Over at Education Week, Sara Mead blogs about her disappointment with Waiting For Superman. There’s very little classroom footage in the movie. “For a movie that hangs its argument on the critical importance of excellent teachers,” Mead writes, ”Waiting for Superman seems surprisingly uninterested in instruction itself.”
“By failing to engage more deeply with the realities of what good or bad schools, or good and bad teaching, actually look like in practice, Waiting for Superman makes good schools or teaching seem like a kind of magical black box, as incomprehensible to us as Superman’s powers. And I think that notion of good schools and teaching as a kind of magical black box can fuel a kind of futility in our thinking about our ability to make good instruction a reality for more children–ironic in a film that above all else wants to convince us that something better is possible.”
Mead is right, but to pin the blame on Waiting For Superman director Davis Guggenheim misses the point. (This is not to indict Mead, who has consistently demonstrated she understands the importance of teaching and curriculum). Guggenheim is not an education expert, and the film is essentially an ed reform infomercial. If Waiting for Superman is incurious about what happens inside the classrooms of low-income children that’s because ed reform is incurious about it. The ed reform agenda is all about structures — charters, contracts, data, funding, accountability, etc. — not what teachers teach and kids do in school all day. Guggenheim is merely reflecting the mindset of the reformers who are his sources.
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Ed reform is incurious. Thank you. As a nation, we’re more inclined to believe an infomercial (good word choice) than to dig a little deeper into the heart of teaching and learning: curriculum and instruction.
The movie’s climax features a lottery (something that happens VERY rarely, almost never, even in Charter World) to “save lives”– an event so far from the norm across this nation. It’s not about lotteries. It’s about what happens in the classroom.
Diane Ravitch took it on the chin from people who criticized “Death and Life” for not offering specific, new, jazzy reform options. But Ravitch returned to the (ahem) core: rich, in-depth curricula and capable instruction. High standards.
Want to see high-quality instruction around comprehensive curriculum? Try Carnegie Center for the Advancement of Teaching’s Gallery, including “Inside Teaching.”
Way too much of this media explosion over “Superman” is ego.
Comment by Nancy Flanagan — October 10, 2010 @ 2:43 pm
This is a rare moment when I disagree. I love reading the Core Knowledge blog, and I deeply value the curriculum that E.D. Hirsch Jr. developed. However, I think that the focus on structural change is appropriate. Without it, instructional change will continue to change at the same pace it has in the past 100 years (very little). In my experience, curriculum and instruction have rarely produced a student-centered school. Just new versions of teacher-centered instruction. Core content is great! Humanities are important! But so are student interests and talents, technology, and teaching the ability to learn on one’s own. The latter 3 are less tied to standards and rarely measured on any assessment, but more important for the future that students face.
What scares me most is that if public education is unable to restructure itself, something else will restructure it…because there are too many change forces at work to let the status quo survive! Students are becoming more cynical about school as it becomes less relevant, and the culture of apathy and sarcasm is becoming popular among teens and 20-somethings.
Comment by Don Brown, D.Ed. — October 11, 2010 @ 12:30 pm
I would argue — and I have often — that structural change and instructional innovation including curriculum are not mutually exclusive. Nowhere is it written that one must precede the other. I continue to believe the structural changes will bear limited fruit without attending to the substance of what children learn. There’s no reason we can’t or shouldn’t have both.
Comment by Robert Pondiscio — October 11, 2010 @ 12:33 pm
Don Brown,
What makes you think student-centered instruction will cure apathy and cynicism? Isn’t this the way schools have been tending for the last century? Perhaps student-centrism is part of the CAUSE of cynicism and apathy. I know I get cynical when enrolled in a student-centered college class –I want a professor to TEACH me something, not orchestrate presentations by my amateur classmates, or help me divine what my individual learning needs are and then point me to books that will teach me in the professor’s stead.
I find that the more I embrace the heretical ideal of a teacher-centered classroom (and it IS heresy these days, wouldn’t you agree?), the more my students like me and my class. They know B.S. when they see it. Why this fetish for student-centered instruction? If your kid gets into Yale, will you advise him to take student-centered courses, or courses with the powerhouse professors who can stand and deliver? I’d be curious to know if YOU have been in a student in a satisfying student-centered course? I haven’t.
Comment by Ben F — October 11, 2010 @ 8:36 pm
Ben, you make a good defense of “teacher-centered” instruction. I know what you mean, I think, and I expect I would probably agree with you in most everything you do in your classroom and how you do it. I expect I would teach your subject very much as you do. But consider the possibility that the terms themselves, student centered and teacher centered, are logically meaningless and not helpful in understanding or improving teaching and learning.
I can claim that I have always used “student’ centered” methods. That is I have always used whole class direct instruction. I explain a lot, so it can be said that I use lecture. I assign homework and grade it. I don’t play around with group projects and other things that just seem silly to me. I use manipulatives when appropriate, just as I use examples and demonstrations when appropriate. I use appropriate technology. I do all of these things in the interest of teaching effectively. I am guided by the what the students need in order to learn whatever subject I am teaching. Therefore I am obviously a “student-centered” teacher. (And I might add that I am a constructivist in the sense that all these things give students the materials and tools by which they can effectively and efficiently construct knowledge.)
A teacher-centered teacher, in contrast, can be defined as one who tries to apply educational fads because they make him feel good, because they give him bragging rights with other like minded teachers. Never mind that they sometimes frustrate students and are usually comparatively ineffective.
These terms, student centered and teacher centered, have been around for many decades, but that doesn’t mean they are sensible, accurate, logical or helpful. They are ideological terms, in my humble opinion, not functional terms. I think they need a little critical thinking applied to them.
Comment by Brian Rude — October 11, 2010 @ 11:24 pm
Excellent clarification, Brian. In fact, one way of being student-centered is to be ultra-aware of what engages students. I understand Ben’s point of view because I actually taught in a similar way myself for many years. Students were engaged.
However, with advances in technology, I still can’t believe that a group of age-alike students set in a passive environment is the most effective educational model. For advanced students, headed to Yale, the knowledge and skills of independent study and learning have already been mastered, so they know how to access material and are engaged in part due to the path they are trying to achieve.
My point is addressed at a much broader level. How can we make more citizens life-long learners? In an many high schools, and many courses, I don’t see stand and deliver teaching doing the job of engaging kids, and I do see students in 16 school districts regularly. I would invite Ben to look at several classrooms in different schools in his city and county, then judge. In my experience when students are empowered to learn on their own, that’s when they are no longer cynical about learning.
Comment by Don Brown, D.Ed. — October 12, 2010 @ 12:07 pm
Brian, I agree.
Don, forgive me, but your edu-cliches get my hackles up.
Just because students are sitting quietly (your “passivity”) does not mean they are not learning a lot. On the contrary, they are probably learning a lot more than the kids in that noisy activity going on down the hall. Why the prejudice against passivity? Docility may be a precondition to learning, though it’s heresy to say so.
Young Yalies have “mastered the skills of independent learning” and only thereby can profit from a lecture? Sorry –young Yalies have acquired vast stores of vocab and general knowledge from parents, reading, travel and erudite prep school and AP teachers. This, not chimerical skills, is what enabled them to ace the SATs and speak articulately at the admissions interview. Your poor lad at Student Centered High acquires mere dribs and drabs of knowledge through inefficient activities and wastes much time in fruitless skills-building exercises. Unless he has erudite parents, he bombs the SAT and has little to say in admission essays and interviews.
We want to make “life-long learners”? Why wait? Let’s have kids learn something NOW, for goodness sake! Or do you think they’ll find it easy to pick up and appreciate a history of Byzantium when they’re 35, working two jobs and raising kids? Will the will-o’-wisp “skills” and “dispositions” they acquired at Student Centered High do the trick? Do you think it’s even likely that they would WANT to pick up such a history if all they’d ever had were “student centered” history teachers who deftly administered cooperative learning activities but never gave engrossing lectures?
You never answered my question about whether you’ve ever been in a satisfying “student-centered” class.
I don’t mean this post to be mean and disrespectful –please take it in the spirit of spirited debate.
Comment by Ben F — October 12, 2010 @ 11:37 pm
Hey, Ben
I too was concerned my post edged toward flame! But is is a spirited debate. In my 5th grade class I will never forget when students created screenplays based on the American Colonial period that we were studying. They read and then developed their own plays based on specific events, such as the “lost colony of Roanoke Island”. Then they critically analyzed the scripts each group had written based on a rubric we developed together. We selected one to produce. They became actors, directors, set designers….did all of the camera work and edited the movie down. I added titles and burned a DVD for each student. That is the best example I have. I knew the content standards that needed to be addressed and “steered the group” toward them. They were in charge of the project and had very differentiated roles…it was messy, noisy but it was meaningful! Similarly, online teaching can take a lot of the concern about content off a teacher’s plate and let them focus on student interaction, creation of products based on content knowledge, and tailoring the course to student interests.
We have a way now for each student to have an individual experience for learning, and we can take into consideration their interests and challenges.
They don’t need to be grouped by age or put into a track. I guess what it comes down to for me the old “Self Actualization” thing (at the risk of another cliche’. I promise I will stop now, but I look forward to your response.
Comment by Don Brown, D.Ed. — October 13, 2010 @ 3:54 pm
Don,
I’m glad you’re up for feisty discussion –I wish more of my colleagues could tolerate it.
Your screenplay project sounds as if it was fun and memorable for the kids, although I’ll bet that the actual content learned could have been taught directly in one period. I concede that it’s possible that the positive associations with learning and the high-level of memorability may justify the relative inefficiency of the method. But the superiority of such methods is not self-evident to me and it bugs me when people speak as if it is.
When you say “self-actualization” I think: what SELVES do twelve year olds have yet? Something shallow, raw and inchoate. A liberal arts curriculum is supposed to create deep, mature, well-defined selves –that’s why we call colleges “alma maters” –soul mothers. Why steer them to cultivate their interests before they even have a chance to learn what the vast menu of human interests consists of? (I can tell you this: an overriding interest of most 12 year olds is watching pornography on their iPhones). The idea of “actualizing” as self before it’s even created strikes me as putting the cart before the horse. Or trying to create topiary out of a seedling.
By inclination, I am deeply skeptical of innovation. Most innovations are failures. If you’ve read Diane Ravitch’s Left Back, you’ll see that American ed has been beset by innovations over the last century –and look where we’ve ended up: with mediocrity. Is the solution more experimentation? Or is it sticking with what’s traditionally worked here and in other countries? Wisdom recommends the latter. But we’re not wise, and we’ll keep blundering into experimentation (without ever measuring if it works) because Americans are constitutionally blind to the value of what’s old. In our eyes, innovation is good, even if it’s bad. We’ll keep falling for the false promises of ed-tech utopiansts, or student-centered utopianists. If we just purge every last vestige of what’s old (read: bad) a bright new day will dawn in American education.
As you can see, Jeremiah is my favorite prophet.
Comment by Ben F — October 14, 2010 @ 1:01 am
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Don, I hesitate to jump in and criticize the project of writing plays that you described in your comment above. Obviously I was not there and you were, so I have no firm basis to draw any conclusions. However, sometimes there is some benefit in getting a glimpse of how the other guy thinks. I’m the other guy, so here’s my thoughts. I feel bad that they’re all negative, but they exist, and I don’t think I’m alone. So here goes.
My comments came out long, so I put them on my website, at http://www.brianrude.com/blogspa.htm
Comment by Brian Rude — October 16, 2010 @ 12:06 am