Assumptive Teaching

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 9, 2010 in Assessment and Testing, Curriculum, Education Practice and Teaching. 7 Comments

Karin Chenoweth visited two large, suburban high schools recently, both serving significant numbers of middle-class and working-class African-American families.  Chenoweth, the author of How It’s Being Done: Urgent Lessons from Unexpected Schools, explains that at both schools, there’s been a lot of “assumptive teaching” going on.  That means

…teachers assume a great deal of background knowledge among their students and have not done the essential work of determining what their students really know, what more they need to learn, and then figuring out how to teach them. 

At one of the schools, teachers and administrators “know that their long tradition of teachers teaching in isolation with no accountability for the success of their students is part of what nurtures that “assumptive teaching,” Chenoweth writes at Britannica Blog.  The second school, however, seems less willing to change its ways. 

Some of them visibly recoiled when I said that highly successful schools with significant percentages of minority and low-income students achieve success by collaborating on careful plans of instruction mapped to state or college-preparatory standards, complete with common formative assessments and data systems so they can track how well each of their students is doing and ensure that each of them gets the help they need.

Chenoweth, one of our best and most knowledgeable chroniclers of classroom practice, clearly looks askance at ”assumptive teaching.” But it’s worth asking if the lack of a coherent curriculum isn’t the thing that should go instead.   With no common body of shared knowledge in elementary and middle school, high school teachers can’t reliably know what content and skills students arrive with.  Thus every student is a blank slate and must be constantly assessessed and reassessed to determine what they know.  Student mobility further complicates matters.  The teacher can take nothing for granted.

Indeed, student mobility may be the best argument for a common curriculum in elementary and middle school.  The deleterious effects of moving on student achievement is well-documented, and highly mobile, low-SES students suffer disproportionately.  If there were some reliable commonality of content from grade to grade and school to school, at least within districts, students might spend less time catching up and more time learning. 

The same is true for assumptive teaching.  Time spent amassing an inventory of student skills and background knowledge is time not spent learning new things.   “Meet the children where they are” is a standard teaching homily.   Isn’t is merely making a virtue of necessity?  In the absence of a common curriculum, standards and assessments we have to meet them where they are.  We have no idea where they have been. 

 

The Rest of the Story

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 8, 2010 in Education News. 2 Comments

A little late to its own party, the Washington Post’s ombudsman explains what happened behind the scenes in the Turquemada incident.

100 Years of Solipsism

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 8, 2010 in Curriculum. 7 Comments

There is a significant shortcoming in Susan Engel’s much-discussed and widely lauded vision of what children should do in school all day, writes Dan Willingham at the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog, and it’s that content is never mentioned.  “It’s all about process—reading is a skill, science is all about observing and finding patterns, and so on,” he writes.

“Skills and knowledge are actually not separable, and it’s a mistake to base a curriculum solely on skills. The response, I expect, would be that the content will come along naturally, as part of the authentic activities. But it hasn’t in the past. 

Citing Diane Ravitch’s Left Back, Willingham points out that Engel’s ideas are not fresh and new, nor are they based on “modern developmental science” as she claims.   And they’re not necessarily bad ideas.  However, they are nearly impossible to implement effectively.

Progressive curricula are characterized by “authenticity.” Authenticity means that the underlying principles that the child is supposed to learn are seldom overt. To learn about ecosystems, the child might grow tomatoes. It is simply harder to ensure that the child is thinking about ecosystems and not about tomato sandwiches, or that worms are gross, or that his shoes are muddy. It can be done, assuredly, and it’s wonderful when it is, but it presents real challenges.

“Done right, progressive methods are terrific. All the benefits — student engagement, understanding that is more closely tied to out-of-school contexts — do accrue. Done wrong, progressive methods turn in to fluff, into kids horsing around a greenhouse,” he concludes.

Over at Teacher in a Strange Land, the redoubtable Nancy Flanagan comes to Engel’s defense.  Sort of.  Flanagan shows she understands the complexity of successful project-based learning.  If Engel gets it, her piece gives no clue.  Rather she leaves the distinct impression that everything worth knowing can be arrived at by diligent inquiry, which is a tall order–especially for young children. 

Me?  I’m grateful for the Pythagorean Theorem.  And even more grateful that someone explained it to me rather than leaving it to me to discover on my own.

“Let’s Eat Grandma!”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 5, 2010 in Humor. 3 Comments

No, “Let’s Eat, Grandma!”  Punctuation saves lives.  Brilliant.

Suing Over Curriculum

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 5, 2010 in Curriculum and Education News. 3 Comments

A judge in Washington State has rejected Seattle’s high school math curriculum and ordered schools to consider alternatives.  A district-wide curriculum called “Discovering Math” was adoped last year.  But two parents and a University of Washington professor went to court  to overturn the School Board’s decision.  Remarkably, they won.  The court ruled “there is insufficient evidence for any reasonable member to approve selection of the Discovering series.”

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer expects the district to appeal the ruling.  Martha McLaren, one of the plaintiffs, issued a statement praising the decision.“

This is a sweet victory for the parents and students of Seattle Public Schools. It announces to Seattle that in this instance, the School District’s practice of ignoring evidence, in favor of preconceived decisions, is arbitrary and capricious, and contrary to law. The judge’s finding may, hopefully, be a step towards improving high school math education through replacing confusing textbooks with coherent ones. However, students at all levels, not just in high school, badly need clear, understandable materials. In addition, it is essential that teachers, especially elementary teachers, understand fundamental math much more deeply than is now the norm.

The local website Where’s The Math Bellingham says this means is that school districts are legally accountable to the local community and citizens.

While the district court judge did not rule on the curriculum itself, she made it clear that decisions should be based on evidence and analysis. It’s an expensive lesson for school districts to learn, but an important one they will now have to remember.

Maybe not, says the Seattle Times, which notes the ruling “doesn’t order the district to stop; in fact, there’s nothing in it that bars the district from hanging onto the curriculum after its review.”  Crosscut.com blogger Dick Lilly wonders how school curriculum ended up in court to begin with.   The answer, he says, tells us a lot about the problems of public schools:

Put simply: We don’t know what to teach. The result over the past 40 years has been a weakening of common curriculum to the point where transferring from one school to another — even just within the Seattle School District — almost certainly means a kid will end up in a class studying something entirely different from the class she left. And who transfers the most? Poor kids, so this is a contributor to the achievement gap.

“Mostly, we’ve left decisions about course content to individual schools and even to individual teachers,” Lilly concludes. 

Consider me deeply sympathetic with the plaintiffs concerns about the curriculum.  And equally concerned about the potential for seeing every decision made by a school system brought before a judge.

Old Whine, New Bottle

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 4, 2010 in Curriculum, Education Theory and Literacy. 31 Comments

How did the New York Times get suckered into running an op-ed piece that recycles standard ed school constructivist orthodoxies, presenting them as a bold, new curriculum initiative?   In her curious essay titled ”Playing to Learn,” Williams College professor Susan Engel calls on elementary schools to “overhaul the curriculum itself.”   By the time children leave elementary school they

“…should be able to read a chapter book, write a story and a compelling essay; know how to add, subtract, divide and multiply numbers; detect patterns in complex phenomena; use evidence to support an opinion; be part of a group of people who are not their family; and engage in an exchange of ideas in conversation. If all elementary school students mastered these abilities, they would be prepared to learn almost anything in high school and college.

“Imagine,” Engel writes, ”a third-grade classroom that was free of the laundry list of goals currently harnessing our teachers and students, and that was devoted instead to just a few narrowly defined and deeply focused goals.”  Even the Gates Foundation, with its “fewer, deeper, clearer” standards mantra would agree.  But it’s the how-do-we-get-there piece where this leaves the rails.  Engel says children should:

“…spend two hours each day hearing stories read aloud, reading aloud themselves, telling stories to one another and reading on their own. After all, the first step to literacy is simply being immersed, through conversation and storytelling, in a reading environment; the second is to read a lot and often. A school day where every child is given ample opportunities to read and discuss books would give teachers more time to help those students who need more instruction in order to become good readers.”

Translation:  goodbye curriculum, goodbye content, so long rigor.  Hello “lifelong love of reading” and whole language. (Notice that phonics and decoding is neither the first or even the second “step to literacy.”) Curiouser and curiouser.

Children would also spend an hour a day writing things that have actual meaning to them — stories, newspaper articles, captions for cartoons, letters to one another. People write best when they use writing to think and to communicate, rather than to get a good grade.

Translation:  It’s our old friend “authentic learning,” a bold and new idea when Dewey suggested it one hundred years ago.  Another set piece of any constructivist ed diatribe is a complaint about trivia and rote learning and Engel doesn’t disappoint. What children shouldn’t do, she writes, is spend

tedious hours learning isolated mathematical formulas or memorizing sheets of science facts that are unlikely to matter much in the long run. Scientists know that children learn best by putting experiences together in new ways. They construct knowledge; they don’t swallow it.

In short, Professor Engel is offering not one new idea here, but rather a steaming gumbo of fads, failed ed school homilies and constructivist ideology.   It’s a vision that has lost none of its ability to charm and inspire–Engel’s piece has been among the most forwarded at the New York Times website since it appeared Monday–yet remains as ineffective and doomed to fail as ever.  At Kitchen Table Math, Katharine Beals has Engel’s number:

Clearly Engel not only knows her cognitive science, but has spent countless hours observing what happens in today’s classrooms: all that futile phonics instruction; all those tedious math and science drills; all that dearth of collaborative learning, game playing, letter writing, and cartooning.  But I must reserve my greatest appreciation for the New York Times for deeming it fit to publish this courageous piece, with its original criticisms of today’s classrooms, its revolutionary proposals for reform, and its pioneering attempts to bring science into classroom teaching.

At least a few ed reformers recognize Engels piece for the nonsense it is, but let’s not kid ourselves, they’re not innocent bystanders.  By pushing a punitive form of accountability, demonizing teachers, and remaining on the sidelines during critical discussions of pedagogy and curriculum–what children actually do all day–they tacitly encourage the joyless prep-and-test environments Engel’s piece rightly decries.  Yes, yes, I know.  There’s nothing in strict accountability standards and aggressive testing that precludes a rich, engaging curriculum and a spirited classroom environment.  It’s just funny how it rarely ever seems to work out that way.

The Million Dollar Misunderstanding

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 3, 2010 in No category. 10 Comments

Everyone knows that a college graduate will earn nearly a million dollars more than a high school graduate over his or her lifetime.  Everyone may be wrong.  The common and much-repeated college earnings premium stems from a 2002 Census report titled “The Big Payoff.“   According to that report, the average high-school graduate earns $25,900 a year, while the average college graduate earns $45,400.  Take the $20,000 dollar difference, multiply it times a 40-year career, and you’ve got the $800k college earnings premium.

The Wall Street Journal’s Mary Pilon points out that the actual premium is under $300,000, once you factor in tuition payments, student debt loads and other variables.  The Cato Institute’s Andrew Coulson goes even further, calling the oft-repeated wage gap figure “worse than useless.”

For a college earnings premium figure to be of any value to policymakers or prospective college students, it would be necessary to break it down by field and by student characteristics. What’s the premium difference, for instance, between workers who majored in engineering, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, economics, etc., compared to those who majored in communications, art history, social work, multicultural studies, etc.? A similar breakdown of interest would be by SAT score.

As a teacher, I confess I often invoked this statistic with my students, asking them “How’d you like to be a millionaire?” and selling them on the benefits of college as a goal.  Even if it’s a specious argument, I probably still would.  Three-hundred large is incentive enough.

DOE to States: Clean Your Room!

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 3, 2010 in Education News and Educational Policy. 1 Comment

Race to the Top reminds Dan Willingham of his mother’s attempts to get him to clean his room when he was 10 years old.  At first, young Danny’s goal was to get out of the house each morning before Mom found out his room was a mess.  Tired of nagging, Mom offered him – sorry, incentivized him – with 50 cents a week, so he changed his ways.  Now his goal was to get out of the house before Mom saw all the junk he’d pushed under his bed. 

It’s obvious, Willingham writes at the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog, that like his mother’s attempt to make him a tidy boy, Race to the Top is “a doomed bribery scheme.”  The secretary of education and the president “believe they know what ought to be done, and they are offering money to states who do it,” he writes.

Here’s the problem. States are not really committed to the reforms the administration envisions. If they were, they would have implemented them, or at least they would have been making a game attempt to do so. When you pay people to do something, they don’t become motivated to do it. They become motivated to be able to defend that they are doing it. States will do their best to make it appear that they are complying.

The likely failure of the “Race to the Top” initiative, Willingham writes, doesn’t depend on whether the reforms embedded in the program are any good, but rather the inherent flaws of its incentive structure.  “The administration is motivating states to shove their dirty laundry under the bed. Eventually that will be discovered, but in the meantime we will have wasted a lot of time and money,” Willingham concludes.

Who Dat Say They Gonna Cancel School?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 2, 2010 in Education News. 5 Comments

Arne Duncan has backtracked on his claim that Hurricane Katrina was “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.” But schoolchildren in the Crescent City probably think the Saints making the Super Bowl is the best thing to happen, since the city’s schools are likely to call an emergency day and stay closed on Monday. 

“We feel that it is not in the best interest of our students to be required to attend school on a day when a significant number of absences or tardiness will be the reality, and when learning will not be optimal,” says one school official. 

Not one to let les bon temps rouler, PBS’ education correspondent John Merrow thinks closing for the day sets a bad example for the kids.  “Call me an old fogey, but I find closing schools to be irresponsible behavior on the part of the adults,” Merrow writes on his blog. “Are the 2nd, 3rd and 4th graders going to be worn out from partying? What are working parents supposed to do, or are they also exempt from going to work?”

By canceling school, says Merrow, the adults “are inadvertently revealing who’s really in charge: the kids. The unspoken message is clear: what we offer in schools isn’t enough to hold students’ attention.”

Core Knowledge to Make Curriculum Available for Free

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 1, 2010 in Core Knowledge and Curriculum. 25 Comments

Over at Education Week, Catherine Gewertz has advance word on a big piece of upcoming news:  After more than two decades of publishing and distributing its K-8 Core Knowledge Sequence exclusively to Core Knowledge schools, the Foundation is planning to make its proprietary curriculum available for free online. 

The decision to publicly release the Sequence comes on the eve of the release of the Common Core State Standards, which are expected to call explicitly for increased attention to nonfiction reading and writing within its ELA standards—a linchpin of the Core Knowledge movement, which from Day One has centered on building literacy through a coherent and systematic build-up of language and content knowledge.  

The move to common standards ”could be bigger than any other reform I can think of,” Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch, Jr. tells Gewertz.  “We’ve had a hell of an incoherent system. It’s been based on a how-to theory, and not enough attention has been paid to the build-up of knowledge. This is a moment when we really could change the direction.”

Understanding the connection between background knowledge and reading comprehension—and failing to address it instructionally–is almost certainly  the weakest link in elementary education.  While many reading programs and publishers include nonfiction selections within their reading programs, they tend to do so in a hit or miss fashion, mistakenly treating nonfiction reading as a transferable skill–as if any science passage will do, for example, whether or not it is connected to science passages read or studied in other grades.  Hirsch and Core Knowledge have pointed out for decades the need for a coherent, sequential approach to avoid gaps and repetitions in curriculum–and that reading achievement must be addressed by systematically building up children’s background knowledge. 

By acknowledging the content/comprehension connection and urging the use of a coherent curriculum, the Common Core Standards could go a long way toward cementing the connection between background knowledge and reading comprehension. “The Core Knowledge Foundation has made the decision to make available this tried and true set of curriculum guidelines at no cost in hopes that it will be of use to schools and publishers as they start searching for ways to infuse nonfiction into language arts,” says Foundation President Linda Bevilacqua.

First published in 1988, the Core Knowledge Sequence represents a systematic effort to identify the foundational knowledge that writers and speakers take for granted their readers know, and to teach it, grade-by-grade, year-by-year, in a coherent, age-appropriate sequence.  It’s currently used in hundreds of schools–public, charter and private– in nearly every state.

More — much more — to come in a few weeks’ time.