Archive for the 'Curriculum' Category

Willingham: Reading Is Not a Skill

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 28, 2009 in Curriculum, Education Practice, Educational Policy, Research and Reports and Teaching. 29 Comments

Dan Willingham reviews the draft voluntary national standards in reading and sees a problem:  ”Teachers and administrators are likely to read those 18 standards and to try to teach to them,” he notes.  “But reading comprehension is not a ’skill’ that can be taught directly.”

His latest blog post at the Washington Post’s education page observes that teachers tend to teach comprehension as a series of “reading strategies” that can be practiced and mastered. “Unfortunately it really doesn’t work that way,” he writes. “The mainspring of comprehension is prior knowledge—the stuff readers already know that enables them to create understanding as they read.”

Prior knowledge is vital to comprehension because writers omit information. For example, suppose you read “He just got a new puppy. His landlord is angry.” You easily understand the logical connection between those sentences because you know things about puppies (they aren’t housebroken), carpets (urine stains them) and landlords (they are protective of their property.)

Policymakers need to pay attention here because this is what those of us who complain about curriculum narrowing are complaining about: the natural impulse to focus on pure reading instruction in an attempt to boost reading scores is self-defeating.  When you see, as Dan does, how “bad readers” look like good readers when they have background knowledge to bring to bear on a topic, the reasonable goal of education becomes increasing the number of topics children know something about.  It may sound smart, even heroic, to focus like a laser on reading instruction, but ultimately the law of diminishing returns kicks in.  You build comprehension by building background knowledge in the reader–not by endless practice in determining the author’s purpose, finding the main idea and making inferences. 

The kids who score well on reading tests are ones who know a lot about the world—they have a lot of prior knowledge about a wide range of things–and so that whatever they are asked to read about on the test, they likely know something about it….Can’t you teach kids how to reason about texts, and thereby wring the meaning out of it even if they don’t have the right prior knowledge?  To some extent, but it doesn’t seem to help as much as you might expect. For one thing, this sort of reasoning is difficult mental work. For another, it’s slow, and so it breaks up the flow of the story you’re reading, and the fun of the story is lost.

And Dan has a line in his post that I wish could be on the wall of every classroom in the country:  “Hoping that students without relevant prior knowledge will reason their way through a story is a recipe for creating a student who doesn’t like reading.”

Ultimately the draft national standards do not serve us well by reinforcing the idea that reading a a skill.  It’s not, Willingham notes:

The mistaken idea that reading is a skill—learn to crack the code, practice comprehension strategies and you can read anything—may be the single biggest factor holding back reading achievement in the country. Students will not meet standards that way. The knowledge base problem must be solved.

A request–no a plea, really:  Forward Dan’s post to every teacher you know.  Tweet it.  Blog it. Put it on your Facebook page.  Do it now.   We’re not going to solve this problem until or unless we see this for what it is.  Here’s the link: Reading Is Not a Skill.  Pass the word.  And while you’re at it, here’s Dan’s video, Teaching Content Is Teaching Reading. 

 

Civics and Sanskrit

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 18, 2009 in Assessment and Testing, Curriculum and Literacy. 5 Comments

Only 3.5% of Arizona public school students got six or more questions correct on a version of the United States Citizenship Test.  Matthew Ladner of Jay Greene’s blog thought that was pretty pathetic–new immigrants to the U.S. have to answer six or more correct–until they gave the same test to kids in Oklahoma.  The results were not OK.

Perhaps I ought not to have been so hard on Arizona students. After all, they passed at a rate that was 25% higher than their peers in Oklahoma!  That’s right: the passing rate for Oklahoma high school students was 2.8%. They somehow underperformed Arizona’s already abysmally pathetic performance.

“These kids wouldn’t do much worse if the pollster asked them questions in Sanskrit instead of English,” Ladner concludes.  Over at Joanne Jacobs, guest blogger Diana Senechal says Ladner’s right.  ”According to a binomial distribution calculator, the chances of getting at least 6 out of 10 questions correct (where each question has 4 options) is about 2 percent. So, no, they wouldn’t do much worse in Sanskrit,” she writes.

“I have an empty metal coffee pot in my office marked “Sweden Civics Survey Fund,” Ladner writes.  “Please drop by a give what you can afford. Once it gets to a couple of thousand bucks, I’ll retain the pollster to give this exact same survey on AMERICAN civics to high school students in Sweden.”

Great idea.  I’ve got a ten-spot in my hand, Matthew.  What’s the address?

Health Care and Background Knowledge

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 17, 2009 in Curriculum. 8 Comments

Understanding the health care debate requires basic literacy and math skills.  But Checker Finn writing at National Review Online, is struck by “the enormous amount of background knowledge” required to make sense of it.  “It’s almost a litmus test of cultural literacy,” he writes.  To illustrate his point, he looks at a few paragraphs of President Obama’s recent address to Congress last week in which the President took for granted that his audience was familiar with words and phrases like “comprehensive health care reform,” “Democrats and Republicans” “self-insurance,” “coverage,” and ”bankruptcy” among other terms.

What’s an “advanced democracy”? How many are there? What are some others? What’s the point of Obama’s comparison of the U.S. with other countries?  What are Medicare and Medicaid? Where did they come from? How do they work? Who is covered by them? What’s the federal deficit, and why are some people concerned about its size? What is the congressional legislative process, and why is it unusually complex in this instance?

“Perhaps you don’t need to know these sorts of things to succeed in college or the workplace (which seems to be the litmus test for today’s standards-writers and education reformers). But you really do need to know them to be a constructive participant in modern American life,” Finn concludes.  “Who is going to ensure that our schools teach them?”

Mr. Wilson, You Lie!

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 17, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum and Teaching. 2 Comments

Over at Curriculum Matters, Sean Cavanagh gets a response from NEA executive director John Wilson to the Common Core letter about the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.  It’s an eyebrow-raiser.

This group continues to amaze me,” he said of the letter-writers, “that they would pit core knowledge against 21st-century skills, when our students need both. … I have witnessed first- hand teachers using 21st-century skills and new technology to enhance the teaching of core subjects. To relegate today’s students to rows of desks, a teacher at the front of the classroom espousing content, and a textbook with paper and pencil is to guarantee that our students will be left with the lowest skills and the lowest-paying jobs.”

So a rich, well-rounded core curriculum means kids in rows, and a teacher in the front of the room droning on from a textbook?  Says who?  Visit a Core Knowledge school, Mr. Wilson.  Over half of them are public schools.  You’ll see some dynamic teaching and learning going on, not the picture of 19th century drudgery you paint.  You know what else you’ll see in some of those schools?

Your members.

You’re forgiven for not recognizing them, though.  They’re not standing at the front of the classroom, droning on from textbooks to neat rows of students. 

Here’s what continues to amaze me:  that people who should know better equate a robust curriculum with boring teaching.  And that a leader of our largest teachers union would bash teachers as mindless automatons.

The Four Sweetest Words

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 16, 2009 in Curriculum. 2 Comments

The four sweetest words in the English language are “I told you so.”  Here’s the response of Ken Kay, the head of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, to Common Core’s letter:

We have never advocated, in any context, the teaching of 21st century skills separate from content. It is clear that you can’t just teach students to think, you have to teach them to critically think, problem solve and innovate about something – knowledge is the base of learning.”

Right.   Exactly as predicted.  I told you so.

OK, we’ve all had our fun.  Basta.  Enough. Ken, whaddya say?  Let’s marry P21’s skills to the Core Knowledge Sequence and show everyone that we’re all on the same side.  To heck with national standards.  Together, we can roll out a first-rate national curriculum that everyone can get behind.   

Have your people call my people, Ken.  OK, I don’t have people.  But get in touch, Ken.  Really.  We can do this thing.

All Together Now….Sing!

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 16, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum and Education Theory. 1 Comment

If the signers of the Common Core missive want to consider a singing telegram instead of a letter, I humbly suggest the following, sung to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s “Love and Marriage” (that’s the theme song to “Married With Children” if you’re under 40):

Skills and content, skills and content
Go together like a nun and convent
Problem solving’s dandy
But content knowledge comes in handy!

Skills and content, skills and content
It’s a fact that you just can’t circumvent
Teaching innovation
Won’t work without a strong foundation.

Try! Try! Teach skills without content.
You’ll be frustrated.
You’ll just have to learn the hard way, it
Can’t be debated.

Skills and knowledge, skills and knowledge
Kids need both if they’re to get to college
Facts are thinking’s mother
You can’t have one without the other!

Saying “content is important”
Just makes me nervous.
Without a solid core curriculum
It’s just lip service.

Skills and knowledge, skills and knowledge
Kids need both if they’re to get to college
Facts are thinking’s mother
You can’t have one
You can’t have one
You can’t have one
Without the other!

Horses and Carts

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 16, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum and Education Theory. 30 Comments

A who’s who of educators and reformers have signed a letter from Common Core reminding the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) that attempts to teach skills apart from knowledge have failed repeatedly.  Randi Weingarten, E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Dan Willingham, Diane Ravitch, Checker Finn, John Silber, Kevin Chavous and Whitney Tilson are among those urging P21 “and other advocates of 21st century skills to reshape their effort by putting knowledge and skills together at the core of their work.”

Under Lynne Munson, Common Core has done a bang-up job raising questions about the value and validity of P21’s advocacy.  But as surely as the sun will rise in the East tomorrow, P21 and its advocates will scratch their heads and say, “But we do think content is important and we’ve said so consistently.”  To a certain degree, they’re right.  The difference is one of orientation–whether you take a skills-oriented view of teaching and learning or a knowledge-based orientation.  The case needs to be made that a skills-based orientation puts the cart before the horse.  It’s possible P21 might even agree.  If skills are the cart and knowledge the horse, they have no reason to insist on going first. 

Let’s say your goal is to teach a critical thinking skill like comparing and contrasting.  You might ask your student to fill out a Venn diagram.  Students might compare and contrast deserts and tundra; others will look at igneous and sedimentary rock, or the two houses of Congress.  A content advocate will look at what you’re doing and say “See! You don’t care about content!”  Confused, the skills advocate will reply in dead earnest, “What are you talking about?  It’s geography!  It’s geology!  And civics!  That’s content!”

In a skills-oriented classroom, content is content is content.  It’s a mere delivery mechanism for the skill.   It could just as easily be apples vs. oranges or baseball vs. football, since what matters is the skill.  If the content drives the instruction, however, you might assign the compare and contrast exercise as an organic part of your unit on colonization, perhaps asking students to compare English and Spanish settlements in the New World.  The skill serves as a way of thinking about and organizing the content, which is seen as intrinsically important. 

This is not an arbitrary difference. Those of us who favor rigorous curriculum make the case for a clearly defined, grade-by-grade, sequenced core curriculum  for many reasons: it boosts reading comprehension by building background knowledge, it eliminates gaps and repetitions and helps address issues associated with student mobility.  Without an agreed upon sequence, a student might end up studying the rain forest three times in elementary school and never get the Bill of Rights, for example.   Broad background knowledge also helps create critical thinkers and problem solvers.  But the sequence matters.  With a sequenced curriculum–the horse before the cart–you get all those good things AND a framework for teaching skills effectively.   Put the cart before the horse and you have incoherence, superficiality, gaps, repitition and confusion. 

As advocates for a rich, robust curriculum, we need to start making the case not just for rigor and common knowledge, but for a sequenced curriculum.  Otherwise 21st century skills advocates will continue to scratch their heads and say “but look we agree with you about content” and both sides will continue to talk past each other.

Ask Your Child About Content, Not Grades

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 10, 2009 in Curriculum and Parents. 2 Comments

Don’t ask your kids about grades, test scores or homework, advises Kerry Dickinson of the East Bay Homework Blog.  Instead, focus on the content of the subject he or she is studying.

Instead of “What did you get on the test?” say, “What are you learning in science?” If you are connected to some school communication tool (like Schoolloop) you can look at homework assignments and grades privately. Benefits: you are teaching them to take ownership of their own schedules. You are letting them manage their own time. You are taking the focus off scores and putting it on learning.

Dickinson’s ”10 Tips to Start the School Year Off Right” offers a list of ideas from common sense to counterintuitive: Don’t overschedule your children; don’t sign your child up for academic tutoring unless he or she is in jeopardy of failing a class; and don’t attend every sports game or extracurricular activity (”your child will be participating for the love of the game or of the activity, not to earn your approval”).

(H/T: Kathleen Manzo via Twitter)

President Obama’s Standards-Based Speech

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 8, 2009 in Curriculum, Education News and Opinion. 9 Comments

If there’s a bright side to the past week’s uproar over President Obama’s speech to schoolchildren it’s this: when was the last time we had a robust national debate about what our kids actually do in school?  A Niagara of ink was spilled debating whether the speech and a set of recommended classroom activities represented political propaganda, indoctrination or an abuse of presidential power.  But here’s an overlooked, yet indisputably accurate description of Obama’s speech and those controversial lesson plans: 

“Standards-based.”

The draft national standards in reading, writing, speaking and listening worked up by National Governors Associations (NGA) and The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), specify only the skills our children should be able to demonstrate.  Whether President Obama and the Department of Education realize it or not, they are revealing exactly how empty and meaningless these “standards” are as currently written.  For example, in order to be “college and career ready,” the draft standards hold that students must be able to “listen to complex information and understand what was said, identifying main ideas and supporting details.”  This is a standard you can apply to today’s speech by President Obama, a Glenn Beck talk show rant, the films of Michael Moore, or the conspiratorial ravings of the 9/11 “truth” movement.   So while conservatives can rest assured that Obama’s speech to schoolchildren will not be a part of the emerging national standards, neither is Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” speech, Lincoln’s second inaugural address or Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.   In fact, no speech, book, poem or play is required.  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all speeches are created equal. 

But wait a minute, you might be thinking, “isn’t that what national standards are supposed to do?  Doesn’t it mean that kids from Maine to Montana are learning the same thing?”  No, that’s what a national curriculum would do.   It’s become distressingly clear that even people in education who should know better use the terms “standards” and “curriculum” interchangeably.  Yong Zhao, a distinguished professor of education at Michigan State University wrote in the Detroit Free Press last week that national standards “stifle creativity and reduce diversity of talents by instilling a single view of worthwhile knowledge” thereby doing “irreversible damage” to American education.  There are many criticisms one can level at the national standards movement.  That’s not one of them.

What conservative critics like Beck, Michelle Malkin and others might have focused on but did not is that the Administration’s suggested activities meet literally every one of the draft common core standards.  In order to be “college and career ready” students should be able to “sustain focus on a specific topic or argument through careful presentation of essential content;” “support and illustrate arguments and explanations with relevant details and examples;” and “represent and cite accurately the data, conclusions and opinions of others” among other skills.  Even the “inartfully worded” suggestion, that students ”write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president” is not in conflict with such standards. 

This is the dilemma of process standards:  they are aggressively, adamantly agnostic on the content of a good education.  Anything goes.  What speeches and texts are important to know?  Right now, the official answer is “none.”   Perhaps that’s a silver lining in this otherwise strange and irritating controversy that has greeted the President’s speech to school children.  If you don’t think that listening and responding to a Presidential address is a productive use of school time, the question you need to address is, “What exactly do you think your child should be reading and listening to all day?”

It’s a debate that is worth having.  At present, 46 states and the District of Columbia are close to answering the question “What should children learn in school” with “whatever.”    If you don’t think “whatever” is a good or helpful answer, then your choices quickly narrow to two:  You can fight to define what is (or is not) the appropriate content of a sound, well-rounded public education.  Or you can keep your child home every time he or she is assigned a text that you don’t like.

Update: Jay Greene comes at this from a similar angle.  “Parents sense a lack of control over what their children are taught in school,” he notes. “This is as true of every day’s social studies lesson as it is of Obama’s speech.”

The “Curse of Knowledge”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 18, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum, Literacy and Research and Reports. 8 Comments

Try this experiment: Find a friend and tell him you’re going to tap out the rhythm of a famous song that everyone knows.  Without telling him what the song is, tap out the notes for “God Bless America,” “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” or “Happy Birthday to You.”  No singing or humming along; just taps.  Before you begin make a prediction: Do you think he’ll guess the song correctly based on your ability to tap it out?

Nearly 20 years ago, a Stanford graduate student named Elizabeth Newton did her dissertation in psychology on this simple game and discovered something remarkable.  Given a list of 25 well-known songs to tap out, the listeners’ success rate was only 2.5 percent—one out of 40 attempts.  However the tappers were so sure the listener would know the song, they predicted a 50% success rate. 

Why the disconnect? In the experiment, the tapper hears the song in his or her mind and thinks it’s so obvious that the listener can’t possibly fail to understand it.  The tapper mentally sings the words and hears the melody to “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” while the listener merely hears “tap tap tap tap tap tap tap.”   The tapper can’t understand why the listener doesn’t get it; the listener gets frustrated that the tapper thinks he should.  Chip Heath and Dan Heath describe the phenomenon in their book Made to Stick: 

The problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it’s like to lack that knowledge. When they’re tapping, they can’t imagine what it’s like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than a song. This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us.  And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.

As a listener, the task is hard because even though you are getting valid information, it’s incomplete.  You’re not getting the whole song.  Newton’s experiment offers as good a model as you’re likely to find as to why background knowledge is the key to reading comprehension— for struggling readers, what’s on the page is useful, but it’s not enough. 

This is also one of the most difficult concepts to wrap your mind around.  When you read, your background knowledge is the melody playing in your head.  Like the tapper in the experiment, it’s impossible to forget what you know and force your mind NOT to make the connections that create understanding.    Proficient readers hear the music, the lyrics, even a full orchestra.  Students, especially those from low-income families or households lacking in enrichment, hear only tap, tap, tap, tap, tap tap.  

The tapping experiment also shows why reading strategies don’t help.  Try to determine the author’s (tapper’s) purpose.  Tap, tap, tap.  Can you find the main idea (melody)?  Tap, tap, tap.   When meaning breaks down, reread (relisten) for clarity.  No matter what “strategy” you employ, if you don’t know the song, it still sounds like tap, tap, tap.  Seen through this lens, reading strategies are worse than useless, only compounding the listener’s frustration.  You might as well instruct students “don’t just listen to the tapping, try to hear the song in your head!”  They can’t.

We all know background knowledge matters.  As teachers, even devotees of strategy instruction tell students to “activate your prior knowledge” to aid in comprehension.  However, we are assuming that there is background knowledge to activate.  If we don’t teach the explicit content needed to guarantee comprehension, we are hearing the melody in our heads and refusing to share it. 

Our students, on the other hand, hear only “tap tap tap tap tap tap.”