John Thompson is a historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma who blogs frequently.
Reading In Search of Deeper Learning: the Quest to Remake the American High School, by Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine, is like reading the Mueller report. Special prosecutor Robert Mueller compiled a thoroughly researched narrative documenting the Donald Trump’s impeachment-worthy misbehavior and law-breaking but he did not indict the President. Mehta and Fine do the education version of making the case that school reform failed, but they don’t explicitly indict the Billionaires Boys Club for their role in driving deeper learning out of schools.
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674988392
My only complaint with Mehta and Fine’s narrative is that it charges the “command and control,” compliance-driven model that is antithetical to modern thinking,” imposed over the last century, without naming the names of corporate reformers who doubled down on socio-engineering an even more odious school culture during the 21stcentury.
The methodology of Deeper Learning and its findings would seem to provide a final verdict that corporate school reform, like previous top-down reforms, has been a disaster, so maybe I’m being unfair. Mehta and Fine study the most successful schools, that are disproportionately charters, and ask whether they offer deeper, more meaningful learning. They find that even the best of them succumbed to the inherent flaws in the test-driven, competition-driven model. For instance, a top charter, “No Excuses High,” could not fix the behaviorist, controlling essence of their model, and produced a school with a joyless culture, where a student explained, “No one actually likes it here.”
If the best products of the contemporary accountability-driven, charter-driven reform movement are schools with “an absence of relationships” and where extrinsic measures drive out opportunities to build intrinsic motivation and lifelong learning, what does that say about the No Excuses pedagogies the corporate reformers imposed on the poorest children of color? If even the best examples of reform take inequities and often make them worse, one would think that would be the explicit conclusion. But Mehta and Fine document the damage done to teaching and learning when “the many” (our diverse public education systems) are forced to implement the ideas of “the few” (the 21st century corporate reform movement’s co-conspirator #1?).
Whether or not Deeper Learning should have been less diplomatic, it does a great job of surveying the wastelands that the Billionaires Boys Club, following their forerunners who imposed Taylorism in the 20th century, helped create. It cites the Gates-funded Gathering Feedback for Teaching (2012) which videotaped 4th through 8thgrade classes and found that only 1 percent of math lessons received the top rating for analytic complexity, while 70 percent received the lowest rating. Also, the Education Trust’s 2015 survey of middle school instruction “only found that 4 percent of assignments asked students to think at higher levels,” while “about 85 percent asked students to either recall information or apply basic skills and concepts as opposed to prompting for inferences or structural analysis.”
Deeper Learning cites research by Martin Nystrand and Adam Gamoran (in 1997) which found that 9th graders doing 224 lessons only engaged in an average of less than 15 seconds a day of free-flowing discussion! This is evidence of failures predating NCLB. But Mehta and Fine watch today’s teachers “appropriate the early shoots of what students were trying to say,” and “incorporate them into their own longer comments.” Consequently, “We seldom heard students speak more than a sentence or two.”
Similarly, by 2015, a Gallup poll found that 75 percent of 5th graders were engaged in school, while only 32 percent of 11th graders were engaged. Deeper Learning then explains in depth how reforms that require “teaching a formula” result in schools where, “students couldn’t name a piece of work they were proud of.” They cite a No Excuses school leader with the inspiring vision of increasing time on task in their 49 minute classes from 44 to 46 minutes! Mehta and Fine nail the case for unlearning the practices that have most damaged poor children by emphasizing “hierarchy, control, and fear of failure.” They thus conclude that the “rush of teaching and testing for an enormous amount of content … must be rethought.”
Mehta and Fine cite teachers’ rejection of “district pacing guidelines, [the] teacher evaluation system, and the pressure of state tests.” They are particularly great at explaining how and why “most teachers we saw were highly concerned with what was covered, and would rush or lecture if they were ‘falling behind’ their expected goals.
I would just add some anecdotes in support. When my principal distributed the state’s aligned and paced standards guides on the eve of NCLB, she acknowledged that we would ignore them, but she said that they could benefit rookies and struggling teachers. Our principal merely requested that we not to throw the guides in the trash. She asked us to keep them on file in case a central office or state administrator enquired about them.
After NCLB when the pacing schedule became a mandate, not a guide, our school’s veteran teachers pushed back against hurried in-one-ear-out-the-other, skin-deep teaching that was the inevitable result. Compliance was achieved by mandating that students’ math and reading benchmark tests be graded. The result was that 40 percent of students in tested subjects dropped out of school in nine weeks!
Resistance to high-stakes testing, I suspect, was a key reason why reformers used value-added teacher evaluations, Race to the Top, and School Improvement Grants (SIG) to “exit” veteran teachers and socialize 23-year-olds into obedience. For instance, when I was runner-up district teacher of the year, another principal said she knew I’d ignore the pacing mandates, so we reached a compromise. My students would keep the book on their desk, and turn to the mandated pages, and pretend to comply when administrators inspected us.
After I retired, our SIG school was staffed disproportionately with young teachers who couldn’t push back. When visiting my old school, I’d feel physically ill when seeing how the $11 million grant took the lowest-ranked mid-high in Oklahoma and made it worse. I’d get sick at my stomach visiting classes with no meaningful teaching and learning, just students watching Thunder basketball games on their laptops and doing each others’ hair, as teachers went through the motions of delivering their boring, mandated “preset” lessons.
Mehta and Fine offer some hope. They found deeper learning in electives and extracurricular activities. They do a great, nuanced job of describing ways that a few “sensible adjustments,” such as assigning shorter reading passages and “scaffolding” unfamiliar words,” allow some teachers of high-poverty, low-skilled students to offer instruction for “seminal learning experiences.” Rather than focusing solely of remediating kids’ deficits, these teachers learn from their students and build on their strengths.
As some of Deeper Learning’s evidence shows, worksheet-driven malpractice has a long history. Teachers tend to teach the way they were taught, prompting a systemic inertia and reluctance to build humane innovative pedagogies. And, yes, today’s venture philanthropists follow in the footsteps of disgusting micromanagers from outside of the education profession.
So, maybe Mehta and Fine are right to not name the names of the elites who turned 21st century students into their lab rats, just as Mueller may have had reason to not indict but to lay out plenty of evidence for impeachment. They are definitely correct in calling for a new era of “undoing and unlearning” so we can create schools worthy of a dynamic democracy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Mueller the fearsome tough-guy prosecutor was a loyal fearful wimp who failed the nation when it needed him most, so he will be remembered. We have long known the name of the system undermining school and society, long past time to name it and encourage relentless opposition. We also know how children learn and what children need to grow into smart, healthy, happy, civic beings. We are not allowed to use what we know works for children and the nation because of the “unnamed” system preying on us. 35 yrs ago Ted Sizer said it in ‘Horace’: People in schools are better than the system so the system must be the problem. Touring high schools, he also was baffled at how crucial social class was and how unnamed, unacknowledged social class: Tell me the incomes of your students’ parents, and I will describe to you your school, he wrote.
Interesting how St. Mueller has fallen like Lucifer now that he didn’t find what people kept insisting he was going to reveal any day now….
Keep waiting, someday a hero will come take out Trump for you. And someday the Rapture will come too.
OR … The Democrats could start doing the hard work of what it will actually take to defeat Trump in a year and a half. But they won’t do that because none of them want to give up what meager power they have. They prefer Trump to Bernie, so they’ll go right on their merry neoliberal way and it will be 2016 all over again, complete with stolen primary and liberals still insisting that we have to vote for the thief. Trump we’ll get, but let’s pretend that Democrats are better than Republicans. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Many of us for decades have never waited for a hero to deliver us. Many of us never trusted Mueller and saw the expectations surrounding him as a trap of suspended opposition.
It all comes down to one 5 letter word…..GREED. Democrats have aligned themselves with Republicans and the ALEC way. If they speak out, they will have to reveal and implicate themselves. The masses don’t begrudge wealthy people…. they abhor the underhanded way they acquired that wealth and HOW they use that wealth to further their own agenda. Feel the Bern!!!
two directly powerful words: IMPLICATE THEMSELVES.
A friend of mine once told me that covering material is the enemy of real learning. I have to agree. The top down, test based curriculum avoids real engagement and thinking from students. My grandson is in third grade, and most of the curriculum is test prep. In math especially, the school covers one topic and jumps to the next before students are competent in the first topic. Students get a superficial understanding rather than in depth learning.
As far as scaffolding is concerned, ESL teachers know what a powerful tool it is. We builds scaffolds all the time with students that lack prior knowledge. I think this technique can also be very helpful to poor students that have not been exposed to some of the content and concepts that middle class students have as their knowledge base.
Your 1st paragraph is exactly WHY I pulled child #2 and put him into private HS (we pay dearly for it). He hated school so much and he had no motivation to learn anything after school….and really, why should a kid have to go to tutoring after school to receive the education they deserve while in school? Four more yrs in our school system would have doomed him to a life of living in our basement and working menial jobs. For the 1st time ever, he likes school and he talks about how much he learns and how much the teachers make learning an enjoyable experience. The state of MD has one of the best test prep curriculums in the nation and they had it before Common Core came into play…..CCSS just pushed it way into overdrive and over emphasized really poor ELA standards and stupid Math. For the first time in 5 yrs, I am able to help my son with his math/algebra/geometry homework if he needs it.
Years ago the complaint I heard as a high school teacher was that math curriculum was “a mile wide and an inch deep”…..years of effort to try to change that has resulted in common core….and now I think things are even worse……clearly no improvement.
RT,
“. . . the school covers one topic and jumps to the next before students are competent in the first topic. Students get a superficial understanding rather than in depth learning.”
You taught ELL, right? Now did you explain every single English word that you used to your ELL students so that they had “in depth learning”?
I would venture to say that, no that is not the case. Learning cannot be guided by a concept such as “in depth knowledge” (which really has no meaning other than being another bit of education jargon). Learning necessarily involves remembering, forgetting, rehashing, going back over, redoing, moving forward, taking steps backward, moving forward, etc. . . ad infinitum
There is nothing wrong with “covering the curriculum” and moving the teaching and learning process along so that all students have the opportunity to learn the curriculum. Now some will learn it right off the bat, others it might take years. I had a level 3 Spanish student who in the beginning of the year review stated that she finally got the concept of subject/verb agreement. Now I know that she had that explained multiple times over the course of her first two years. She was still learning other aspects of speaking/using Spanish even though she didn’t quite understand a very vital concept of the learning of a second language.
A teacher must manage the teaching and learning environment so that all levels of students can learn and move forward with/in their learning. To insist on “in depth knowledge” is a panacea that denies the reality of how each individual learns and that in the past has resulted in many students not being given the chance of learning all the curriculum and then some if needed, because “in depth knowledge” was supposed to be achieved by all.
Well, the phrase “in-depth knowledge” is kinda vague, but there is one interpretation of that phrase that is, I think, really defensible–sticking with a subject long enough actually to become familiar with its terrain. Brains are connection machines. New learning happens a lot more quickly and easily in the context of other learning in the same domain–it has stuff to stick to. One of my primary beefs with the current standards-and-testing regime in ELA is that because of it, ELA curricula and pedagogy have devolved into exercises in applying some item from the Gates/Coleman bullet list to some isolated, random snippet of text. Big mistake. People aren’t built to learn in that manner. Give them some real quality time in a knowledge rich domain, and they will learn. Have them apply vague, abstract “skills” willy nilly to this or that text, and no real learning will occur. I call the approach to ELA that has resulted from the Gates/Coleman bullet list the Monty Python “And Now for Something Completely Different” approach to pedagogy. This superficial CC$$ approach to ELA is easy to implement on computers–that’s why Gates paid to have a single national list created–but it’s disastrous for learning.
“sticking with a subject long enough actually to become familiar with its terrain.”
I can agree with that definition. However even then what does it mean to “become familiar with its terrain”? Ah, the classic post-modern language problem of definitions, eh!
Be that as it may, I was referring to a problem I have seen in the past wherein teachers spend too much time attempting to get students to that “in depth point” but at the same time ignoring the rest of the curriculum. Now, as you point out we’ve gone way too far in the other direction. There is a balance and it is the classroom teacher that has the expertise and knowledge to determine that in her/his classroom.
Sticking to the terrain. OK, kids. We are going to be studying literature of the Puritan Era in the US. We’re going to learn about the Puritans’ daily lives, their concerns, their cares, their amusements, their dress and habits, their customs and laws and history, their hopes and fears. And we’re going to read a lot of what they wrote, and it’s pretty interesting stuff. MUCH OF WHAT WE DO AND THINK TODAY is a direct result of what these folks did and said. We will study them so that we can understand ourselves better.
Or, we’re going to look at 20 ways to put together a story. In other words, we’re going to study story structures and story arcs. But they all have this in common. Someone encounters a problem or crisis, reacts to it, and learns or grows. OK. What are some kinds of problems that people can encounter? Let’s fill his white board with them.
Good points, Duane. Of course, the great lesson to learn from the postmodern critique of language is to subject our language and definitions to critique even as we, inevitably and of necessity, use them.
And, of course, this nonsense of thinking that the teaching of English is SOLELY about teaching kids to apply vague, abstract “skills” irrespective of particular studies or knowledge domains preceded the stupid Gates/Coleman ELA bullet list. That virus had already infected ELA before Master Gates appointed Lord Coleman the decider for the rest of us. All Coleman did was to pick and choose a list of abstract “skills” from those ridiculous, content-free products of educatic groupthink, the existing state ELA “standards,” and season it with a few of his prejudices. All that mattered to Gates was that there be one national list to key software to, and Coleman didn’t know enough about the teaching of English to subject any of the crap he threw together to critique. But at least, back when there were competing state “standards,” as bad as these were, curriculum developers in ELA set out to make coherent texts and then to correlate them to those standards. Now, they simply make texts that take the bullet list as the default, de facto curriculum, and coherence and content are out the window entirely.
My understanding of “in-depth” has nothing to do with word to word translations. It takes some time for ELLs to develop cognitive academic language, usually five to seven years. During that time students can still learn a lot of English and content through read alouds, shared and guided reading. Scaffolding often provides students with visual maps that help students understand relationships and structure. If this process is repeated, the language develops almost like a snowball as more and more language is comprehensible.
I think one of the problems with the CCSS is the curriculum is crammed with so much material students get worn down and overwhelmed. Students do not have enough time to be comfortable with the current material before a new topic is introduced, and it is worksheet driven. At least, this seems to be the case in my grandson’s school.
BUT, according to the English department head at my school, “We dont’ teach content in English, only skills.”
If people used the phrase “procedural knowledge” instead of the term “skill,” it would force them to come up with something concrete and actually useful to impart to their students.
RT, your English Department head is like many young people in the profession now–so profoundly ignorant of the English language arts as to think it content free. It’s really sad that we’ve come to such a pass and really frightening that people this ignorant are teaching our kids.
cx: as to think THEM content free. ofc
This is what an entire generation (20 years) of standards-and-high-stakes testing has done to the field of the English language arts. Department chairpersons now make comments like, “We don’t teach content in English, only skills.” Imagine a so-called “teacher of English” who knows nothing of and has not experienced, himself or herself, the value of having content knowledge of particular great authors and works in the literary canons of the world (British, American, European, Asian, African, etc); of literary techniques, structures, periods, and genres–their characteristics and historical development; of literary history; of the relations of literary history to the history of ideas and events; of prosody; of rhetoric; of approaches to literary works (i.e., the varieties of literary criticism and the methods of each); of syntax and semantics and phonology; of the elements of speech; of dialects; of literary archetypes; of the varieties of folk orature; and so on. Knowledge enables one to see what’s there. If I teach you about the varieties of grasses and other plants on your lawn, then it will not longer seem like an undifferentiated mass of green to you. You will see communities interacting. Let’s consider something that people typically think of as “a skill”–public speaking. If I’m serious about making you into a better public speaker, then I will teach you descriptive knowledge of the elements of speech–pitch, or intonation, and range; stress, or accent; length; rhythm; pace; volume; timbre; tone; articulation and enunciation; diction; respiration; facial expressions; eye contact; gestures; stance; proximity; silences and pauses; register; movement; dialect; dress; paralinguistic vocalization; body language; and resonance. And I will teach you procedural knowledge about how you can use that descriptive knowledge: If you vary the pitch of your voice, this produces melody, and your voice will be more attractive to listen to; most people vary their pitch a tiny bit around an average pitch that is too high; by lowering your average pitch and varying your pitch around that center, you can make your voice much more melodious to an audience. And so it is with each of these bits of descriptive knowledge–they make it possible to learn procedural knowledge that will empower you. But the person who does not possess that descriptive knowledge cannot use it to teach procedural knowledge. And so the student does not grow.
It would be an altogether good thing for the English language arts if people stopped using the term “skills” altogether and instead spoke in terms of “procedural knowledge,” for then they would have a clue that knowledge is key to being able to do things. The woodworker needs to have knowledge that there is something called grain and that it runs in a particular direction. If he or she knows this, then it becomes possible to plane a piece of wood to make it smooth–one works in the direction of the grain. Knowledge is KEY.
People who think that they are teaching “skills” in the absence of content, or knowledge, are totally confused. There is, for example, no general “finding the main idea skill” or “inferencing skill.” These are as fictional as were Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fairies. Let me give another example. One of the very few actual texts mentioned anywhere in the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave from the Republic. Is one going to have any clue what this is about based on applying some general “finding the main idea” skill? Of course not. Understanding what’s going on there requires a lot of background knowledge about what Plato was concerned with and how he thought. Plato was highly influenced by Greek mathematics. He recognized that perfect forms, like a point or a triangle, don’t exist in the world but that they can be conceived of in the mind. In Greek, the word psyche meant both “mind” and “spirit.” The fact that people can conceive of perfection, of perfect forms, led him to think that there exists a separate spiritual world of perfect forms, of which the psyche partook, and that simply by thinking carefully enough, one could discover these perfect forms–the real meaning of “truth” and “virtue” and so on. If you are a student and know all that, then the allegory will make sense to you. Otherwise, good luck trying to apply your general finding the main idea “skill.” LMAO!
Imagine two teachers, planning their lessons. One will have her students read Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. Why? She thinks that the book is life-changing. It introduces Western students to a whole new realm–to the life and ideas of the Buddha. There will be much, in the future, that her students will understand if they know this book that would otherwise have been opaque. And it teaches an important lesson: people don’t have to be victims of random events in their external lives. They have the freedom to set those at a distance and transcend them. It’s the same idea, the same stance toward life, expressed by Melville in these lines from Moby Dick:
“But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.”
The beauty of encountering this stuff through a story is that the student vicariously experiences the life of the young man who will become the Buddha. And so, the key ideas in the book are EARNED by the reader. That’s one reason why we read–to share others’ experiences, to be moved by them, to find them significant and to learn from them as from direct, personal experience. Literature MEANS in this other way–via its significance–in the same way that life events do.
In the course of her lessons on Siddhartha, the teacher will teach many things about specific structures and techniques in the novel, and the kids will learn a lot of new vocabulary in context: ablution, transience, atonement, sacrifice, sagacity, asceticism, illusion, consolation, folly, nirvana, enlightenment, devotee, aristocrat, artisan, seclusion, Brahmin. And because these words were learned in actual, significant contexts, they will be retained. That’s how almost all vocabulary is ACTUALLY ACQUIRED. Almost none of an adult’s working vocab was acquired through direct instruction.
Her students will learn that the story has an episodic structure and so learn one way in which they can tell a story. They will also learn that it is an example of the monomyth: the naive young person sets out, experiences trials, gains various boons, and then uses these to achieve a great purpose and comes back from that experience a teacher of others. Another way to structure a story.
Incidentally, by studying this novel, the kids will have a lot of doors opened to them–to the understanding of history and world cultures and religions–keys to Hinduism and Buddhism and Asian philosophy and art and history.
So, that’s one way. Here’s another:
The second teacher has her students doing online exercises on applying literature standards from the Gates/Coleman bullet list to isolated snippets of text in preparation for high-stakes standardized tests. The students’ focus will not be on what the authors of these paragraphs have to say, mind you, about their subjects but on application of standard x to snippet 1 and then standard y to snippet 2. At the end of the set of exercises, there will be a neat printout showing the student’s level of “proficiency” with teach standard and suggesting further exercises.
Some of the students in the first teacher’s class will become readers because of what they experienced there. And they will have learned that we read because it matters, because it’s transformative. There’s always, in addition to the overt curriculum, this hidden curriculum–what the overall approach teaches covertly. What does the second approach teach? I don’t know. Not much. One might say that it teaches Prole children to sit down, shut up, and apply themselves gritfully to whatever random, inane, useless task an overseer puts in front of them.
The bean counters have just about completely destroyed English language arts instruction in the United States. Lord forgive them, for they haven’t a freaking clue what they have done.
What you describe is why we should be teaching real literature and context to students instead of short passages of non-fiction and fiction for test prep fodder. It is not only understanding. It is also about appreciation of the work. Engagement is what will produce students that will read for pleasure and become life long learners.
And much of that real learning will not be immediately quantifiable. It pays dividends far, far later, as anyone who thinks about what he or she most learned from past teachers will readily see.
cx: At the end of the set of exercises, there will be a neat printout showing the student’s level of “proficiency” with regard to each “standard” and suggesting further exercises.
YOU ROCK!!! My son now has a teacher #1 after 3 years of teacher #2’s. What was his least favorite subject in MS with teacher #2’s?…..ELA. What is his favorite subject in HS with a teacher #1?….ELA. He has a rock star teacher in a school that doesn’t use CCSS or standardized testing. He WANTS to take AP English Lit in 12th grade so that he can have this same teacher again. Common Core kills curriculum. CC sucks the learning out of education. Reading a book is ALL about how it makes one think and feel…..but then again, David Coleman has no feelings and I doubt that he has the ability to think how his actions affect others (sociopath). As for the bean counters…..they do know what they have done and they just don’t care!
I sometimes think that the whole purpose of the standards-and-testing regime has been to make public schools so dreadful that no one would want to have their kids in them. We need to take back our classrooms, and we need unions that will back us in doing this instead of feeding at the Deformer trough.
Thank you, LisaM. So glad that your son has real teachers again!
“Common Core kills curriculum.”
Great line Lisa M! Gonna have to use that.
And look! It’s alliterative.
I’m afraid few teachers can teach literature the way you do, Bob. That’s one reason they cling to wretched curricula like Common Core: it’s a travesty of an English education but it’s within their range.
Having taught at the beginning of my career, before the era of Ed Deform and at the end of it, with Ed Deform in full swing, I’ve had the opportunity to observe my fellow English teachers in both circumstances. Most people who become English teachers do so because they have fallen in love with literature and language. So, they start out on a path of ever-increasing knowledge of their subject. The so-called “higher standards” breed mediocrity. In the old days, if you went into a middle school or high school, there was an English Department chairperson who was generally older and learned and respected as the resident authority on the subject. He or she held department meetings at which people discussed what was working and what wasn’t, decided on what materials they were going to use, and planned their curricula and pedagogy. The older teachers mentored the young ones. The teachers subscribed to the English Journal, and from this superb publication, they learned about new approaches from subject-matter experts, and these entered into the discussions of materials, curriculum maps, and pedagogical approaches. The debates about these were often intense, but they were quite productive. Interestingly, things changed fairly slowly because people are creatures of social sanction, and what had been done in the past was the primary guide to what was to be done in the future (“Well, we’ve always taught Romeo and Juliet in 9th grade”). And that made sense because there were reasons why something had stuck and become a default (In 9th grade, kids are becoming really interested in romantic love, and they are about 14 years old–the age of Romeo and Juliet in the play–and they are subject to the same madness that motivates those characters, so the story hits home at that age). But there was also, because of the local autonomy and decision making, the possibility of innovation. A teacher could say in a department meeting, “I’ve been reading about sentence combining. It’s a technique for increasing students’ syntactic fluency. Here’s how it works.” And this would be tried. So, there was this built-in mechanism for bottom-up continuous improvement. Go into a middle-school or high-school today, and the English Department chairperson is just as likely to be a kid a couple years out of college–someone chosen because of his or her willingness to accede to top-down mandates rather than someone who earned the position by becoming learned. And so you get, as you always do when everything is run top-down, the obedient blind in leadership roles. This all comes down to people and how they work. Ed Deformers don’t understand people. They understand balance sheets and, some of them, computer programming, and they distrust bottom-up democratic processes, despite the history of success that these had in the US.
The saddest thing for me. I have taught a current issues class last year and this (it’s being cut at my school after this year). I do a LOT of “free flowing discussion,” as was mentioned–much longer than 15 seconds a day.
BUT, most of hte kids will NOT engage. They just stare at me. One or two students per class may ask questions or make comments, but that’s out of 40 students per class. The kids have lost their natural curiousity and DEMAND that I just hand them the “right” answer. Most can’t even tell me a personal event or put an opinion in writing.
The BS tests have “taught” studens that there is only one “right” answer, that the information should be spoon-fed to them so that they can reguritate it on a test, and then forgotten. The vast majority of students can no longer think for themselves, and they don’t want to.
My daughter had this in her ELA grade 11 class. Great teacher in that he shut his door and used the “free flowing discussion” method (not many of them these days). Most of the students would comment to my daughter that they wished that he would just give them the information that was going to be on the test and stop it with the talking. My daughter loved this teacher, enjoyed his class, and learned a lot. A lot of her friends can’t think for themselves and they don’t write very well, either.
This is criminal. It is a very good thing for Gates and Coleman that I am not the law in the United States. They would be brought up on charges for having robbed a whole generation of students of humane studies in literature, language, writing, speech, and thinking.
Thompson: “As some of Deeper Learning’s evidence shows, worksheet-driven malpractice has a long history. Teachers tend to teach the way they were taught, prompting a systemic inertia…”
retired teacher 5/18 10:27am: “covering material is the enemy of real learning.” Her grandson’s experience of 3rd-gr math (“the school covers one topic and jumps to the next before students are competent in the first topic”) was precisely mine, 3rd-11th, in a ‘50’s-‘60’s good pubsch sys.
Perhaps the reason the Deeper Learning Report doesn’t name names is that top-down test-driven curriculum has been with us much longer than we care to admit. Maybe the entire NYS math curriculum in my day was backwards-mapped from the Algebra Regents exam. Just one test, but it was high-stakes in it way, & “covering the material” was how most taught math, then as now. Students do well in math despite pedagogy instead of it, as ever.
There are differences now: test-driven curriculum has been enshrined in law, driving those creative enough to teach math well between the lines either crazy or out of teaching; NYS students no longer have the non-Regents diploma option; ELA has been quantified to resemble math standards so its teachers also have to fight the curriculum to teach properly.
I question Mehta and Fine’s measuring sticks. Why privilege complex analysis in math? What if learning the basics by heart is what beginners need? Why privilege student talk? What if being a student is mostly about listening? What if listening isn’t the horrid, deplorable, no-good, passive state that Dewey and his descendants say it is? Why wring hands that students haven’t produced great work? Is “doing work” the point of school, or is learning? I don’t doubt that many of the classes they witnessed were lame, but I wonder if they were judged lame for the right reasons. What I would look for: are the students actually learning something interesting and important? When they’re actually learning, they’re usually pretty happy.
I suspect Mehta and Fine don’t care about kids’ acquiring knowledge so much as a progressivist aesthetic: the child performing visible and/or audible intellectual feats for the adult observer. The long, slow, invisible, inaudible foundation-building for intellectual feats is not valued by them. They want the utterances, the works, the high-level thinking NOW.
This issue that you raise here, Ponderosa, seems really clear to me with regard to the debates that rage in the arena of mathematics. For a long, long time, progressives rightly argued that whatever it is we are teaching in our K-12 math classes wasn’t mathematics, which is an art form in which patterns are manipulated in order to solve problems and make discoveries. Paul Lockhart makes this all very clear in his seminal essay “The Mathematician’s Lament.” Lockhart’s superb analogy is that for a long, long time, our approach to math instruction has been like giving kids 12 years of learning about the rules for manipulating musical notes–this is the cycle of fifths, these are the types of scales, this is how you transpose–without having them actually sing or play instruments. Lockhart is RIGHT about what mathematics is and how our instruction left the math out. But there’s a problem: most (though not all) kids simply do not have, when they are young, the mental machinery for doing very abstract creative thinking. They are quite concrete thinkers, for the most part, though they are capable of some actions that look like very abstract thinking because these are performed by hard-wired mental mechanisms. This last leads people, in a Clever Hans sort of way, to mistakenly ascribe some accomplishments by children to an abstract reasoning ability that kids actually don’t have yet. The well-intentioned desire actually to have kids do real mathematics from an early age leads to abominations like the current CC$$ in Mathematics, which calls for children “understanding the concept of the variable” at Grade 3!!! And this leads to the incomprehensible Common Core Math lessons focused on conceptual learning that parents complain so vociferously about. Longitudinal fMRI studies of brain development conducted at John’s Hopkins and elsewhere have shown that the prefrontal cortex, which does planning and very abstract thinking, really starts to develop when kids are about 16 and isn’t fully in place until about the age of 26. So, the CC$$ in math asks kids to do what they haven’t (most of them) the equipment for yet. It’s like asking a fish to climb a tree or like trying to turn a tiny Phillips-head screw with a butter knife. So, the progressives were right about math and what it is, but they were wrong about child development. (Importantly, there are exceptions. Some few kids, we know, are born with exceptional hardwiring for abstract, mathematical thinking. These are the young Gausses and von Neumanns. They need to be identified and pulled out for completely different educational tracks.) But for most kids, the sane approach would be this: delay the onset of formal math instruction. Have kids at early ages do lots and lots of play with patterns and forms to accelerate the development of abstract reasoning abilities (See Nisbett’s Intelligence and How to Get It for a superb discussion of studies of this). If we did this–if we implemented a program that recognized both a) the true nature of mathematics (Lockhart and the progressives) and b) the developmental readiness of children (the traditionalists), we would make, I think, astonishing progress. But this would require a revolution in our K-12 mathematics curriculum maps and pedagogical approaches. As it is, we aren’t successful. MOST adults, though they’ve had 12 or 13 years of “math instruction,” are functionally innumerate and, most importantly, have learned these covert lessons from all that “instruction”: that math is hard, that they hate it, and that they aren’t good at it. Well, they were fish being asked to climb a tree, and the CC$$ has placed tree climbing at the center of K-12 fish training.
Long and late.
First, Deeper Learning has a specific meaning. It has been set forth by the Hewlett Foundation. I have not read the book titled In Search of Deeper Learning: the Quest to Remake the American High School, but I note that brief Amazon reviews of that book are provided by Linda Darling-Hammond, President and CEO, Learning Policy Institute and Ron Berger, Chief Academic Officer, EL Education among others. Readers of this blog should know this: “Deeper Learning” (DL) is a concept marketed since 2010 by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Further, both the Learning Policy Institute and EL Education have received grants to promote DL: At least $1.6 million and $1.1 million respectively.
Second, here is what I have learned about “Deeper Learning” and how the idea has been marketed.
A formal definition of DL exists and it has been promoted by the Hewlett Foundation. The definition is organized around a proposed a model of student mastering six broad categories of tasks.
1.Core Academic Disciplines (unidentified disciplines but 8 performance tasks/criteria),
2. Think Critically and Solve Problems (8 tasks/criteria),
3. Work Collaboratively (four tasks/criteria),
4. Communicate Effectively (six tasks/criteria),
5. Learn How to Learn (13 tasks/criteria) and
6. Develop Academic Mindsets (11 tasks/criteria, all framed as “I Can…” statements). I have used the word “criteria” because almost all of the tasks assigned to each valued category of learning can be converted to checklists, rubrics, and tests. Moreover, the Hewlett Foundation given at least $2.8 million for work on such assessments, including performance assessments and “performance simulations.”
How do I know all of that? I have looked for references to “Deeper Learning” (DL) in the grants database for the Hewlett Foundation. https://hewlett.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Deeper_Learning_Defined__April_2013.pdf
Without doing a complete review of the Hewlett Foundation grants database, I sampled 400 grants (from over 1,000). Of these 400, 132 were for DL and these grants summed to $48,393,374 (between 2010 and 2018).
That formal definition of DL, published in 2013, was preceded by a huge publicity campaign that included a least one grant for $50,000 to Harvard in 2012 “In support of a book on Deeper Learning,” and a $70,000 grant to The New Press on the same subject in 2011.
In fact, the Hewlett Foundation has tried to insert DL into almost aspect of education by grants intended to shape state legislation for DL, DL curricula, DL instructional methods, DL assessments, DL professional development, online modules for DL and more.
The Foundation has marketed DL to at least 54 different non-profit and for profit agencies representing state legislators, members of state boards of education, business communities, even the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards. The Hewlett Foundation sent over $4.8 million to High Tech High Schools, The High Tech High Graduate School of Education (and associated Foundation) for publicity, an on-line course and conference, teacher evaluation, a DL learning hub for teachers, along with a program to see if Teach for America trainees can be taught to deliver DL in five weeks (in addition with non-nonsense discipline).
Stanford University received money to help states develop tests for DL. The Teaching Channel was paid to produce and to air a video on DL. The Alliance for Excellent Education received over $4.6 million for DL publicity, policy, and DLDL–“metrics” for DL digital learning policy). The American Institutes for Research received $5.6 million to identify models of DL and how DL could be developed “at scale.” What does “at scale” mean? At minimum, charter schools and public schools in states that can be sold on DL.
Among the DL models at scale, at least one is a survivor of the B&M Gates Foundation’s “small high schools” venture. The conspicuous example is The Big Picture Company franchise (Gates start-up funding over $20 million). I found at least $5.6 million in grants from the Hewlett Foundation to pay for site visits and tours to these schools by legislators and business groups, in addition to a DL “Fellows Program” sponsored by the franchise. https://hewlett.org/grants/?keyword=Deeper%20Learning&sort=relevance&grant_programs=31392¤t_page=40
Deeper learning was hatched at the Hewlett Foundation under the leadership of Barbara Chow. Crow managed the education program for eight years. She is now on the Board of Directors of the Learning Policy Institute. Linda Darling-Hammond, CEO of that Institute, is also co-author of a 2019 Harvard University book: Preparing Teachers for Deeper Learning. https://www.hepg.org/hep-home/books/preparing-teachers-for-deeper-learning
That makes two Harvard University books on the DL published in the same year. Even so, the marketing DL for teacher education, often in tandem with “Digital Promise” and online delivery of instruction, is nothing new. https://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/on_innovation/2014/05/preparing_teachers_for_deeper_learning.html.
An intended connection of DL to the Common Core (yes) is evident in this paper funded by the Hewlett and Sandler Foundations. https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/creating-systems-assessment-deeper-learning.pdf
I could go on, but Deeper Learning should be recognized as a hot-house concept developed for billionaire-funded charter high schools, TFA versions of quickie teacher preparation, with “high tech” regarded as essential for instructional delivery. The Hewlett Foundation has struggled to link DL to equity issues through grants to the Asia Society, Univision Communication (for Spanish speaking audiences), the placement of content at the GreatSchools website (about 54 million viewers, many parents with ads from Zillow as well), the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and National Center for Learning Disabilities.
We should recognize that deeper learning is functioning as a brand for an underlying philosophy of education that the Hewlett Foundation has identified as “mastering tasks” in the conventional (if unnamed) “Core Academic Disciplines.” The end game seems to be students who have “Develop Academic Mindsets.” I hope I am not alone in being underwhelmed by the Hewlett Foundations definition of Deeper Learning and decade-long campaign to market it as if it is some revolutionary transformative idea.
Efforts to stretch some idealized version of DL to public schools are constrained by budgets, no end to state and national standards, the persistence of high school course criteria for College and Career “readiness” (from the Gates Foundation), testing mandates in NCLB and now ESSA, plus the proliferation of AP courses, add some social-emotional learning with grit and growth mindsets and project-based learning… as if all are essential for education in public schools.
At best, the quest for DL is imagined to be a methodological and philosophical departure from text-based instruction with teachers doing not much more lecturing, asking questions about a section of a textbook, giving and grading assignments, with students “regurgitating” content. That seems to be the stereotype of high school education. Perhaps it fits some classrooms and some subjects more than others but the Hewlett Foundation definition of DL together with their grants strike me not much more than another piling on expectations for teaching and learning and with a big investment in testing, curriculum, teacher training, and professional development—all structurally resembling the top down mandates about which there seems to be big complaint.
If I read the Harvard books on DL, the books will be from public library. If you want one last romp through the connotations of deep as in “deep learning” and the allure that word may have in the imaginariums of people who inhabit billionaire funded foundations (and institutes, and centers, and councils, and alliances, and networks), I suggest taking some time to look at your Roget’s Thesaurus or make a brief stop here. https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/deep
$48 million on this vagueness! OMG what a waste of money. Well, at least Hewlett staffers probably got some nice vacations in French Polynesia out of it and expensive lunches at San Francisco’s Ferry Building (where I happened to share a table with two Hewlett staffers by accident one day).
Give it up, Hewlett. Quit trying to reinvent education according to your half-baked ideas. Education is simple: give the kids the knowledge about the world as clearly as possible. Once it’s in their heads, they can do all sorts of fancy stuff with it. The difficulty is getting it in their heads.
Laura,
My response to your well-researched comment is similar to your response to Larry Cuban’s take on the subject:
I think your nuanced response to the papers merits more attention.
I was aware of the recent push for Deeper Learning, bur your comment taught me a lot. Just as I would have liked more explicitly named names on how corporate reforms increased the damage done by the assembly line grammar of schooling, I’d have appreciated more explicit explanations of how Deeper Learning fit into the broader deeper learning efforts, that became more difficult after corporate reform.
You may be glad to know that I read a library copy of the book, not one that was purchased, so I’ve no longer got it at home, but I searched for other articles I’d read. Mehta and Fine wrote that they started in an effort to find solutions for the standardized test conundrums, and asked the question, “What would it take to transform high schools into more humanizing and intellectually vital places?”
The definition of deeper learning they reached was “Mastery, identity and creativity.” It is sad that today we must be so suspicious of any reforms proposed by the Billionaires Boys Club. School improvement requires trust, and it will be hard to build trust back to the pre-corporate reform levels, much less the levels our schools need.
But, even though I’d like to have read a more explicit statement from Mehta and Fine about this, your comments reinforce my main take. When an edu-philanthropy funds an effort to produce Mastery, identity and creativity, whether you call it deeper learning or Deeper Learning, and researchers find that even the best of those efforts have failed, and that standardized testing (which has been essential for corporate reforms) is further indicted for doing that damage, that is a powerful assault on the basic premises of Gates’ and the Billionaires Boys Clubs’ approach.
Thanks again,
John
Thanks for the followup. I do not know what evidence the authors cited apart from the brief mention of reports about adolescent boredom and perhaps lack of “intellectual challenge.” If the authors did not look at the devastating role of NCLB and ESSA and the influence of the Billionaire’s boys club on federal policy…with the huge spillover into state and district and school enactments of those policies, they are probably making unwarranted claims. Imagining alternatives is easy, especially if you ask experienced teachers and scholars of education who think that disruptive innovation should NOT be a hallmark of education.
Most adolescents are engaged in finding a way to deal with the hormonal shockwaves of adolescence and intimations of life as an adult. Many cultures and religious traditions have formal rites of passage with clarity about adult responsibilities and duties. I think schools have never been well-equipped to serve as “proxy” providers of rites of passage, even as they are expected to do so. You see this in schools that have student councils, newspapers, clubs, homeroom advisories, chaperoned dances, organized sports in addition to school counselors, social workers, nurses, and so on. Perhaps most important in socialization is being placed in the orbit of teachers who were not automatons and who have forms on knowing not likely to be acquired by unguided experience alone.
You mention trust as an issue. Last year I read Who CanYou Trust: How Technology Brought Us Together and Why It Might Drive Us Apart by Rachael Botsman. I have come across some other books with that theme, and it resonates as one too rarely talked about as a problem in education.
Distrust in “institutions of authority” is not new, nor is propaganda designed to heighten distrust as a pre-condition for this or that reform. What is now more visible than at any recent time in my memory and experience is the role of wealthy people in marketing schemes to micromanage education.
My skepticism about billionaire-funded agendas is long standing. I learned about some of the mindsets from an on and off relationship decades ago with a very large and very new operating foundation. I also have watched the evolution of a local foundation, KnowledgeWorks. It began with some misguided efforts to a banker. After he vanished, a new leader was hired from Great Britain’s Open University. The new agenda is all things techie, and so-called personalized learning uncoupled from brick and mortar schools.
Finally, if you are unaware of the defacto national course recommendations now treated as if “civil rights” take a look the biennial Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) for 2017-2018. Here is a small sample of data reporting required and with the clear imprints of the Gates-funded image of the purposes of schooling as college and career preparation. the CRDC has data collected from every public and school that receives federal funds, including charter schools. Begin Quote
Pathways to College and Career
–Number of students enrolled in gifted & talented programs (disaggregated by race, sex, disability- IDEA, EL).
–Number of students enrolled in distance education courses (disaggregated by race, sex, disability- IDEA, EL) (LEA).
–Number of students enrolled in at least one dual enrollment/dual credit program (disaggregated by race, sex, disability-IDEA, EL).
–Number of students who participate in at least one credit recovery program that allows them to earn missed credit to graduate from high school.
–Number of students ages 16-19 years who participated in LEA-operated high school equivalency exam preparation program (disaggregated by race, sex, disability-IDEA, EL) (LEA).
–Number of students enrolled in the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme (disaggregated by race, sex, disability-IDEA, EL).
–Number of different Advanced Placement (AP) courses provided.
–Whether students are allowed to self-select for participation in AP courses.
–Number of students enrolled in at least one AP course (disaggregated by race, sex, disability- IDEA, EL).
–Number of students enrolled in at least one AP course in specific subject area (disaggregated by race, sex, disability, EL):
—-AP math of any kind;
—-AP science of any kind;
—-AP computer science of any kind; and
—-Other AP subjects of any kind (including foreign language).
–Number of students who took one or more AP exams for one or more (which may include all) AP courses enrolled in (disaggregated by race, sex, disability-IDEA, EL).
–Number of students who were enrolled in one or more AP courses but who did not take any AP exams (disaggregated by race, sex, disability-IDEA, EL).
–Number of Algebra I classes in grades 7-8.
–Number of Algebra I classes in grades 7-8 taught by teachers with a mathematics certification.
….
Access to Internet and computers/devices
–Whether the school is connected to the Internet through fiber-optic connection.
–Whether the school has Wi-Fi access in every classroom.
–Whether the school allows students to take home school-issued devices that can be used to access the Internet for student learning.
–Whether the school allows students to bring to school student-owned devices that can be used to access the Internet for student learning.
–Number of Wi-Fi enabled devices provided by the school to students for student learning use. End quote.
There is much more. Find what else counts as a “civil right” in public education.
Click to access 2017-18-crdc-data-elements.pdf