|
Focus on Teachers Newsletter Volume 1, No. 4,
September
2002 CONTENTS Editor’s Musings For those of you who have just returned to the classroom after a summer hiatus, may you begin the year with high spirits and loads of energy. And for those to whom September is just another month in your 12-month school year, thank you for "hanging in there" and keeping things moving. ***** A word about the Focus on Teachers workshops. We've added a page to the website describing the purpose of the Focus on Teachers workshops, as well as summaries of a number of specific topics. If you are in a school district that you think would benefit from a Focus on Teachers workshop, or are involved in staff development, please let us know and we'll be happy to send the workshop packet. Don't forget to include all the address information. We've recently sent out packets to the ten Regional Education Laboratories and to many state, regional, and local education service centers and professional development centers. If you like what you've seen on the website, or in the book Teaching in Mind, we would appreciate it if you would encourage your local agency to include Focus on Teachers workshops in their offerings to local districts. Locally sponsored workshops would serve a broader range of educators than we could reach through our own trainings. There has also been some interest in a "Trainer Training"--a weeklong "retreat" held in the summer of 2003. During the training, participants would not only experience the basic Focus on Teachers workshops on beliefs, metaphors, meaning, and language, but also develop the skills to present their own workshops. If you think you might be interested in this training, please let me know. This training would be limited to 24 people. We'll work with those who are interested in terms of when and where the training will be held. I'm tentatively planning a three day workshop in the Portland, OR area in mid-February, 2003. This would include work on beliefs, metaphors, and meaning and is appropriate for teachers, administrators, staff developers, or anyone involved in the educational process. If you think you might be interested in attending, please contact us and ask to be put on the mailing list when more information becomes available. There's no obligation, but it will help us determine the level of interest and size of the space we might need. Because of the reflective and personal nature of these workshops, participants will be limited to 30. Louis Schmier is at it again. It seems that his monthly (sometimes weekly) “random thoughts” are so thought-provoking that they will probably become a permanent fixture in the newsletter. Louis has the knack of finding metaphors for teaching in unlikely places. This month, one of his "thoughts" addresses the start of the new school year. “reduce it to the ordinary and old hat. We act with settled expectations, with assuring familiarity, and with securing safety. We are convinced that we have uncovered all there is to uncover of interest. By virtue of having been there for a long time and doing the same things for so long, we have become practiced at what I call indifferent and disinterested ‘unnoticing.’ So many of us wrongly assume…that people and things remain unchanged; things and faces become passe, invisible, unstimulating, uninteresting, unprovoking, unexciting, unfulfilling, and even at times, empty.”
If
you have read something you would like to share with others or would like to
contribute your own thoughts to this section, send your ideas in the body of an
email to feedback@TeachersMind.com. Article
of the Month In
the past several weeks, I’ve been struck once again by the ability of
high-sounding rhetoric to mask underlying beliefs that may be anything but sound.
One of the most egregious of these is a source of tremendous stress among American
teachers—the No Child Left Behind
Education Act, with its accompanying emphasis on standards, testing, and
‘scientifically-based’ practices. The issue is complex, so bear with me as I
approach it from a variety of angles. Let’s look first at the stated goals of
the Act. The
following quote is from the overview to the Act: “Democrats
and Republicans united under the President's leadership to declare that success in
schools will be measured by --whether every child is learning.” (Emphasis
is in the original.) Although the
term “learning” is undefined, I think it would be difficult to argue that
public schools, by their own definition, are places where people go to learn.
Therefore, when taxpayers are underwriting public education, they have a right to
demand accountability—to expect that “every child is learning.” According to No Child Left Behind, the “measurement” of this learning is done through testing. “An
‘accountable’ education system involves several critical steps:
The
overview goes on to say that results of these tests must be separated by group to
address the achievement gap of students who are "economically
disadvantaged, from racial or ethnic minority groups, have disabilities, or have
limited English proficiency." It is this aspect of public school
accountability that contributes the most to the name—No Child Left Behind. Another
major provision of the NCLB Act is the funding of only those practices that
“work”—practices supported by scientific research. “Under No Child Left Behind, the federal government will invest in educational practices that work-that research evidence has shown to be effective in improving student performance.” “To say that an instructional practice or program is research-based, we must have carefully obtained, reliable evidence that the program or practice works. For example, an evaluation might measure a group of children who are learning how to read using different methods, and then compare the results to see which method is most successful.” Again,
the rhetoric sounds inherently reasonable. What sane person would propose using
methods that don’t “work”? Going
Beneath the Surface of the Rhetoric Now
that we have the overview, let’s stop and analyze the presuppositions that
underlie the program. What
are presuppositions? The word presuppose comes from the Latin words meaning
“to put under.” Presuppositions are unconscious
assumptions that must be accepted as true for a statement to make sense. They are
the unexamined foundation “under” the belief statement. For
example, if a person says, "John is a good father", and you accept that
statement as true, you are presupposing that the
following statements are also true.
If
all of those statements are true, then the listener can accept the original
statement as true—at
least to the extent that they trust the speaker's judgment. In reality, when
people state a belief, the listener often unconsciously accepts all of the
required presuppositions as true. In this way, our language communicates much more
than the words themselves. This makes conversation much simpler and produces a
high degree of cognitive economy. Unfortunately, it can also lead to errors in judgment. (For a more complete discussion of presuppositions and their role in education, see chapter six in Teaching in Mind: How Teacher Thinking Shapes Education.) Presuppositions
of No Child Left Behind Some
of the presuppositions contained within the NCLB Act include the following:
These are but a few of the “built-in” presuppositions in the NCLB Act. Let’s take them one at a time to see if we can legitimately accept them as true. Defining
the Content
Many
people (at least in the Western world) would probably agree that all humans who
are not prevented by some physiological or psychological condition should attain
“literacy”—that is, they should know how to read, write, and perform basic
mathematical operations that enable them to function effectively in the world. To
this fundamental list, we might also add a number of the basic “thinking
skills”—effective problem solving, decision-making, communicating,
observation, and predicting. (There are undoubtedly cultures around the world that
would define literacy in a very different way, but for the sake of this analysis,
I will limit the definition to this perception.) I’m certain that each of you
has other skills or knowledge that you would add to a list of “basic
literacy.” Beyond
that, there is the question of what it means to be “educated”—to be
“culturally literate.” What is the responsibility of schools in that regard?
In June of this year, The Washington Post reported on a ruling by a panel of the Appellate Division of
New York State’s Supreme Court. The panel ruled that, in terms of spending on public
schools, the state “is obliged to provide no more than a middle-school level
education, and to prepare students for nothing more than the lowest-level jobs.”
Clearly, there is still disagreement about the very
purpose of schools. Whatever
you believe to be the purpose of schools, and however the lists of “essential
knowledge and skills” are constructed, I doubt that any individual would come up
with a list that approximates the literally thousands of skills and “concepts”
listed in state and national standards and benchmarks. What people tend to include
in such lists are those things that have played an important part in their own
lives—that have served them well in their own development—that have
contributed to their "success"—as they define it. A
scientifically oriented person might insist that “everyone should understand”
Newton’s Laws or natural selection. An historically oriented person might see
the Code of Hammurabi or “The political, social, and cultural consequences of population
movements and militarization in Eurasia in the second millennium BCE”
(click here
for the original) as essential knowledge. I once heard a school board
member, who happened to also be a professor of physics at a prestigious
university, insist that “even carpenters need to know trigonometry.” The
question one must ask before adding something to the list of “essential”
knowledge and skills is “Why is it essential?” The word essential
means “containing the essence of something”—the intrinsic, inherent, unchanging nature of a
thing or class of things. What is the essence
of science, of mathematics, of history? What are the pervasive principles that a
practitioner in each of these disciplines uses to understand and effectively
operate in that world? I would suggest that, whatever they are, they are much more
than lists of facts that lend themselves to measurement on multiple-choice tests. What
is the essence of historical
understanding? Isn’t it more essential for students to know how to unpack the
volumes of information available on a subject—to identify patterns and
relationships and develop a “sense” of the times—than to memorize isolated
bits of meat picked from the rich stew of human history? This is not to suggest
that facts are unimportant. However, when the acquisition of those facts becomes
the primary purpose of instruction—when it usurps time spent engaging in higher
cognitive functions such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation—is it truly
“essential” education? The
proliferation of benchmarks provides grist for the test mill. Many of the endless
lists that comprise our standards and benchmarks are composed of “answers” to
easily posed questions. To provide the hard data that will “prove” the
effectiveness of schools, proponents argue that we must have “objective”
standards against which to compare every student. How else will we know that
teachers are doing their job? None of this wishy-washy stuff like analysis or
interpretation of meaning... The
presupposition that there exists a universally agreed upon list of skills and
knowledge that every person must possess is, I suggest, seriously flawed. Not only
do the “experts” charged with developing such lists disagree, but the lists
presently used for testing largely reflect the values of one segment of
society—those who deem themselves “educated” and “successful.” They
assume that this definition of success is shared by all—or that if it isn’t,
it should be! There is a fine distinction between giving every student the opportunity to become whatever he or she chooses—providing them with the tools and resources they might need even before they recognize that need—and imposing one's own values on what is "essential." Because we don't really know what students will need to know later in life, it seems clear that what is "essential" is that they learn how to learn on their own, and how to use that information effectively. There would probably be much more agreement if those who decided what children "must know and be able to do" would focus on cognitive processes and skills rather than specific facts. Yes, those processes and skills do appear in the introduction to various sections of standards documents. But often, they are little more than a handy title for a collection of facts. What gets tested gets taught—and what gets tested are specifics, not generalities. Despite those who provide an abundance of evidence to the contrary, the general public continues to accept the premise of educational standards with little or no thought. The “noble cause” rhetoric blinds people to the unwarranted claim that standards result in higher expectations and equal opportunity for all students. (See the article on Standards and Expectations.) Age-Related
Learning
If there are still arguments about “what” everyone should know and be able to do, how can we assume that there is agreement about “when”—at what age—those disputed achievements shall have been accomplished? It is regrettable that so many people still apparently perceive the mean, median, or mode of a Bell Curve as a measure of “normalcy.” Ironically, they then set that point as the ‘minimum’ that is acceptable and demand that all students “clear the bar” at that minimum. But be careful what you ask for! If that does actually happen—if everyone "passes" the test—these same people then “raise the bar”, claiming that the first one must have been set too low because everyone cleared it. They revert back to the belief that there must be a Bell Curve distribution. Genetic
Variability in Learning
This
presupposition is related to the previous one. However, there is a significant
difference between claiming that there are identifiable “things” that everyone
of a given age should be able to know or do, and the claim that all “normal”
people of a given age are capable of knowing or doing them. How
would parents respond if schools failed every 12 year old who couldn’t bench
press 100 pounds or jump over a 5 foot high bar? I have to think parents would
raise a cry, citing the argument that not all students are possessed of the same
physical characteristics and that such a demand in unreasonable. Is it fair to
expect an 80 pound, small boned female to possess the same physical strength
and/or muscle development as a 130 pound male of the same age? The cry would be
even greater if such demands were placed on students who arrive at school
undernourished to begin with. Why
then, is an even greater cry not forthcoming when policy makers make similar
demands in the mental arena? Cognitive differences in students of the same age are
arguably much greater than physical differences, if for no other reason than that
cognitive processes constantly change in response to experience and no two
students have had the same experiences. People are discouraged from questioning the presupposition that all students can learn at the same level and in the same amount of time because of claims that this is the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” Is
it bigotry to suggest that not all people have the same physical strength, build,
or muscle development at a given age? Is there some “standard” to which all
people should aspire in that regard—some ideal form or appearance? We accept and
understand that people’s physical characteristics are dependent on many factors,
such as genetics, environment, diet, not to mention personal choice. In fact, we
are surprised when two people look alike. Why
then is it bigotry to suggest that not all people will have the same mental
development at a given age? That mental development—the sum total of what a
person knows, the skills a person possesses, and the cognitive processes a person
uses to manipulate information—is also dependent on genetics, environment, diet,
not to mention available experience and personal choice.
Saying that not all people can learn at the same level and in the same amount of time is not equivalent to saying that some people are inherently ‘dumber’ than others. It is not the same as holding some students to lower expectations. (See the article on Standards and Expectations). In my opinion, it is the enforced comparisons of students with some mythical (and often culturally biased) “norm” that produce the bigotry. It is that fixation on standardized results that inhibits teachers from focusing on the strengths of individual students. Given
doubts about whether there is an "objective" list of what everyone should
know or be able to do, and whether that learning can be assigned by age, the next
presupposition—that
schools are responsible for identifying the essential knowledge and
"teaching" it to students—is
also necessarily called into question. Testing
Presuppositions The
last three presuppositions
listed above refer to testing as an appropriate and/or accurate measure of student
learning or school effectiveness. Again, given the question of what
knowledge and skills are “essential” and whether there is an age at which
everyone should have achieved those goals, the presuppositions about standardized
tests being appropriate and/or accurate are suspect. This
is not to say that testing—measurement—isn’t useful. Testing is a useful
tool when used to help shape the educational program for individual students. It
can help teachers identify individual strengths to be nurtured and weaknesses to
be addressed. When testing focuses on comparing groups of students to some
mythical norm, of what value is it to individual student progress? Indeed, where
is attention to such individual progress even addressed? “Scientifically-based”
Practices How
can a plan that places such emphasis on “scientifically-based” practices base
so many of its own practices on claims that research
on individual differences has seriously called into question? Where is the “carefully
obtained, reliable evidence that the program or practice works”? That “standards
for what a child should know and learn for all grades” can even exist given the
variability of the human mind? That standardized testing contributes to the
effectiveness of educational programs? Why
shouldn’t the practices—the claims of policy makers who devised this method of
so-called accountability—be subject to the same scientific scrutiny they demand
of programs used to teach students? In fact, I suggest that policy with such
wide-ranging influence over the educational scene should be held to an even higher
burden of proof. In one sense, the NCLB Act, with its high-sounding rhetoric and promise of millions of dollars for education, is like dangling a juicy chicken in front of a well-trained, but starving, bird dog. It is the well-trained and caring teachers who are most resistant to programs designed to bring schools into compliance with federal demands and bring in more dollars. But if they refuse, their own jobs may be on the line. They are the ones who recognize that high expectations do not mean the same expectations for all. They are the ones who believe that education is about the development of the individual rather than the transmittal of a body of knowledge. One need only read their frustrated comments on discussion boards to understand that they recognize the flawed bases of the Act. Yet if they have the courage to speak out against its provisions, they are branded as lazy or unwilling to do what it takes to improve the education of the young. What
are the Options? It’s
fine to criticize what others are trying to do, but without a viable proposal to
replace it, it is empty criticism. At issue here is the presupposition that the
present use of standards and testing is the only—or at least the best—method of insuring
accountability in schools. I
would like to offer at least one alternative—one that could not only go a long
way to assess the effectiveness of an educational program, but enable the focus of
that program to shift back to the development of individual students rather than
norms, bell curves, and the generation of group data. As
a parent, would you rather know that your child ranked in the 56th
percentile of all students of the same age in the country—or that your child
demonstrated two years of progress in a subject area during the previous school year?
Which piece of data would tell you the most about the possible
effectiveness of the program in which your child was enrolled? (A caveat—there
are many reasons why such progress might occur. The effectiveness of teaching and
progress in learning are far from a simple cause-effect relationship.) In the
overview of the NCLB Act, we saw the statement that “Democrats and
Republicans united under the President's leadership to declare that success in
schools will be measured by—whether
every child is learning.” There is nothing in that statement to
suggest that every child must be learning the same thing at the same age and at
the same rate. What if we compared the progress that each student has made, not to what other students have done in the same time period, but to where that student was in his or her own development at the last measurement. As a parent, I want to know what the school program is doing for my child. How is the school helping my child develop and grow? How is it addressing the enhancement of my child’s strengths and strengthening those areas in which my child is weak? What are the teacher’s expectations for my child? Do those expectations encourage my child to work hard and achieve everything of which he or she is capable? Certainly,
accountability must also include the overall progress of every student in the
school—should
insure that every student is demonstrating appropriately challenging and ongoing
progress. But it is illogical to demand that this progress be identical in content
and rate for every student. Opponents to
this approach will throw out all kinds of arguments about the impossibility of a
unique educational plan for each student. They will argue that tests of individual
progress would be a nightmare to construct and would be subjective at best. They
will argue that teachers don’t have time to work with each child individually
and to create unique growth plans. And they would be right—but only if the
present beliefs about the meaning of testing, teaching, and learning are retained. Outstanding teachers already teach individual students rather than subjects. There isn’t time here to go into all the possibilities, but objective assessments of individual progress are more than possible once educators let go of the outdated and destructive practices that dominate the field. Change that
begins with questioning hallowed assumptions and practices is perhaps what
frightens many educators the most. The security that goes with knowing exactly
what a “class” will be doing at any moment of the day; exactly what questions
students might ask and exactly what answers the teacher will give; exactly what
points students might raise in discussions and exactly what answers they must
produce on homework—and tests—could disappear. In its place would be a true
focus on what each student brings to the table and how that can be enhanced and
strengthened. Is it easy? Hardly. Is it possible? Absolutely. Is it worth it? What
do you think? Many educational leaders have suggested ways to move toward a more individualized assessment and still provide for accountability. ***** Several
years ago, a Chicago inner-city principal was fired because the students in his
school had not scored sufficiently high on year-end mandated tests. The school
board refused to consider that nearly every child in the school had exhibited two
years of improvement during one school year. Even without individualizing
tests, there was a clear measure of individual progress, but in the end, that
progress lost out to the numbers game. Listen
carefully to the rhetoric—to the unconscious presuppositions and beliefs
embedded in educational policy statements. Decide for yourself whether these
presuppositions—the foundations on which the policy rests—are sound. Insist on
evidence. Demand that the policy makers be held accountable to the same
"standards" to which they hold others. This idea for "individualizing" your teaching is particularly useful when you've tried everything you can think of and a student still doesn't understand. It also shows that individualizing doesn't necessarily require more time or effort on the part of the teacher--it's just a matter of "consulting the experts"—the students themselves. Casey, a fourth grader, had great difficulty learning to spell his weekly word list correctly. Al had "tried everything" in his teaching bag of tricks to help Casey. I suggested that he simply ask the boy how he thought he could learn the words. Needless to say, Casey was surprised that anyone thought to ask his opinion, but he immediately had an answer—he'd turn them into cheers! Given the right to learn in his own way, Casey made up a cheer, complete with arm and leg movements, for each word. Did Casey have to perform his cheers during class? No! On his tests, Casey merely wrote the word as he imagined himself doing the cheer. In another case, Rosa read aloud fluently, but had the habit of rocking back and forth. This irritated the teacher, who told her to stop. Subsequently, Rosa read in a halting (and personally embarrassing) manner. Had the teacher asked, Rosa would have told her that rocking made it easier for her to read. (By the way, if you have a student who has difficulty reading aloud, you might suggest that they try rocking back and forth—front to back, or if that doesn't work, side to side. It doesn't always work, but you may be surprised at what happens.) It's unlikely that a teacher would have thought of cheers or rocking because they weren't part of the teacher's learning process. The belief that a teacher "knows best"—that it's the teacher's responsibility to manage every aspect of a student's learning in school—actually limits what could turn out to be very useful and effective techniques. The next time you've "tried everything you can think of," try one more thing—ask the student. Until next month... [1] Helwig, C., Turiel, E., and Nucci, L. (1997). Character Education After the Bandwagon Has Gone. http://www.tigger.uic.edu/~lnucci/MoralEd/articles/helwig.html [2] Lawley, J. and Tompkins, P. (2001) Metaphors in Mind: Transformation tThrough Symbolic Modeling. London: The Developing Company. [3] Palmer, Parker J. (Nov./Dec. 1997). The Heart of a Teacher; Identity and Integrity in Teaching. Change [4] Eisner, Elliot (1994). The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs, 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan College Publishing, 96-97
|
| ©2002 Teacher's Mind Resources |
There
is a person named John.
There
are specific things that everyone should know or be able to do.