Tag Archive for 'critical thinking'

Stuff or Nonsense?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on May 14, 2009 in Curriculum. 9 Comments

“The Story of Stuff,” a 20-minute video about the effects of human consumption on the environment has become “a sleeper hit in classrooms across the nation,” the New York Times says.  “More than 7,000 schools, churches and others have ordered a DVD version,” the paper reports, and hundreds of teachers have written to the film’s producer to say they have assigned students to view it on the Web.

<a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=gLBE5QAYXp8">http://youtube.com/watch?v=gLBE5QAYXp8</a> 

Produced and hosted by activist Annie Leonard, the video is chirpy and upbeat.  An Inconvenient Truth, it’s not.  To put it as benignly as possible, Leonard has a definite point of view.  She defines extraction, for example, as ”a fancy word for natural resource exploitation, which is a fancy word for trashing the planet.  What this looks like is we chop down the trees, we blow up mountains to get the metals inside, we use up all the water and we wipe out the animals.”    The video is rife with similiar broad-brush assertions, such as Leonard’s contention that as people, “the primary way that our value is measured and demonstrated is by how much we consume.”

Critics complain that the video is stridently anti-capitalist and even anti-American.  “My friends tell me I should use a tank to symbolize the government and that’s true in many countries and increasingly our own,” Leonard says at one point, “After all more than 50% of our federal tax money’s now going to the military.”  The video’s line-drawing animation then shows a figure representing the U.S. government on its knees shining the shoe of a large, top-hatted figure with a dollar sign on its chest, symbolizing corporations.  “As the corporation has grown in size and power, we see a little change in the government where they’re a little more concerned in making sure that everything’s working out for those guys than for us.”

Subtle, it’s not.

Equally unsubtle is the reaction of the Heritage Foundation which lambastes the video as “the very extreme left’s Greenpeace view of America.”

Essentially it tells the story of how America is not a nation to be proud of, and in fact, your child should be ashamed for living in it. For example: after implying that the radios for sale in Radio Shack are assembled by 15 year olds in Mexico, and by purchasing one, you contribute to the exploitation of the third world and the eventual end of the Earth, the film’s creator and narrator Annie Leonard says: “So MY country’s response to this limitation is simply to go take somebody else’s. THIS is the third world. Which SOME would say, is another word for our stuff that somehow got on somebody else’s land. So what does that look like? The same thing, trashing the place. (capitalized emphasis ours).”

Heritage asks how “The Story of Stuff” has found its way into so many classrooms.  “While nobody denies liberal Greenpeace activists their point of view, even if factually wrong, surely airing a 20 minute political ad to little kids wouldn’t be supported by mainstream outlets, would it?”    The popularity of the video has led to a debate about academic freedom and the video’s appropriateness in at least one school system in Missoula County, Montana.  After getting the New York Times treatment, more will surely follow.

Sounds like another test of those 21st Century skills in critical thinking and media literacy our children are supposed to be developing.

Whose Core Knowledge?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 8, 2009 in Core Knowledge. 11 Comments

The normally thoughtful and engaging Clay Burell swings and misses at E.D. Hirsch’s recent New York Times op-ed about reading tests, painting with an uncharacteristically broad brush.   Relying on the standard misperception of Hirsch and Core Knowledge as promoting ”the white male-privileged narrative of history,” Burell writes that such a curriculum is “unfair to those very disadvantaged students Hirsch claims will benefit from his model.”  This ignores the fact that the curriculum has had its greatest success with low-SES students.  Pay a visit to schools like the Carl Icahn Charter School in the South Bronx; P.S. 124 in Queens; Atlanta’s Capitol View Elementary; among others.  I don’t believe you’ll find much evidence of unfairness.

There are a couple of problems with Clay’s analysis of Hirsch’s piece.  First, the immediate benefit of teaching a broad, content-rich curriculum is not cultural (although no apologies need to be made for familiarizing students with the history and culture of their own country and the broader world) but structural.  Reading comprehension suffers in disadvantaged children exactly because they lack the background knowledge to make sense of what they read.  Indeed, Burell himself underscored the crucial role of content knowledge in creating strong readers in a post a few months ago praising Dan Willingham’s Teaching Content is Teaching Reading YouTube video.  Hirsch has been making the same argument for decades. 

Clay wants Hirsch’s essay to address critical thinking, but that wasn’t the point of the piece.  Hirsch’s singular service to education has been to attempt to define the broad body of background knowledge that speakers and writers assume their audience knows, and point out that literacy (as well as critical thinking and other so-called “21st Century” skills) depends on sharing it.  The curse of this contribution is that it is easy to dismiss it, as Alfie Kohn typically does (and I fear Burell does too) as “a bunch o’ facts” and “rote memorization” even though Hirsch has never even so much as hinted that kids should memorize lists of names and dates.  Clay wants the curriculum infused with critical thinking questions, but where is the disagreement?  There’s absolutely nothing in the Core Knowledge curriculum that suggests or implies it has come down from Mt. Sinai on stone tablets and must be taught, unquestioned, in a specific way.  Good teachers like Burell, an Apple Distinguished Educator, have always–will always–infuse their teaching with thoughtful perspectives and critical thinking.  How does a set curriculum prevent them from doing so?  How does defining what to teach determine how to teach it?  The answer is simple: it doesn’t.  

He also takes issue with Hirsch’s criticism of reading strategy instruction.  Allowing for Clay’s personal experience, I think he underestimates the damage done to children by a heavy over-reliance on such instruction in the elementary grades.  In many disadvantaged schools, strategy instruction IS reading instruction, at the expense of science, history, art and music.   The result is a vicious circle where kids robotically search for the main idea or “question the author.”  But their lack of content knowledge prevents them from meaningfully answering the ”metacognitive” questions they are trained (speaking of rote memorization) to pose. 

We’re never going to get away from the rhetorical questions with which Burell challenges Core Knowledge (”Knowledge of what? From whose perspective? In whose interests?”) nor should we.  But it’s dispiriting that smart educators like Burell are chary about a specific curriculum out of some misperception of balance, fairness or perpective.  If you want students to be critical thinkers–and to his credit Burell clearly does–what better way than to give them the background knowledge they need to grapple with precisely the questions he suggests?

Clay is on more solid ground, I think when he suggests “If we can talk leaving high school content under the control of local teachers, not dictated by national content tests, then maybe  – high school teachers could fill in the silences left by the national(istic) 3-8 standards, teach race, gender, and class-based perspectives in history that almost surely wouldn’t be covered earlier.”   Not a bad idea, that.  If every kid comes to high school with a shared body of knowledge that is both strong and subtle, then those high school classes could be rich in critical thinking and challenging perspectives.  Without it, we’re frozen forever at the starting line, searching for some shared subject or common ground to engage with and argue about. 

Email me your address, Clay (Seriously).  I’ve got a copy of the Core Knowledge Sequence with your name on it.  See what’s in it, and see how pedagogically prescriptive it’s not, and ask yourself which students would get the most out of your high school humanities class: those who walked in with a firm grasp of the content it describes?  Or those whose sense of history, science and the arts was left to chance?

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?

Report: Visual Media Hampers Critical Thinking Skills

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 9, 2009 in Education News and Research and Reports. 5 Comments

The “informal learning environments” of television, video games, and the Internet are producing learners with a new profile of cognitive skills, says UCLA psychology professor Patricia Greenfield.  Our visual skills are improving, while our critical thinking abilities are in decline, according to a review of 50 studies on learning and technology conducted by Greenfield and published in the journal Science. 

Formal education must adapt to these changes, taking advantage of new strengths in visual-spatial intelligence and compensating for new weaknesses in higher-order cognitive processes: abstract vocabulary, mindfulness, reflection, inductive problem solving, critical thinking, and imagination. These develop through the use of an older technology, reading, which, along with audio media such as radio, also stimulates imagination. Informal education therefore requires a balanced media diet using each technology’s specific strengths in order to develop a complete profile of cognitive skills. 

What’s the upshot for educators?  At ARS Technica, John Trimmer notes because she recognizes that both forms of skills have their place, “Greenfield advocates a balanced approach to the rising tide of visual content obtained through informal education. First, she argues that schools should emphasize textual materials during the learning process in order to provide a counterbalance to the informal learning environment. But, for testing purposes, we could do a better job of providing a more balanced approach than the typical all-text method of evaluating skills and recall. “

21st Century Snake Oil

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 3, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum and Education News. 6 Comments

Yesterday, Alfie Kohn; today Tony Wagner.

Jay Greene goes after the education guru on his blog and in an op-ed in the Northwest Arkansas Morning News.  The Fayetteville Public School system has purchased 2,000 copies of Wagner’s The Global Achievement Gap and is holding a series of public meetings, according to Greene, on how Wagner’s vision for 21st century skills ”might guide our schools.”  Be afraid, says Jay.  Be very afraid. 

It’s hard to get people to think critically about people who push a focus on critical thinking.  To be for critical thinking is like being for goodness and light.  The tricky part is in how you get there.  To the extent that Wagner has any concrete suggestions, he seems to be taking folks down the wrong path.  He wants less emphasis on content and less testing.  But he shows no evidence that higher levels of critical thinking can be found in places or at times when there was less content and less testing.  In fact, the little evidence he does provide would suggest the opposite.

Joanne Jacobs weighs in as well, pointing to a Sandra Stotsky op-ed on Tony Wagner, and noting succinctly: “I don’t see excess knowledge as a big problem for today’s students.”

Cultural Literacy Bonus:  Check out the illustration atop Jay’s blog post.  It’s Bugs Bunny dressed as a Wagnerian Valkyrie from the cartoon, What’s Opera, Doc?  Can you imagine a kid’s cartoon using Wagner’s Ring Cycle as the basis of a parody today?  It’s a bromide to suggest that entertainment has been dumbed-down over time, but it’s hard not to notice the difference in the vocabulary of Mary Poppins, for example, or the Rex Harrison version of Doctor Doolittle compared to contemporary kids’ fare.  Quantifying the change in cultural references and vocabulary level in children’s entertainment over the last 50 years or so would make for an interesting study, if it hasn’t already been done.

21st Century Skills: The Newest Edufad

Published by Robert Pondiscio on December 16, 2008 in Core Knowledge and Curriculum. 0 Comments

Credit to Eduwonk Andy Rotherham (and his Ed Sector colleague Elena Silva) for continuing to describe the “false choice between teaching facts and teaching how to approach them.” Writing in U.S. News, Rotherham foresees the potential “to make the 21st-century skills movement another fad leading to little change in American education.”

Critical thinking and problem solving, for example, have been a component of human progress throughout history, from early tools and agricultural advancements to gunpowder, vaccinations, or exploration. And while “global awareness” has historically been as much a martial talent as an economic one, interconnectedness is not new nor is information literacy among elites. Likewise, the idea that there is a hierarchy of knowledge from facts to complex analysis is not a new one. Plato, for example, wrote about four distinct levels of intellect. Perhaps these were considered ‘3rd-century B.C. skills’?

As Andy notes, some of those advocating 21st-century skills believe such skills should replace the teaching of content.  “While students should leave school with more than just facts in their head, facts do matter, too,” Rotherham writes. “Content undergirds critical thinking, analysis, and broader information literacy skills….It’s impossible, for instance, to critically analyze the American Revolution without understanding the facts and context surrounding that event. Unfortunately, state, national, and international assessments show that despite a two-decade-long focus on standards, American schools still are not delivering a content-rich curriculum for all students.”

Rotherham also credits Core Knowledge founder E. D. Hirsch in the piece for fighting the good fight lo these past two decades that “giving all students a common framework of knowledge is a key strategy for increasing civic equality.”

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.”

Quote of the Day

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 16, 2008 in Core Knowledge. 0 Comments

“’Critical thinking’ and ‘problem solving’—which progressives like me promote—have been taken to their extreme absurdity. We’ve disconnected them from their base—deep knowledge.”

-Deborah Meier, “A Disrespect for Knowledge” at the blog Bridging Differences

21st Century Cliches

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 24, 2008 in Core Knowledge and Education Practice. 7 Comments

Does giving a kid an iPod mean you are teaching “21st century skills?”

A Chapel Hill, North Carolina middle school may become the first in the country to give an iPod to every teacher and student, “an experiment that would challenge teachers and administrators to ensure the hand-held devices are used as learning tools, not toys,” reports the News & Observer.  The school’s principal defends the iPod plan with a phrase that is rapidly becoming an education cliche:  “[Our teachers] state their commitment to teach 21st-century skills, because technology is the future for students and teachers.”

Reporter Matt Dees injects a healthy note of skepticism in his piece, noting “it’s still not clear how the iPod Touches would be used at Culbreth Middle School. And school officials know that students may use the iPod Touches more to download the new Jonas Brothers single than to tap the riches of human knowledge.” Dees quotes Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch, who comments, “There has been a tendency to use technology as a substitute for curriculum.”

Technique and how-to ideas have taken the place of deciding what it is, exactly, we want these children to learn, says Hirsch. But I have nothing against the technology if it’s in the service of grown-ups facing their responsibilities to decide what the students need to know precisely. If they did that, these technical gadgets will be valuable.

I’ve been hearing the phrase a lot, so I ask the question in earnest: What exactly does it mean to ”teach 21st century skills”?  Is learning to play an instrument a 21st century skill because you use an iPod?  Is writing a research paper a 21st century skill just because you use Google?  I’m hard-pressed to think of a single use of the phrase that didn’t conflate the tool and the task.   

In a New York Times piece last week, Steve Lohr noted the technology is starting to “turn the corner” in schools, and offered an example of how it can transform learning.  “The emphasis can shift to project-based learning, a real break with the textbook-and-lecture model of education. In a high school class, a project might begin with a hypothetical letter from the White House that says oil prices are spiking, the economy is faltering and the president’s poll numbers are falling. The assignment would be to devise a new energy policy in two weeks,” Lohr wrote.  But as Joanne Jacobs noted, there’s nothing new about project learning.  I would add that neither is working collaboratively intrinsically “21st century.”

Critical thinking? Problem solving? As old as banging rocks together to make fire.  Working collaboratively?  You mean, like hunting in groups to bring down a antelope?  I’m no Luddite, and I’m all for using technology in the service of learning.  But what are these uniquely “21st century skills?”  Are there any?

Critical Thinking Not Possible Without Content Knowledge

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 11, 2008 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum and Review. 3 Comments

Here’s a plan for eliminating the national debt: Charge a tax of one dollar on anyone who says ”teaching critical thinking skills” should be the goal of schools.  One person less likely to idly toss around the phrase in the future is none other than The Washington Post’s Jay Mathews, arguably our most influential education writer.  He concedes today that critical thinking programs “don’t work very well, except as a measure of the gullibility of even smart educators.”  How did he come to see the light?

A remarkable article by Daniel T. Willingham, the University of Virginia cognitive scientist outlines the reasons. Critical thinking, he explains in a summer 2007 American Educator article, overlooked until now by me, is not a skill like riding a bike or diagramming a sentence that, once learned, can be applied in many situations. Instead, as your most-hated high school teacher often told you, you have to buckle down and learn the content of a subject–facts, concepts and trends–before the maxims of critical thinking taught in these feverishly-marketed courses will do you much good.

“The processes of thinking are intertwined with the content of thought (that is, domain knowledge),” Willingham says. “Thus, if you remind a student to ‘look at an issue from multiple perspectives’ often enough, he will learn that he ought to do so, but if he doesn’t know much about an issue, he can’t think about it from multiple perspectives.”

Willingham’s work builds the strongest case I know for why narrowing the curriculum to load up on reading and math at the expense of other subjects is ultimately self-defeating.  If we want kids to be critical thinkers, they need the broadest possible education.  Describing Willingham’s upcoming book, Why Don’t Students Like School? — A cognitive scientist answers questions about how your mind works and what it means for the classroom,  Mathews says “Willingham’s own work is, in my view, a triumph of critical thinking because he knows his content so well….We need to do our homework and remember that no matter how brilliant we think we are, we can be useful critics only after we master the facts.”