Marion Brady is a veteran educator who has been trying to reform the school curriculum for many years. He persists.
He writes:
When face-to-face schooling isn’t possible
There’s no getting around it. Firsthand experience is the best teacher. If what’s attempting to be taught is worth knowing, it’s going to be complicated. And if it’s complicated, firsthand experience isn’t just the best teacher, it’s the only teacher.
That’s the main reason most adults remember so little of what they were once “taught.” Information delivered by teacher talk, textbooks and computer screens is dumped on kids’ mental “front porch”—short-term memory—but gets no farther. To be useful, information has to be interesting enough to be picked up, taken inside, and a place in memory found for it that allows logic to access it weeks, months, or years later.
That rarely happens. Most classrooms are purpose-built for delivering information, making it hard to create firsthand experience. It’s even harder to do it via laptops, which goes far toward explaining the usual failure of virtual, remote, and distance instruction.
Alfred North Whitehead, in his 1916 Presidential Address to the Mathematical Association of England, identified a fundamental problem with traditional schooling:
“The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.”
Schooling’s bottom-line aim is societal survival in an unknowable future. Survival requires new knowledge—continuous evolution of citizens’ mental models of reality. An honest look at the world today says time is growing short for creating schooling that teaches kids the most important of all survival skills—how to turn information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom.
That’s doable, but it requires changing the primary aim of middle school-level instruction from covering the content of the core curriculum to improving the ability to think—to hypothesize, generalize, synthesize, imagine, relate, integrate, predict, extrapolate, and so on.
There are dozens of thought processes and countless combinations of thought processes that make humanness possible, but they’re not being taught because they’re too complex to be evaluated by machine-scored standardized tests.
Make maximizing adolescents’ ability to think the aim, and the resulting efficiency from the sharpened focus will be revolutionary. Reducing the hours each day devoted to the soon-forgotten conceptual chaos of the core curriculum will make available a big chunk of time for programs keyed to individual learner interests and abilities.
Dealing with Covid-19
Nothing really substitutes for face-to-face schooling, but when that’s unwise or impossible, learning’s fundamentals still need to be respected.
– Real-world experiences
– Teachers or mentors who ask thought-stimulating questions
– Keeping a journal
– Instruction paced by learner understanding rather than the calendar
– Learning teams small and intimate enough for dialogue—”thinking out loud” about matters of significance.
Textbooks, teacher talk and laptop screens give kids a steady stream of information, but it’s been “processed.” The interesting, creative, intellectually challenging work has already been done, leaving nothing to do but try to remember it.
Would newspapers publish completed crossword puzzles? What the young need that they’re not getting is “raw” reality to chew on—reality in a form that lends itself to description, analysis and interpretation.
Primary data—the “residue” of reality—provides it. However, for kids to engage, data has to come in the form of puzzles, problems and projects, with lesson aims they consider important enough for attention to be paid, and content interesting enough to be self-propelling.
But guidance is necessary. Teams of teachers with varied expertise need to monitor the teams and sometimes comment or pose questions.
Below is an illustrative activity consistent with the above that meshes with existing middle-level curricula and bureaucratic requirements.
Use the present crisis to give education back to educators, and make middle-level schooling’s aim maximizing the quality of thought, and adolescents will demonstrate abilities only long-experienced teachers knew they had.
A Project: Town Planning, 1583
Big idea: Humans shape habitats that then shape humans.
Age group: Middle school and older learners.
Instructional organization: Small, three-to-five-member work teams.
Technology requirements: Broadband internet access, laptop computer.
App: Zoom or another screen-sharing program
Primary data:
Page 2@https://www.marionbrady.com/documents/AHHandbook.pdf
brilliant and necessary analysis: thank you.
Mr. Brady: So many brilliant, exciting projects in the AH Handbook!!! Extraordinarily well done!!!
Good morning Diane and everyone,
Hmmm….”how to turn information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom.”
Knowledge plays a role in wisdom but wisdom comes from another place. If we want our education system to teach wisdom (which I might argue can’t be taught to you) we’ve got to make a LOT of changes!
And as the nation works so hard to bring in only younger, cheaper workers, wisdom becomes our critical loss
Imagine if our students just put together a scrapbook, wrote in a journal, and read. Also, cook, bake, plant, and sketch. Observe and record observations.
Make graphs, draw, and just daydream.
There’s a saying in Dutch: “Lekker Niksen.”
https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/niksen-dutch-mental-health-36647389
Our young need time to “Lekker Niksen” and they will learn a lot and we will be surprised.
High school would be a lot saner for the kids if some time were built in between classes for preparation, for relaxation, for resetting, for interaction with friends: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/03/17/one-way-to-make-high-school-suck-less/
This is the exact reason that child #2 attends a private school (along with my dissatisfaction with CC, over testing and AP for all curriculum). Child #1 has the ability to make lemonade out of lemons, but child #2 will make every single person suck on the lemons without sugar and water. First time he ever liked school was has 1st day of private school. His school is very “whole child’ oriented with plenty of free time to socialize or seek out additional help. It’s so sane at his school and the kids respond to that.
Diane has pointed this interesting fact out many times on this blog:
E.D. Hirsch, Jr., created The Core Knowledge Foundation to promote knowledge-based learning. Opponents attacked him and the foundation for peddling the mere memorization of facts. However, those who visit Core Knowledge Schools find something different–these schools tend to spend a lot of time and energy on project-based learning. Why? Well, here’s why, I think, such pedagogical approaches emerged spontaneously from the Core Knowledge curriculum outline: a) the Core Knowledge Schools tended to be, overwhelmingly, elementary schools because the foundation started with the development of K-6 materials, and elementary-school teachers tend to do a lot of hands-on stuff; and b) when you have a lot of specific, vivid, concrete materials to deal with (that knowledge list associated with a particular topic), people tend to look for ways of tying the bits of knowledge together and doing something with them. Debates in education have a tendency to devolve rapidly into abstract arguments, such as the argument about the relative merits of fact-based versus discovery-based curricula. However, the ideologies of those on either side of the debate have a tendency, as ideologies do, to “stick to the eye,” as Wallace Stevens said of theology. Or, to put it another way, also in Wallace Stevens’s language, “No ideas but in things.” I am anticipating, here, that some readers will respond to Mr. Brady’s materials by dismissing them as examples of “failed discovery learning.” However, if you look at the actual activities in the handbook linked to, any kid doing these a) has to acquire a lot of knowledge in order to do them and b) will walk away from the activities with a lot of new knowledge connected in important ways. I could imagine a teacher following up almost any one of these activities with, among other things, a simple “objective” test on facts about the world acquired in the course of the activity. And these should not be dismissed by those who care about producing students who are creators and thinkers, for facts are what we think WITH. The secret sauce in Brady’s activities that make them better than some discovery learning materials, I think, is that they involve the students acquiring and using a lot of concrete, specific CONTENT in the form of world knowledge and procedural knowledge.
The activities are concrete enough to impart to the kids doing them a pretty specific powerful procedure that is generally applicable.
Additions to the mental toolkit
I hasten to add that I describe, above, the way Core Knowledge Schools used to be. I, too, was struck, as Diane was, when visiting them by how much project work was being done in them.
What I’m saying, here, is that I want people to move beyond that simple either-or business about knowledge-based v. discovery-based learning. Yes, you can teach kids that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees. But it doesn’t take that long, really, to have the kids measure some triangles and come up with this on their own.
Thanks for the post. Knowledge is definitely foundational to thinking. We also know that some students tend to learn better by doing rather than merely observing or even discussing.
Teachers often say, “Gosh, I thought I knew this stuff, but when I had to teach it, I found that I REALLY grew in my knowledge and understanding of it.” This is an important clue.
I LOVE these activities. As a child, my creative activities revolved around inventing little societies. Underground bunny-rabbit villages when youngest. Then an elemsch friend & I spent many an afternoon designing an Amazon matriarchy. I would have been thrilled to do social studies à la Brady in midschool!
Marion Brady has contributed far more to the progress of education than all the Rheeformers ever will. IMHO
I agree. Whole experience is much more nutritious than processed.