adults . But not for K12, for the same reasons trying to do K12 or even college at a computer fails for all but a couple% dogged & highly-motivated individuals.
K12 for-lang teachers these days actively seek out & share kid-friendly internet sources to beef up listening/ speaking practice, but that’s enhancement. [& they’ll be free to do so as long as for-lang ed flies under the radar of ed-reformers 😉 ]
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Agreed. Don’t get me wrong, I think that such programs SHOULD be created and available for people who want or need to work on their own (e.g., to people without access to good schools and teachers, to highly motivated adults, to people who want to do quick credit recovery, and so on)–but as options or supplements.
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Bob: Do not apologize for the length of a response. I will comment on the idiosyncratic nature of teaching.
One of the early defenses of standards that was advanced to me was that teachers, especially in history, would spend all year on their passion to the exclusion of all else. Around here that meant spending all year on World War II or the Civil War, for most people had a fascination for Bob those wars. I agreed with the idea that there existed many history teachers who only taught one thing. I was not so confident that writing lists of things was a good idea. In college I wrote a satirical essay about behavioral objectives, one step away from the modern standards movement.
It seems to me that we can be persuaded to be balanced in our presentation of material with appeals to our professional status. Trying to strong-arm teachers into teaching specific ideas gets a course into trouble. There is so much to teach in a history class. Do I teach revolutions or romantic art. One using the other? When will I spread the subject too thin across the bread to flavor it?
If I taught literally all the standards of my present world history course, I would be at it for three years. It strikes me that a similar floor plan 25 years ago would have produced a house that never got built.
All that said, I am fascinated by the connections and ideas in history, and attempt to use history to make the students aware of the changing zeitgeist that produced the onset of representative government, nationalism, fascination with ethnic identification and glorification of nationality, fascism, communism, Impressionism, as you can see, I am drowning. But it is a pleasant way to go.
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I’m betting, Roy, that a significant number of students catch your fascination with “the connections and ideas in history” and become fascinated by the wealth of detail that you can share about some particular historical event or circumstance and then go on, themselves, to read history as adults. And yes, learning has no end, and it’s an extraordinarily pleasant way to go, and many students will experience those pleasures because of the model that you provide to them of what a life-long learner is.
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SERIOUSLY!!!!!!!!!!!! Blame history teachers for this slavish devotion to standards?????????????????? I am SICK of history being the punching bag for everything. Roy, I am a history teacher and know a lot of history teachers. You have no idea what you’re talking about. The history teachers who teach one thing and nothing else are still around, and standards do NOT stop them. Nor do administrators or anyone with power. The rest of us normal people that teach history know that balance is important, and do it accordingly. Standards be damned. This is not us.
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The Reformers need to be slowed down when they suggest things. Reading is an inherently enjoyable activity and if students are provided with sweet, lovely, magical books that give them the joy of reading they will get it.
But they do not have to be rushed, at all. And if children fall into love with books they will stay with it forever. But the adult who teaches the child needs to be sensitive to the child’s development.
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Sincere question: do any of your teachers out there find that students are enjoying Common Core English/Language Arts? Or that they’re learning to read better now that we have CC ELA? I suspect it’s possible in the hands of an exceptional teacher, but I see no love and no gains at my school.
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“you” not “your”
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I’ve met one or two ELA teachers, Ponderosa–ones who are OK with the CC$$ but take it with a HUGE grain of salt. If the “standard” says that the student will be able to show how “the use of figurative language affects tone and mood, “and they are doing something with a selection that is in some way related to figurative language, they think that that’s “covering the standard.” Such teachers choose significant texts that they care deeply about and that have been meaningful in our general cultural development and “sort of” relate them to the standard but actually go about the business of teaching the text and don’t take the “standard” very seriously. And, as a result, their students actually learn something. But the ones who think that every lesson should be about “teaching the standard” make their students’ lives a holy hell of test prep exercises based on snippets of text and questions modeled on those on the state exams.
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You teach as well, don’t you, Ponderosa? What is your experience there? How would you answer your own question? Isn’t it always true that the great teachers themselves are very knowledgeable and that they impart a lot of knowledge to their students and that they basically don’t give a microbe on a hair of a rat’s tushy for David Coleman’s puerile list of vague “skills”?
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I teach history, but it strikes me that I never hear kids say anything good about ELA class since Common Core took over. Perhaps not everyone hates it, but I’ve never heard someone say they love it. Conversely, I do hear kids say they love history (not just my history class, but other teachers’ too). Significantly, at our school history remains the only core subject that has resisted the infiltration of Common Core-ification –i.e. demoting fact learning and teacher-led instruction in lieu of marooning kids in group work or with computers to do test prep exercises and painful, mostly fruitless close readings. At a recent IEP meeting a mom told the group that history is the only class at school her son likes. There may be CC ELA classrooms where kids are lovin’ it; I just am not aware of them.
I’ve been ranting lately about the evils of Progessivism/Constructivism. The standards movement, to be fair, is in one sense a traditionalist reaction against Progressivism. We can’t blame Progressives for the fact that we have standards now But it seems to me that one reason the standards movement has turned out so terribly is that, in ELA at least, they imported Progressivists conception of what learning is: i.e. vague skills rather than concrete knowledge. So NCLB/Common Core is the worst of both worlds: rigid demands mixed with a mythical notion of what learning is.
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“a mythical notion”
I entirely concur. And students are starting to get used to this. Progressives, who were for good reason interested in their motivating students, threw the baby out with the bathwater when they jettisoned a knowledge-rich curriculum. And students have got used to classes being those knowledge deserts. I taught English, film, debate, and theatre. Kids would come into my film classes thinking that they were just going to sit around and watch movies and bs about them. Big surprise! There was a lot to learn, about design and film technology and film structure and how film scripts are constructed and the history of film and theories and approaches to film making and much, much more. And knowing that stuff–knowing, for example, the principles of composition of frame or approaches to putting together a montage–changed the way they saw films. They could never look at them in the same way again. The experience was richer, deeper. There was more to see. Lack of knowledge causes inattentional blindness–not seeing the elephant on the basketball court.
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So, please rant on. People need to learn just how fascinating a knowledge-rich curriculum is.
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Peruse these four life science (biology) learning standards for elementary students (grades 3, 4, 5). Two of the standards are from MA (2006); two are NGSS (2012).
1) Identify the structures in plants (leaves, roots, flowers, stem, bark, wood) that are responsible for food production, support, water transport, reproduction, growth, and protection.
2) Construct an argument with evidence that in a particular habitat some organisms can survive well, some survive less well, and some cannot survive at all.
3) Describe the major stages that characterize the life cycle of the frog and butterfly as they go through metamorphosis.
4) Use a model to describe that animals receive different types of information through their senses, process the information in their brain, and respond to the information in different ways.
The NGSS are bastard children of the Common Core; the ghosts of Pimentel, Zimba, and L. Coleman are clearly evident.
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Pardon me. The classic experiment in inattentional blindness was with a gorilla on the basketball court.
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Standardized testing was fine before high stakes were added with the NCLB. Race to the Common Core Bottom just made things even worse. It doesn’t just take the joy out of learning ELA; it takes the learning out of learning ELA. It makes students less “College and Career Ready.” I ask you, did and of your literature or history professors ever assign you to read only one chapter of a book, without context, over and over again? I assume not. They wanted you to read the whole book and derive contextual meaning from it.
The more knowledge a student has, the more context the student has, and the more “College Ready” the student is. ELA is not skill based; it is knowledge based. The only one who can assess the knowledge is the one who assigns the reading. Tragically, for the most part, ELA has been effectively destroyed. But again, the real problem isn’t the curriculum, but the high stakes testing that drives it.
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My students HATE to read and write. They don’t read for pleasure, and most of them don’t even want to write a paragraph that is a personal story. And when they do, the story is non-sensical. It doesn’t follow any pattern or organization or anything. CC and computer “graded” writing have destroyed the ability to read and write for a generation, who will be functionally illiterate.
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As Baily stated, “The combination of NCLB, Race to the Top, and Common Core is frightful for young children.” I maintain it is harmful and stunts their academic growth but that is what happens when we let politicians and businesses decide the curriculum.
When children are read to from day one they learn to read without formal instruction and for sure don’t need a structured phonics approach. They learn early that reading is more than just blending- sounding out words; that it is a process that allows one to gain knowledge, comprehend, analyze, synthesis to apply knowledge and visualize/imagine. Reading is a thinking process, drawing on background information to construct new meaning. It involves and interaction between what we already know and the author’s ideas. Phonics, knowing about the letters and sounds in written words is more important for encoding (spelling) than decoding (reading.)
Phonics has many short comings:
– Phonics only give an approximate pronunciation.
-Phonics only helps if the words are already in one’s hearing vocabulary.
-There is no carry over. My grandchildren reinforced the fact that there was no carry over from what they learned in the structured phonetic approach to their reading.
-Every rule is broken at some time; e.g., I no sooner tell the children, “When there is only one vowel in the word and between two consonants the vowel is usually short.” The next word invariably will be kind, find, mind, wild, or mild.
-Phonics is a skill; readers occasionally use skills but constantly need to use strategies. For the emergent reader only the initial letter sound is needed.
-With so many varied speech patterns around the county, how can phonics be the primary approach to reading? There is a single spelling across dialects that pronounce words very differently. My son once stopped a Boston police officer for directions. He asked the officer to repeat it five times and finally gave up. My son couldn’t figure out what the officer was saying.
-“And when the rules being taught do not match the learner’s own dialect, it is that much more confusing and that much harder to learn. Yet another barrier for far too many children! “
-How about the children with an auditory discrimination problem? They can not learn via phonics. Extra help in phonic lessons is a waste of time.
“Phonics instruction should never dominate reading instruction. At least half the time devoted to reading should be spent reading connected text -stories, poems, plays, trade books etc. No more than 25% (and possibly less) of the time should be spent on phonics instruction. Children should read some text daily, preferably a complete story, with phonics instruction integrated into the text reading.” Steven Stahl, The Reading Teacher April 1992
Take words from the story of the day to teach a phonetic skill or sounds. Phonics does not have to be taught in sequence. Furthermore, children do not have to know the entire alphabet before they can receive reading instruction.
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ponderosa: Having been retired since 2010 as a consideration, I have to say (last having taught in middle schools for 13 years) that, hands down, students loved their social studies classes the most. I was an L.D. Resource Teacher, so those were inclusive classes for me, & I, myself, loved them & the teachers, who made it all come alive.
(My daughter–a student in the 90s & early 2000s {a freshman in 2001} also loved those classes, as did I, a student in the 60s–what an historic period that was!)
The memories bring a smile to my lips, &, as long as we have social studies, history, civics & related courses, the kids are alright.
Thank you, ponderosa, & all of you who ensure that bad history will not repeat itself, & that critical thinking will prevail.
We will NOT be silenced, & students WILL learn!
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Ponderosa, stated,
▪ “I’ve been ranting lately about the evils of Progessivism/Constructivism. The standards movement, to be fair, is in one sense a traditionalist reaction against Progressivism. We can’t blame Progressives for the fact that we have standards now But it seems to me that one reason the standards movement has turned out so terribly is that, in ELA at least, they imported Progressivists conception of what learning is: i.e. vague skills rather than concrete knowledge. So NCLB/Common Core is the worst of both worlds: rigid demands mixed with a mythical notion of what learning is. ”
Progressivism and Constructivism are not the same. Progressivism was a political movement. Under that notion educators bought into the progressive way of thinking about society and education. Constructivism would fall under the progressive philosophy. Constructivist education is when learners actively construct meaning by building on background knowledge, experience and reflect on those experiences.”
Research shows that constructivist learning is congruent with how the brain learns. There is plenty of research to prove, that constructivist education is the best way for learners to learn- interactive, anchored in personal experience – contextualized.
Plus NY State Learning Standards were in place before CC and were far superior.
NY State Learning Standards did not change the curriculum; it gave us a new way of teaching, incorporating higher order thinking skills including the imagination; CC ignores the imagination. Common Core not only imposes a new curriculum but limits the thinking skills to be taught. New York Learning Standards builds on prior knowledge and makes learning fun. Children’s minds are activated in bridging prior knowledge to the new- Marie Clay’s philosophy. Common Core ignores the interactive approach using the direct teaching, skills-based approach.
As said numerous times, CC standards are too often not age appropriate and pushes the curriculum downward ordering the children to follow inappropriate standard under the delusion that “one-size-fits all.” This will only cause emotional problems.
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“NY State Learning Standards did not change the curriculum; it gave us a new way of teaching, incorporating higher order thinking skills including the imagination.”
Do you have examples of NY learning standards that did this? The old NY science standards (pre-NGSS), thankfully did not incorporate higher order thinking or student imagination. Thinking cannot be taught and imagination is nowhere near our jurisdiction.
Can you cite the studies that support constructivist learning? In my practical experience, asking young adolescents to assemble their own knowledge is inefficient, ineffective, counterproductive, and is dislike by the most serious students. There is no evidence that I have encountered suggesting that kids learn better when they are asked to teach themselves.
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The Kirschner article explains that students do indeed construct knowledge. This much the Constructivists have right. But novices do it much better when given lucid direct instruction than when left to their own devices. This is Constructivists’ central error. They think, wrongly, that listening and looking to a teacher are passive, inert processes, when in fact attentive students are actively sorting and manipulating teacher input, simultaneously deploying and tinkering with knowledge schema in their long-term memories. They think the quality of learning is better when kids are deprived of teacher talk and have to struggle more. The Reformers saw this call for struggle and saw “Rigor!”, so they embraced it as the path to higher achievement. But it leads in the opposite direction, unless the student has already been endowed with robust background knowledge. It’s rigor without results.
“In each new decade since the mid-1950’s, when empirical studies provided solid evidence that the then popular unguided approach did not work, a similar approach popped up under a different name with the cycle then repeating itself. Each new set of advocates for unguided approaches seemed either unaware of or uninterested in previous evidence that unguided approaches had not been validated. This pattern produced discovery learning, which gave way to experiential learning, which gave way to problem-based and inquiry learning, which now gives way to constructivist instructional techniques.” (Kirschner, “Why Minimal Guidance In Instruction Does Not Work”)
Like climate deniers, evidence doesn’t matter to the nabobs of education.
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I suggest giving this article a read: Putting Students On the Path to Learning.
Click to access ae_spring2012.pdf
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Building on background knowledge requires actually having a body of knowledge to build upon. Chance favors the prepared mind, Pasteur said. Once I was interviewing a prospective editor. She was a graduate of a prestigious writing program. I asked her if she knew the standard editorial markings and how to use them. I will never forget her answer. She said, “No. They didn’t teach us those. Mostly, we just sat around and bs’d [she used the whole word] about gender relations.”
ELA classes have commonly, now, devolved into alternation between group activities in which students who know very little learn from students who know very little and test prep activities in which students relate some item from Coleman’s vague, abstract bullet list to a snippet of text in order to answer questions modeled on those on state tests. Far, far, far too often, more often than not, in my experience, the poorly conceived items on the bullet list have BECOME the curriculum.
Back in the 1960s or 1970s, when a junior student of American literature opened his or her lit textbook to the chapter on literature in the Puritan Era, he or she would learn about Calvin and Luther and the Protestant Reformation and Original Sin and election and local governance and the Protestant Work Ethic and how learning to read was related to Protestant theology and individualism and rejection of intermediates and how Catholic beliefs differ from Protestant ones and how the Puritans and Pilgrims viewed themselves vis-a-vis the indigenous population–and all of this learning enabled them to understand a) what writers of the time were actually saying and b) how they thought and c) how they influenced the development of American culture and government. This knowledge would enable them to understand a LOT about how the country they lived in came to be the place that it is today.
Now, open the CCSS version of that same 11th-grade American literature text, and you will find NONE (or almost none) OF THAT. Instead, you will fine incredibly vague questions about how a piece of figurative language affected the tone and mood of a snippet from “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” taken completely out of context. Students and, often, the teachers THINK that they’ve read the piece, but they don’t really understand it because they need the context for that.
Turn to the next unit, on the Transcendentalists, and it’s the same crap. Students walk away thinking only that the Transcendentalists were these guys who liked nature or something–without any understanding of Transcendentalist philosophy or where it came from or how it influenced later American thought, movements, and institutions. But, there will be the same ridiculous exercise about how a piece of figurative language in two paragraphs from Emerson’s Essay on Nature affect those paragraphs’ tone and mood.
And so, kids leave that English class knowing nothing that they didn’t know before they entered it, except, perhaps, that there was some guy named Edwards who was a preacher and was angry and used figurative language and some guy named Emeril or Emerson or something who liked trees. It’s IDIOTIC. It’s a profound DEVOLUTION.
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“Back in the 1960s or 1970s, when a junior student of American literature opened his or her lit textbook to the chapter on literature in the Puritan Era, he or she would learn about Calvin and Luther and the Protestant Reformation and Original Sin and election and local governance and the Protestant Work Ethic and how …”
I think you are on to something here. In that time, history was the lynchpin of the study of much of the curriculum. Everybody needs history to understand context. One of the problems was those anthologies you describe. Unsupported by good instruction, they were often wasted. Jonathan Edwards is a good example. A thinker who, in the words of one biographer, kept both eyes on the enlightenment and both eyes on the scripture, Edwards is not done justice by reading sinners in the hands and nothing else.
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He certainly isn’t, Roy! Edwards’s journals are simply amazing. This was not Puritan caricature. There are passages in those journals that could have been written by Shelley.
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But it isn’t just knowledge of history that’s key; it’s knowledge generally. If you are going to be in the business of helping people to learn how to understand and interpret works of literature, then you need to know things like the rules of prosody and the tenets of dozens of different schools of literary criticism and a lot about the history of literature and the history of ideas generally and and definitions and characteristics of a great many literary genres and thousands of common literary structures and tropes and rhetorical techniques and the biographies of great authors and the major works in the canon and a whole lot more. There is a LOT of knowledge to be brought to bear on that teaching of English, and sadly, many people in education today seem to think that it’s OK for the preparation of an English teacher or a reading coach or an English teacher trainer to be almost completely content free. And that’s just a few things that an English teacher ought to know about literature. We haven’t even begun to talk about speaking, reading, writing, grammar, usage, mechanics, language history, linquistics, and thinking. If a person thinks that he or she knows about “teaching critical thinking” but hasn’t a clue how an induction, a deduction, and an abduction differ or what the difference is between a modus ponens and a modal operator or between a probability and odds or can’t name a few dozen logical fallacies and give examples of them and can’t describe a enormous number of heuristics for problem-solving or decision making, then he or she is simply deluded. He or she has bought into nonsense promulgated by a few know-nothing education pundits–the notion that any real education can be knowledge/content-free.
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I want to make sure that no one thinks that I meant, by my comments above, any disparagement of learning about gender and gender relations and gender identification. I think such learning extraordinarily important. But again, there is a LOT of relevant knowledge to be gained about those topics. Someone who has learned about intersex children, about variations in gender roles around the world and throughout history, about the extraordinary variety that gender takes in the biological world, and so on, will have very different perspectives that does, say, Mike Pence.
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And calling that crap–those CC$$ New Criticism Lite exercises “higher thinking” is utterly laughable. One cannot think clearly about matters about which one KNOWS nothing.
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Bob Shepherd stated:
“higher thinking” is utterly laughable. One cannot think clearly about matters about which one KNOWS nothing.”
Bob,
I am sure you are familiar with Bloom’s Taxonomy- the Higher Order Thinking Skills: creating, evaluating, analyzing, applying, understanding, and remembering.
From day one teachers should start encouraging students to become active learners by developing higher order thinking skills: pretending, imaging, reflecting, observing, comparing, contrasting, solving problems, predicting, using deductive reasoning to pull together key elements; reviewing and responding critically to and judging; using ideas, processes, or skills in new situations; creating new ideas…
Even kindergarteners can make a judgement on a character, e.g., After the teacher finishes reading the Ant and the Grasshopper. They certainly can tell which character they like better and why addressing several Higher Order Thinking Skills.
John Dewey stated, “Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.”
John Dewey, by the way, never used the term Constructivism.
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Yes, Mary. But thinking, again, is not independent of what one knows. And somethings being a comparison or a solution to a prediction or an evaluation doesn’t make it :higher thinking.” That’s education school nonsense. A toddler’s “I hate peas” is an evaluation. A television psychic’s “You will meet a tall, dark stranger” is a prediction. There are whole sciences (literally, sciences) related to each of those items on your list, and education pundits seem to think that one can practice these “skills” in the abstract without understanding any of these. Consider “predicting” whether a volcano is going to erupt and when. Doing that requires KNOWLEDGE of the relevant facts and the relevant methods–KNOWLEDGE of what and of how. Simply saying to a kid, “Make a prediction based on the story” is not providing him or her with any new tools for thinking. It is not providing knowledge of the world (descriptive knowledge) or of processes for thinking (procedural knowledge) that will ENABLE clear thinking at the time or in the future. Teaching the kid that in stories in the science fiction genre, windows and mirrors are often are symbolic or literal portals and ravens are associated with battlefields and carrion and thus are traditional symbols of impending death or doom gives him or her a piece of knowledge that enables a prediction based on Lady Maceth’s observation about the hoarse, raven-like voice of the messenger who announces the arrival of Duncan. Making the prediction based on this passage is IMPOSSIBLE without the relevant knowledge. And again and again and again this is so.
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Sorry, that last comment was posted by accident before I had edited it properly. Here it is, edited:
Yes, Mary. But thinking, again, is not independent of what one knows. And somethings being a comparison or a solution to a prediction or an evaluation doesn’t make it :higher thinking.” That’s education school nonsense. A toddler’s “I hate peas” is an evaluation. A television psychic’s “You will meet a tall, dark stranger” is a prediction. There are whole sciences (literally, sciences) related to each of those items on your list, and education pundits seem to think that one can practice these “skills” in the abstract without understanding any of these. Consider “predicting” whether a volcano is going to erupt and when. Doing that requires KNOWLEDGE of the relevant facts and the relevant methods–KNOWLEDGE of what and of how. Simply saying to a kid, “Make a prediction based on the story” is not providing him or her with any new tools for thinking. It is not providing knowledge of the world (descriptive knowledge) or of processes for thinking (procedural knowledge) that will ENABLE clear thinking at the time or in the future. Teaching the kid that ravens are associated with battlefields and carrion and thus are traditional symbols of impending death or doom gives him or her a piece of knowledge that enables a prediction based on Lady Maceth’s observation about the hoarse, raven-like voice of the messenger who announces the arrival of Duncan. Making the prediction based on this passage is IMPOSSIBLE without the relevant knowledge. And again and again and again this is so. I have seen literally many hundreds of so-called “lessons on making inferences” that simply asked kids to make them without teaching a single method for doing that!!!! It’s as though the education writers were working in total ignorance of the fact that there are many, many sciences related to making various kinds of inference and that one actually has to learn something about these, to know something, in order to make inferences well.
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Mary,
Progressivism wasn’t just a political movement –it was an educational movement too. John Dewey was its guiding light. Diane’s Left Back likens it to Constructivism (p. 441).
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Ponderosa stated,”Progressivism wasn’t just a political movement –it was an educational movement too. John Dewey was its guiding light. Diane’s Left Back likens it to Constructivism (p. 441).”
Have you read Experience and Education by John Dewey? He attacks both the traditional and progressive movement.
Progressive movement, by the way, was in reaction to the traditionalist. Not the other way around.
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Rage Against the Testocracy, you asked:
Can you cite the studies that support constructivist learning? In my practical experience, asking young adolescents to assemble their own knowledge is inefficient, ineffective, counterproductive, and is dislike by the most serious students. There is no evidence that I have encountered suggesting that kids learn better when they are asked to teach themselves.
I didn’t say that students should teach themselves. All knowledge must be related to the individual. Here are some of your constructivist:
Emmanuel Kant, a philosopher in the 18th century purported that new information, new concepts, and new ideas can have meaning only when they can be related to something the individual already knows… Reason without experience is hallow. Experience without reason is aimless.You can’t expect people to reason their way through life- it won’t work
John Dewey was emphatic about interaction for learning; learning can’t be on an abstract, passive mode. Learning is social. We don’t see with your eyes, or hear with your ears. We perceive with your whole being which is based upon our experiences. He was a philosopher but in his day philosophy and psychology merged into one study. (John Dewey had 37 Volumes of his writings. He wrote 588 essays and 29 books. Some say he was the best mind America ever produced.)
Piaget maintained concrete experiences are needed for learning to occur. He was a contemporary of John Dewey. He is also philosopher and psychologist plus a scientist.
Frank Smith, a psycholinguist, maintained that readers must bring meaning to print rather than expecting to receive meaning from it. As we become fluent readers we learn to rely more on what we already know, on what is behind the eyeballs and less on the print on the page in front of us.
Frank Smith purports that reading is an interactive process in which the reader uses two sources of information: perceptual and conceptual.
Marie Clay’s methodology reflects a philosophy and theories held by Kant, Dewey, Piaget, and Smith.
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What Kant actually taught is that there are some varieties of knowledge of the world that result from innate (and automatic) faculties–what we would now call abilities that are hard-wired into the brain’s mechanisms–and some that have to be learned. And, of course, the more you learn about your innate abilities and proclivities, the better positioned you are to direct these. And “bringing meaning to print” means having a lot of relevant knowledge of the kind that the writer took for granted that his or her readers would have. Kids typically don’t have a lot of that knowledge, and it is the teacher’s job to provide it, to provide the knowledge that is key to understanding what the text is saying. https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2017/09/02/on-the-pseudoscience-of-strategies-based-reading-comprehension-instruction-or-what-current-comprehension-instruction-has-in-common-with-astrology/
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So, when Matthew Arnold wrote “Dover Beach,” he knew that his readers would be familiar with Sophocles and tragedy and with the standard tropes and arguments of of Romantic literature and with the debate then raging about religion and with certain kinds of relations between men and women and with challenges to the old order like the revolutions of 1848 and with challenges to the very idea of empire and to traditional economic and political structures. He could be certain that his sophisticated readers would share a general malaise or excitement about the Old Order falling apart and nothing being certain anymore. And it’s in this context that the poem makes the kind of sense that it does. Yes, you can read it knowing nothing of any of that, but your reading will be extraordinarily shallow.
But let me take another example. What does Dylan Thomas means when he writes of “the twelve triangles of the cherub wind”?
Well, that’s pretty opaque unless you bring a bit of knowledge to bear. Old maps often pictured the winds as cherubs blowing. As the wind blows out from a cherub, it forms two angles of a triangle. With that bit of knowledge, suddenly the passage makes sense. Texts exist in context, and knowledge matters.
If you are reading Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” you need to know the story of Zeus and Leda. You need to know that Leda was the mother of Helen. You need to know that the Trojan War was seen as the end of the Heroic Age–that this birth marks the end of an era, a cycle in history. You need to know that people have often thought of history in that way, as being divided into eras and cycles that changed because of divine intervention. You need to know who Agamemnon was, because he, too, is mentioned in the poem. It helps to understand the difference between an Elizabethan and a Petrarchan sonnet and how the parts (the quatrains + the final couplet or the octave + the sestet) are organizational units developing the argument of the work.And ofc you don’t impart this all at once. You make a plan of attack. You give the students enough background to understand the thing, and you pose questions relating the poem to things they know and care about and understand, and you cycle back to the poem, successively revealing it. But again, understanding the poem AT ALL is extremely knowledge-dependent.
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RageAgainstTheTestocracy asked:
“Do you have examples of NY learning standards that did this? The old NY science standards (pre-NGSS), thankfully did not incorporate higher order thinking or student imagination. Thinking cannot be taught and imagination is nowhere near our jurisdiction.”
What are you doing when you ask students to predict, applying information, or respond to a story and make connections. Children engage in higher order thinking skills when they evaluate choices made; summarize the story; note relationships; analyze characters’ conversations and actions; compare the story with other stories read; or compare feelings and events to their own lives. When making connections to self, another text, and to the world you are reinforcing higher order thinking skills.
Some of our great thinkers maintained:
“Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.”
Albert Einstein
“Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.” Margaret Mead
Common Core developed standards for Language Arts and Math. It did not develop standards for science.
Here are a few standards the NYLearning Standards addressed:
Language for Information and Understanding
Language for Critical Analysis and Evaluation
Language for Social Interaction
Language for Literary Response and Expression
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Here! Here! And so well said. What we are doing to children stuns. As a student teacher supervisor, I actually watched a kindergarten lesson on placing commas in a series; the following week, they’d “progressed” to quotation marks around dialogue. This to kids who could barely read a sentence, let alone write one.
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People are naturally curious, and little people come to school eager to learn. Then, we do everything in our power to kill this in them. Many, many thanks to those teachers of young ones who push back against this spirit-killing nonsense.
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Bob Shepherd stated, “Kids typically don’t have a lot of that knowledge, and it is the teacher’s job to provide it, to provide the knowledge that is key to understanding what the text is saying.”
Regardless what the age, children have prior knowledge to tap into and that prior knownledge must be used so that the children to learn new concepts.
As John Dewey maintained, we begin with the child and we end with the child.
Marie Clay maintained that teachers need to connect the new information in the text, to the child’s life. Whatever new knowledge a child encounters, the child must reconstruct his/her knowledge base and become a ready learner for the next event.
If it is a story of a grandpa, the teacher first bridges the story to the child’s experience by asking him/her about his/her grandpa. Regardless what the topic of the story, the teacher either reminds or questions the child of his own experience or the teacher develops a background for the new concept in the story..
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I am always amused at these textbook and classroom activities for “activating prior knowledge.” If the child already has the relevant background knowledge, it doesn’t have to be “activated.” It’s just there. And if he or she doesn’t have it, it has to be taught. Having the kids sit around before reading “After Apple Picking” and talk about the times then they ate apples is a freaking ridiculous waste of time.
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We’re going to be reading about octopuses now, children, so please turn on (“activate”) your octopus prior knowledge. See what I mean? Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.
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Exactly.
This betrays ignorance of the architecture of our brain. Long term memory deploys unconsciously and automatically. It is not something that must be dragooned on to the stage.
As Kirschner points out, many of the things we call “skills” are really just the mighty long-term memory in action. Reading comprehension? Long term memory. Problem solving? Long term memory. Critical thinking? Long term memory.
Orthodox education thought today hazily imagines these skills as discrete “mental muscles” separate from the long term memory. In the orthodox view, education is about strengthening these muscles with arduous mental exercises; building stores of knowledge is unimportant. But if Kirschner is right, the only way to strengthen these skills is to augment long-term memory with knowledge and know-how.
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I think that you have hit on the essential notion, Ponderosa. A lot of “educators” today believe that skills are these separate mental muscles that simply need to be exercised. It’s a lousy metaphor, and it leads them into a lot of nonsense like the CC$$ in ELA, which is for the most part simply a vague list of extremely general and poorly defined or undefined “skills” to be practiced over and over. We could get a lot further, I think, if people stopped thinking and talking about “skills” altogether, 21st century or otherwise (LOL) and started thinking about Descriptive Knowledge (knowledge of what) and Procedural Knowledge (knowledge of how). In other words, the term Procedural Knowledge would universally replace “skills.” Thinking is rooted in the concrete. Much of our thinking about concepts, for example, is based on mental maps–analogies to geography and placement in space. Emerson wrote about this long ago in his “Nature” essays. When we give kids a concrete procedure to follow when doing some sort of thinking–predicting, observing, evaluating, or whatever–when we teach them a procedure, it’s concrete enough to find root in the connection machine of the brain and to be accessed and applied to novel situations. I give some examples of this, below, for teaching kids to analyze characters in a story. You are doubtless correct that this bad metaphor of exercising the skill muscle is what has led so many educators so far into utter nonsense.
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“the term Procedural Knowledge would universally replace ‘skills.'”
I’m going to memorize this line.
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Yes, there are times when a given student has knowledge that other students don’t have that is relevant to the task at hand, and it’s important for teachers to know their students well enough to be able to call upon that resource. For example, most students will not know what a ball turret is, so they will be lost reading Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner: without that, and if there is a kid in the class who is a World War II airplane buff who can talk about that, great. But most of this activating prior knowledge stuff is just silly education school nonsense. Children are often FASCINATED by that which is entirely outside their own experience, by what is novel and unusual, by what is new and alien and weird. It is the teacher’s job to take students where they have not been before. That’s the whole point.
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I am thoroughly sickened by this pervasive education-school attitude that knowledge is some kind of awful, bitter, nasty pill that has to be disguised and smoothed over and sugar coated and made palatable, as though nothing that might be transmitted of human culture from one generation to the next might be interesting in itself. This is the worst kind of anti-intellectualism. It’s precisely the attitude toward our cultural inheritances that teachers should NOT have. Everything doesn’t have to be already “relatable,” to use the current vernacular. Much of schooling is about giving kids experiences that THEY HAVEN’T YET HAD. This whole pervasive approach presupposes that learning itself is something distasteful, and that becomes the hidden curriculum of lessons approached in this way.
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Thank you for this. It is no different than those who insist that teachers develop lessons that appeal to the “interests” of their students. Hogwash! It just the opposite; we try out best to draw them into new worlds filled with interesting and compelling ideas. When I explain that our Sun loses five million tons mass per second it is an innately interesting fact that leads to the very origins of virtually all of the energy on earth – and a basic understanding of Einstein’s equation: E = mc2. Now maybe some of them have a new interest. Aha!
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Yes. Yes. Yes.
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I like to think of human cultures as this enormous Alice in Wonderland garden full of astonishing things and the teacher as a guide to it. People have to be taught where to find those wonders and how to see them. I had a friend once who was a botanist. We were standing on my porch, and he started talking about the three varieties of grass on my lawn and how they were at war with one another over territory, and suddenly, what had been to me an undifferentiated mass of green stuff became populated, and I could never look at the lawn again without seeing that. We take them on tours of the garden, to those unfamiliar places, and we teach them how to see them and use them and make themselves at home in all these weird and wonderful places.
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One of the ideas that struck me most on this rereading of Left Back was that Progressive education, despite emanating from Teachers College in cosmopolitan NYC, gained strength from the abiding anti-intellectualism in American life that Richard Hofstadter famously described. Before I’d seen it as intellectuals gone awry; i.e. people who loved book learning who’d stumbled upon an idea that there was something better than book learning to give to kids. But maybe its most ardent proponents hate books and learning (I can think of one or two people in the education field who fit this description). Maybe its power and longevity in America come from the fact that Progressivism gives a facade of respectability to dullness, incuriosity and hatred of culture; it is an intellectual fig leaf to cover anti-intellectualism.
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Exactly, Ponderosa. All one has to do is to let one of these skills gurus talk for a while, and pretty soon he or she will betray that incuriosity and hatred of culture–that anit-intellectualism. He or she will start talking about “mere facts” and how boring a lesson is if it isn’t connected to little Yolanda’s shopping trip with Grandma or to Yolanda’s playing SuperMegaWorm on her iPhone, as if there were no possibility that self-obsessed little Yolanda might be interested in ANYTHING as boring as art, history, literature, science, music, or other cultures. Basically, such “educators” have the same point of view that one finds among the most spoiled and clueless and ignorant of 13-year-olds. They, too, think that “history” (which is everything that every happened to anyone, lol) is BORING because they don’t know any of it themselves. I think, for example, of the district “reading coordinator” who visited our high school from time to time to tell English teachers how to teach English. She thought that Classical Literature was anything literature that was famous and that the Odyssey was a novel. She said that she was far too busy to read much. Or I think of the high-school English department chairperson who pronounced Yeats as YEETS and didn’t know what a gerund was and thought that Twilight was a great novel but always had her list of today’s CC$$ “skills” on the board.
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In the face of NGSS (here in NY) the 21st century skills gurus continue to rationalize this corporate (Achieve) disruption of traditional science education with the usual host of misrepresentations:
Stop teaching by rote memorization
Stop teaching strings of disconnected facts
Stop teaching in ‘silos’ (discrete disciplines)
Stop teaching textbook definitions
And of course . . . low PISA scores
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Metastasizing anti-intellectualism. ELA is already terminal. Well, I guess that it’s some consolation that there are other places in the world where teachers of science still think that in science the facts and the definitions matter and are extremely interesting.
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From time immemorial, humans have relied upon older humans, ones who knew something, to transmit what they knew to younger humans ones who didn’t know it yet. The very term “culture” refers to what is so transmitted. And now we have entered this weird era in which a person who knows something teaching what he or she knows to someone who doesn’t yet know it is derided as the activity of “the sage on the stage.” This is an attack on the essential goal of education–that of cultural transmission from the knowledgeable to the not-yet-knowledgeable. God help us if we’ve come to a time when many people take such nonsense seriously.
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Yes, I call it mutant education. Or learning without learning.
I’m still struggling to see what is the thinking behind Constructivism. What is supposed to be the fruit of kids’ toiling to construct their own knowledge? Clear, lasting, deep knowledge? Well, Kirschner just proved that lecture does a far better job at imparting clear, lasting and deep knowledge. Yet I suspect the Constructivists won’t give up so easily. They’ll claim there’s something else –some je ne sais quoi –that kids get from the process. I would like to hear more about that. I suspect that it’s really NOT the knowledge that matters to them. It’s this je ne sais quoi.
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“Doing without learning” is what I call it. We now have a majority of educators who believe in magical learning.
They believe in manipulatives. They believe in hands-on-learning. They believe in project based learning. They believe in discovery learning. They believe in context free learning. They believe in 21st century thinking skills. They believe in guides on the side. They believe in facilitating. They believe in using professional adult practices. They believe in the je ne sais quoi of magical learning.
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Why do they believe in magical learning? Could it be the constant conflation of the fully developed brains of well educated adults with the under-developed brains of children and adolescents. Meddlers in education are behind the push for the impossible – asking kids to think and learn like highly motivated and super curious adults.
A simple truth for all edu-meddlers: Children (with very few exceptions) remain CONCRETE learners well into middle school and often beyond. Abstract thinking, transference, and making connections are the jurisdiction of magical learning.
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Parts of the brain that do highly abstract reasoning (much of the prefrontal cortex) don’t even start developing until kids are 16 or so in most people and aren’t fully in place until kids are about 24, but CC$$ basically rewrote the NCTM math standards to push more abstract reasoning down in grade level, so that 3rd graders are being asked to grasp “the concept of the variable.” And this is, ofc, developmentally inappropriate and doomed to failure. And that’s why twenty years of CC$$ testing and teaching has led to no statistically significant increase in test scores–why Ed Deform has failed according to its own preferred measures. There are rare kids who can reason very abstractly at early ages–the young Gausses of the world. Those need to be identified and taught separately and differently. But for most, it would probably be best to put off math instruction entirely until until high school and replace it with exercises in pattern manipulation designed to create and strengthen neural pathways for pattern manipulation (which is what math is). As it is today, most adults leave their 12 or 13 years of math instruction HATING math and thinking that they can’t do it. I suspect that if we followed the plan I’ve outlined here, people would learn far more in those last 4 years than they do now in 12 or 13 and that they would actually enjoy math and continue to practice it as adults. See Lockhart’s “A Mathematician’s Lament”: https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
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Rage,
You assume the proponents and adherents of Constructivism care about cogency. I think many of the former are just snake oil salesman and like Constructivism because it sells (and advances their education school careers). It’s hard to get a man to understand something when his paycheck depends on his not understanding it, as they say. And I think many of Constructivism’s adherents just don’t think that much at a theoretical level, and don’t think it’s their bailiwick to question the dogma –especially when they’ve been given no alternatives to contemplate, and the dogma is couched in such lofty, pretentious and obscure language that critiquing it becomes difficult, and advocating for something humbler and simpler would make one look like a simpleton. It takes a certain amount of intellectual self-confidence to take on the reigning orthodoxy. I guess that’s in short supply.
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The notion that one can “Construct” meaning without having the materials to construct with (descriptive knowledge) and methods for doing the construction (procedural knowledge) is, ofc, completely absurd. This is not to say that it isn’t occasionally useful to have kids discover something, if it doesn’t take a lot of time and the activity is structured in such a way as to provide the relevant information and procedure. So, for example, you can give kids a bunch of triangles with the angle measurements labeled, and have them add them up, And very quickly they will discover that the angles of a triangle always add up 180 degrees. But if you try to elevate this occasionally useful pedagogical tactic to a general rule for lessons, you end up with utter disaster. Years ago, my daughter’s high school adopted a new discovery math program. She described it like this: “We would go home and try to do these activities, and none of us would get the right answers, and then we would go in and, after wasting all that time, the teacher would tell us what we were supposed to have figured out.” After two years of this program, the students’ math scores in that high school had totally plummeted, and though the school had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the program, they threw it out.
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One important truth that gets lost in this discussion is the reality check by kids put on these ineffective and inefficient methodologies. The better more serious students do not want facilitators or guides on the side – they want interesting, knowledgeable, and compelling teachers.
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Rage,
Recently, the very bright daughter of a good friend of mine was home from her first semester in college. She said to me that it was such a relief to finally have teachers who knew a lot and weren’t afraid of teaching her stuff that she didn’t already know. She described her high-school years as basically sitting around in a circle listening to other kids bs about stuff they didn’t know anything about.
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Bob,
I have no idea what you are talking about.
Read: “Skills for the 21st Century: teaching higher-oder thinking skills” in Curriculum & Leadership Journal. 8/29/14
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?um=1&ie=UTF-8&lr&q=related:zoLDE6Nnav3FCM:scholar.google.com/#d=gs_qabs&u=%23p%3DzoLDE6Nnav0J
“It is hard to imagine a teacher or school leader who is not aware of the importance of teaching higher-order thinking skills to prepare young men and women to live in the 21st Century. However, the extent to which higher-order thinking skills are taught and assessed continues to be an area of debate, with many teachers and employers expressing concern that young people ‘cannot think’.
What are we talking about when we talk about ‘higher-order thinking’? Brookhart (2010) identifies definitions of higher-order thinking as falling into three categories: (1) those that define higher-order thinking in terms of transfer, (2) those that define it in terms of critical thinking, and (3) those that define it in terms of problem solving…”
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If you have no idea what I am talking about, then please go back and read my comments a lot more carefully. I think that I was pretty clear. However, I realize that I am challenging some preconceived notions. You can’t think in the abstract. You have to think using knowledge–knowledge of the world and knowledge of processes for manipulating knowledge of the world to arrive at new conclusions. There are entire sciences of those processes. If someone want to teach people the “skill” of prediction, well, there are sciences related to that–the mathematics of probability, for example, and specific arts and sciences dealing with causal mechanisms, and one actually has to become knowledgeable about those arts and sciences in order to use their tools. For example, there are standard ways in which stories are constructed, and having knowledge of those ways enables one to do informed prediction of what is going to happen in a story. Thinking is DEPENDENT upon knowledge. There is no such thing as knowledge-free thinking. All this time spent in English classes simply telling kids to predict or evaluate or whatever isn’t teaching them any of the powerful tools that exist for predicting and evaluating. And so, they don’t learn anything, from such activity, that is of much use to them in the future. They haven’t added any tools to their toolbelt.
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Simply asking kids to “do inferencing,” without teaching them a technique for making inferences of particular kinds, is pretty much a waste of time. But as a teacher and as an editor, for many years, of ELA textbooks, I have encountered literally many hundreds of “inferencing lessons” that do precisely that. The kids walk away with no ability, no superpower, that they didn’t already have, and so the lesson is pretty much pointless.
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So, instead of simply asking the kids to sit in a circle and “analyze the character,” teach them three or four heuristics or techniques for analyzing characters (there are, literally, hundreds of these that have been developed by critics and scholars) and then have them work together to apply those. In other words, impart to them KNOWLEDGE of processes for character analysis and give them opportunities to use these.
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So, here’s one approach to “doing a character analysis” that you can teach kids: Have them simply brainstorm for a character a list of as many characteristics of that character as they can find, with page and line numbers. Award a prize to the group with the longest list. Then talk about what the lists reveal about “who this person is.”
Here’s another: teach the kids about Jonathan Haidt’s “Moral Foundations Theory,” which says that people differ in which of the following “moral foundations” they really care about:
Care: cherishing and protecting others; opposite of harm
Fairness or proportionality: rendering justice according to shared rules; opposite of cheating
Loyalty or ingroup: standing with your group, family, nation; opposite of betrayal
Authority or respect: submitting to tradition and legitimate authority; opposite of subversion
Sanctity or purity: abhorrence for disgusting things, foods, actions; opposite of degradation
Have the kids discuss which of these Winston cares about and which O’Brien cares about (in Orwell’s 1984). They can make a chart. Then, have them contrast the two character’s concerns and objectives.
Here’s another: teach the kids about what the “Big Five Personality Traits” are–the CANOE or OCEAN model. Then have them apply that to each character. Is he or she conscientious? agreeable? neurotic? open to experience? extroverted? In what ways? Have the students go to x website and imagine that they are x character in the story and fill out the personality test as that character. What results do they get?
Here’s another. Have the kids do web charts of character’s relations to other characters. Each chart should list one character’s in the middle and the other characters around that character’s name. Then, have them draw a line from the character in the middle to every other character to whom he or she is connected in some way. One one side of the line, have them write the type of connection (friend, wife, employee, etc) and on the other verbs describing the relationship (hates, loves, fears, distrusts, etc).
And so on. Don’t simply say to kids, “Apply x thinking skill.” Give them some procedural KNOWLEDGE that provides a method for thinking.
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You guys sound like TFA teachers who haven’t a clue what education is about. You sound
like you never had the needed core courses for a certified education degree. Was your institution even accredited by the state?
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Sigh.
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Let me know when you find a TFA teacher who taught for 40 years and was guided less by theoretical education programs and more by careful observation of real students combined with endless attempts to find best practices. The methods you argue for have failed miserably in the classroom because they really can’t work.
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Once, Rage, I went to a job interview for a high-school teaching position in English. At the end of a long career as a teacher and developer of textbooks, I wanted to return to teaching. I took with me a large wheeled suitcase full of ELA materials that I had written or edited–African-American literature texts, well-known hardbound literature texts for grades K-12, widely used grammar and composition texts, a book on writing the research paper, a series of texts on document-based questioning in history, papers I had written about teaching reading and grammar and writing and literature, essays of mine on the cognitive psychology of learning, samples of lessons I had written for various online learning platforms, a hundred-page outline I had written for an online reading program, copies of materials I had written for English teachers on a wide variety of subjects, from Anglo-Saxon poetry to prosody to varieties of metaphor to approaches to literary criticism.
The interview hadn’t got very far before it became quite clear that the Principal I was interviewing with did not want to hire a subject-matter expert–that she had no interest whatsoever in WHETHER I ACTUALLY KNEW SOMETHING about, say, literature or grammar or linguistics. She wanted someone who was just starting out and could be told what to do. None of my previous teaching experience or textbook writing experience and certainly none of my learning was of the slightest interest to her. She wanted someone who could be scripted, a neophyte who could be told to make the kids get on their computers and practice their CC$$ skills in preparation for THE BIG TEST. What can I say? A mismatch. She didn’t want a teacher. She wanted a proctor, a lackey.
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This discussion is opening my eyes. If Constructivism’s popularity is, as I suspect, due to its unrivaled ability to give a veneer of intelligence and professional respectability to fundamental stupidity, it will be very hard to dislodge. If it allows for the development of “top notch” teachers in a semester of theoretical training (no need for 18 years of solid liberal arts education), it will be very hard to dislodge. If it gives know-nothing administrators instant (ersatz) authority over erudite teachers, it will be very hard to dislodge. No wonder it sells so well! It’s a short cut. Too bad there aren’t any real short cuts to building great schools.
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Exactly, Ponderosa. With VERY LITTLE “training,” you, too, could become a highly compensated Education Instapundit. Here’s how: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/becoming-an-edupundit-made-ez/
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Time for me to cash in! Thanks for your help Bob.
Attention school administrators, my first two seminars are now available ($2K/hr)
Strategies for Empowering Assessment Outcomes
Dimensions of Effective Teaching for Improved Evaluations
Brilliant!
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Hard to dislodge may be an understatement. It won’t be long until the new generation of educators will not even be aware of the alternative.
Reminds me of the old saw, “It is really easy to be a bad teacher”
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