Tag Archive for 'skills'

Good Schools “Avoid False Choices”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 13, 2009 in Core Knowledge School and Education News. 5 Comments

Whole language or phonics?  Skills or content?  Equity or excellence? In visits to successful schools, Karin Chenoweth has “been struck by how free they are from the frustrating controversies other schools get mired in.”   Chenoweth who works for the Education Trust, writes  in Education Week  that high-achieving schools with significant populations of low-income children ”tend to avoid questions about the philosophy of reading instruction. Rather, they approach the issue with what I consider a cheerful empiricism.” 

One such school is PS/MS 124, a Core Knowledge school and a past winner of Ed Trust’s “Dispelling the Myth” award.  As part of the New York City school system, “it is expected to teach its students a district curriculum that emphasizes skills rather than a set body of content,” writes Chenoweth.  But principal Valarie Lewis, noticed “teachers would teach skills, but if [the children] didn’t have background knowledge, it didn’t stick.”

She and the school’s then-principal, Elain Thompson, brought the Core Knowledge program to the school. Its curriculum, developed in part by E.D. Hirsch Jr., focuses on providing students with a great deal of background knowledge, from nursery rhymes to Newton’s Laws. ‘Teachers still need to teach the skills,’ said Judy Lefante, the school’s Core Knowledge coordinator, ‘but we’ve worked hard through professional development to make sure they teach skills through content.’ Skills such as making inferences, drawing conclusions, and separating facts from opinion, for example, are all worked on within the science and social studies content areas.”

Student achievement at PS/MS 124 is “almost indistinguishable from that of wealthy, white schools,” Chenoweth notes, “despite the fact that more than 80 percent of its mostly African-American, Latino, and South Asian students qualify for free lunches,” 

“The point is this,” she concludes. “Arguments that for too long have fostered false dichotomies, pitting one practice against another, can be resolved—but only if educators have as their clear goal ensuring that all their students become educated citizens, and then focus closely on what it takes to help them reach that goal.”

Breaking the ELA Skills vs. Content Logjam

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 5, 2009 in Curriculum, Educational Policy and 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.”

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!

Laws, Sausages, and National Standards

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 9, 2009 in No category. 2 Comments

Jay Greene has a smart, sobering piece on national standards.  “People tend to be in favor of them when they imagine that they are the ones writing the standards,” he notes.  “But when everyone gets into the sausage-making that characterizes policy formulation, it generally becomes clear that no one is going to get what they want out of national standards.  What’s worse is that the resulting mess would be imposed on everyone.”

Jay also quotes Sandra Stotsky on the sausage-makers:

Instead of choosing nationally known scholars to chair and staff these committees–to assure us of the integrity and quality of the product–the NGA and the CCSSO have, for reasons best known to themselves,  treated the initiative as a private game of their own.  The NGA and the CCSSO haven’t even bothered to inform the public who is chairing these committees, who is on them, why they were chosen, what their credentials are, and why we should have any confidence whatsoever in what they come up with.

While not writing about national standards, Mark Bauerlein at the Chronicle of Higher Education might as well be in describing the inevitable conflicts and disappointments when it comes time to choose texts in curriculum meetings.

Traditionalists in the room want to identify core texts, events, figures, and ideas, and on various grounds of historical influence, civic inheritance, and aesthetic virtue they stick with a generally Eurocentric tradition.  Progressivists want to enlarge the canon and contexts, to give representation to other cultures and identities, and explode the reigning “normativities,” and they resist a core knowledge of any kind being set down as official.

The result is satisfying to neither side, he notes.  ”There doesn’t seem to be any way out of the impasse,” which Bauerlein thinks “partly explains the rise of the skills’ movement in education circles.”