Will you help us by answering a question about school? Okay?
Here it is...
When you were young, did you have a special teacher that made a difference in your life? Bring them to mind, see their face, hear their voice. What was it that teacher/coach/mentor had?
Was it:
a. their personality itself, bursting with passion, joy, love or connection?
b. the way, the actual methods and strategies (i.e. pedagogy) they used to reach out and capture students?
c. was it the material, the very content itself that animated what they brought to others?
That's it, skip, and answer the poll. This is your one sacred contribution to the Ykos education group. When done, return to politics, imagine everything is just fine in American education. Nothing to see here. Move along.
For the rest--the curious, motivated, and especially those seeking to consider education deeply--jump the fold. Ed/Up's on stage, and about to tackle a monster roaming the vast plains of education: How does one go about the task of teaching?
Many mountains to the sky; on those mountains, many paths
This is an awesome topic: How do you lead people to things strong and beautiful? Posit a challenge to the core of their identity? Get them to do real work--in fact, help each other? Ask the public to witness all this? And insist that, in the end, they must prove they can survive on their own, using what they learned?
Luckily, there is not a single route, but many paths. Here's my amateur map, scrawled on the back of a table napkin, used as much to salute the work of true warriors for education as to wipe the sweat off my forehead.
Where have we been?
Last week, we looked at "who", ideally, should become a teacher. It's relevant because before we embark on "how", we damn well better be clear on "who", otherwise we get stuck by things like this:
Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.
----- Parker Palmer
Amen to that.
So, we established that service, integrity and the heart of a learner pretty much make up a person's personal sense of mission and are paramount assets for a teacher. Again, in an ideal world. (Yeah, and increased pay, responsibility and respect in our culture.)
So, let's put it this way: a teacher who does not bother themselves with "how to teach" is pretty much devoid of all the qualities listed above. True, such things can be learned over time, but the clock must be seen as ticking, particularly if one is already licensed or occupies a senior position at school.
The Reflective Teacher
Let's return to Parker Palmer. I like Palmer because he is honest enough to look deeply at his own humanity and confront truth, integrity, wholeness--as well as doubts in himself. He talks about how much of life's, and teaching's, richness and profundity, comes in confronting "paradox". We can think our way into certainty, but often times, we can't find our way back out.
In Courage to Teach, Palmer lays out six ways an individual teacher can structure classrooms to confront the fundamental paradoxes around teaching, and use these to enhance learning, make it whole, rather than rendering it hollow.
- The (classroom) space should be bounded and open.
- The space should be hospitable and "charged."
- The space should invite the voice of the individual and the voice of the group.
- The space should honor the "little" stories of the students and the "big" stories of the disciplines and tradition.
- The space should support solitude and surround it with the resources of community.
- The space should welcome both silence and speech.
What Palmer is doing is allowing for variety and diversity, what our own Marion Brady might call "human variability", not only in students, but in a teacher's awareness. In so doing, as many students as possible will be stimulated, challenged, acknowledged, valued and respected. And, as well, truth and intelligence, in their unique varieties and manifestations, will be promoted and encouraged.
This is not about harboring some spineless relativism. He asks the teacher to put the content material--the subject itself--at the center for all to gaze upon, wonder over and examine. He favors hard truth, but one divined and winnowed as part of a process which emerges, initially, from a learning community, and which, at some point, must return.
Palmer's ultimate goal for educators is not an abstract objectivity, impartiality or expertise; the goal is connection, passion, excellence, all directed back to its provenance and fundamental purpose. He articulates both principals and practices for each item described above, a solid overall approach.
But, while he lists "principles" for achieving these pedagogical goals, he avoids the trap of "prescriptions"--and for the very same reason that I will: "how" one teaches is directly connected to "who" one is. What works for one "who" will not necessarily work for another "who." You need make your own way up the mountain.
What about the brain?
Eric Jensen affords a different perspective. Palmer is a professor; Jensen a brain researcher, and more-oriented to development in young people. The short of it: while Palmer scales intimate internal mountains, Jensen charts specific strategies to grow brains and maximize potential.
The book in question, Enriching the Brain, is a devastating account that shows how and why rats in cramped, joyless, sterile cages end up with shriveled brains in comparison with their counterparts in roomy, compelling and life-enhancing environments.
If it sounds like Jensen just exposed the bitter truth behind America's "achievement gap", you must read this book. It is truly enlightening, and like Palmer, gives the lie to proponents of standardized testing.
Just one gem:
If (young students) can't develop and show their intelligence in a certain environment, they get labeled as slow or unmotivated. If someone is waiting for them to have intelligence instead of fostering it, it may never surface.
Can we acknowledge that our educational system gets it completely wrong? Rather than assisting students to build skills and understanding, promoting and supporting their efforts, we are asking them to solve narrow, shallow and frequently meaningless questions, then judging them and the entire school on their answers.
At some point, a majority of Americans will come to, slap the side of their heads and say: "How dumb could we be?" Learning happens best when the educative environment provides crucial inputs, scaffolding and support that stimulate a learner with rich and meaningful material.
Anyway, Jensen's thesis, and most of neural brain development theory goes like this: enrich the learning environment, provide students with stimulating contrast from normal routine, allow them to work with personally relevant and therefore "meaningful" material, and you will get an "enrichment response" that measureably enhances both learning and brain development. And stunningly, that "intelligence", once thought a fixed entity, can grow or retreat based on the inputs from a child's life environment.
While the fungible nature of "intelligence" is a surprise, what stimulates growth is not: travel, music, museums, adult relationships, reading, art, physical activity, mental challenge--all these maximize positive outcomes for kid's brains. Poor schooling, prejudice, domestic violence, disorder, drug abuse, poor nutrition, trauma--all these result in diminished capacity in kids' brains. (Yes, they actually measure such things with brain scans.)
Question for standardized testing zealots:
How many tests will it take to see that affluent kids have multiple and overwhelming advantages compared with the poor and unfortunates' continuous struggle just to survive? And that the so-called "achievement gap" reflects the most basic truth about American society: that in terms of health care, nutrition, housing and income levels, we are hugely unequal, and, in fact, are "surging" toward greater levels of inequality with every passing year?
Pardon my incredulity.
Jensen does not let America's short-term fixation on test results rain on his educational parade. He is all about naming what works. And here they are, the soon to be central tenets of effective educational design--what Jensen calls the seven golden maximizers of brain enhancement:
- Physical activity (as opposed to passivity)
- Novel, challenging, and meaningful learning (versus doing what is already known, repeatedly drilled or routine).
- Coherent complexity (versus boredom, chaos or over-simplicity)
- Managed stress levels (versus stressful conditions)
- Social support (versus isolation)
- Good nutrition (versus poor quality food and drink)
- Sufficient time (versus quick, one-time experiences)
Yeah, I can hear the screaming through my computer: What does this have to do with "how" we teach? In a single word: "everything." But because contemporary education too often adopts a kind of solitary confinement model of reaching each student, we see these things as being isolated and unrelated to learning tasks.
I am not pretending that a school, or especially government, can satsify the neural demands of every brain or the relationship/security needs of every learner, yet this should not keep us from improving conditions. In fact, such a goal should be a key take away point for the Ykos Ed/Up team: use the latest brain research to construct a "whole" approach to maximizing the potential of every learner. Since we know what works for and against learning, can't we set out systematically to build one and do everything in our power to undo the other?
Jensen has other suggestions too, much of it emerging from brain research completed in the last decade, though a lot of it cleaving close to what has been argued for by "cognitive" educational theorists for three decades. Practical things that work:
- Getting kids to pay fixed attention to tasks.
- Ensuring there is low to moderate stress levels in the room.
- Creating coherent, meaningful tasks for kids to complete.
- Massed practice of an activity, 90 minute segments, 3-5 times a week.
- Learner controlled feedback which assists the learning process.
- Overnight rest between new learning sessions...
What a radical! What an idealist! What a no-nonsense, straightforward, pragmatic way to structure learning for kids. Can't we just do this?
Toward a Repetoire of Possibilities
Before putting the rest of my cards on the table face-up because this is a Dkos diary and not a dissertation or book, I need cite two figures in the field of pedagogy and use them to stake some ground on the contest between "teacher-centered instruction" and "child-centered instruction." (If need be, you can helicopter directly to Uncle Henry's skeet-shoot below and skip the intervening material.) It is an old debate, one that won't go away, and to which I would like to post a small offering.
John Dewey: An American Original
John Dewey was, perhaps, America's greatest philosopher and certainly its most influential educational theorist. He had a lot to say about how education "works" for kids: namely, it's the "doing" (sic) of it, the actual application of concepts and ideas to real-life tasks that provide evidence of mastery, motivation to go further and locks in place the content and methods of learning in the mind of a student.
Eventually, with this kind of empirical framework backing up a child's repetoire for learning, they themselves become capable of analyzing, proposing, testing, resolving and creating knowledge. That's what we say we want kids to be able to do, right? By practicing, honing and utilizing important skills, create new knowledge for the world. Everyone on board? Dewey turns up in the blazing skeet-shoot at the end in multiple ways, so be forewarned.
Paolo Freire, Maestro Internationale
And, second, Paolo Freire, the seminal Brazillian educational philosopher. (Yeah, I'm that radical.) His "banking model" of education is still, IMHO, the most powerful explanatory metaphor for how we school children. In it, Freire posits that education in much of Western society is built around the concept that students be "allowed" to withdraw learning from the system, but only if they stay within the accepted constraints imposed by "lending authorities."
Of course, students are required to "show" they are making proper progress on their "loan" by periodically regurgitating truths that the authorities demand. (Sometimes with the sword of Damocles poised over them.) If they can't, or use their education for the wrong kinds of things, like questioning how things are done at the bank, well, it's "foreclosure" time--the note is callestudent/customer downrated if not completely eliminated.
Pedagogy as Ideology
I bring these up because it must be said: There is a point in education when teaching using "traditional" methods (worksheets anyone?) means espousing belief in truth and its handling as a kind of convention--the accepted way of proceeding. At a certain point, such dogmatism and unresponsiveness to change crosses over the line and becomes mere ideology.
Endlessly asking kids the system's questions, using the "approved" text, demanding standard answers, then handing out societal rewards based on their success rate, becomes, in fact, an elaborate rehearsal for maintaining the status quo and a prop for socially engineered inequities.
I understand that math is math, and science science, but failing to discuss larger contexts and status, like "why" math is important and beautiful and essential, or what role science has played in the development of human society in the last 200 years, is part of the problem with education, not part of the solution.
Knowledge is seemless. Our problems and challenges cross subject disciplines at every turn and demand well-informed, versatile, creative thinking. An issue like "global climate change" is not just about burning fossil fuels, but involves a complex array of factors and issues--geo-politics, economics, psychology, cosmology, etc--that need to be broached if we are to ever deliver ourselves from its worst effects.
Perhaps if current civilization hadn't fundamentally altered the earth's climate to the point of threatening survival, or taken warfare to the point of nuclear annihilation, or used religion, history and politics to rationalize mass killings, invasions, ethnic cleansing, or busied itself with altering the genetic code of plants and animals...
Or, maybe if current "civilization" could just acknowledge that all human beings deserve dignity, food, clean water, acceptable health care--you know, something we would call fundamentally humane treatment...
Perhaps then, it would be less defensible to call the baseline premises and practices of our current educational system an "ideology."
But facts are stubborn things, and when they all point to a kind of unsustainability in human society, a degree of unfairness between rich and poor that is obscene and untenable, an inability to turn from the path of environmental destruction, then, at some point, we need to look at education and decide if we are simply defending the status quo or producing learners capable, imaginative and smart enough to fundamentally reconsider how we do things.
Or, at the very least, learners able to cognitively realize the extent to which their learning, beliefs and perspectives might contain an ideological and ethnocentric flavoring.
Children are, after all, to paraphrase Buckminster Fuller, nature's next tentative step along the evolutionary chain--they enter a world slightly more evolved, slightly closer to an unknown destiny that human-kind has been pursuing for thousands of generations.
At some point, we must equip them with the best of what we know, think and believe, hoist them on our shoulders, support their best efforts, then, let them go. Let them reach for the stars.
Uncle Henry's Skeet-Shoot
So, with that as prologue, on to the skeet-shoot. I'll knock off as many of these pedagogical strategies and approaches as I can in less than ten minutes. These merit mention because they fit with Palmer, Jensen, Dewey or Freire, or because, in my experience, they work.
But, as mentioned earlier, none of these is guaranteed without the skillful application and delivery of a fully passionate, committed educator. Sorry people, if we could deliver quality teaching by just reading scripts, we would turn education over to the Edison Schools corporation. (You mean some cities already have?)
Integrated curriculum -- Subject distinctions are artificial and serve as much to keep thinking apart as to focus it on resolving complex problems. Integration creates richness of content, encourages creative teaching and thinking, and makes the school day more imaginative and pregnant with possibility. In fact, it is the lack of connection to larger, real-life issues, that is responsible for draining life and meaning from subjects like math and science. (Jensen, Dewey and Palmer.)
Integrating the community into actual learning tasks and assessment -- Is there a more untapped resource, local, largely free and completely invested in the outcome of learners? The possibilities here are endless, from internships to shadowing to guest speakers and field trips, as well as utilizing accomplished professionals who want to "give back" to their communities. (Dewey, Jensen)
Employing cooperative group learning strategies and tasks -- In my personal experience, the most dynamic, effective and profound aspect of classroom design and pedagogy. Hands down. Students grow interpersonal skills, combat prejudice, develop meta-cognition, personal confidence and a wider perspective, all while mastering content and multiplying learning in a profound way. (Jensen, Dewey, Freire, Palmer.)
Favoring projects and hands-on tasks as opposed to pen and pencil assessments -- We need to favor pedagogy that builds upon individual differences rather than stifles it. Projects allow for a level of achievement and excellence consistent with every student's level of mastery. Moreover, projects connect up to students' need for meaning and relevance in the learning process. Excellence cannot be mass-produced, a tough lesson but an important one to understand. (Jensen, Palmer, Freire, and Dewey.)
Asking students to turn their efforts toward their community and the world beyond school-- We need relevance and connection between learning at school and the needs of the community at large. Why would any society accept a complete disconnect between the tasks that their youth undertake in learning and the realities facing the larger society? It is not acceptable and it has multiple negative impacts for kids, our communites and our society. We can, and in fact, need to do better here. (Freire, Dewey and Palmer.)
Explicitly teaching kids what effective interpersonal skills look, feel and sound like then evaluating them on their use-- Not to enter the realm of Dr. Phil, but it should be explicitly explored and evaluated:
1.) Do students make eye contact with others?
2.) Do they use names when they address ohters?
3.) Do they give feedback or other appropriate responses after listening?
4.) Do they adequately summarize other opinions and then construct responses that build, alter or contrast with the original?
In short, we should delineate what constitutes effective interpersonal behaviors and reward students who are capably applying them in classroom situations. (Personal teaching experience.)
Extended learning environments, i.e. longer class periods, and varied schedules -- Can someone explain to me why exactly it is that in the 21st century we are unable to liberate ourselves from a 19th century factory model schedule for schools? It was always one of the most difficult and demeaning things for me about being in high school, and later, teaching high school, that the schedule was so damn predictable. On the first day of school in September, you can pick a day in mid-May and know exactly where you will be at every hour--and in many districts--exactly what you will be studying.
I think that is bad for the brain... isn't it? (Jensen, personal teaching experience.)
Asking kids to learn from setbacks, mistakes and failures rather than internalizing them as part of their identity --There was a time when it was a regular part of education that you learned from mistakes. Not any more. We give assessments that never come back to students, which are not accountable in their accountability of others, and which are not even trasnparent! How exactly are people supposed to grow if not by reflecting on their experiences, their responses, and understanding what they would do differently the next time? Definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. (Personal teaching experience.)
Teaching students to be asset-thinkers, to find and celebrate the positive parts and potential in themselves, their efforts and the world -- Life is about being creative and continuing to live and produce and move forward. Do you ever wonder why animals don't fall into depression or just give up when bad things happen? Asset thinking is, in fact, a skill, and amidst America's epidemic of complaints and dissatisfaction with virtually everything, there needs to be a determined effort to see why, in fact, gratitude is the basis for living a great life. Students can be taught this skill, and it does make a difference in how they perceive the world. At some point, we need to decide if human fulfillment is a worthy goal of education, or whether we allow corporations and advocates of crass materialism to decide that for us. (Freire, Jensen, Palmer.)
Regular school-to-school exchanges and symposiums on shared projects, issues and concerns -- At a time when we are segregating schools very quickly and living in our isolated conclaves away form the hurly-burly of life, what about the possibilities that exist for "re-integrating" Americn society by expanding connections, exchanges, dialogue across racial, class, and ethnic lines? Oh, I forgot, there's not time. We have to continue to prepare for the next exam. Meanwhile, America's social fabric continues to fray and tear in ways that could eventually mean disaster for our democracy. (Freire, Jensen, personal teaching experience.)
Demand that arts be part of the curriculum -- Why exactly do we have to cut arts out of the curriculum? Because there are more important things to do--like study for a standardized test that will soon be forgotten and used to further narrow the curriculum.
Eric Jensen:
Typically, arts-centered schools have fewer drop-outs, higher attendance, better team players, an increased, love of learning, greater student dignity, and enhanced creativity, and they produce citizens better prepared for the workplace of tomorrow and with great cultural awareness as a bonus.
(I won't even mention that the arts, music and dance, in poor, urban schools of color, are often the central means of communicating and continuing the culture that is so central to the meaning and drive for students to succeed in the first place.) Or... maybe I will mention it.
Customization of Learning as Opposed to Standardization -- This one I guarantee will sweep the country after No Child Left Behind dies its terrible death. As Marion Brady rightly claims "human variability" is the very basis for society. Do we really want to restrict and retard that in the people we most need to possess "excellence" for our survival and happiness? More than ever today, we have the technology to make this happen.
Have some fun-- Let's also not underestimate the importance of communicating to kids that study and learning are fun, that, at the end of the day, personal enjoyment comes from being at school, learning, growing, being "in it" with others. Our job is to create life-long learners, and there is nothing that does that better than having a good time in the pursuit of learning. (Jensen and personal teaching experience.)
FlocK Uncle Henry -- Sick of all this? Maybe as a teacher you feel a little threatened or down because out of all the excellent pedagogical approaches mentioned, you, like me, only do a couple of them? First, let me remind that the purpose here is to design an "ideal" educational system, not to improve the one we currently have. Second, relax. Maybe, I'm overstating things a little. There is a simpler way, at least according to one author:
It may be that the most important aspect of teaching is to inspire youngsters; to fill them with hope, desire, and curiosity to become someone extraordinary. ("Life, oh life!" according to Whitman.) When a child becomes inspired, they will do for themselves much more than anyone can do for them; once lit, the lamp of scholarship infuses a life-long burning to learn... The job is to get them immersed in their own process -- thinking, relating, imagining, connecting, creating-- so they beome a well-spring for making their own meaning.
Now let's see about that poll...?