Si usted puede leer esto, usted podrá comprender estudios sociales clase en esta escuela primaria de Wisconsin. ¿Cómo se dice “well-intentioned nonsense” en español?
(Inclino el sombrero a Joanne Jacobs)
Tag Archive for 'Curriculum'
“Although American teachers spend more working hours in classrooms than do instructors in some of the top-performing European and Asian countries,” says an Education Week story on a new professional development study, “U.S. students routinely post below-average scores on international exams.”
Why is this a “paradox” as EdWeek observes? If you spent more hours on the job than top-performing European and Asian workers, would you expect to be wealthier than they are? Time on task only makes a difference if you’re using it wisely. Doing more of what doesn’t work won’t change the outcome.
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.
Add the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews to the growing number of observers skeptical of ”21st century skills,” which he pronounces the latest doomed pedagogical fad.
It calls for students to learn to think and work creatively and collaboratively. There is nothing wrong with that. Young Plato and his classmates did the same thing in ancient Greece. But I see little guidance for classroom teachers in 21st-century skills materials. How are millions of students still struggling to acquire 19th-century skills in reading, writing and math supposed to learn this stuff?
Mathews is especially tough on the rhetoric of 21st century skills enthusiasts who insist, as one advocacy group does, that every aspect of our education system must be aligned to prepare citizens with the 21st century skills they need to compete. “This is the all-at-once syndrome,” Mathews observes, “a common failing of reform movements.”
Like many fads, 21st century skills has legs because it sounds so reasonable, especially to non-educators. Children should be able to solve problems, and think critically. For teachers, the fad has the potential to send the message that such skills are content-neutral, or can be taught in the abstract, which is demonstrably false. As has been discussed on this blog and elsewhere, you can’t uncouple higher order thinking from the deep subject-specific knowledge that makes it possible.
“It takes hard work to teach this stuff, and even harder work, by poorly motivated adolescents, to learn it,” Mathews concludes. “In our poorest neighborhoods, we still have some of our weakest teachers, either too inexperienced to handle methods like modeling instruction or too cynical to consider 21st-century skills anything more than another doomed fad. There might be a way to turn them around, but if there isn’t, instead of engaged and inspired students, we will have just one more big waste of time.”
I teach in New York City, ostensibly one of the most successful districts in the nation. Our reforms are second to none. Test scores soar year after year. We buy the best new products and quickly toss out the old. When I began teaching in Brooklyn, I thought I would teach literature and writing. I quickly learned that literature was outmoded and “accountable talk” all the rage. It was once a phrase in lowercase. How it has grown!
You attended school in the bad old traditional days. Don’t deny it. Back then, the teacher lectured while you took notes, read dead authors, and regurgitated dry facts. There was no class discussion. You were never encouraged to think for yourself. It’s a miracle that you read the paper now-or read at all, for that matter.
Today, you would not have to suffer. Schools across the country have purchased and mandated an exciting new type of classroom conversation called Accountable Talk®.
“Purchased classroom conversation?” you might gasp. Hold it! Your question doesn’t conform to Accountable Talk® format. You must phrase your question thus: “It seems to me that you said that schools have purchased their own classroom conversation. Is that what you meant?” Yes, that was my drift.
Coined in the 1990s by the Institute for Learning at the University of Pittsburgh, the phrase “accountable talk” refers to a mode of classroom conversation that emphasizes (you guessed it) accountability: justifying one’s statements, responding to others, and staying within the boundaries of the topic. Beyond that, it is now a brand name and a product. In 2007, the Institute for Learning began displaying a service mark (SM) next to the phrase. In 2008, Accountable Talk® became a registered trademark. In other words, we must now purchase our own classroom conversation-or rather, our district purchases it for us and requires that we place it on our tongues.
What kind of talk have we purchased? Accountable Talk® embraces conventions of so-called academic conversation: starter phrases, social cues, and habits of referring to the text. The basic principle–that we must substantiate what we say-has generally been part of any good class discussion, but Accountable Talk® makes the conventions explicit and requires total compliance with its rules. It is intended especially for children who lack exposure to such conventions of speech. In moderation, it makes sense. But does it really reproduce academic conversation? Or does it require us to give up an element of intellectual freedom: our choice of wording and phrasing, within reason?
Suppose I decided to hold a class discussion without Accountable Talk®. If I admitted openly that it was not Accountable Talk®, I would be flouting district mandates. If I called it Accountable Talk® but didn’t conform to its protocol, I would break trademark law. In other words, teachers are now bound by both district regulations and trademark law to acknowledge and adhere to a particular kind of classroom talk. This should raise some concern and questions if not outright alarm. Our speech, of all things, should be protected from branding and marketing. The Founding Fathers did not foresee that someone might appropriate, sell, and mandate a style of speech.
Trademark concerns aside, I object to a mere three aspects of Accountable Talk®: the accountability, the talk, and the poor prose resulting from the two.
In education, “accountability” suggests a wrongdoing: we are made “accountable” so that we can no longer slip by with poor practice. Why, then, must a good class discussion be called “accountable”? Shouldn’t it be driven by something deeper, like desire for truth, curiosity about the subject, and respect for others? Accountability should not be our highest ideal; it has value and meaning only when higher principles are in place. Those principles present, a class discussion needs no special name. Accountable talk could help us out of a bog; but once we can breathe and walk, we should make full use of our faculties, using the words and phrases that seem best. One does not have to be “accountable” at every moment; there is room, in a good class discussion, for exclamations, tangents, and incomplete ideas.
As for talk, there is too much of it in our classrooms already. Students must constantly “turn and talk”; “peer-edit,” “engage in group work,” and “share out.” They sit facing each other, so that teachers won’t distract them. Students rarely learn how to listen, take in ideas and language, and think independently. Consider, for instance, the “turn and talk” technique. Instead of taking in a story that the teacher is reading aloud, students are instructed periodically to turn and talk about it with a partner. This breaks up their private thoughts and requires them to consult with someone else. One recalls David Riesman’s observation in The Lonely Crowd regarding “that rapid circulation of tastes which is a prelude to other-directed socialization.” Contemplation cedes to buzz. The buzz, in turn, creates a market for talk products, which require services, consultants, and a brand.
Of course there should be some discussion in the classroom, but now it has risen to the status of a petty god. Teachers and students alike must be trained in this sort of talk so that they will practice it correctly. As a consequence, the emphasis is often on the talk itself. Administrators conducting spot-checks want to see evidence of it; they are pleased when they see students turning and talking to their partners. It matters little whether they can recite and interpret Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” or give a thoughtful definition of democracy. What matters is that they are talking. This makes careful, sustained thought difficult if not impossible.
Let’s be reasonable, though. If we disregard the accountability, talk, and trademark, Accountable Talk® is a fine idea-except that it isn’t. Its emphasis on process results in bad prose. In a typical Accountable Talk® discussion, students put great effort into their beginning and ending phrases. A student might comment: “I would like to add on to what Jeremy said by saying that the picture shows a covered wagon. Does anyone care to concur, challenge, or add on?” The student thus conveys: “the picture shows a covered wagon” but adds twenty-two extraneous words for the sake of compliance. No one notices; it all sounds good. Checklist conditions have been met. The sentences, replete with verbiage, sound “academic.” We can all go to sleep. But some of us stay up late remembering the fiery, pithy, lovely language we love. Such memory offers hope: it has no trademark yet.
Diana Senechal teaches theatre and ESL at P.S. 108, an official Core Knowledge school in New York City. She has a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale. Her translations of the Lithuanian poetry of Tomas Venclova appeared this fall in a new volume, The Junction.
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.”
Over at Eduwonk, Andy Rotherham posts a pair slides of 7th-grade writing assignments from two different middle schools in California, culled from a presentation by Ed Trust. In the first, students are asked to submit a detailed character analysis of Anne Frank; the second asks students to write about “my best friend” or “a chore I hate.” The point is stark and obvious. ”When you hear people talk about the expectations gap, this is the sort of thing they are talking about,” Rotherham writes.
Would that it were so simple as “raising expectations.” In the comments section, the smart and fiery John Thompson, an occasional contributor to this blog, describes a disappointing exercise at his Oklahoma City high school similar to the one posted by Eduwonk, and gets to the heart of the empty slogan that is “high expectations.”
Had it been done as a wake-up call, and a first step towards raising standards, it would have been constructive. Had they asked why some teachers wrongly lowered standards too much, making class dull, it would have been a great professional development tool. Had they addressed the extreme classroom disruptions in neighborhood 7th grade classes that make it virtually impossible to do more than busywork, it would have been a contructive excercise….But our district leaders had the the same visceral response as you seem to be having, and mandated immediate and much much higher standards. Instantly, many core teachers were intimidated into teaching five years above the students reading level, and failure rates soared to 95% in some. The dropout rate exploded and the distrcit immediately abandoned the experiment.
“The reality is so shameful, when administrators/lobbyists with no relevant experience in the classroom come in contact with it, they have no idea how complex the problem is,” writes Thompson. ”Then when the consultants offer the simple and free solution of just “raise expectations,” the blame and shame game takes over, and the students are hurt even more.”
In my own comments on Eduwonk, I point out that curriculum is an undiscussed piece of the “high expectations” dodge. To John’s point, students don’t just show up in middle school five years behind their higher-achieving peers. You can’t feed kids a thin gruel of content-free, “self-directed” reading and writing for their entire academic career and then expect them to suddenly be able to write a nuanced character study of Anne Frank in the 7th grade. You can’t ask kids to do “self-directed” writing about their family, their friends and their personal experiences throughout elementary school to the exclusion of nearly all else, then expect them to dazzle you with their insights into literature in middle school.
The policy community, alas, continues to be nearly silent on curriculum, focusing instead on incentives, “teacher quality,” and other structual issues. Read Eduwonk’s post and the responses. May I humbly submit that the time has long since come to a) start looking at what students are actually being taught and, b) listening to teachers?
Diane Ravitch applauds the Gates Foundation’s decision to shift the focus of its educational philanthropy, while reminding us that their effort to transform high schools into smaller learning communities is a cautionary tale of seeking a “magic bullet” solution. “We must give the Gates Foundation and its founders credit for their honest self-scrutiny,” Ravitch writes on Forbes.com. ”Most proponents of education reform defend their ideas against all critics, regardless of what evaluations show.”
“The press for small schools, now taken up by almost every big-city district, has diverted our attention from the need to strengthen curriculum and instruction, beginning in elementary schools. Whether a school is small or large, the essential questions in education cannot be ignored: What should students learn? How should they be taught? Are classes too large, especially for struggling students? Are teachers well-prepared in the subjects they teach? Do teachers have the resources they need? Do students arrive in school ready to learn? Until we answer these questions, the size of schools is not a relevant issue.
It’s good news, Ravitch concludes, that Gates is pledging to devote its attention to what happens in the classroom. “The first thing it will learn is that there are no quick fixes. If it targets its dollars wisely, exercises a measure of humility, and continues to evaluate its efforts rigorously, it can make a positive difference,” she says.
One of President-elect Barack Obama’s education ideas is to “improve the assessments used to track student progress.” But improving the tests may be tougher than he appreciates ”and the problem may be rooted in the state standards themselves,” says UVA cognitive scientist Dan Willingham. ”Most people underestimate how hard it is to write good test items that are based on state standards.” Writing at Britannica Blog, Willingham notes:
If you want to assess what students know and can do, it is only reasonable to list your expectations. Make the expectations too broad and they do not help students, teachers, and parents understand what is expected. Make them too narrow and you invite teachers to teach the list of expectations at the expense of everything else.
“I don’t see how these problems can be avoided unless you make the expectations more comprehensive,” concludes Willingham. “That is, instead of writing a list of standards, specify the expectations for contents and skills in more detail—in short, base tests on a curriculum. A curriculum would differ from a list of standards because it would include both the broad conceptual ideas and the specific content, and it would describe how the abstract concepts relate to the specific content.”
E.D. Hirsch, Jr. sounded a similar call early this year in a cover story in the American Educator, which argued that reading tests should contain passages about specific topics taught not just in literature, but in all other subjects taught in that grade. It makes all the sense in the world, for the reasons Dan Willingham describes.
The current economic climate make it unlikely that President-elect Obama can enact the full range of education intitiatives his campaign promised, but one pressing issue cannot be deferred, writes Diane Ravitch on Forbes.com. The reauthorization and redesign of NCLB. Six years after its bipartisan passage, she notes, we have nothing to show for it.
NCLB has turned every school into a test-preparation factory, focused solely on reading and mathematics. They are the only subjects that count in a school’s ranking, so teachers routinely reduce attention to history, science, foreign language, literature, geography, the arts and other non-tested subjects. With this narrowing of the curriculum, students may be getting dumbed down even if their scores go up. Do we really want a society where our fellow citizens know nothing of history, literature, science and the arts?
First, Ravitch says, the Obama administration should “eliminate the goal of universal proficiency by 2014, because it is unattainable. Period. No state or nation has ever achieved 100% proficiency.”
Second, it should recognize that the federal government is best at providing accurate information, such as what children in each grade need to know to be abreast of international standards (that is known as the curriculum) and whether our children are meeting those standards (that is, testing); third, the administration should expect states and districts to fashion appropriate reforms and remedies for their schools.
Congress, Ravitch concludes, is not the right place to decide how to fix our schools. And more money isn’t the answer if we don’t have the right vision for improving education.
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