Archive for the 'Education Theory' Category

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.

Want Research-Based Teaching? Then Forget “Learning Styles”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 14, 2009 in Education Practice and Education Theory. 12 Comments

Want to claim you support research-based methods of teaching?  Then stop demanding that teachers cater to children’s individual ”learning styles.”  There’s no research to support the idea that certain children learn best in certain ways, notes Dan Willingham who guest posts at The Answer Sheet Valerie Straus’ new education blog on the Washington Post’s recently revamped education page. 

“Learning styles has become unquestioned dogma among many educators, despite the utter lack of evidence to support it,” notes Willingham who calls out Washington, DC for becoming the latest to drink the learning styles Kool-Aid in Michelle Rhee’s new District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) Teaching and Learning Framework:

In the framework, which lays out Michelle Rhee’s vision of what it means to be a good teacher, the fourth guideline in the “Teaching” section of the Framework suggests that teachers “target multiple learning styles” in order to “ensure all students have the opportunity to meet lesson objectives.” Teachers are encouraged to vary the content of lessons (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, tactile, interpersonal, linguistic, social).

Researchers have been conducting experiments on learning styles for fifty years, Willingham notes. “They’ve been tested with the sorts of materials that kids encounter in schools. They’ve been tested with kids diagnosed with a learning disability. There just doesn’t seem to be much evidence that kids learn in fundamentally different ways.”  A lesson clicks or doesn’t, he writes, “because of the knowledge the child brought to the lesson, his interests, or other factors” not “because of an enduring bias or predisposition in the way the child learns.”

“Suggesting that teachers cater to learning styles—when teachers must already do some differentiation based on what students know—makes a teacher’s job much more difficult with no benefit to students,” he concludes.

Those who follow Willingham’s work will recall his YouTube video on learning styles.  

Common Knowledge and Democracy

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 9, 2009 in Core Knowledge and Education Theory. 8 Comments

“Citizenship spins upon the axis of common information; its responsibilities require, at their base, the sense of security that comes from knowing that what I know is fundamentally similar to what you know.”

While this quote may sound as if it’s ripped directly from the pages E.D. Hirsch’s new book, The Making of Americans, it actually appears in a remarkable essay in the Columbia Journalism Review.  “Common Knowledge,” by Megan Garber, examines the fragmentation of news and its potential impact on our democracy.  News, writes Garber, is “democracy’s common denominator.”

Our political system demands not only that citizens receive a steady flow of information that will, in turn, allow them to be democratic decision-makers—but also that the information in question be, in a profound sense, shared. “A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it,” James Madison wrote, “is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both.” Madison wasn’t one to mince words; and it’s telling, here, that popular information, shared information—rather than simply information itself—was his concern. Without “popular information,” we lose not only our baseline of knowledge about the political world, but also our bearings within it. We risk becoming subject, as it were, to subjectivity itself—and ending up with a society, as William James had it, in which “people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”

The parallels between education and news are striking.  As news consumption increasingly defines itself “according to cliques rather than commons,” Garber points out, “cognition itself becomes ever more customizable.”

An infrastructure of information consumption that fosters homophily—that allows us to cocoon ourselves in our own worldviews—compromises our ability to relate to each other, discursively, as citizens of a diverse nation. It fosters distance and dissonance, rather than resisting them. It compromises that nebulous yet necessary space in democratic discourse: the public sphere. And it highlights a paradox of the digital age—that the diversity of our news outlets threatens the broader diversity of public discourse. The democratization of information, it turns out, is in some ways at odds with democracy itself.

Garber’s concerns are ultimately identical to Hirsch’s.  And her question–How do we determine which information will keep us broadly synchronized with everyone else?–is a question with equal potency for education and journalism.

Of what value is discourse, after all, when we’re unable able to talk about, and act upon, the same things? Imagine a book club in which everyone shows up having read different books—one person having read The Brothers Karamozov, another having read Pride and Prejudice, another having read Twilight. Or a town hall meeting in which one citizen comes prepared to talk about teacher tenure in the local schools, another to talk about improving a neighborhood park, another to talk about rewriting local zoning laws. There may be some discussion, sure—but that discussion will be crippled to the point of absurdity.

“Democratic discourse requires the core commonality of shared information,” Garber concludes.  “Otherwise, what’s the point?”

The Making of Americans

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 1, 2009 in Core Knowledge and Education Theory. 4 Comments

The official publication date is still two weeks away (Sept. 15), but copies of E.D. Hirsch’s new book, The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools, have started to hit the bookstores.  Jay Mathews gets a jump with his review in the Washington Post.  “If the inventive 81-year-old had been a business leader or politician or even a school superintendent, his fight to give U.S. children rich lessons in their shared history and culture would have made him a hero among his peers,” Mathews shrewedly observes. ”Instead, he chose to be an English professor, at the unlucky moment when academic fashion declared the American common heritage to be bunk and made people like Hirsch into pariahs.” 

Mathews notes (correctly, I think) that Hirsch’s new book makes the case for a common curriculum “in the clearest form since his ground-breaking 1987 book, Cultural Literacy.”

“The Making of Americans” puts the most troublesome elementary school subject, reading, at the center of its argument. Reading achievement and language proficiency generally have been disappointing for decades, particularly in schools full of the children of immigrant or impoverished parents. Progressives have called for engaging students with lessons that celebrate their real lives and their cultural heritages. Old books about dead white guys don’t hack it, they say. Hirsch’s research convinced him that this approach cut children off from the shared background they all must have to understand the words in front of them.

Richard Kahlenberg, reviews the book in the Autumn issue of The American Scholar, not yet available online:

In The Making of Americans, Hirsch…widens the lens to connect his ideas on education reform to the fundamental rationales for our system of public schools in the United States. Citing the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Horace Mann, Hirsch identifies two central reasons for the American “common school”: to create social mobility, allowing bright, hard-working students of all origins to enjoy the American dream; and to create social cohesion, binding children of diverse economic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds into citizens of a single nation. Hirsch makes a highly cogent case to support the concept that a common curriculum is necessary in elementary schools to further both goals. The American focus on skills, rather than on content, has left low-income students bereft of “unspoken background knowledge” that is explicitly taught in countries like France and Finland, where levels of academic inequality are much lower. “It does not seem to occur to the intellectual descendants of Rousseau,” Hirsch writes, “that the four-year-old children of rich, highly educated parents might be gaining academic knowledge at home that is unfairly being withheld (albeit with noble intentions) from the children of the poor.”

“American education would be far better off if leaders heeded Hirsch’s sound advice to restore a common-core curriculum, Kahlenberg concludes.  “Our system would do even better still if leaders went one step further and reinvented Horace Mann’s economically integrated common school for the 21st century.”

Close Only Counts in Horseshoes…and School Choice?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 14, 2009 in Education Theory, Parents and Research and Reports. 12 Comments

Why do parents enroll children in underperforming schools when there appear to be better choices nearby?   For some, transportation may be a dealbreaker,  according to a new survey by the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education posted by EdWeek’s Debra Viadero:

The results suggest that transportation is especially challenging for low-income families, 45 percent of whom do not own cars, or who own vehicles that are unreliable. According to the survey, one third of those families said they did not enroll their child in the school they preferred due to transportation difficulties.

Dan Willingham recently unpacked one of the paradoxes surrounding school choice over at Britannica Blog with his patented cog sci spin.  In particular, he takes issue with the argument that choice will improve the overall quality of education, since parents would not knowingly send their kids to “bad” schools.   Yet they do it all the time.   “Why should we expect people to make rational decisions about their child’s schooling,” Willingham notes, “when they don’t make rational decisions in other complex arenas?”

I can imagine an advocate saying ‘But the real point is that it’s the parent’s choice. If they want to send their kid to a mediocre school because it’s close to the home, that’s their business.’ Fair enough, but that is a different argument. We are no longer debating whether choice will improve schools but about philosophy of governance. What happens if parents do not make sensible educational choices for their children?  We don’t let parents choose not to educate their children—there are truancy laws. Should society intervene if parents send their child to a school that the parents ought to know is terrible? And are we, as a society, going to allow people to make poor choices for which there is a collective cost? Perhaps this is the educational equivalent of letting people choose to drive without wearing a seatbelt.

When I taught in the South Bronx, I routinely (and quietly) encouraged dozens of families to enter their children in the lottery for the KIPP school less than a half a mile away, but few ever did.  Meanwhile, the massive and dangerous middle school across the street was the top choice of students leaving my school.   Granted, there were three basic flavors of middle school in the neighborhood : bad, worse, and abandon-all-hope-ye-who-enter-here   Still, to Willingham’s point, a disproportionate number made what I perceived to be the worst possible choice.  The one thing it had going for it was proximity.

Update: Jay Greene wanders into the fray at his blog and in the comments below.

One Bad Apple

Published by Robert Pondiscio on May 12, 2009 in Education Theory, Educational Policy and Research and Reports. 18 Comments

bad-apple Children from troubled families perform “considerably worse” on standardized reading and mathematics tests and are much more likely to commit disciplinary infractions and be suspended than other students, according to a new study.  Writing in Education Next, Scott Carrell of UC-Davis and the University of Pittsburgh’s Mark Hoekstra offer evidence that  “a single disruptive student can indeed influence the academic progress made by an entire classroom of students.”

Carrell and Hoekstra, who are both economists, examined confidential student data from Florida’s Alachua County school district, consisting of observations of students in grades 3 through 5 over an eight-year period. The pair also had access to disciplinary records for every student in their sample, which they cross-referenced to domestic violence data from public records.  What emerged was a compelling set of data that indicates children exposed to domestic violence have more disciplinary problems at school, underperform academically and have a negative effect on peers–resulting in lower test scores and increased disciplinary problems in others.  In essence,  a ”one bad apple” syndrome.  Carrell and Hoekstra title their piece “Domino Effect.”

“A majority of parents and school officials believe that children who are troubled, whatever the cause, not only demonstrate poor academic performance and inappropriate behavior in school, but also adversely affect the learning opportunities for other children in the classroom,”  observe Carrell and Hoekstra.  The pair cite a Public Agenda survey which found that 85 percent of teachers and 73 percent of parents agreed that the “school experience of most students suffers at the expense of a few chronic offenders.”  The study largely validates those concerns. 

Our findings have important implications for both education and social policy. First, they provide strong evidence of the validity of the “bad apple” peer effects model, which hypothesizes that a single disruptive student can negatively affect the outcomes for all other students in the classroom. Second, our results suggest that policies that change a child’s exposure to classmates from troubled families will have important consequences for his educational outcomes. Finally, our results provide a more complete accounting of the social cost of family conflict. Any policies or interventions that help improve the family environment of the most troubled students may have larger benefits than previously anticipated.

Poll teachers in struggling schools, and I will wager a substantial amount that classroom disruption is identified consistently as the primary barrier to student achievement.  Yet it is consistently glossed over or dismissed, typically attributed to a teacher’s lack of classroom management skills.  I have long believed that the time on-task lost to disruption and behavior problems is almost certainly one of the under-discussed root causes of the achievement gap.  This study does a great service by confirming what many teachers and parents have intuited for years: disruption matters and has a negative effect on all students.

School and classroom tone matter enormously–perhaps more than any other factor.  Get it right and everything seems to work.  Get it wrong and nothing does.  This study holds out the promise of sparking a very important discussion about the rights of the individual in the classroom versus the rights of the community.  It’s long overdue. 

(Image via Digital Eargasm)

Freire Is Foul and Foul is Freire

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 27, 2009 in Education Theory and Teacher Training. 41 Comments

Mention the name Paolo Freire at a gathering of educated people and you’re likely to get blank stares.  Unless members of that group went to ed school, where the Brazilian theorist is nothing less than a rock star, and his 1970 book Pedagogy of the Opressed is part of the canon.  In the new City Journal, Sol Stern examines the curious case of Freire and asks  how his “derivative, unscholarly book about oppression, class struggle, the depredations of capitalism, and the need for revolution ever gets confused with a treatise on education that might help solve the problems of twenty-first-century American inner-city schools?”  For starters, Stern says Freire’s seeds were cast upon fertile soil.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed resonated with progressive educators, already committed to a “child-centered” rather than a “teacher-directed” approach to classroom instruction. Freire’s rejection of teaching content knowledge seemed to buttress what was already the ed schools’ most popular theory of learning, which argued that students should work collaboratively in constructing their own knowledge and that the teacher should be a “guide on the side,” not a “sage on the stage.”

Freire opposed what he described as the “banking” concept of education, in which the student is a seen as a tabula rasa to be filled by the teacher.  Banking, naturally, is a tool of the oppressor in which the teacher talks and the students listen, the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply, and the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined.  “Freire’s strictures reinforced another cherished myth of American progressive ed,” Stern notes, “that traditional teacher-directed lessons left students passive and disengaged, leading to higher drop-out rates for minorities and the poor.”

Stern finds no evidence that Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed has gained much traction or met with much success anywhere in the Third World.   “Nor have Freire’s favorite revolutionary regimes, like China and Cuba, reformed their own ‘banking’ approaches to education, in which the brightest students are controlled, disciplined, and stuffed with content knowledge for the sake of national goals—and the production of more industrial managers, engineers, and scientists,” he notes.  Why, Stern finally wonders, does American education’s love affair with Freire persist?

A broad consensus is emerging among education reformers that the best chance of lifting the academic achievement of children in the nation’s inner-city schools is to raise dramatically the effectiveness of the teachers assigned to those schools. Improving teacher quality as a means of narrowing racial achievement gaps is a major focus of President Obama’s education agenda. But if the quality of teachers is now the name of the game, it defies rationality that Pedagogy of the Oppressed still occupies an exalted place in training courses for those teachers, who will surely learn nothing about becoming better instructors from its discredited Marxist platitudes.

Stern challenged me a few months ago to find a published piece critical of Friere’s work and its impact on American education.  I failed.

Want to Improve Education? Put Your Best Lessons on YouTube

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 31, 2009 in Education Theory, Higher Education and Teaching. 11 Comments

At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Kevin Carey looks at the collapse of newspapers and sees higher education on the same trajectory.  I’ll defer to Carey on what the Internet might do to higher ed, but I suspect that as long as there is market value in the credential of a name-brand university degree in addition to the actual product of education, elite colleges needn’t worry about filling their freshmen class.  You can only take the newspaper analogy so far: nobody ever got an interview at a job fair merely by being a reader of The New York Times.

It seems to me there is a bigger opportunity, however, to use technology to radically improve K-12 education.  While not every child goes to a great school or has a great teacher, it seems reasonable to suggest that it’s easier–and faster–to get every child in front of a great teacher online than to get a great teacher in every classroom.  

YouTube, which is owned by Google, has just launched YouTube EDU, a service that puts college lectures online.  Great idea.  But how about K-12, Google?  Why not incentivize teachers to create first-rate videos by splitting advertising revenue from each viewing?  This could create a new source of income for low-paid teachers, and a rich trove of material for students.  While it obviously wouldn’t be a substitute for good classroom instruction, it could certainly supplement bad classroom instruction.  Such a resource would also be a boon for differentiated instruction and enrichment during school, homework help or tutoring after school–and a great resource for homeschoolers or parents whose children are trapped in failing schools. 

When you think about the enormous waste of teaching capacity that takes place every day — millions of teachers preparing lessons for audiences of two dozen kids — it seems a shame not to have a mechanism to capture great teaching and distribute it broadly for all students.  Tomorrow, thousands of teachers will teach their kids how to add unlike fractions.  Undoubtedly there are some real gems among them, some that could produce an “aha” in tens of thousands of kids.  In YouTube, the free distribution channel already exists.  Why not take full advantage of it?

The Slippery Slope of “Content”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 30, 2009 in Education Theory and Opinion. 9 Comments

The 21st Century Skills debate is back on again.  Lynne Munson of Common Core caused a ruckus at a P21 event at the NEA last week.  That sparked a response by Paige Kuni of Intel, who chairs the P21 board, over at Flypaper.  I won’t rehash the debate, but reading it and thinking about the ongoing dustup prompted a flashback.

Back when the World Wide Web was the Next Big Thing, I worked at TIME Magazine when it became the first major magazine to make its complete contents available each week on a then little-known service called America Online.  The project was regarded within the House the Luce Built with anything from amusement to irritation.  Those of us who were mixing it up online with readers were dismissed by some ink-stained colleagues as wasting our time on a fad, one that had more in common with CB radio than publishing.  But one criticism had merit then and still rings in my ears today.  It bothered many reporters and writers that we referred to their magazine pieces as “content.”  The very word connoted a commodity, something cheaply made, processed and packaged, sold by the ton and shipped in containers. 

So it is with P21.  I’ve come to conclude that they are genuinely bewildered by those of us who complain they are soft on rigor and academics.  Ken Kay and Co., I think, earnestly believe that they support “world class skills and world class content.”  But it’s the word content that causes the disconnect.  By referring to history, art, science, math, and literature as “content,” it seems to betray an orientation that dismisses the best of our accumulated knowledge, thought and expression as simply a bunch of stuff.  P21 is by no means alone in this.  Lots of people who favors a rigorous curriculum throw the word content around as convenient shorthand, present company included.   

Many of my erstwhile print colleagues adamantly — and in retrospect, correctly — refused to see themselves as “content providers.”  They were White House correspondents, investigative reporters, bureau chiefs, editors, writers and photojournalists.  They were probably right, even as they ended up on the wrong side of history.  One of the problems bedeviling print media today is precisely that newspapers and magazines have allowed themselves to become commoditized.  The reader doesn’t see the value (and doesn’t want to pay) for commodity news, cheaply available everywhere.   There’s a lesson in here for education somewhere.  It concerns who we are, what we do, and what–if we’re not thoughtful–we will allow ourselves to become. 

Over in the comments sections in Flypaper, Diana Senechal responding to Paige Kuni, nails the reductive nature of viewing everything as content. 

“I question the value of the sort of analogies you describe. The life cycle of the butterfly is fascinating in itself. The transformation from egg to butterfly is not just a story of “success”—it has intricate processes and startling beauty. There is no need to make superficial analogies with business. There is much of interest right here, in the subject, and it becomes more interesting with deeper study….Making connections is very important, but we have to be judicious about the kind of connections we make, lest we trivialize the subject. I am not a biologist, but I believe many a biologist would agree.

Biology teachers, who clearly see themselves as teaching science not content, would doubtless agree too.  Indeed, I doubt there are too many great teachers who view what they do in class as teaching “content.”  Those of us who worry that a skills orientation dulls academics need to find a better word to describe what we value if we want others to prize it as highly as we do.