by Robert Pondiscio
December 9th, 2009
Tags: Curriculum, literature, student engagement
Posted in Curriculum | No Comments »
The business book Cowboy Ethics purports to hold lessons for Wall Streeters about the “code of the west,” but a Colorado teacher believes it’s a good vehicle for reaching high school students and giving them “the personal qualities they will need to achieve true career and life success.”
A story in the Denver Post describes how teacher Ann Moore’s “cowboy curriculum” has spread to a schools in half a dozen other states since she first taught the book in her classroom at Cherry Creek High School, in Greenwood Village, Colorado. When I saw the story, my immediate reaction was “here we go again, another dumbed down class substituting personal reflection for engagement with literature.” The Denver Post story doesn’t help by calling it a “curriculum” and noting that at least one school dropped Shakespeare to make room for Cowboy Ethics.
But do a little digging, and it turns out that it’s not a curriculum at all, but rather a four-week unit on character education. A video on the unit gives a better feel for how it might play out in class. It’s not hard to see how this unit could actually pay dividends, enriching future literature studies by giving kids a set of traits by which to judge and discuss characters they encounter in literature. I remain skeptical of any trendy course or curriculum where academic content plays second fiddle to ”student engagement.” Cowboy ethics doesn’t seem to be one of them. It would be interesting to hear from teachers who have taught the unit in their classrooms.
by Robert Pondiscio
October 5th, 2009
Tags: common core standards, content standards, Daniel T. Willingham, ELA, literature, skills
Posted in Curriculum, Educational Policy, Higher Education | 15 Comments »
If the authors of the draft national standards are unwilling to name specific works of literature children should read, they should at least name specific literary movements, writes Dan Willingham.
The draft ELA standards floated by the Common Core State Standards Initiative focus almost exclusively on skills–what students should be able to glean from written texts, for example–but remain silent on content. Dan Willingham floats an intriguing way to split the difference in his latest post at the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog. He points out it’s not a problem to specify what kids should learn in other subjects. “In science, for example, we expect that students will acquire certain skills– methods of scientific analysis–but we also believe that there is a body of scientific knowledge that students will learn,” he notes. “The same is true of history and mathematics.” Why, he wonders, should literature be any different?
Perhaps a better method would be to select literary movements based on their influence. Specifying literary movements (e.g., Modernism, The Lost Generation, Harlem Renaissance) rather than specific authors would better parallel standards in other disciplines.We might expect a national body to recommend that students study Colonial American History in 3rd grade. We would not expect that national body to specify the particular events that must be studied (and by inference, what ought to be excluded).
“Influence is likely a less arbitrary criterion than aesthetic value, and it is more useful to students. Influential movements changed how future authors wrote, their subject matter, how they thought about literature, and so on,” writes Willingham, who argues understanding something of various literary movements is a key to understanding individual works of literature.
Is it really impossible for literature experts to agree on a set of major literary movements with which American high school graduates ought to be familiar? It would not be an easy task, surely, but I think that, if given the chance, a group of literature experts (teachers, editors, professors, writers, and critics) could rise to the occasion, especially if the criterion—literary influence—were made clear.
There is more at stake in getting the balance between process and content correct if the national standards movement is to succeed. “A stated goal of the common core standards is to prepare students for college,” Willingham concludes. ”If the standards leave the selection of literary works utterly to chance, they are unlikely to meet that goal.”
by Robert Pondiscio
September 29th, 2009
Tags: Curriculum, Diana Senechal, group work, KIPP, literature
Posted in Curriculum, Education Practice | 5 Comments »
Schools should stop telling children to be nice and start teaching them to be good.
So writes Diana Senechal at DoubleX. Reviewing Charles Murray’s recent book Real Education, she seizes on an unremarked upon quote in which the controversial author observes that schools “tell children to be nice but not how to be good. It tells children to be happy but does nothing to help children think about what happiness means.” When Murray is right, she notes, “he is awfully right.”
Being nice is something of a bromide in education. It’s enshrined in KIPP’s “Work Hard. Be Nice” slogan, and is the focus of a lot of group activity that revolves around “pleasant, uncontroversial subject matter” with familiar social messages “Being good is more complex than being nice,” Diana observes. “It requires that we recognize our own faults and complexities; that we forgive each other; that we say what we think; that we make difficult decisions and face the consequences.”
When we read literature and history, we begin to glean what it means to be good. We see how people with the best intentions can fail; how people struggle with conflicting desires and values and make the best choices they can; how people overcome their limitations when put to the test. From works like Antigone, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Chekhov’s short stories, we learn about selfishness, cruelty, cowardice, and confusion, as well as grace, generosity, and patience. We come to see elements of all these traits in ourselves.
When the curriculum has substance, “students learn not only how to behave, but how to think and feel deeply,” Diana writes. ”They come to understand what humans are made of, what choices we have, and what reason, artistic gift, and imagination can do.” By contrast, when the emphasis is on group work for its own sake, ”it becomes more important for students to work together than to learn something important.”
If we only teach children to be nice, they will be at a loss when life calls for more than niceness. They will be at a loss when faced with problems—intellectual, practical, or emotional—that they have to solve on their own. And when the niceness wears out, they will reach for the next thing they know, the knee-jerk reaction. Murray is right: There is a wide gulf between being nice and being good—and while no curriculum can produce goodness, an excellent curriculum can give students a vision of what it might be.
by Diana Senechal
August 30th, 2009
Tags: literature, reading workshop
Posted in Education News, Teaching | 23 Comments »
The New York Times story on the “reading workshop” method glorifies indifference toward literature. Its hero is a teacher who saw the light: who used to love to teach To Kill a Mockingbird but by the end of the story was sending her class sets of that and other books to the storage room. No more would she tell her students what to read. Not after attending that seminar led by Nancie Atwell.
And an interesting little fact: the teacher disliked the literature she read in school as a child. No wonder she gave up the teaching of it so willingly.
This so-called movement is led by people who don’t love literature enough to defend it, and who don’t care about history enough to find out that their revolution is nothing revolutionary. It glorifies a certain indifference.
The movement writes off the literature itself. It writes off the teachers who teach it well and inspire their students to love it. It writes off the possibility that literature will affect students’ entire lives and stay in their minds, in ways that teen novels cannot do. Proponents say, “Look, the kids are reading; this is working!” They do not stop to think that reading 20 pages a day is not the same as grappling with literature. The chicken coop is not a palace. (Oops–no one teaches Dostoevsky anymore.)
I taught Sophocles’ Antigone (among many other works of literature) to my eighth grade ESL students. We had heated debates in class. Students wrote thoughtful essays. I thought, “How much more they will understand when they read it in high school!” Then I realized they probably wouldn’t read it in high school. They would probably never have it assigned to them again.
A former Core Knowledge teacher in New York City, Diana Senechal is currently writing a book in New Haven, Connecticut.
by Robert Pondiscio
June 30th, 2009
Tags: academic freedom, Curriculum, literature, reading lists
Posted in Curriculum, Education News | No Comments »
A New Hampshire high school teacher has resigned after igniting a controversy over her choice of assigned reading materials. Stories assigned by Kathleen Reilly included “The Crack Cocaine Diet” by Laura Lippman, and “I Like Guys” by David Sedaris. Reilly, who also served as the head of the English Department at Campbell High School in Litchfield, New Hampshire, assigned the stories as part of a short story unit on “love, gender and family units.”
In a June 19 email to a Union Leader reporter, Reilly explained that, “The first story, ‘The Crack Cocaine Diet,’ was not intended to glorify bad behavior; rather, it was chosen for its tone and point of view and to show the often devastating consequences of drug use. In addition to its tone and style, the message of the story ‘I Like Guys’ was respect and acceptance, not an advocacy for homosexuality.” In the email, Reilly added that the stories were not left up to the students’ interpretation alone because “we discuss them extensively.” However, parent Sue Ann Johnson has said the stories promoted bad behavior and a “political agenda,” and they shouldn’t be incorporated into classroom teachings.
The school has permanently eliminated “The Crack Cocaine Diet” from the list of acceptable reading materials, says School Superintendent Elaine Cutler. “The reason the books were pulled was because I believe that there wasn’t enough parent notification about the topics that were being covered,” she said. “So, it was parent notification and the developmental age of the students and that varies; all 16-year-olds are not created equal.” The short story course will be examined by a committee comprised of teachers, parents, students, the principal and the curriculum director.
I was unfamiliar with “The Crack Cocaine Diet,” and remain sympathetic to allowing teachers broad latitude in choosing literature. That said, two paragraphs is about all one needs before it might occur to most teachers that assigning this story to teenagers might just be asking for trouble.
by Robert Pondiscio
July 7th, 2008
Tags: literature
Posted in Literacy | No Comments »
Elementary school students will be exposed to the work of Shakespeare starting at five years old under a new government education initiative in the U.K., the BBC reports.
Ian McNeilly from Britain’s National Association for the Teaching of English said: “Some of the language in the plays would be beyond pupils under a certain age, but the earlier children are introduced to Shakespeare the better.”
“It’s all down to the approach,” says McNeilly. “You can bore people of any age with the wrong approach and you can enthuse people of any age with the correct one.”
That’s true of teaching any subject.
by Robert Pondiscio
March 27th, 2008
Tags: classics, literature
Posted in Curriculum | No Comments »
Back in the age of Ike, Elvis, and tail fins millions of kids were introduced to great works of literature in a magazine called Classics Illustrated. A new generation of CI books is on the way, and Newsweek writer Malcolm Jones likes what he sees.
Jones waxes rhapsodic about a new version of The Wind in the Willows. In illustrator Michael Plessix, Rat, Mole, Toad and Badger “have met their Michelangelo,” he writes. “Every frame is drawn and colored with meticulous care. Every elegant page is composed with a dual purpose: to enchant the eye and to further the various narratives that make up the loose plot. Plessix knows how to advance and retard the story’s pace. He knows just when to zoom in and when to pull back for a wide shot.”
Teachers have a tortured relationship with “graphic novels,” often dismissing them as mere comic books. Some of us, present company included, reflexively bridle at what we perceive as the dumbing down of challenging classics, or shrug and mumble apologetically about the need to engage students “at their level.” Jones’ perspective is enlightening. Describing the original Classics Illustrated series he notes “that was where I first discovered just how good stories could be.”
“For kids who came of age after World War II, Classics Illustrated was our first encounter with stolen—or, put more mildly, borrowed—goods,” Jones writes. “How many kids, from the ’40s through the ’60s, first encountered Captain Ahab or Jean Valjean or Madame Defarge in the pages of those comics with the unforgettable yellow logo in the top left corner of the cover? Did we know who Charles Dickens was, or Victor Hugo, or Herman Melville? Probably not. We just knew that these were good stories, to be read and reread and passed around. We did not care particularly where they came from, if we thought about that at all. Somebody named Hugo wrote ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame,’ but he didn’t draw the pictures in our comics, any more than he had anything to do with the old black-and-white movie that we sat through every time it came on TV. Which suggests an intriguing esthetic principle: might we say that a truly great novel or movie or play is one that so thoroughly works its way into the culture that we forget who created it in the first place? Are these not ultimately the most potent stories, the ones that belong to everyone, and no one? It’s about as close as we get to myth these days.”
by Robert Pondiscio
March 14th, 2008
Tags: history, Literacy, literature, math
Posted in Curriculum, Educational Policy | No Comments »
I could kiss Michael Petrilli on the mouth.
A perennial, frustrating blind spot among ed reformers, with their monomaniacal focus on systems, structures and accountability, is curriculum. Trying to build good schools without looking at curriculum is like trying to build a winning baseball team by focusing on the parking lot, the stadium and the vendors and assuming the “baseball people” are the experts on the game. My new hero Mr. Petrilli gets this. Read his take in the Fordham Foundation’s Gadfly on the NY Times piece How Many Billionaires Does It Take to Fix a School System?
“In a 5,000 word forum on education, these words did not appear once: instruction, curriculum, reading, math, history, literature,” sayeth Mr. Petrilli, with the clarity of the child pointing out the Emperor is naked. “This ‘incentivist’ thinking is a fair reflection of the state of the ‘new’ education philanthropy. Staffed mostly by smart MBAs and obsessed with structures and systems and processes, their ignorance about the stuff of education leads to agnosticism. And, predictably, to trouble. (See Joel Klein’s embrace of Diana Lam and Lucy Calkins as Exhibits 1 and 2.).” As Petrilli sees it, to remain agnostic on curriculum and pedagogy is “like sending in nation-builders who can’t speak Arabic and never studied Iraqi history.”
He wraps up with a thought exercise. What if a billionaire wants to focus his philanthropy on smart instructionist investments? Petrilli offers three: Support the development of national standards and tests; create a voluntary national curriculum; and fund thousands of high-quality summer workshops.
Not a bad start. Bravo, sir! Discuss among yourselves, billionaires.
