On a personal note, Diana, best of luck to you this week as you start teaching at a Core Knowledge school! Your students are lucky to have you, and we’re fortunate for the time and care you take in posting on this blog.

A teacher gives a mini-lesson on “inferencing” (awful verb). She then models it with a “read-aloud” and a “think-aloud.” (”Hmmm, why did Fern say that Wilbur was the capital of Pennsylvania? Maybe she was so deep in thought about Wilbur that she didn’t even hear the teacher’s question. I do that too, sometimes.”) Then the children read their own books and practice their own “inferencing.”

This is bizarre in two ways. First, there’s much, much more to discuss about Charlotte’s Web than the inference alone. It would make much more sense to teach the book, and have lessons and class discussion center around what was actually in it. It is a story about words, friendship, life and death; it has sharp satire and beautifully rhythmic passages. A mini-lesson on inferences does it no justice.

Second, inferences differ from each other in the degrees and kinds of knowledge and insight they require. There is no generic “inferencing.” At best, a student can learn to recognize when he or she doesn’t understand something, or when there is a gap of information in a text. But one can recognize those things and still not make a good inference.

So, Dan, I agree with you that some strategies are so straightforward that they should not take up much class time. Others are so nuanced that they can only be taught in context. And no strategy should overshadow the literature itself.

I wonder what you think about his arguments. His vision of craft seems to be a perfect metaphor for teaching and his “collective craftsmanship” a model for schools. Sennett draws on the same studies on business organizations and social psychology as Richard Rothstein. For instance, he critiqued “Fordism” in the English National Health Service, and the primitive data-driven accountability which has largely failed in the last decade in a range of organizations. The implication is that those modern day “piece work” approaches run counter to our fundamental being. His twist is the distinction between “social expertise” and “anti-social expertise.” (Sennett might be appalled by my interpretation but his discussion could almost verbatim be an indictment of the Michelle Rhee’s vision of “a culture of accountability.”)

Sennett cites Kant’s “the Hand is the Window of the Mind,” and asserts that the “10,000 hour rule” applies to mastery of all sorts of crafts from music, woodworking, medical diagnosis, and basketball. He explores “domain shift” synthesizing cognitive research with Hesiod, Henry Petroski, and Levi Straus to explain why cell phones, the result of marrying radio with telephones would not have been possible “under the watchful eyes of boss-minders” but required cooperation, as well as the patience of glass blowers to put breakthroughs on the shelf until they meet their standards of quality. (sounds like delayed gratification to me)

I guess I should mostly ask you about Sennett’s interpretation of recent brain science, but if you are familiar with his work, I’d like to hear about his synthesis.