Knowledge Really Is Power

by Lisa Hansel
June 18th, 2013

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Posted in Core Knowledge, Curriculum | 7 Comments »

This post isn’t about KIPP, but I’ll start with thanking KIPP for keeping a fundamental truth alive: Knowledge is power. Knowledge enables us to develop, refine, and deploy skills. Knowledge opens doors both literally and figuratively, giving meaning to freedom and democracy.

Knowledge is essential, and it needs to be taught. So it’s with great pleasure that I offer this far-too-long post, with Sol Stern, Annie Murphy Paul, Daniel Willingham, E. D. Hirsch, and Tom Birmingham all making the case for knowledge.

Written as an open letter to the next mayor of New York City, Sol Stern’s article in the new City Journal makes a strong case for a content-rich curriculum:

Though children from disadvantaged families, and particularly from single-parent families, certainly tend to start school with less knowledge than middle-class students have, you can nevertheless pronounce confidently that educational improvement is possible, even in the toughest neighborhoods and lowest-performing schools.

We know that because it happened in Massachusetts…. The Bay State’s 1993 education-reform legislation established the country’s most demanding set of academic standards, which replaced trendy but ineffective pedagogical approaches with an old-fashioned emphasis on “content”—that is, knowledge. The standards eventually brought Massachusetts the greatest overall improvements in student performance in the nation, as measured by the NAEP….

The infrastructure for improvement is already in place, thanks to New York’s adoption of the Common Core State Standards…. If implemented properly—admittedly, a big “if”—the standards could start our schools on a long, difficult path to higher academic performance, not only for poor children but for all students.

Critics of the Common Core argue that the standards aren’t as demanding as Massachusetts’s. They’re right. But the Common Core is far superior to anything that previously passed for academic standards in New York. “By reading texts in history/social studies, science, and other disciplines, students build a foundation of knowledge in these fields that will also give them the background to be better readers in all content areas,” say the standards’ accompanying documents. “Students can only gain this foundation when the curriculum is intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades.” If a coherent, knowledge-based curriculum drove improvement in Massachusetts, it could do the same in New York City….

If you pick a schools chancellor and other top officials who keep up with education research, they will know that a consensus exists among cognitive scientists that building broad content knowledge in the early grades is the best way to raise reading comprehension for disadvantaged children. As education scholar E. D. Hirsch, Jr. has warned for the past quarter-century, many poor children remain functionally illiterate not because teachers are incompetent but because those teachers have been “compelled to teach a fragmented curriculum” that dismisses the accumulation of knowledge as “mere facts.” More, a knowledge-based curriculum provides the most promising long-term strategy for preparing all children, poor and middle-class alike, for success in college or, for those who don’t attend college, in the twenty-first-century workplace. As a bonus, the Common Core encourages teaching the historical and civic knowledge that children need to become informed citizens and better Americans.

Contrary to what some critics say, content-based curricula are hardly an untested idea that we should try in only a limited number of schools. Not only do we have the success story of Massachusetts; we can point to the city’s field test of Hirsch’s content-based Core Knowledge literacy program in several schools between 2008 and 2011. The test showed that Core Knowledge produced significantly greater gains for students than the school system’s most widely used reading program (see “The Curriculum Reformation,” Summer 2012).

You still shouldn’t promise miracles, of course. There will be no overnight double-digit leaps in test scores…. It will take more than a few years to change the culture of teaching and restore the priority of knowledge acquisition in the classroom.

Changing the culture of teaching (which would entail changing most teacher preparation programs) will indeed be difficult. One major obstacle to overcome is the idea that students no longer need to acquire knowledge—with the right skills, they can just look up what they need to know whenever they need to know it. In a new post, Annie Murphy Paul addresses that myth:

What kind of information do we need to have stored in our heads, and what kind can we leave “in the cloud,” to be accessed as necessary?

The answer will determine what we teach our students, what we expect our employees to know, and how we manage our own mental resources. But before I get to that answer, I want to tell you about the octopus who lives in a tree.

In 2005, researchers at the University of Connecticut asked a group of seventh graders to read a website full of information about the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, or Octopus paxarbolis…. Applying an analytical model they’d learned, the students evaluated the trustworthiness of the site and the information it offered.

Their judgment? The tree octopus was legit. All but one of the pupils rated the website as “very credible.” The headline of the university’s press release read, “Researchers Find Kids Need Better Online Academic Skills,” and it quoted Don Leu, professor of education at UConn and co-director of its New Literacies Research Lab, lamenting that classroom instruction in online reading is “woefully lacking.”

There’s something wrong with this picture, and it’s not just that the arboreal octopus is, of course, a fiction…. The other fable here is the notion that the main thing these kids need—what all our kids really need—is to learn online skills in school. It would seem clear that what Leu’s seventh graders really require is knowledge: some basic familiarity with the biology of sea-dwelling creatures that would have tipped them off that the website was a whopper (say, when it explained that the tree octopus’s natural predator is the sasquatch).

But that’s not how an increasingly powerful faction within education sees the matter. They are the champions of “new literacies”—or “21st century skills” or “digital literacy” or a number of other faddish-sounding concepts. In their view, skills trump knowledge, developing “literacies” is more important than learning mere content, and all facts are now Google-able and therefore unworthy of committing to memory….

Indeed, evidence from cognitive science challenges the notion that skills can exist independent of factual knowledge….

Just because you can Google the date of Black Tuesday doesn’t mean you understand why the Great Depression happened or how it compares to our recent economic slump. And sorting the wheat from the abundant online chaff requires more than simply evaluating the credibility of the source (the tree octopus material was supplied by the “Kelvinic University branch of the Wild Haggis Conservation Society,” which sounded impressive to the seventh graders in Don Leu’s experiment). It demands the knowledge of facts that can be used to independently verify or discredit the information on the screen.

Okay, students really do have to learn things. Knowledge really is power. How should we go about teaching them all this knowledge? Many educators have been taught that the best approach is the supposedly natural one: having students explore, making observations and discoveries. But according to recent research, it appears as through directly teaching students is both natural and—more importantly—highly effective. In yet another must-read post on his science and education blog, Daniel Willingham explained this research:

I don’t much care about “naturalness” one way or the other. As long as learning is happening, I’m happy, and I think the value some people place on naturalness is a hangover from a bygone Romantic era, as I describe here.

Now a fascinating paper by Patrick Shafto and his colleagues … leads to implications that call into doubt the idea that exploratory learning is especially natural or authentic.

The paper focuses on a rather profound problem in human learning. Think of the vast difference in knowledge between a new born and a three-year-old; language, properties of physical objects, norms of social relations, and so on. How could children learn so much, so rapidly?…

Much of the research on this problem has focused on the idea that there must be innate assumptions or biases on the part of children that help them make sense of their observations…. Many models using these principles have not attached much significance to the manner in which children encounter information. Information is information.

Shafto et al. point out why that’s not true. They draw a distinction between three different cases with the following example. You’re in Paris, and want a good cup of coffee.

1) You walk into a cafe, order coffee, and hope for the best.
2) You see someone who you know lives in the neighborhood. You see her buying coffee at a particular cafe so you get yours there too.
3) You see someone you know lives in the neighborhood. You see her buying coffee at a particular cafe. She sees you observing her, looks at her cup, looks at you, and nods with a smile

In the first case you acquire information on your own. There is no guiding principle behind this information acquisition. It is random, and learning where to find good coffee will slow going with this method.

In the second scenario, we anticipate that the neighborhood denizen is more knowledgeable than we–she probably knows where to get good coffee. Finding good coffee ought to be much faster if we imitate someone more knowledgeable than we. At the same time, there could be other factors at work. For example, it’s possible that she thinks the coffee in that cafe is terrible, but it’s never crowded and she’s in a rush that morning.

In the third scenario, that’s highly unlikely. The woman is not only knowledgeable, she communicates with us; she knows what we want to know and she can tell us that the critical feature we care about is present. Unlike scenario #2, the knowledgeable person is adjusting her actions to maximize our learning.

More generally, Shafto et al suggest that these cases represent three fundamentally different learning opportunities; learning from physical evidence, learning from the observation of goal-directed action, and learning from communication.

Shafto et al argue that although some learning theories assume that children acquire information at random, that’s likely false much of the time. Kids are surrounded by people more knowledgeable than they. They can see, so to speak, where more knowledgeable people get their coffee.

Further, adults and older peers often adjust their behavior to make it easier for children to draw the right conclusion…. more knowledgeable others often do take into account what the child knows, and speak so as to maximize what the child can learn. If an adult asked “what’s that?”  I might say “It’s Westphalian ham on brioche.” If a toddler asked, I‘d say “It’s a sandwich.”

One implication is that the problem I described—how do kids learn so much, so fast—may not be quite as formidable as it first seemed because the environment is not random. It has a higher proportion of highly instructive information….

The second implication is this: when a more knowledgeable person not only provides information but tunes the communication to the knowledge of the learner, that is, in an important sense, teaching.

So whatever value you attach to “naturalness,” bear in mind that much of what children learn in their early years of life may not be the product of unaided exploration of their environment, but may instead be the consequence of teaching. Teaching might be considered a quite natural state of affairs.

I’ll leave the summing up to two leaders of the charge to ensure that all students acquire the knowledge (and skills—they go together!) they need.

E. D. Hirsch, chiming in on Willingham’s blog, noted:

Readers … should be aware of the relevant comments of the most curmudgeonly education commissioner California ever had, Max Rafferty, with regard to the natural teaching methods. “Schooling is not a natural process at all. It’s highly artificial. No boy in his right mind ever wanted to study multiplication tables and historical dates when he could be out hunting rabbits or climbing trees. In the days when hunting and climbing contributed to the survival of homo sapiens there was some sense in letting the kids do what comes naturally, but when man’s future began to hang upon the systematic mastery of orderly subject matter, the primordial, happy-go-lucky, laissez faire kind of learning had to go. [...] The story of mankind is the rise of specialization with its highly artificial concomitants. [...] When writing was invented, “natural” education went down the drain of history. From then on, children were destined to learn artificially. [...] This is civilization — the name of the game. [...] All civilization is artificial.” Actually, I think Rafferty understated the case. The pre-historic kid had to be taught by a grownup how to hunt rabbits — at least if the group was going to be successful.

Natural or not, acquiring academic knowledge is necessary. To the extent that we ignore the power of knowledge, and the efficiency and effectiveness of teaching it directly, we are locking the doors that a content-rich education would open. Tom Birmingham, former president of the Massachusetts Senate and coauthor of the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993, clearly stated our dire situation just a few days ago in the Boston Globe:

As education theorist E.D. Hirsch Jr. has demonstrated, achievement gaps are really knowledge gaps. Poor kids tend to have access to less background knowledge outside school than privileged kids. Unless poor kids are exposed to the same academically rich content in school that more affluent kids can get at home, we consign these students to second-class citizenship.

 

With the Common Core, the Whole Is More Than the Sum of Its Parts

by Lisa Hansel
June 13th, 2013

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Posted in Curriculum | 21 Comments »

In a new post on Diane Ravitch’s blog, Robert Shepherd makes many insightful observations about the sad state of reading instruction:

Back in 1984, Palinscar and Brown wrote a highly influential paper about something they called “reciprocal learning.” They suggested, in that paper, that teachers conducting reading circles encourage dialogue about texts by having students do prediction, ask questions, clarify the text, and summarize. Excellent advice. But this little paper had an enormously detrimental unintended effect on the professional education community. All groups are naturally protective of their own turf. The paper by Palinscar and Brown had handed the professional education community a definition of their turf: You see, we do, after all, have a unique, respectable, scientific field of our own that justifies our existence—we are the keepers of “strategies” for learning. The reading community, in particular, embraced this notion wholeheartedly. Reading comprehension instruction became MOSTLY about teaching reading strategies, and an industry for identifying reading strategies and teaching those emerged. The vast, complex field of reading comprehension was narrowed to a few precepts: teach kids to identify the main idea and supporting details; teach them to identify sequences and causes and effects; teach them to make inferences; teach them to use context clues; teach them to identify text elements. Throughout American K-12 education, we started seeing curriculum materials organized around teaching these “strategies.” Where before a student might do a lesson on reading Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” he or she would now do a lesson on Making Predictions, and any text that contained some examples of predictions would be a worthy object of study….

The question of how to “make an inference” is extraordinarily complex, and a great deal human attention has been given to it over the centuries, and a quick glance at any of the hundreds of thousands of Making Inferences lessons in our textbooks and in papers about reading strategies by education professors will reveal that almost nothing of what is actually known about this question has found its way into our instruction….

I bring up the issue of instruction in making inferences in order to make a more general point—the professional education establishment, and especially that part of it that concerns itself with English language arts and reading instruction, has retreated into dealing in poorly conceived generalization and abstraction. Reading comprehension instruction, in particular, has DEVOLVED into the teaching of reading strategies, and those strategies are not much more than puffery and vagueness. There is no there there. No kid walks away from his or her Making Inferences lesson with any substantive learning, with any world knowledge or concept or set of procedures that can actually be applied in order to determine what kind of inference a particular one is and whether that inference is reasonable. Why? Because one has to learn and teach a lot of complex material in order to do these things at all, and professional education folks have decided, oddly, that they can teach making inferences without, themselves, learning about what kinds of inferences there are and how one evaluates the various kinds.

But to my way of thinking, he goes too far in indicting the Common Core State Standards:

Have a look at these standards, and what do you see? Well, the standards are abstractions, generalizations: The student will be able to recognize the main idea. The student will be able to draw inferences. The student will be able to determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze in detail its development over the course of the text. In English language arts, the CONTENT of what is studied is treated in the new standards AS AN AFTERTHOUGHT. We are told that students should be reading substantive, grade-level appropriate works. Some examples of these are given in an appendix. But the standards themselves are simply a list of abstract skills and “strategies.” They don’t even include ANY descriptions of procedures that students might learn for carrying out tasks. So, they completely ignore both world knowledge (knowledge of what) and procedural knowledge (knowledge of how), though they occasionally make vague references to what would result if one had (miraculously, by what means they do not say) acquired the latter….

In our rush to make ELA education scientific, in our emphasis on abstract form over content, we’ve forgotten why we read. We don’t read to hone our inferencing skills. We don’t read because we are fascinated by where, in this essay, the author has placed the main idea. Our purpose in reading is not to find out how the author organized her story in order to create suspense. We read because we are interested in what the text has to say, and the metacognitive abstraction about the text is incidental. It grows out of and relates to what this particular text does and takes meaning from that. The Common Core State Standards in ELA is just another set of blithering, poorly thought out abstractions. And starting from there, instead of starting with the text and its content, is a mistake.

One could implement the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts perfectly and have students entirely miss what reading literature is about. They would not come away from their literature classes with the understanding that when they read a literary work well, they enter into an imaginative world and have an experience there, in all its concreteness and specificity, and it is then THAT experience that has significance, that matters, that has “meaning.”

While Shepherd is spot-on regarding the purpose and value of reading, and on the devastating overemphasis on reading strategies, on the CCSS he is making the same mistake that many educators are making—focusing too much on the standards and too little on the text surrounding the standards. The individual standards are abstract goals. Alone, they could inspire more strategy-focused instruction. But they do not stand alone.

To ensure that students acquire the breadth and depth of knowledge needed to read with ease across academic domains, the standards repeatedly call for a content-rich curriculum (the page numbers given refer to the PDF version of the standards):

While the Standards make references to some particular forms of content, including mythology, foundational U.S. documents, and Shakespeare, they do not—indeed, cannot—enumerate all or even most of the content that students should learn. The Standards must therefore be complemented by a well-developed, content-rich curriculum consistent with the expectations laid out in this document. (p. 6)

Through extensive reading of stories, dramas, poems, and myths from diverse cultures and different time periods, students gain literary and cultural knowledge as well as familiarity with various text structures and elements. By reading texts in history/social studies, science, and other disciplines, students build a foundation of knowledge in these fields that will also give them the background to be better readers in all content areas. Students can only gain this foundation when the curriculum is intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades. (p. 10)

The standards also show how to accelerate knowledge and vocabulary growth through a carefully sequenced, grade-by-grade approach to constructing content-area domains:

Building knowledge systematically in English language arts is like giving children various pieces of a puzzle in each grade that, over time, will form one big picture. At a curricular or instructional level, texts—within and across grade levels—need to be selected around topics or themes that systematically develop the knowledge base of students. Within a grade level, there should be an adequate number of titles on a single topic that would allow children to study that topic for a sustained period. The knowledge children have learned about particular topics in early grade levels should then be expanded and developed in subsequent grade levels to ensure an increasingly deeper understanding of these topics. (p. 33)

Word acquisition occurs up to four times faster … when students have become familiar with the domain of the discourse and encounter the word in different contexts…. Hence, vocabulary development for these words occurs most effectively through a coherent course of study in which subject matters are integrated and coordinated across the curriculum and domains become familiar to the student over several days or weeks. (Appendix A, p. 33)

Anyone who brings a checklist mentality to these standards will get checklist results. But they won’t be able to honestly say their approach was in keeping with the spirit or intent of the Common Core.

The CCSS are stronger than states’ previous efforts to produce ELA standards because they do explain the need for domain-based studies organized in a coherent, content-rich curriculum. But in deference to America’s tradition of local control, the CCSS fall short of sealing the deal, of requiring even a few specific texts for each grade.

Just consider what Virginia, a state that did not adopt the CCSS, is currently doing. According to Rachel Levy, VA is clearing content out of the way so students can spend even more time on strategies:

Recently, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell proposed and the General Assembly approved a bill that allows elementary schools to apply for waivers from high-stakes science and social studies testing (aka SOLs) for third graders. So far this testing season, approximately twenty-five public elementary schools have availed themselves of this waiver. The idea is that before struggling readers can learn content they have to master reading comprehension.

Virginia’s Deputy Secretary of Education Javaid Siddiqui thinks this is a good idea:

The law, which expires in 2015, is a kind of a pilot program, Siddiqi said. He said that schools with low reading pass rates often have low pass rates in social studies and science because the two are connected. “It’s not about what they know,” Siddiqi said. “They are struggling with comprehension.”

On the one hand, I am all for reducing standardized testing in Virginia. I also acknowledge that the intention here is worthy: to help struggling students, to not set them up for failure.

However, I’m afraid that the logic is misguided and that that this will mean a decrease in social studies and science instruction and an increase in reading test prep. Yes, reading is a gateway to learning and limited instruction in reading strategies can be helpful, but the reason these students are struggling to comprehend what they read is because they aren’t learning enough content. It’s true that “it’s not about what they know;” it’s about what they don’t know. A valid test of reading would have passages related to the subject matter the students have already learned.

Putting off content-rich instruction to “focus on reading” will only serve to put off progress in reading proficiency.

Sadly, Virginia’s misguided new plan clearly shows that the CCSS are a real step forward. They give states, districts, and schools a strong foundation to build on. So instead of trying to tear down that foundation, let’s help the nation’s educators build up the excellent curriculum, and related materials and professional development, they need.

Slowing Down, Feeling Dumb, Getting Smarter

by Lisa Hansel
June 11th, 2013

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Posted in Research and Reports | 1 Comment »

Assuming everyone reading this blog is an adult, I think there’s one experience we all share: Time going by too fast. Unlike when we were children, the weeks, months, and even years seem to fly by. Someone once told me that it’s because each for each day you live, any one day is a smaller percentage of your life. There may be something to that, but I don’t think that’s the real issue. I think adult life seems to fly by because adults so rarely do new things.

If I want to slow down the clock, I try something new. A new yoga class or recipe can slow down an evening. A couple of years ago, building on my love of hiking, I took a forestry course that slowed down the fall as I struggled to identify various trees by their (strikingly similar) leaves. My new job has slowed down this entire spring—and since I still have a lot to learn, it’s looking like I’m going to have a pretty slow summer.

Most people I’ve talked to about this (okay, that’s not many) agree that tackling something new temporarily alleviates that sense of life passing by, so why don’t we learn new things more often? There are plenty of obvious answers; I’ll skip to what I think are the real answers (and, yup, this is the part where a blog feels too much like a diary). New things are often hard, confusing, and when they make you feel dumb, scary.

Since children are confronted with newness almost daily in school, I think adults—especially adults in education—should feel obligated to push themselves into new territory with some regularity. The benefits could range from empathizing with students to being better able to digest research on learning.

I was thinking about this today as I read a recent talk by Annie Murphy Paul, a journalist writing a book titled Brilliant: The New Science of Smart. She explored eight facets of intelligence. While the whole talk is worth reading, she makes a few points that are especially relevant to those interested in Core Knowledge:

Beliefs can make us smarter. Many of you have probably encountered the work of Carol Dweck, the Stanford psychologist who wrote the terrific book Mindset. Dweck distinguishes two types of mindsets: the fixed mindset, or the belief that ability is fixed and unchanging, and the growth mindset, or the belief that abilities can be developed through learning and practice.

These beliefs matter because they influence how think about our own abilities, how we perceive the world around us, and how we act when faced with a challenge or with adversity.

Anyone trying to engage students in a rigorous curriculum should be very familiar with Carol Dweck’s research. While the fixed mindset is quite common in the US, research supports the growth mindset: learning new things actually makes your smarter. Sadly, students with a fixed mindset have been found to avoid challenging work for fear that it will show that they are not smart. Students with a growth mindset are more eager to take on challenging work and to be persistent. Dweck’s research not only highlights the importance of teaching the growth mindset, it has produced specific ways of praising and interacting with students to reinforce the message that effort and mistakes are essential to cultivating intelligence.

 Expertise can make us smarter…. An expert’s knowledge is deep, not shallow or superficial; it is well-organized, around a core of central principles; it is automatic, meaning that it has been streamlined into mental programs that run with very little conscious effort; it is flexible and transferable to new situations; it is self-aware, meaning that an expert can think well about his or her own thinking. Expertise takes a long time to develop, of course, but the adolescent and young adult years are not too soon to begin encouraging students to go deep in a subject area that interests them.

Just as I think adults should force themselves out of their comfort zones and into new territory, I agree with Annie that youth should be encouraged to develop true expertise. In fact, I’d say we could start much younger than adolescence. The seven-year-old who knows more than the average adult about dinosaurs or ballet is already getting a taste of the pleasure of expertise. Students with deep knowledge of a topic experience the meaningful boost to self-esteem that comes from a real accomplishment. Neither their content knowledge nor their knowledge of their own competence can be taken from them. If all children had the opportunity to develop some expertise, just think how much easier it would be to explain the growth mindset and convince all students that intelligence comes from effort, not just genes.

Attention can make us smarter. You’ve probably heard about the ‘marshmallow test,’ a famous experiment conducted by psychologist Walter Mischel in the late 1960s. Mischel found that children who could resist eating a marshmallow in return for the promise of two marshmallows later on did better in school and in their careers.

Well, there’s a new marshmallow test that is faced every day, almost every minute by our students: it’s the ability to resist the urge to check one’s email, to respond to a text, to see what’s happening on Facebook or Twitter. I know we’ve all heard that ‘digital natives’ grew up multitasking and therefore excel at it, but the fact is that there are information-processing bottlenecks in the brain—everybody’s brain—that prevent us from paying attention to two things at the same time.

This, of course, is directly related to the growth mindset and expertise—you can’t attain them without paying attention. And yet, it’s one thing to convince students that the more you know the smarter you are—it’s another to convince them that no one smart enough to learn about the world while texting. Multitaskers tend to think they are good at doing two or more things at once—like texting, checking Facebook, and doing homework. But in fact, no one is good at it, and multitaskers tend to be worse at focusing their attention.

So what if students aren’t paying much attention in class, can’t they just Google what they need to know whenever they need to know it? Probably not. Even the ability to look something up requires a base of knowledge. As Annie put it: “The ready availability of technology may persuade students that they don’t need to learn facts anymore, because they can always ‘just Google it.’ In fact, research from cognitive science shows that the so-called ’21stcentury skills’ that we’re always hearing about—critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, creativity—can’t emerge in a content-free vacuum. They must develop in the context of a rich base of fact knowledge: knowledge that’s stored on the original hard drive, one’s own brain.”

So, here’s to having some empathy and productive praise for those students whose “hard drives” are assimilating as much new knowledge as possible. And here’s to making sure that those of us who haven’t learned anything new recently make a little time this summer to slow down, overcome our fears, and tackle a foreign topic.

Brian Pick Gets It

by Lisa Hansel
June 6th, 2013

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Posted in Curriculum | 3 Comments »

Earlier today I had the great pleasure of a blog post that I wrote about the District of Columbia’s approach to the Common Core standards being published on Valerie Strauss’s “The Answer Sheet.” And just a couple of hours ago I had the great honor of speaking with Brian Pick—the man in charge of revamping DC’s approach to curriculum and instruction to meet the new standards.

In my earlier post, I congratulated the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) for being dedicated to implementing the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), and for tackling the necessary changes in a very open, public manner. I also conveyed concerns about the standards being reduced to a checklist, and saw far too much business as usual in the instructional guidance I found online. It appears skills heavy, and content light. I am thankful to Pick for calling me to share his bigger picture and some of his longer-term goals.

Pick is, quite frankly, one of the most impressive educators I’ve spoken with in a long time. He gets it. He gets the cognitive science research on what knowledge does for reading comprehension and critical thinking. He gets teachers and teaching. He gets students’ needs—especially the needs of students who change schools frequently. He gets the importance of domain-based, cross-curricular studies for building broad background knowledge.

Some part of the system may have, as I claimed, checklist mentality—but Pick gets the intent of the Common Core standards.

He also has a correction for me: That District of Columbia Comprehensive Assessment System Resource Guide 2013 that I’m so worried about (because it reduces the CCSS to a list with assessment stems and completely ignores the call for a content-rich curriculum) was published by DC’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education, not the district. I should have noticed that!

He also told me about the curriculum that DCPS is writing. Unfortunately, the units developed thus far are only available to those in the school system. But based on the conversation I had with Pick, I am happy to give him the benefit of the doubt. He agreed with me that the scope and sequence outlines I was able to see, with each unit described with just a bare-bones theme and focus, are too vague and too focused on skills. He explained that the actual units (which are password protected) are very content heavy.

Even better, he told me about a specific change that I found delightful. In my original post, I quoted a second grade “unit focus” that stated, “Students will study the history of, and daily life in, another country (teachers should select which country to study). In reading, students will continue to compare and contrast by making text-to-text connections. Students will also focus on summarizing individual paragraphs and multi-paragraph texts. In writing, students will write an opinion piece. Significant time should be devoted to learning how to peer-edit and peer-revise.” In critiquing it, I noted that this description was far too focused on skills, and not focused enough on the content. I did not add on how bothered I was that the country selection was being left up to each teacher. In other writing I have explained why that bothers me: In brief, I’ve argued that what to teach ought to be a communal, research-based, and experience-based decision. Since knowledge is essential to comprehension and critical thinking, and since there is a body of knowledge that literate adults are assumed to have, I think all of us should be willing to plow through the hard work of agreeing to certain content for each grade. (In contrast, I think that how to teach should be up to the individual teacher.) Finally, the delight: Pick told me that his team has revised that unit. The selection of the country is no longer up to the teacher. They’ve decided to teach about our neighbors, Canada and Mexico.

I am not easily won over, so I quizzed Pick about how the curriculum is being developed and to what extent they are creating domain-based studies. Pick showed that he knows the research on how being immersed in a topic accelerates learning (of knowledge, vocabulary, and skills). He has studied the human body example in the Common Core. And he is driving toward a very rich learning experience for DC’s children.

 

Why Reading Is the Tougher Nut

by Lisa Hansel
June 3rd, 2013

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Posted in Assessment and Testing, Core Knowledge School, Literacy | 1 Comment »

In the New York Times last week, Brett Peiser, chief executive officer of the Uncommon Schools network, asked some very important questions about why students struggle with reading comprehension: “Is it a vocabulary issue? A background knowledge issue? A sentence length issue? How dense is the text?” As Peiser noted, all of these are facets of comprehension that take time to improve—but the problem is both easier to understand and harder to address than most educators realize.

In response to the Times article, Mike Goldstein, founder of the Match Charter School, noted on his blog that “At Match, we too have always had larger math gains than English gains.  Not just on MCAS, also on SAT.” He continues:

Two years ago I tackled this topic, and Tom [Hoffman] commented:

One problem with our testing regime is that it makes math look like half of the goal of a school. Math as a discipline is constructed and taught differently than all others. If your school is constructed to optimize math instruction, you’re not half way there; you’re more like 1/5th of the way.

Good thought.  I don’t know of any schools where kids have, say, 4 English classes and one math class.  And if we didn’t have the phrase “English class” — if instead we only had the component parts called “Literature class,” “Non-fiction class,” “Writing class,” “Vocabulary Building and Grammar class,” and so forth, you could imagine a school designed that way, with 4X the amount of time devoted to English.  And then instead of one test for English, we’d have 4 exams and one math exams.

I’m not saying this is a good idea given other tradeoffs, I’m saying that might result in more equal sized gains.

Goldstein is a fan of E. D. Hirsch’s work, so I hope he’ll smile when he reads this: I know of schools that have “4 English classes and one math class.” Schools that teach the full Core Knowledge Sequence teach language arts, world and American history and geography, visual arts, music, science, and mathematics. If you trust the decades of research showing that the key to literacy is broad knowledge, then these schools have, in effect, five English classes and one math class. The difference between this and typical schooling is that Core Knowledge schools teach all of these things from kindergarten through eighth grade. They do it rigorously, with content-rich curricula that flesh out the Sequence with domain-based studies in which reading, discussing, and writing content happens throughout each day.

To put this back in Peiser’s terms, if you focus on knowledge, issues with vocabulary, long sentences, and dense texts will be resolved.

As E. D. Hirsch has explained, vocabulary is best learned not with vocabulary lists, but in context while studying specific domains of knowledge. Key terms may be explained as needed, but most vocabulary is acquired through multiple exposures in multiple contexts. I saw an example of this recently at P.S. 104, the Bays Water School in Queens, NY, which is doing a terrific job of bringing Core Knowledge Language Arts to life. Second graders had recently listened to, discussed, and written about a series of texts their teacher read aloud about leaders—like Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King, Jr.—who had fought for a cause. Along the way, they learned the word “injustice.” I happened to be sitting in when the teacher started reading aloud from Charlotte’s Web: “Fern was up at daylight, trying to rid the world of injustice. As a result, she now has a pig.” Hands flew into the air as the children were eager to relate what they already knew about injustice to this new example.

It may be fairly obvious that building knowledge also builds vocabulary and enables comprehension. But the connection between knowledge and comprehending dense texts with long sentences may not be as obvious. Recent research by Diana Arya, Elfrieda Hiebert, and P. David Pearson shines some light:

The present study was designed to address the question of whether lexical or syntactic factors exert greater influence on the comprehension of elementary science texts. Based on previous research on text accessibility, it was expected that syntactic and lexical complexity would each affect students’ performance on science texts, and that these two types of text complexity together would additionally impact student performance. In order to test this hypothesis, 16 texts that varied in syntactic and lexical complexity across four different topics were constructed. Students read texts that ranged in complexity, each from a different topic.

Contrary to our hypotheses, syntactic complexity did not explain variance in performance across any of the four topics….

Lexical complexity significantly influenced comprehension performance for texts on two of the four topics, Tree Frogs and Soil, but not for texts on Jelly Beans and Toothpaste. This finding was consistent across all participant groups, including ELLs.

In writing about this research, E. D. Hirsch noted that “These results are at odds with the notion that the usual measures of sentence structure (and/or length) and vocabulary are reliable ways to determine the ‘right’ reading level of a text for a child. On the other hand, their findings are consistent with other work in language study, as Arya, Hiebert, and Pearson were quick to point out…. Given enough familiarity with a topic, children are able to make correct guesses about words they have never seen before. They are also able to disentangle complex syntax if their topic familiarity enables them to grasp the gist of a text.”

So, for comprehension, the primary question is this: How can we ensure that students are familiar with a broad range of topics? You don’t need four English classes—you need a content-rich, carefully organized, grade-by-grade curriculum. Introduce young children to the world through literature, science, history, geography, and the arts. Even in middle school, read to them texts that are too challenging for them to read themselves. Engage them in discussions and substantive writing every day.

And be patient.

Patience is the hard part. Our high-stakes accountability systems not only expect yearly gains, they reward bad practices. While drilling students in comprehension strategies can get a bump in scores, it will not lead to meaningful increases in literacy. Building broad knowledge (and thus broad vocabulary and the capacity to grasp complex text) takes time. With a content-rich, sequential curriculum, schools can build the necessary knowledge over time. What they can’t do is show big yearly gains on tests that are not matched to their curriculum (which is a hazard of all state tests in which the content of the passages is not revealed and thus can’t be studied).

Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Institute has proposed an interesting solution: a two-part accountability system that allows schools to create their own measures. Here’s his pitch (Duncan, Congress—are you listening?):

    1. First, as the default system, we keep something like we have today, but with better standards and tests. (Yes, common-core standards and tests.) Students are tested annually; schools are held accountable for making solid progress from September to June, with greater progress expected for students who are further behind. States and districts give these schools lots of assistance—with curriculum development, teacher training, and the like. Such a default system won’t lead to widespread excellence, but it will continue to raise the floor so that the “typical” school in America becomes better than it is today. (NB: I’d scrap any state-prescribed “accountability” below the level of the school. In other words, no more rigid teacher evaluation systems; leave personnel issues to the principals.) And it would provide taxpayers an assurance that they are getting a “public good” from their investment in public education (namely, a reasonably educated citizenry).
    2. Then we offer all public schools—district and charter—an opt-out alternative. They can propose to the state or its surrogate that they be held accountable to a different set of measures. My preferences would be those related to the long-term success of their graduates. School “inspections” could be part of the picture, too. These evaluation metrics would be rigorous, but designed to be supportive of, rather than oppositional to, the cause of excellent schools. And they might be particularly important to educators of a more progressive, anti-testing bent.

This plan would allow schools to focus on building knowledge instead of artificially boosting scores with drills on comprehension and test-taking strategies. Schools could commit to a strong curriculum, then measure progress in reading comprehension through curriculum-based tests of students’ growing knowledge of literature, science, history, geography, music, the arts. Such tests could involve reading, writing, and speaking to ensure that students are progressing in all aspects of language as they develop broad knowledge of the world.

Developing and teaching a content-rich, coherent curriculum is hard to do, but it’s also the only approach that works.

 

Deepest Learning: Reading to Write & Writing to Learn

by Lisa Hansel
May 29th, 2013

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Posted in Core Knowledge School, Curriculum, Education Theory | 6 Comments »

Where in Queens, NY, can you find second graders comparing the Olympics in ancient Greece with our modern games—and using that discussion as an opportunity to review the use of past and present verbs? Or third graders preparing travel guides on the Amazon, Orinoco, Nile, and Yellow rivers? What about essays by fourth graders on the Chinese painter and calligrapher Zhao Mengfu, small groups of fifth graders discussing the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, or sixth graders writing out what they would say if they were reporters during the French Revolution?

I saw all that and more yesterday during a visit to P.S. 124, the Osmond A Church school. This K–8 school has been using the Core Knowledge Sequence for 14 years. Students’ writing and related artwork line the halls and dangle from the ceilings. As the principal, Valarie Lewis, said several times, the Core Knowledge “is a thinking curriculum.” Whether in a presentation to the class or in an essay (usually both in this demanding school), Core Knowledge gives students something significant to say. And as I saw, the educators throughout P.S. 124 ensure that they learn to say it well.

Far from dry facts, the Sequence provides teachers the core content they need to develop engaging domain-based studies that immerse students in cross-curricular units—like the fourth graders who learned about medieval castles and trebuchets. Not only did they read and write about medieval warfare and weapons, they built trebuchets and launched paper balls to knock down paper castles. These children were not ready to write the equations, but they did grasp how lever action makes a trebuchet more powerful than a regular catapult.

For Lewis and her staff, test scores are interesting, but students’ writing is what shows not only what students have learned, but to what extent they have assimilated it and are able to use it to more deeply comprehend and question the world. In the halls, students’ essays are often posted along with their drafts—from an initial outline to drafts with teacher corrections and suggestions to the final product. Writing starts in kindergarten, becomes sophisticated by the middle of elementary school, and includes rigorous research papers in the seventh and eighth grades (on topics like the rise of dictators in the 20th century).

This focus on writing is not just for some students; all students are held to high standards. For example, in a special-needs kindergartner class, children had listened to The Three Little Pigs and then drawn pictures and written one sentence about what they would use to build their house. My favorite: lollipops! Meanwhile, in a special-needs sixth-grade class, students studying the industrial revolution were reading about and studying photos of factories so as to write lists of working conditions that needed to be improved. But those lists were not the final product; they were just the base facts collected in preparation for writing persuasive letters to historical factory owners.

One great challenge for the school is student mobility. Because the Core Knowledge Sequence builds knowledge year after year, revisiting and extending topics, students who enter school in the later grades find themselves far behind. P.S. 124 is there for them. Open until 6 in the evening and every Saturday for remediation and enrichment, this school is constantly finding new ways to meet all students’ needs. To extend learning into the home, parents receive copies of What Your [1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.] Grader Needs to Know. And to build strong connections between teachers and parents, the school hosts themed nights, such as a medieval festival in which children showed how they can tell stories through stained glass.

P.S. 124 makes delivering a strong education to all children look straightforward, but Lewis was careful to point out that her school is engaged in a never-ending process of trying to improve. She’s tough—and supportive. In working with teachers, she says she takes no excuses for children not learning, but she also asks teachers what they need and how they want to accomplish the schools’ ambitious learning goals. To deliver, Lewis has made some tough choices. For instance, a school her size should have four assistant principals; she has two, and she uses the savings to pay teachers for their extended hours.

When P.S. 124 adopted Core Knowledge, it went from a rather typical school in which teachers taught in isolation to a collaborative community. The teachers began working together, visiting classrooms, examining students’ work, sharing lessons—everything they could do to build on their strengths. To make adoption of the Sequence manageable, they phased it in, teaching one-third the first year, two-thirds the second, and the full Sequence in the third year of implementation. And to have some early successes, teachers started with whatever one-third of the content they were most comfortable with and had the most resources (like student readers) to draw on. Today, the teachers are able to teach the full Sequence and supplement it as they see fit—including adding content on Sikh culture due to a growing population of Sikh students.

After visiting a terrific school like P.S. 124, I always wonder, why don’t more schools embrace this type of rich, rigorous education? Why aren’t the benefits obvious to everyone? I think it often comes down to good intentions combined with faulty beliefs.

Earlier today, in a great post on Brookings’s Brown Center Chalkboard, senior fellow Tom Loveless examined the most recent fad pulling educators away from offering a content-rich curriculum:

In the past century, several alternatives have arisen to dethrone the prominent role of knowledge in schools: project-based learning, inquiry and discovery learning, higher-level thinking, critical thinking, outcome based education, and 21st Century Skills. Now it is deeper learning.

These ideas represent a variety of approaches to curriculum and pedagogy. They are not all the same, but they share one characteristic. All are advertised as transcending, and therefore superior to, academic content organized within traditional intellectual disciplines. It is not enough for students to know the major events of U.S. history, for example, but to be able to critically analyze the histories, any history, that one studies. Knowing about science is inferior to doing science. It is less important to learn the algorithms and articulated procedures of mathematics than to apply them in real world contexts while solving real world problems….

[For] a thorough critique of deeper learning or its philosophical kin … I urge you to read E.D. Hirsch’s The Schools We Need: And Why We Don’t Have Them. Published in 1996, the book pre-dates today’s deeper learning fad but convincingly rebuts its twentieth century ancestors, showing not only that these anti-knowledge movements lack anything resembling evidentiary support for their claims, but that they also, in disparaging academic content taught in public schools, exacerbate social inequality….

I am not disputing that some tasks are more cognitively demanding than others and some learning is more complex than other learning. Educators have known that for a long time. Bloom’s Taxonomy … laid out a hierarchy of skills: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation…. The first two layers, knowledge and comprehension, are synonyms for remembering and understanding what one has learned. Although the hierarchical structure of Bloom’s Taxonomy has been challenged, no serious model has emerged that eradicates the prerequisite roles of knowledge and comprehension. It is difficult to think deeply about Shakespeare without actually having read his work, remembering it, and grasping at least a good part of what he was saying.

Deeper learning, like its intellectual ancestors, tries to turn all of this on its head and upend the pre-eminence of knowledge…. I appreciate that aim, but it doesn’t work.

Indeed it does not. If you want to see what does work, just ask Valarie Lewis.

The Common Core Needs a Common Curriculum

by Lisa Hansel
May 23rd, 2013

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Posted in Curriculum, Teacher Training | 11 Comments »

As first published in Education Week, May 22, 2013. Reprinted with permission.

The Common Core State Standards contain laudable goals for what students ought to be able to do. Attaining those goals, especially in English/language arts and literacy, depends on how schools interpret the standards’ call for a content-rich curriculum: “[W]hile the standards make references to some particular forms of content, … they do not … enumerate all or even most of the content that students should learn. The standards must therefore be complemented by a well-developed, content-rich curriculum.”

What is a content-rich curriculum? And who should pick the content? I argue that we should all come to agreement on the content. But first, we must understand the cognitive science that explains why content is important.

Instead of writing a content-rich curriculum, some schools have selected a scripted program. Some new teachers have said their schools’ scripted reading programs saved them because they were not prepared to teach children with widely varying backgrounds. But once teachers build expertise, they meet individual students’ needs better than any script. Perhaps scripted programs should be optional, not mandated.

At the other extreme, some schools have a sink-or-swim approach in which each teacher writes his or her own curriculum. This drives too many new teachers out of the profession, creating a level of turnover that is harmful to students. Some teachers swim, but their ability to learn from their peers is minimal when everyone is teaching very different things.

Many educators seem to agree that the middle ground between a script and a free-for-all makes sense, so the sticking point is defining that middle ground. This is where my perspective differs from mainstream educational thought.

Many school districts mandate specific pedagogies, but not specific content. I think this is backwards. Effective instruction depends on the content to be learned and the students in the room, so pedagogical mandates are often counterproductive. What to teach ought to be a communal, research-based, and experience-based decision; how to teach should be up to the individual teacher.

The content of instruction is so important that any responsible community should be willing to do the hard work of specifying and agreeing to what students need to know and be able to do by the end of each grade.

Research demonstrates that knowledge and skills develop together. The most crucial skills—comprehension, critical thinking, and writing—all depend on having relevant knowledge not at one’s fingertips, but already stored in one’s long-term memory. The cognitive science is clear: Any topic students need to read or think about is a topic they must know about.

Exactly what are those topics? Research can partially answer that question. Skim a few newspaper articles. For brevity’s sake, the articles explain what’s new, but offer little background knowledge. The sports section gives game highlights and scores; it does not explain the rules. The economy section tells you where the Dow closed and offers the latest jobs and housing data; it reveals little about what those are or why they matter. The news tells you what’s new—it expects you to know enough to digest it.

As a foundation for lifelong learning, the knowledge all students need is the knowledge that adults are assumed to have. One way research can help determine what to teach is by showing what knowledge is taken for granted in publications intended for broad audiences.

Here’s a recent example from The New York Times: “Samuel Ting, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Nobel laureate particle physicist, said Wednesday that his $1.6 billion cosmic ray experiment on the International Space Station had found evidence of ‘new physical phenomena’ that could represent dark matter, the mysterious stuff that serves as the gravitational foundation for galaxies and whose identification would rewrite some of the laws of physics.”

What knowledge is assumed and what is not? We are not expected to know who Ting is or what dark matter is. But we are expected to know MIT, the Nobel Prize, particle physics, cosmic rays, the International Space Station, gravity, and galaxies. That’s a lot to know.

Researching what knowledge is commonly taken for granted is the approach E.D. Hirsch Jr., the founder of Core Knowledge, and his colleagues took when they initially developed a list of what all Americans should know. Many critics pointed out—rightly—that the list was too narrow. By focusing on knowledge assumed by mainstream outlets, it did not adequately reinforce fundamental American values: finding strength in diversity and appreciating all Americans (not just those who become famous).

Many of those critics do not realize that Hirsch agreed with them. That initial list has been revised with input from hundreds of teachers and scholars; today’s Core Knowledge Sequence contains a great diversity of people, events, and ideas.

When schools adopt the sequence, they go through their own communal process: The sequence takes half the instructional time, so each school adds on, creating its own curriculum.

As Jeffrey Litt, the leader of New York City’s Icahn Charter Schools, has pointed out, schools that go through this communal process can foster real collaboration among teachers, enabling them to build on one another’s strengths and reduce their workloads by sharing materials.

Agreeing on content also prevents repetitions and omissions, like the 2nd and 3rd grade teachers reading Charlotte’s Web aloud, instead of agreeing onCharlotte’s Web for 2nd grade and selecting another excellent book, like Bud, Not Buddy, for 3rd grade. The world is a fascinating place; the more of it we introduce to students, the richer their lives will be.

Now let’s tackle some uncomfortable issues. We all have our hang-ups. One of mine is highly mobile students. Far too many students change schools frequently, falling further behind every time. We can blame inadequate low-income housing, the bad job market, poor transportation … the list continues. Regardless, there’s one obvious way to help: Schools that share students should share grade-by-grade content. Mobile students would suffer less, and teachers would be better equipped to help them catch up.

Even better, if a state specified some content for each grade, it could overhaul teacher preparation and student testing. Today, teachers are taught, in education professor David Cohen’s words, “nothing in particular.” With specific content, teacher-preparation programs would know exactly what content and pedagogical knowledge teachers need.

With grade-by-grade content, a state could also develop better tests: Specifying course content and testing a sample of it is what our most highly regarded programs—Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate—do. Preparing for these tests (unlike typical state tests that are not anchored to specific content) means developing knowledge and related skills.

My hunch is that shared content appeals to far more teachers than policymakers realize. Many teachers find selecting content frustrating because students in our current, incoherent system have enormous variety in their knowledge and skills. Many teachers enjoy the communal process of agreeing upon content. Many more enjoy the result: time to focus on how to teach each student.

 

This Is What Equal Opportunity Looks Like

by Lisa Hansel
May 21st, 2013

Tags: ,
Posted in Core Knowledge, Educational Policy | 10 Comments »

A few days ago, Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Economy wrote about supporting the Common Core State Standards—and doing whatever it takes to implement them well—simply because they reflect real-world standards. Institutions of higher education and employers have high standards. For many children from disadvantaged homes, rigorous schooling offers the only hope for being well prepared. Tucker recalled:

Years ago, I was running a focus group in Rochester, New York. I was asking parents how they felt about standards. An African-American single mother living on welfare said, “My boy is in middle school in the city. He is getting A’s just for filling in the colors in a coloring book. The kids in the suburbs have to work really hard for their A’s. When my child graduates, all he will be good for is working the checkout counter at the grocery store. I want my child to have the same opportunities they have. I want him to have to do as well in school as they have to do to earn an A.”

Tucker points out that instead of shying away from the Common Core, we ought to accept it as one necessary step in a total overhaul of our educational approach. “We will have to do what the top-performers everywhere have done: radically change our school finance systems, academic standards, curriculum, instructional practices and tests and exams. Not least important, we will have to make big changes in teacher compensation, the way we structure teachers’ careers, the standards for getting into teachers colleges, the curriculum in our teachers colleges, our teacher licensure standards and the way we support new teachers.”

All true. I argue that the place to start is standards and curriculum. The standards provide the goals and the curriculum provides the specific content. With those as the foundation, we can rebuild the rest of our educational infrastructure—especially teacher preparation.

Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) is a comprehensive reading, writing, speaking, listening, and knowledge-building curriculum for preschool through third grade that could be used to strengthen the elementary grades.

Teachers are excited about it because it develops decoding and encoding skills while also engaging students in listening to and discussing rich teacher read-alouds. Fiction and nonfiction, the read-alouds have a mix of fables, science, and history, including tales from around the world, ancient civilizations, the human body, and astronomy.

To really understand it, you have to see it. Take a look at this video featuring two schools that participated in the pilot of CKLA in New York City: P.S. 96Q and P.S. 104Q.

In the video, Alice Wiggins, Core Knowledge’s executive vice president, explains that one great benefit of CKLA is the carefully organized content: Children “are pulling knowledge from what they learned earlier in the school year and even in prior years because of the way the program spirals.”

Hope Wygand, a teacher, has seen this in action. In her hands, CKLA builds knowledge and excitement:

In second grade, I know I have to teach ancient Greek myths because in third grade, they are going to do ancient Roman myths. So it all builds….

When you can start a lesson and the children already know what you are talking about, they are so much more interested because they already have an investment in it—and they want to show you what they know.

But don’t just take it from me. See for yourself.

 

TTBOMK, Paying Attention Is MIA. NISM?

by Lisa Hansel
May 15th, 2013

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Posted in Education Practice, Students | 9 Comments »

Translation: To the best of my knowledge, paying attention is missing in action. Need I say more?

I don’t need to say more about the problem, so let’s get right into what to do. Many thanks to Dan Willingham for drawing attention to, as he put it, “the 21st century skill students really lack”:

It’s unlikely that they are incapable of paying attention, but rather that they are quick to deem things not worth the effort.

We might wonder if patience would not come easier to a student who had had the experience of sustaining attention in the face of boredom, and then later finding that patience was rewarded….

Students today have so many options that being mildly bored can be successfully avoided most of the time.

Most students are able to avoid being mildly bored, but the result may be that they become boring people. I doubt it is possible to learn a great deal about the world—to make “the inside of your head … an interesting place to spend the rest of your life”—without enduring some boredom. Many great books pull you in slowly—it’s only after 50 or so pages that you’re hooked. Likewise, many academic subjects only become fascinating when you’re far enough in for contradictory details to emerge and for questions that once seemed clear to become debatable. I was one of those teenagers who thought that learning about raindrops as prisms would ruin the rainbow. It didn’t. The textbook diagram was dry, but the next rainbow was more vibrant. Suddenly, I was glad that I had diligently studied that textbook, not merely crammed for the test.

Paying attention and then being unexpectedly rewarded for it is an experience many of us have had—but we can’t just assume all students will be so fortunate. As Willingham wrote, “If we are concerned that students today are too quick to allow their attention to be yanked to the brightest object (or to willfully redirect it once their very low threshold of boredom is surpassed), we need to consider ways that we can bring home to them the potential reward of sustained attention.”

Willingham mentioned a Harvard art professor, Jennifer Roberts, who “asks her students to select a painting from a Boston museum, on which they are to write an in-depth research paper. Then the student must go the museum and study the painting. For three hours.”

Some boredom is assured, but would be painting be ruined or enhanced? Roberts explains that it is enhanced as students see more details. Willingham notes that students’ patience is rewarded, revealing the value of persisting and paying attention.

I think there is one more element here—the quality of the work being studied. Students were not to spend three hours gazing upon any painting; it had to be one in a Boston museum.  This assures that they are looking at the original work, and that the work itself has been judged by several experts to be worthy of preservation.

We should indeed encourage students to pay attention—and we must also hold ourselves accountable for giving them things worthy of their attention.

That said, how do we help more students learn to value paying attention and persisting through initial boredom? I hope Willingham will answer that question with rigorous research. Meanwhile, I’ll offer a common sense approach: start early and build slowly.

Just that happens in Core Knowledge Language Arts and Will Fitzhugh’s Page Per Year Plan.

In Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA)—a knowledge-building reading, writing, speaking, and listening program for preschool through third grade—teachers slowly develop students’ ability to pay attention by reading aloud. Importantly, the read-alouds start short and grow longer over the course of the school year and across school years. The read-alouds also provide information worth learning and are grouped by domain so that students have time to grasp concepts and acquire new vocabulary. Even better, the domains themselves are carefully sequenced, with early studies of topics like plants and farms providing a foundation for later studies of pilgrims and ecology. Squirmy young children quickly grow into attentive students as they realize that these fiction and nonfiction read-alouds contain interesting stories and answer questions about the world.

Fitzhugh is the founder of the Concord Review, a scholarly history journal with well-researched essays by high school students. Fitzhugh often laments that the traditional history term paper is quickly becoming a relic. He hopes to reinstate the term paper through his Page Per Year Plan:

Each first grader would be required to write a one-page paper on a subject other than herself or himself, with at least one source.

A page would be added each year to the required academic writing, such that, for example, fifth graders would have to write a five-page paper, ninth graders would have to write a nine-page research paper, with sources, and so on, until each senior could be asked to prepare a 12-page academic research paper, with endnotes and bibliography, on some historical topic.

This would gradually prepare students for future academic writing tasks, and each senior could graduate from high school knowing more about some important topic than anyone else in the class, and he/she may also have read at least one nonfiction (history) book before college. This should reduce the need for remedial instruction in writing (and perhaps in remedial reading as well) at the college level.

I believe there’s one more benefit: sustained attention. Year by year, students would have to put forth a little more effort, take a little more time, and grasp a little bit more deeply the learning that results from researching and writing about a topic. I’d bet that those Harvard students who dutifully studied a painting for three hours (as well as wrote a research paper on it) were prepared for the task with similarly rigorous studies throughout their K – 12 years.

Today’s typical 12th grader would likely struggle to write a 12-page history paper. YKWIM? (Translation: You know what I mean?) But a 12th grader who had already written 11 other history papers would likely succeed beautifully. Fitzhugh has been touting his Page Per Year Plan for more than a decade. Maybe it’s time we listened.

NVNG! (Translation: Nothing ventured, nothing gained!)

 

Are We Really Waiting for Superman?

by Lisa Hansel
May 10th, 2013

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Posted in Curriculum, Education Leadership, Teacher Training | 24 Comments »

Having spent the last week thinking a lot about teacher preparation, I’d like to share a few more thoughts on teaching, teacher preparation, and student achievement. In the last two posts, we’ve seen that far too many teacher preparation programs eschew preparation and that, instead, there’s an emphasis on social-justice activism, which often results in academic programs that try to build character while ignoring the social-justice lessons embedded in many great works of literature.

So the typical new teacher is minimally prepared, yet feels responsible for ameliorating the ills of society. On top of that, few administrators, leaders, or reformers offer any meaningful support.

We really are waiting for Superman (and using the dedicated, non-superhero teachers as scapegoats).

Most who care about education seem to agree that, while many of our schools are doing great things, many are not. Yet we skirt around the one lever for improvement that has shown the greatest potential: curriculum.

In a policy paper last year, two Brookings scholars, Matthew M. Chingos and Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, argued that we ought to be paying far more attention to curriculum:

Students learn principally through interactions with people (teachers and peers) and instructional materials (textbooks, workbooks, instructional software, web-based content, homework, projects, quizzes, and tests). But education policymakers focus primarily on factors removed from those interactions, such as academic standards, teacher evaluation systems, and school accountability policies. It’s as if the medical profession worried about the administration of hospitals and patient insurance but paid no attention to the treatments that doctors give their patients.

There is strong evidence that the choice of instructional materials has large effects on student learning—effects that rival in size those that are associated with differences in teacher effectiveness. But whereas improving teacher quality through changes in the preparation and professional development of teachers and the human resources policies surrounding their employment is challenging, expensive, and time-consuming, making better choices among available instructional materials should be relatively easy, inexpensive, and quick.

Administrators are prevented from making better choices of instructional materials by the lack of evidence on the effectiveness of the materials currently in use. For example, the vast majority of elementary school mathematics curricula examined by the Institute of Education Sciences What Works Clearinghouse either have no studies of their effectiveness or have no studies that meet reasonable standards of evidence.

The two problems noted—ignoring curriculum and not having adequate studies of curriculum—go together. Since curriculum is not a policy priority, it is very hard to win grant money to study curriculum. The Core Knowledge Foundation, for example, has some evidence of the student achievement increasing with high-quality implementation of the Core Knowledge Sequence and Core Knowledge Language Arts—but we are not satisfied with the amount of research we currently have. (Calling all researchers, doctoral students, and grant makers: We would welcome additional studies!) Core Knowledge materials are based on an extremely strong research foundation from cognitive science showing that reading comprehension, critical thinking, and other important abilities rely heavily on having relevant knowledge stored in memory. Still, we would love to have an even stronger set of classroom-based studies comparing Core Knowledge with other programs.

Let’s briefly imagine a new educational universe in which we did put time and money into studying curricula and could say with confidence that programs A, B, and C are more effective than programs X, Y, and Z. Then we could take a crucial step toward excellence and equity: We could build educational systems around effective programs.

School districts could select a specific program (or more than one, assuming they did not overlap or interfere with each other) and have more intensive, targeted professional development. Students that changed schools (at least within the district) would not fall so far behind academically because their academic program would not change dramatically with each school change.

Best of all, teacher preparation programs could offer minors in the most-effective curricula. So, an aspiring elementary-grades teacher could, for example, major in elementary education and minor in Core Knowledge Language Arts. An aspiring 8th grade science teacher could major in secondary science and minor in the Core Knowledge Sequence with a specialization in how the Sequence enables teachers to make cross-curricular connections.

Contrast this with typical preparation, in which, as University of Michigan education professor David Cohen puts it, aspiring teachers learn to teach nothing in particular:

Absent a common curriculum, teachers-in-training could not learn how to teach it, let alone how to teach it well. Hence, teacher education consists of efforts to teach future teachers to teach no particular curriculum. This is very strange, since to teach is always to teach something, but the governance structure of U.S. education has long forbidden the specification of what that something would be. For the most part, teacher education has been accommodating: typically, teacher candidates are taught how to teach no particular version of their subjects. That arrangement creates no incentives for those training to be teachers to learn, relatively deeply, what they would teach, nor does it create incentives for teacher educators to learn how to help teacher candidates learn how to teach a particular curriculum well. Instead, it offers incentives for them to teach novices whatever the teacher educators think is interesting or important (which often is not related to what happens in schools) or to offer a generic sort of teacher education. Most teachers report that, after receiving a teaching degree, they arrived in schools with little or no capability to teach particular subjects.

If teacher preparation were largely devoted to the content teachers will be teaching, then there would be time to address not only content knowledge, but pedagogical content knowledge. Pedagogical content knowledge is about knowing the most effective methods for teaching the particular content students must master. It is a relatively young concept, but it appears powerful. So far, what seems most important is being able to predict and correct students’ misconceptions.

A recent study of middle schools science teachers provides a good example:

The study, conducted by researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, targeted middle school physical science. The researchers enlisted 181 teachers to administer a multiple-choice test of student knowledge of science concepts. Twelve of the 20 items were designed to have a “particularly wrong answer corresponding to a commonly held misconception,” explained Philip Sadler, the lead author and a senior lecturer at the Harvard-Smithsonian center.

The “unusual” part of the study, he said, was that teachers also took the test, and were asked to identify both the correct answer and the one students were most often likely to incorrectly select. Although the teachers overall did “quite well” at selecting the correct answer, the results were more mixed in predicting students’ incorrect response.

“Teacher knowledge was predictive of higher student gains. No surprise there,” Sadler explained in an email. “However, for more difficult concepts where many students had a misconception, only teachers who knew the science and the common misconceptions have large student gains.” What’s key, he said, is knowing “what was going on in their students’ heads.”

Over time, many teachers do see patterns in students’ questions and errors, and eventually figure out which misconceptions are common and how to prevent or correct prevent them. If the whole educational field would take curriculum more seriously, studies could be done to rapidly accumulate such knowledge.

Ultimately, the achievement gap is a knowledge gap, which has its roots in an opportunity-to-learn gap. For students and teachers, we could close the opportunity gap by figuring out which curricula are most effective, conducting ongoing studies to increase effectiveness, and making the best curricula the foundation for teacher preparation.

We don’t have to wait for Superman. We can make teaching a profession that “regular” teachers (i.e., many of our country’s most dedicated, caring people) can succeed in. The nation’s teachers don’t deserve blame; they deserve support. Let’s start with developing better curricula and training.

 

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