In his 2007 book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Stanford business professor Chip Heath describes why some bad ideas such as urban legends and misleading bits of conventional wisdom are “sticky” and gain traction, while some very good ideas don’t make it through the clutter. Early in the book, Heath describes how the Army used to invest enormous time in planning military operations that turned out to be useless for an obvious reason: the enemy doesn’t follow the plan. The answer, developed in the 1980s, is a planning concept called Commander’s Intent (CI).
CI is a crisp, plain-talk statement that appears at the top of every order, specifying the plan’s goal, the desired end-state of an operation. At high levels of the Army, the CI may be relatively abstract: ‘Break the will of the enemy in the Southeast region.’ At the tactical level, for colonels and captains, it is much more concrete…The CI never specifies so much detail that it risks being rendered obsolete by unpredictable events.
“Commander’s Intent manages to align the behavior of soldiers at all levels without requiring play-by-play instructions from their leaders,” Heath writes. “When people know the desired destination, they’re free to improvise, as needed in arriving there.” Right about now, you’re probably thinking, Hey! That’s just like those voluntary national standards they’re cooking up! Brilliant!
Isn’t it pretty to think so?
Standards might work just as well as “CI” if there was a shared understanding and deep experience with the tactics needed to achieve the desired results—if our understanding of how to teach reading were as simple and straightforward as determining the range of a piece of artillery. The problem in education is that it is possible – nearly certain, in fact – to follow “Commander’s Intent” yet still fail miserably. The draft reading standards put up for public comment this week by the Common Core State Standards Initiative can’t “stick” because they are built on a flawed model of reading as a transferable skill. By promoting even tacitly the idea the we can teach reading independent of content (decoding + reading strategies = the ability to comprehend everything), the standards offer little useful guidance for teachers, virtually ensuring that even these “fewer, clearer” directions will not be met. Only by describing specific texts and content across disciplines (making clear that comprehension equals background knowledge) with assessments aligned with those texts and content, can there be any hope of measuarable progress.
Let’s be blunt: Find one single teacher drawing breath that needed a secretive committee of two dozen experts to tell her that high school students ought to be able to “discern the most important ideas, events, or information, and summarize them accurately and concisely.” This is not a standard, it’s a platitude. As a goal or statement of purpose, it offers as much guidance and direction as military orders to “win the war.” We do not lack clarity on our goals. We lack clarity on how to achieve them. The draft of the voluntary standards promotes tacitly the same flawed concepts that have driven reading instruction for decades.
Worst of all, the standards movement as currently conceived threatens to make matters worse by sending the message that there is now absolute clarity on what is to be taught in the nation’s schools. That, of course, is not what standards do. That would require not national standards, but a national curriculum. They are the same thing in the public imagination. This predictable confusion between standards and curriculum, strategies and tactics, already colors everything from the political attractiveness of merit pay to the anger at teachers for our failing education system. Many education policies assume teachers know exactly how to teach every child to read well but fail to do so out of incompetence, laziness, or refusal to execute the Commander’s Intent. The reality is infinitely more complex.
As written, our vague, insubstantial voluntary national standards are not “made to stick.” In fact, they are virtually guaranteed to have exactly the unintended results. By refusing to specify content to be taught, they will perversely encourage bad practice—teaching reading as a skill rather than a function of background knowledge. In the absence of clear guidance, we will have more unnecessary and pointless reading strategy instruction, more test prep, more focus on reading as a transferrable skill. And less–much less–of what actually creates competent readers—a well-rounded, content-driven, robust core curriculum.
This is an excellent post except there does seem to be a lack of clarity about the goals of education in this country.
You are so right, Robert. In a misguided attempt to reach these lofty standards, our school is going gangbusters on identifying kids’ reading deficiencies so that we can do “interventions”. AS IF we actually knew how to intervene and fix the problem. OK, so Johnny had trouble making inferences on the reading test. Do we pull him aside and teach him how to make inferences? Can’t be done, yet NO ONE AT MY SCHOOL UNDERSTANDS THIS.
What CAN be done is good teaching, and that requires teachers who plunge into their subjects and carefully engineer lessons. THIS takes a lot of study and time and concentration, and it cannot be done in a forty minute prep period, nor can it be done when we are inundated with inane requirements to constantly collect and process and pretend to take meaningful action in response to DATA.
We need to abandon all trends and go back to the hard-but-rewarding old work of crafting lucid, intelligent lessons.
Except, Ben, that I, and I suspect thousands of others, were never taught how to do that. That’s not a criticism of you, mind you, but a criticism of the way that I guess most teachers were taught how to lesson-plan, or indeed of whether or not they were taught to lesson-plan at all.
I don’t know why I write lesson plans sometimes. If you were to ask me, probably I’d tell you that I write them so I don’t get in trouble if my principal asks to see my lesson plan. These days what I truly, mentally do is plan a unit and then take each day as it comes and try to teach the kids what they need to know and what will help them to come to a full understanding of the whole. Sometimes I don’t see how planning, down to the minute, individual lessons really helps me or them. I do it, of course, but not because I feel like I really need to all the time. Sometimes I really do, but I think more often that I don’t.
Again, this isn’t a criticism of Ben or of the idea of “crafting lucid, intelligent lessons.” It’s that I was taught how to plan using the workshop model, which doesn’t always work; that I don’t really know another way; that I love leading discussions and debates but fail to see how to really PLAN something like that; and that I want lesson-planning, on a day-to-day nitty-gritty basis, to be meaningful and helpful for me but that I don’t understand how to make it that way.
Miss Eyre raises an interesting point. The homily in Reader’s and Writer’s Workshop (I taught in NYC too, Miss Eyre) is “teach the child, not the lesson.” What lovely nonsense. What in the name of all that’s holy does that mean? What in means in practice is “help the child with the skill du jour. So in fact teaching a content-based lesson is not only difficult, but structurally impossible. We’re not teaching content, but process. This reinforces the point of my post which is that the reading, writing, speaking and listening strands enshrines a process, “how-to” approach to literacy. If comprehension were a transferable skill like decoding, it would make sense. It isn’t. It doesn’t.
Comprehension as a transferable skill is something I’ve also had a hard time dealing with in my practice. I mean, I can help a child understand something that s/he is reading by providing them with the necessary background knowledge, perspective, etc. to understand what the author is saying. Okay, fine. That seems to be the way I “learned to read” from elementary school all the way through earning an undergrad degree in English: read the story/book, understand some parts and not others, enter into a lecture/discussion/research session to understand the whole. “Comprehension strategies” don’t really seem to make a difference. They can help you understand the thing you’re reading right that minute, with guidance from someone who knows more than you do, but using comprehension strategies on that article about polar bears isn’t going to help you understand Anna Karenina. Just as the reader who knows more about polar bears will do better with the article about polar bears, the reader who knows more about Russian culture will do better with Anna Karenina. This seems obvious, and in some sense even partially understood by people like Atwell and Calkins who encourage children pursuing their own interests in what they read.
Sure, we can say that “successful readers” do things like make inferences, use their background knowledge, stop and question, etc. It doesn’t mean that those things make any actual difference when children can’t resolve the questions the reading brings up for them because of a lack of background knowledge and/or life experience.
Miss Eyre —
Your comment exemplifies something that I find puzzling, i.e., why teachers in the United States so often seem to be on their own when it comes to lesson plans. Have you read Stigler and Hiebert’s “The Teaching Gap,” which discusses the practice of “lesson study” in Japan? See also: http://lessonstudy.blogs.com/ http://hrd.apec.org/index.php/Lesson_Study_Videos
Stuart,
I read that book –ON MY OWN –in ed school. Of course, it gave me a glimpse into a far-less-clownish world than what my hack professors were trying to initiate me into. I absolutely think we should strive to create a national library of well-honed lessons, a set of Platonic forms, if you will. This is just so logical. Yet it will not be done until the Process God is toppled. Because my colleagues are simply not that dedicated to the CONTENT they teach. Miss Eyre, what I’ve done –on my own –is take lots of time on weekends to read as deeply as I can about my topic (e.g. the glories of Tenochtitlan), glean an “angle” to pursue while teaching it, glean juicy details that the kids will find interesting (e.g. the Aztecs ate algae), brainstorm a delivery mechanism (I often organize notes into a simple cartoon-format –I like to draw), trying to compress as much as possible, and then rehearse how the “talk” and note-taking will go –what hook I will use to make kids interested, what jokes I’ll make, which kids I’ll “pick on” during the course of the lecture because that part will make them squirm or laugh, etc. I create and type up review questions (I title these “What Did You Learn?”) with which to orally quiz kids when I’m done. And I often buy weird foods (e.g. a Trader Joes beverage that contains algae) to reward kids who get the review questions right. It’s a super-complex, labor-intensive process. And even with all this work, the final product often seems like it could use a lot more work. Which brings me back to Stuart’s point: it makes so much sense to save these “rough drafts” , hand them to other teachers who can refine them, use these refined versions, and then keep on refining and refining –as I hear Toyota does with its cars: slow and steady refinement. So much of the fruit of American teachers’ herculean labors ends up going down the toilet. It’s demoralizing and dumb.
Your take on the Common Core Standards (which are likely to become confused with Knowledge Core content specs) is spot on, Robert. However, the lack of common background information and a wide spread in the information entering K, need not be an obstacle in reliably teaching kids to read. With very few exceptions, entering kids have more than an adequate spoken General Lexicon and capability in handling spoken English syntax to provide the prerquisites for teaching them to read. The building of background information can and should be done while the reading instruction is being conducted, communicated in spoken language. But as soon as a child has learned how to handle the letter/sound correspondences that comprise the Alphabetic Code, and deal with the other linguistic conventions of written language such as punctuation and morphology, “The kid can read” and has been enabled to read independently as well as under direction to achieve further enablements. Most of these capabilities/enablements will involve a mix of both knowledge and skill (knowing and doing.
“Standards and accountability” hasn’t stuck to kids and teachers, for reasons that you and previous comment describe. But it sure as anything has stuck to federal, state, and local officials–despite the fact that it has failed at every step since the movement began in the late 1980’s. Why? Because it holds harmless, everyone other than kids, parents, and school site personal. School site personnel, slap psycho-babble labels on kids as “deficits” when instructional failures occur. Entertaining the possibility of inadvertent mal-instruction isn’t on the scope. When instructional flaws are attributed to students, parents, and society–who are the ones to be served–makes a travesty of “accountablity.”
Robert, I smiled at your deft allusion to The Sun Also Rises, which made me think, Would that text be a sample of the knowledge he would expect to be specified in a “real” standard? I am concerned that while the current draft standards are too vague (in avoiding ANY content) that we could also invite trouble by going the other way and overspecifying, thereby bringing on an apotheosis of certain pieces of information.
Robert, you decry the slippery slope of process-only, and your position resonates with me, but now (to be practical) I ask: what level of specificity would satisfy you? Titles of high-quality magazines or respected essayists, from which/whom teachers could choose? “A modernist novel”? “More than one Shakespeare play”? Would you be comfortable with minimums and then add higher strata? Are you comfortable with Ben’s “Platonic forms” (with the corollary assumption that that provides a superset from which districts or teachers can select a competent implementable set)? Would you want the Core to represent 40% of what we do in a given year? 75%?
I also enjoyed reading Ben’s description of lesson planning. Such thoughtful planning should be done by every teacher. It’s a great joy of mine to work through such a task, and I often tell people that this (my third career, after software and consultancy) is the most intellectually challenging precisely because of tasks like that. I simultaneously want to be inspired by great lesson-planning ideas and avoid spoon-feeding teachers (and thereby facilitating their brains’ descent toward mush).
In constructing Standards, do we have to choose between the two paths in the yellow wood?
I would really enjoy Ben’s style of lesson-planning. I think I already do at least some of that mentally, but have a hard time putting it down on paper (or inputting it into a Word document, more precisely) because it doesn’t “fit” or wouldn’t have a recognizable format. But it sounds irresistible. I think I need to try it.
Maybe, Ben, the problem isn’t just that too many teachers don’t know enough about their content, but that they’re not passionate about it. I teach American history as well as English, and I LOVE history, especially the Civil War and American government studies. So reading, say, This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust was not at all a chore for me. Maybe not all teachers can say something like that.
Your hypothesis could be tested by looking at the standards of countries with high scores on international English/Language Arts tests. They aren’t at all like the standards you call for. They’re actually more like the NCTE English standards than the proposed common standards. The common standards site provides handy links to check yourself.
I think your original thought, that you care about curriculum more than standards, was the correct one.
Dick, why do you think that once a child has learnt how to handle the letter/sound correspondences (and the other details you list), they can read and have been enabled to read independently? In other words, what evidence convinced you of the truth of your statement?
Any blog about the ’standards’ movement, that is actually a ’skills’ movement….that mentions two of my favorite books, Made to Stick and the Teaching Gap–has my interest. I would add Mind Set, another great book,to the list– it’s about how people learn and succeed. This blog is onto something important. I applaud this discussion and hope it leads to open discussions around the country.
“Dick, why do you think that once a child has learnt how to handle the letter/sound correspondences (and the other details you list), they can read and have been enabled to read independently? In other words, what evidence convinced you of the truth of your statement?”
Transparent, inter-ocular evidence. It hits you between the eyes. There is still much that the child needs to learn. That’s the background information that Hirsch emphasizes and expertise in matters other than reading. There are also metacognitive matters related to reading that are useful. And children acquire increasing automaticity (fluency) as they read. But no further instruction in reading per se is required, and the child is in position to “read to learn” whether the learning is independent or guided.