Archive for the 'Education Theory' Category

Conditions of Lying…I Mean Learning!

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 20, 2009 in Education News and Education Theory. 3 Comments

Australian whole language guru Brian Cambourne has found himself in a minor dust-up Down Under for suggesting a “subliminal campaign” to undermine phonics as an approach to teaching reading by subconsciously linking it with the idea of failure.

Cambourne, best known in the U.S. for his “Conditions of Learning” theory, sent a mass email to literacy educators suggesting they flood an education minister’s office with emails linking phonics to “readicide”, which Cambourne describes as ”the systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools,” the Australian reports.  Cambourne’s suggestion was in response to the official’s announcement of the nation’s “first direct comparison of phonics-based reading methods with other techniques.”

Asked why he had to resort to a subliminal campaign instead of relying on evidence, Professor Cambourne first said: “You don’t really believe we can influence the minister’s subconscious?”  Cambourne tells the Australian:

When the email was quoted back to him, Professor Cambourne said he and his colleagues had to rely on cognitive science’s framing theory. “It’s a way of making ideas change based on new theories rather than just denying or trying to argue with people you can’t argue with,” Professor Cambourne said. “When you rely on evidence, it’s twisted. We can also present evidence but we never get a fair hearing. We rely on the cognitive science framing theory, to frame things the way you want the reader to understand them to be true – framing things that you’re passionate about in ways that reveal your passion.”

Framing things the way you want the reader to understand them to be true?  Forgive me, but isn’t that a fancy definition of lying?

“We have to use the same kind of tactics that have been used to demean and demonise whole language,” he said before adding that, if The Australian reported his comments: “I will deny I ever said this.”

Oops.

Incentivize Everyone!

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 18, 2009 in Education Theory and accountability. 2 Comments

The normally mild-mannered Joanne Jacobs goes off on a former Oregon teacher, principal and superintendent, who writes in a letter to the New York Times that President Obama, if he’s serious about about improving education, should “lose the words ‘achievement’ and ‘rigor,’ which have no connection to the inquisitiveness, determination, creative thinking and perseverance students need for genuine lifelong learning.” 

No connection? I remain dubious about the idea that those who’ve learned little in school will become “lifelong learners” at some happy day in the future.  As for “inquisitiveness, determination, creative thinking and perseverance,” those traits usually lead to achievement in the here and now without the necessity of waiting till winged pigs are ice-skating in hell.  I don’t even think that “achievement” and “rigor” foreclose the possibility of “creative thinking.” Not unless “creative” is a synonym for “wrong” and “thinking” means “making a poster.”

Amen to all that.  Click through to the letter in the Times and the writer’s main point (if you can ignore the nonsense about rigor and achievement) actually proposes a provocative idea.

If the federal government wants to reward school success, it should split those rewards among all those who have contributed: parents; the whole school faculty, including the principal; and the students themselves. The government might also reward the community that gave its schools financial and moral support.

Each of these ideas is fraught with baggage and “moral hazard” but each has its champions: New York City has piloted a program to offer cash incentives for things like attending their child’s parent teacher conferences, for example.  Roland Fryer and others have promoted pay-for-grades schemes.  Merit pay plans are legion.  I remain skeptical about all of them for various reasons. But I’m equally skeptical about treating teachers as the only moving part in the incentive equation.   If you believe that cash incentives matter, it would be an interesting thought exercise to think through what a Total Incentive Plan might look like.

21st Century Skills: A Guide for Clear Thinkers

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 2, 2009 in Curriculum, Education Theory and Teacher Training. 17 Comments

In politics, “issue framing” means presenting an issue in a way that is most likely to get others to agree.  A classic example of this is in the debate over abortion.  No one is for or against it; they support the “right to life” or the “right to choose.”  Reject a cleverly framed issue and you risk finding yourself on political, moral or ethical thin ice.  This is why those who are opposed to military actions must turn cartwheels to “support the troops.”  It’s essential that you praise the men and women in uniform if you wish to criticize what they are being ordered to do. 

21st Century skills is a masterpiece of issue framing.  Who can possibly argue against students being able to innovate, think critically and solve problems?  The beauty of a well-framed argument is that it keeps its opponent forever on defense.  A classic piece of political wisdom is ”if you’re explaining, you’re losing” and critics of 21st Century Skills have to spend a lot of time explaining why something that sounds so attractive and desirable doesn’t make a lot of sense, or simply won’t work. 

That brings us to the peerless Dan Willingham, who patiently and clearly unpacks several of the problems with the 21st Century skills movement.  Dan stole the show at last week’s Common Core panel discussion in Washington, and his piece today on Britannica Blog lays out in a single reading three flawed assumptions made by The Partnership for 21st Century Skills:

1. Knowledge and Skills are separate.
2. Teachers don’t have cognitive limits.
3. Experience is equivalent to practice.

Pay careful attention to point #2, for it’s enormously important, and with the exception of Willingham, it has gone completely undiscussed. As currently conceived, 21st century skills enthusiasts expect teachers to do a job that is literally beyond the cognitive abilities of almost all of us.  Not just beyond the limits of most teachers but beyond the limits of most human beings.

Everyone’s cognitive system has limits. We can’t remember everything that happens to us. We can’t pay attention to five things at the same time. This is important in the classroom because the methods that P21 encourages teachers to use (as the ones most likely to develop 21st-century skills) are incredibly demanding—so demanding that almost no one can use them effectively without a great deal of preparation and training. The demanding methods include project-based learning, small-group learning, and others in which students have some voice in the direction of the lesson plan. These methods are difficult because it’s so hard to plan for them; you can’t know what’s going to happen in the classroom until you get there.

Willingham points out that teachers already believe the teaching methods promoted by P21 are the best ones.  “Yet classroom observation studies show that very few teachers use them, almost certainly because they are so difficult to use.”  He went into even more detail on this point at his Common Core presentation. 

If you’re uncomfortable with the giddy promotion of 21st century skills, here’s the start of your “support the troops” position.  the 21st Century Skills movement is conscripting you in an unwinnable war.  They want you to do a job that is beyond your –  or anyone’s — cognitive capability.  It will be easy (and facile) to say as Ken Kay did at the Common Core event last week that just because something is hard doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.  Diane Ravitch recently pointed out that we’re already gullible about the myth of the miracle teacher.  Now P21 wants to up the ante. 

If we’re serious about closing the achievement gap and raising the level of performance of American education, we can’t be serious about asking teachers to walk on water and labeling them failures when they drown.  Any credible reform has to be reasonable and achievable.  21st Century Skills, as currently conceived, fails dismally on both fronts.   If we’re serious about equipping children with these important skills, we need to be equally serious and clear-eyed about what it will take, about what works and what doesn’t. 

Right now P21’s take on education is a clear case of Garbage In, Garbage Out.  And when it fails, as it inevitably must, guess who will be blamed?

Closing the Achievement Gap Too Tough for Palo Alto

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 4, 2009 in Education Theory and accountability. 4 Comments

Palo Alto, California schools Superintendent Kevin Skelly says educators are “deluding themselves”  when it comes to closing the achievement gap. And, notes the San Jose Mercury News, he dares to say what’s become almost unspeakable publicly:

It’s just not possible for the average kid who comes to this country in seventh or eighth grade, or even third grade, without a word of English and parents with little formal education, to match the achievement levels of kids whose mom has a Ph.D. in English from Stanford and can afford to stay home and spend time supplementing the education of her kids.

Completely eliminating the achievement gap would be “the triumph of hope over experience,” said Skelly, adding that when educators set that lofty goal, “we’re not being honest, and it’s to our detriment.”  In Palo Alto, home of Stanford University and dozens of Silicon Valley companies, including Hewlett-Packard, Facebook and Xerox, “socioeconomic and educational differences are arguably magnified,” notes writer Sharon Noguchi.  “While many professors, high-tech workers and other professionals have paid a premium to live in the city to send their children to highly regarded schools, other parents come from working-class backgrounds, some busing their children from East Palo Alto and eastern Menlo Park.”

Make no mistake, Skelly said, his schools should — and do — try to bring up the achievement of Latino and African-American students. But idealistic rhetoric creates high public expectations for schools, while letting families, politicians and society in general off the hook, Skelly believes. By themselves, schools can’t overcome the influence of parents, friends and communities, he said.

As a group, students in Palo Alto are well above California’s state averages, but the gaps are also wider than average.  On the state’s academic performance index for 2008, the district’s Asians scored 972, whites scored 934, Latinos 746 and African-Americans 700. “That’s a 234-point gap between white and black students, up one-third from 2003 and nearly 50 percent higher than statewide figures,” the paper notes.

Alfie Kohn Smackdown

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 2, 2009 in Core Knowledge School, Education Theory and Research and Reports. 6 Comments

Dan Willingham does a takedown of all-purpose education pundit Alfie Kohn over at Britannica Blog.  Dan cheekily titles his piece “Alfie Kohn is Bad For You and Dangerous for Your Children” to lampoon Kohn’s stock-in-trade of broad-brush oversimplification.  He details how Kohn ”consistently makes factual errors, oversimplifies the literature that he seeks to explain, and commits logical fallacies.”

Kohn specializes in attacking conventional wisdom in education.  He takes a common practice that people think is helpful and then shows it’s not helpful, and in fact is destructive. Most people think that homework helps kids learn, praise shows appreciation and makes them more likely to do desirable things, and self-discipline helps them achieve their goals.  Kohn argues that each of these conclusions is wrong or over-simplified. Homework may bring small benefits to some students, but it incurs greater costs and overall is likely not worth assigning.  Praise doesn’t help academic achievement, it controls children, it reduces motivation, and makes them less able to make decisions. Self-discipline is oversold as an educational panacea, and in some contexts may actually be undesirable.

Kohn raises interesting questions and is a useful provocateur, Willingham concludes, but he “cannot be trusted as an accurate summary of the research literature….He will lead you to something interesting and useful, but if you want to use it, you will have to do the work yourself.”  

Along with Stuart Buck’s recent blog piece, seconded by Jay Greene, it seems the spotlight is burning a bit more brightly on Kohn of late. He has richly earned the dressing down.  I’ve gotten out of the business of responding to Kohn’s deliberate and persistent mischaracterization of the Core Knowledge curriculum as ”rote memorization” and a “bunch o’ facts.”  (The offer still stands, Mr. Kohn: Let me know when you want to visit a Core Knowledge school.)    Clearly, Kohn has no incentive to let a bunch o’ facts get in the way of what is a lucrative business of books, articles and lecture fees– reportedly 200 speaking engagements a year at $5K a pop.   Indeed, it’s tempting to view Alfie Kohn, Inc. as the intellectual equivalent of professional wrestling.  He needs a heavy to go after to keep that income stream running strong.

Update:  Eduwonk questions Dan’s sanity and masochistic tendencies in taking on Alfie Kohn.  Dan’s response in the comments section discusses the real price of shrugging your shoulders and rolling your eyes.

Curriculum vs. 21st Century Skills

Published by Robert Pondiscio on December 1, 2008 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum and Education Theory. 0 Comments

Dan Willingham’s latest is up at the Britannica Blog, and it’s a keeper.  The UVA cognitive scientist and Core Knowledge trustee looks at several recent reports on “21st Century Skills” including creativity, critical thinking, global awareness, and information literacy, and asks “Where’s the beef?” 

21st-century skills require deep understanding of subject matter, a fact that these reports acknowledge, albeit briefly. As I have emphasized elsewhere, gaining a deep understanding is, not surprisingly, hard. Shallow understanding requires knowing some facts. Deep understanding requires knowing the facts AND knowing how they fit together, seeing the whole. It’s simply harder. And skills like “analysis” and “critical thinking” are tied to content; you analyze history differently than you analyze literature, a point I’ve emphasized here. If you don’t think that most of our students are gaining very deep knowledge of core subjects—and you shouldn’t—then there is not much point in calling for more emphasis on analysis and critical thinking unless you take the content problem seriously. You can’t have one without the other.

Calls to focus on 21st-century skills, Willingham concludes, evoke a familiar pattern:  pendulum swings between an emphasis on process (analysis, critical thinking, cooperative learning) followed by a back-to-basics movement that emphasizes content. “In calmer moments,” Willingham writes, “everyone agrees that students must have both content knowledge and practice in using it, but one or the other tends to get lost as the emphasis sweeps to the other extreme.”

The Adult Literacy Paradox

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 28, 2008 in Education Theory and Research and Reports. 3 Comments

It’s a given that as a nation, millions of children struggle to attain a functional level of literacy, but Tom Sticht of EducationNews.org wants to know, where does the reading problem go when children grow up?  Overwhelmingly–but not always accurately–adults rate their own reading skills very highly.  When broken out by ethnic groups, Sticht notes, the ratings are

Whites: Very Well-77%, Well-21%, or Not Well/Not At All-3%.
Blacks: Very Well-67%, Well-27% and Not Well/Not At All-6%.
Hispanics: Very Well-46%, Well-22% and Not Well/Not At All-32%

Just because adults think they read well, however, doesn’t mean they do.  When the average proficiencies of whites and blacks on the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) prose scale were compared, Sticht notes, the average proficiency of whites who rated themselves as reading very well was 308, well above average.  Blacks rating themselves as reading very well scored 259, well below average.  What’s going on here?  Sticht has a theory:

Perhaps when children grow up and get out of the pre-K-12 world they adapt to the ambient literacy demands of a cultural niche that they find possible to occupy. They find jobs they can qualify for, they get information from sources they have access to and feel comfortable in using, and as they slip ever more firmly into their literacy niche, they feel more and more satisfaction with their literacy skills. Maybe this is why so many U.S. adults think they read Well or Very Well, despite their poor performance on literacy tests.

If they are using themselves as a standard, Sticht concludes ominously, many adults are not able to judge whether or not their children are learning to read well in school and fail to act accordingly.

21st Century B.C. Skills

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 30, 2008 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum and Education Theory. 4 Comments

Eduwonk Andy Rotherham gives voice today to something that has been irritating me for a while now–the careless and self-indulgent tossing about of the phrase “21st Century Skills” to describe the simple outcome of a sound, basic education.  Problem solving, critical thinking and cooperative learning have been with us in this country since we hunted in groups using spears with Clovis points.  As Andy puts it:

 We’re not the first society where those skills have been needed or valued.   What’s changed is the need —  for both equity and economic reasons — to give many more students a high quality education that allows them to develop these skills.   In other words it’s about broadening access to a good education rather than a radically different conception of what a good education is.   If dressing that up as 21st Century Skills helps sell an equity agenda, that’s great, otherwise we are flattering ourselves some about just how revolutionary the world we live in really is.

Amen.  The sooner we stop nattering on about “21st Century” skills the better, especially since the phrase tends to be code for devaluing the content-rich curriculum that makes critical thinking possible.

School 2.0

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 26, 2008 in Education Theory. 2 Comments

There’s a thoughtful and important conversation going on over at Britannica Blog about how — or if — Web 2.0 will transform education, as well as the changing roles of student and teacher in our emerging digital age.  The series of essays from boldface names in academia including Michael Wesch, Mark Bauerlein, Dan Willingham and David Cole is mercifully light on the smugness and pie-eyed utopianism that is typical of most writing on education technology.

“While most of our classrooms were built under the assumption that information is scarce and hard to find,” writes Kansas State University cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch, ”nearly the entire body of human knowledge now flows through and around these rooms in one form or another.” 

We are enveloped in a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where the nature and dynamics of knowledge have shifted. We can acknowledge that most of our students have powerful devices on them that give them instant and constant access to this cloud (including almost any answer to almost any multiple choice question you can imagine). We can welcome laptops, cell phones, and iPods into our classrooms, not as distractions, but as powerful learning technologies. We can use them in ways that empower and engage students in real world problems and activities, leveraging the enormous potentials of the digital media environment that now surrounds us. 

Emory University’s Mark Bauerlein, the author of The Dumbest Generation and a reknowned digital skeptic responds that “no generation has experienced so many techno-enhancements and produced so little intellectual progress. Still, in spite of these underwhelming numbers, pro-tech advocacy continues. The disappointing results come years after the initial launch, and so people forget the promises put forward about how technology would transform learning. But with school budgets tight and student writing in critical condition, we need more accountability in the initiatives and more hard skepticism about learning benefits. And we need a lot less fervor for tools and screens that have only existed for a few years and whose human consequences are yet to be determined.”

The genie has long since left the bottle argues Steve Hargadon, founder of the Classroom 2.0 social network.  “What is abundantly clear is that no matter what our schools are currently doing, most of our students are already actively involved in this content creation and conversation outside of school.”  University of Virginia psychology professor Dan Willingham, with his singular gift for separating the transformational from the merely trendy notes:

At the heart of Hargadon’s vision—and Michael Wesch’s—is the collaborative student project, and this idea has been prominent in American education since 1919, when William Kilpatrick published his classic essay, “The Project Method.” Kilpatrick and his followers would recognize most of Hargadon’s list of advantages for Web 2.0 learning: engagement, authenticity, participation, openness, collaboration, creativity, personal expression, discussion, asynchronous contribution, and critical thinking. Most or all of these advantages accrue not from Web 2.0 in particular, but from its collaborative nature, and from the fact that students have a significant voice in selecting and shaping the project.

“The question is really whether Web 2.0 makes the student project more likely to succeed than project-based learning did before Web 2.0,” Willingham writes. 

The most persuasive point in the series so far arguably comes from Michael Horn, the Executive Director of Innosight Institute and co-author of the recent Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. 

If we hope for computer-based or online learning to have a positive impact and fulfill its transformative promise at scale, we need to implement it in a counterintuitive way by deploying it disruptively — that is, by allowing it to compete against non-consumption, where the alternative is literally nothing at all. Once there, it will predictably improve, and at some point, it will become good enough to handle more complicated problems and supplant the old way of doing things.  This is how all disruptive innovations transform their field.

Horn cites examples of education non-consumption advanced courses that many schools are unable to offer, small, rural, and urban schools that are unable to offer breadth, home-schooled students and those who can’t keep up with the regular schedule of school, and those who need tutoring, among others.

 

Deep in the comments section of one of the essays, Karin Chenoweth of the Education Trust offers a thoughtful coda to the entire conversation: “The last thing we need is a generation of students who are able to synchronize their dance moves with millions of other people on YouTube but still have no idea of their roles as citizens in the most powerful democracy in the world–or, for that matter, what a democracy is and how democracies differ from the other ways humans organize their societies.”

Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad…

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 30, 2008 in Assessment and Testing and Education Theory. 3 Comments

In a two-week trial of a cash incentive program for students at a Washington middle school attendance and punctuality have improved. Grades have not.  The Washington Post’s Bill Turque takes a look inside a school that is aggressively implementing the controversial concept.

The Northwest Washington school’s 307 students are among the roughly 3,000 middle-schoolers eligible to earn as much as $100 every two weeks — to a maximum of $1,500 for the academic year — for showing up on time, not disrupting class and getting high grades. Students have been buzzing about the pilot program, called Capital Gains, since they learned in late August that their school had been selected.

The program, as you might have guessed, is the brainchild of incentives guru Roland Fryer.  Every two weeks, students are evaluated on 10-point scales according to a series of performance indicators. “All schools in the program are required to review behavior and attendance, which means showing up on time for every class,” the Post reports.  “Individual schools can choose other criteria, including grades, homework, class participation and adherence to the dress code. Each point is worth $2.” 

For the first two pay periods, beginning Oct. 17, checks will be distributed by school staff. Later, they will be deposited directly into student-owned savings accounts at SunTrust Bank. Students will be able to access the money with or without their parents, and no one can withdraw money without the child, officials said.

Last week, it was announced the Fryer will lead a new education research center at Harvard University, which will monitor efforts to close achievement gaps.  Incentive programs, not surprisingly, will be the first idea under Fryer’s shiny new $44 million microscope.

Update:  I’m still agnostic on incentives, but a reader at Eduwonkette nicely summarizes the ick factor that many educators feel about it.  “The soul-crushing aspect of Fryer’s theoretical framework is that it lets the curriculum and the teacher and the school entirely off the hook,” observes Citizen X. ”It’s a much more cynical view on students living in poverty. They don’t care, they are only motivated by material objects that they don’t have, they have to be bribed into “learning” (or at least learning to get a better score on a bubble sheet).”