After the Future

Constructivism vs. Direct Instruction: A Common Sense Approach

My wife grew up in the Bronx.  She did not live in a world where having a car was valued. She walked or used public transportation for everything, and she believed zealously that the internal combustion engine is the destroyer of civilizations and neighborhoods.  She didn't know how to drive when I first met her, and she had no interest in learning. That was fine when we lived in Manhattan for the first six years of our marriage, but when we moved to Seattle I insisted that I would teach her to drive. No need to go into the details here--about the red lights we ran, the one-way streets we went up the wrong way--it was a disaster.  

It wasn't her fault. It was mine because my direct instructional skills in this area were primitive. I made assumptions about her level of knowledge and motivation that had little or no basis in reality, and it never occurred to me that her learning style was different from mine.

When I taught my son to drive, it was a completely different experience. He  knew more about the rules of the road than I did.  He had spent years observing and asking questions.  When the time came to get his license, he could have got into a car and done fine with little or no direct instruction. He just needed me in the car because the law required it, and because I could give him a helpful hint or two about parallel parking or merging into traffic on I-5.

In this situation my wife needed a teacher trained in direct instruction--which she eventually got from a driving school; in my son's case, a more constructivist approach would have been fine.

Constructivism is a learning theory that dates back at least as far as Socrates helping Meno's illiterate slave to "discover" fundamental principles  in geometry, but it has had its greatest impact on American education through John Dewey's Democracy and Education and Jean Piaget's lifetime of research on cognitive development in children. Both have played a big role in developing theories and curricula for progressive education.  Constructivist learning is experiential, group-centered, and discovery oriented.  The teacher is more of a facilitator than a knowledgeable expert. And while I'm all for experiential learning, Dewey, and Piaget, I'm not necessarily a fan of the way their ideas have been used in developing curricula, particularly in math, and especially in the Discovering Math program.

Direct Instruction, on the other hand, comprises a range of teaching styles from rigidly scripted, step-by-step curricula like  SRA Reading Mastery and Corrective Reading to the kind of lecturing all of us are or were exposed to, for better or worse,  in high school and college classrooms. Direct Instruction therefore requires a knowledgeable expert who conveys his or her knowledge through verbal instruction.

Direct Instruction at it's worst is dry and didactic--my burnt-out high school American history teacher comes to mind.  But it doesn't have to be.  Our most memorable teachers from high school and college were more than group and experiential facilitators. They were passionately committed to their subjects and infected us with their enthusiasm and their love of their subject. And remember Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid? His teaching style was a bit unconventional, but it was a very effective and creative form of direct instruction by a master teacher.

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If you want to learn piano, and if you have some musical talent and a lot of motivation and discipline, you could probably teach yourself to become a decent player.  If you have athletic talent, you could probably do a decent job of teaching yourself golf--and  have fun playing.  But if the goal is to play piano or golf at a very high level, you will get there a lot faster if you have a good teacher to provide you with solid direct instruction and drills to develop the habits of mind and body that are necessary to play at that high level. 

The great thing about civilization is that we don't all have to figure out for ourselves how to build a wheel or a fire.  We learn from those who already know and who pass their knowledge on to us, and if we absorb and work with their instruction, we can attain a level of mastery much quicker than if we try to figure it out for ourselves.

This is particularly true when teaching anything that is part of a large, complex, rich subject matter with a tradition of best practices for  doing it--like martial arts, law, biology, history, music, or math.  The first step is to lay a solid foundation in fundamentals--later on in the process, you can allow the student to improvise or work more creatively.  It's just common sense.  You master the tradition's fundamentals and best practices first, then you can improvise or innovate or discover.

Here's the point: Direct Instruction is the way to go when there is subject matter students need to learn from those who already know and care about it.  Direct instruction is particularly important at the beginning stages of learning when a solid foundation and good fundamentals are necessary for future learning.  The experiential and discovery part are important too, but these experiences will be richer if there is a foundation in place to have experiences with a better chance not to miss the meaning.

Which kids are having the richer experience when they take that trip to Washington, D.C.?  Those who are experiencing it without any knowledge of American history or those who have a good teacher who has already made American history come alive for them?  Knowing something about the Civil War and the 600,000 killed in it makes a difference when you walk around Arlington Cemetery.  Knowing something about the Constitution and the arguments and struggles to create it makes a difference when you visit the White House, the Supreme Court, and the Capitol building.

Both constructivist and direct instruction, obviously, have their place in any curriculum.  In my classes at the UW, I use both.  There are situations in which groups have powerful learning experiences when they work together to solve problems as a group. But I think we've all had group experiences that amounted to a little more than pooled ignorance or were dominated by one or two aggressive blowhards. Good teachers know how to adapt their teaching of the curriculum to different students and to different aspects of the curricula. I'm lucky because I have control over how to do that in my classroom.  Public School teachers too often don't.  One size does not fit all, but they are required to teach as if it does. And there are moments in any pedagogy when one approach is appropriate and the other just isn't.

The bottom line: Whether you have a Mr. Miyagi or Mr. Rogers, the only thing that matters is whether students are leaarning and loving to learn.  That they are making progress and mastering the materials presented in a well-designed curriculum. The Discovering Math curriculum has been a disaster not because there isn't some interesting progressive pedagogical theory behind it.  There is and I get it. It's a disaster because it doesn't produce the kind of learning that kids need to function at the next level.

It's unbalanced in the constructivist/experiential direction.  The kids are not getting fundamentals and parents and volunteer tutors aren't able to work with the curricula to support the kids who are having trouble. It's not delivering kids who are ready to hit the ground running at the university level if they aspire to careers in engineering and the math-heavy sciences.  The curve is being set by the kids from Asia or private schools or home schools, and as a result too many kids from public schools, even those who thought they were good in math, are finding that they can't compete. This is fundamental disservice to our kids. We need to have a math curriculum that does not require the parents who can afford it to send their kids to Kumon, and those who can't afford it--well tough luck.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Teaching to the Test

"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."  Campbell's Law, Donald T. Campbell, 1976

Also known as "Heisenberg", pointing by analogy to the uncertainty principle by which the process of measuring something changes what is being measured.  Since No Child Left Behind (NCLB) elite opinion has been obsessing about closing achievement gaps and using high-stakes testing as  tool to achieve it.  I don't think anybody disputes that there has to be an assessment process.  I do think that high-stakes testing is not the way to do it.

Since No Child Left Behind, the distortions and corruptions to the American education system have been egregious, and it's time to recognize that this approach to improving standards has become the tail wagging the dog, and the only result has been to produce a sick and rather confused dog.  We have to get back to basics, and we have to pay attention to the fundamental health of the dog. We have to ask ourselves what do we really want our education system to produce. And my answer is a love of learning. If you have an educational culture that produces a love of learning, then everything else falls into place.

Don't we all want our kids to be high-spirited and free? Don't we want them to be curious and to have developed a life-long thirst for knowledge and learning? But is that what our education system sees as its purpose?  I don't think so, and if if a love of learning is there at all in our schools, it's because there are good teachers who have not let themselves be beaten down by the system that cares only about scores and not about learning. 

Everybody wants to be good at something, but you can't get good at something you don't like or love to do. You can't be a good student unless you love to learn, and you can't be a good teacher unless you love to teach. And you cannot love to teach unless  first you have developed a love of learning.

Since NCLB We are trending toward an education system in which the love of learning is becoming irrelevant. Why? Because the only thing that matters is the scores students get on these high-stakes tests.  What I would like to see is a way of measuring the degree to which a school or an entire district has fostered a culture that values above all else a love of learning. We'd find that test scores would go up without worrying too much about them. We would use tests not as a club with which to punish teachers and principals  but as a way of identifying problems that could then be solved through a collaborative process.

Every healthy kid has within his or her soul the desire to grow and learn. Everyone wants to be capable, competent, to contribute, to have the respect and admiration of those she admires and respects. Kids want to respect the adults in their lives, but they don't respect them, and have good reason not to, when the program adults present them is at a fundamental level b.s.produced by bureaucrats with a misguided reform agenda.

It's ridiculous that we have a one-size fits all education system because we have a one-size fits all testing system. It's ridiculous that we think of education as some kind of information inculcation and testing process. Ultimately education is about relationships, the relationships kids form with one another and the ones they form with adults that they respect. And they can't respect adult teachers, coaches, counselors, and administrators who are micromanaged, overly scripted automatons following rules that somebody in Olympia or D.C. developed with good intentions, but have created more problems than they have solved.  Kids will develop a love of learning when they are exposed to adults and peers who have a love of learning. Not people who are just going through the motions scripted for them by someone far removed from the classroom.

I want a system that makes it easier for good teachers to do their jobs and for mediocre or burned out teachers to learn from and be inspired by the good teachers. We need to develop better methods for teachers to learn and implement best practices, but more than that we need for teachers and principals to support one another, to help one another to be as good as they can be, to remind one another why they got into the teaching business in the first place. 

We--all of us--need to remember that schools are not about implementing some elitist fad of the month, but to do the basic work that has been done century-in and century-out at least since Socrates gathered the youth of Athens around him, i.e., when kids and adults, the inexperienced and experienced, the aspirants and masters come together out of a shared love of learning to just do it. 

Ed Reform & the Culture of Intimidation

From Diane Ravitch, Death & Life of the Great American School System, pp.  61-62

The teachers and principals. . . were bitter about the high-handed way in which the reforms were imposed on them. Teachers, especially veterans, spoke about being harassed.  They complained about mandates and directives that narrowed what they were permitted to teach.  The Bersin era, several said, was a "reign of terror."  Those who didn't go along were bullied. Teachers were punished by grade switching: A first grade teacher might be reassigned on short notice to teach sixth grade, while a sixth-grade teacher would be reassigned to teach kindergarten or first grade.  Principals spoke in hushed voices about the abrupt public removal in June 1999 of the fifteen administrators.  The theory behind these tactics, several said, was "culture shock," keeping everyone on edge, afraid, insecure.

One principal who was promoted to the central office by Bersin spoke with regret about the district's 90 percent turnover in principals.  When the fifteen administrators were fired, he said, it sent a message: "Comply or be destroyed." The influx of large numbers of new principals brought new problems.  They had no "deep reservoir of experience" and felt "intense pressure to push change," so they bludgeoned people" when they walked through classrooms, thinking that by taking harsh actions, they could forcibly change people's beliefs. "people complied because of fear, " he said.  "All up and down the system, there was fear." . . .

This administrator was blunt about his time as a principal under the Blueprint.  "Putting coaches in every school," he said was "a great idea, badly implemented." The coaches sowed animosity, especially among experienced teachers.  The coaches made teachers feel less competent, not respected. Teachers saw them as policemen and did not trust them. . . . The general sense among teachers was that the coaches were there to catch teachers making mistakes, to report them, not help them.

. . . He said, "Survival became paramount.  Everyone was afraid of speaking out.  We were muzzled." He survived, he said, because his teachers united to protect hm, and he protected them.  

This excerpt from Ravitch's book describes the reign of terror that the San Diego Schools experienced under its Robespierre, Alan Bersin, a lawyer and former prosecutor whom San Diego hired as its superintendent from 1998 to 2005. Bersin during this time and following has been onsidered a courageous reformer, and his methods were praised and emulated by those in the 'ed-reform' community throughout the country.

So have these tactics been emulated in Seattle Public Schools? Maybe not to this extreme--yet. Or maybe it's deliberately more subtle so as not to call too much attention to itself. But talk to an experienced teacher, and if she's candid, she'll tell you that these tactics are not uncommon within our district. And I would suggest to you that it is a template that you can use to begin to understand what was going on regarding the firing of Ingraham's Martin Floe.

Have you heard of the Broad Superintendent Academy?  It's a place where America's "most talented executives"  go to be indoctrinated and trained in the ways of  "education reform". (Seattle's recently departed super Marie Goodloe-Johnson was trained there.) What is education reform?  It's  based on Republican, anti-union and market-centered talking points about how to improve schools coupled with trendy, leftish, rigidly scripted constructivist (i.e, "fuzzy math:) curriculum ideas. In other words the worst of both the political right and the cultural left.

Whatever you might think about one or another of the ideas embraced by these education reformers, here's what you need to understand about the culture of education reform:  It's driven by arrogant, technocratic elites, who know nothing about education, but  think they know better anyhow, and who therefore have no compunction about forcing their ideas on experienced, effective teachers and principals without even attempting to persuade them to buy in.  And when these reforms don't work, as they almost never do,  they blame the teachers or whomever, but never themselves--because they are rich, smart people who just know better. 

David Halberstam classic,  The Best and the Brightest, was all about this mentality.  It's about how very smart technocrats with rigid top-down ideas think they can bend reality to their wills.  The book was about the mess created by the technocratic  Democrats in Vietnam, but it could have been written about the mess Republicans created in their social engineering experiment in Iraq and Afghanistan.  And Ravitch's book is very much a description about how this top-down, social-engineering mentality is making a mess of the American education system.

In Seattle Public Schools we're lucky that the Broad-trained Marie Goodloe-Johnson was fired. Her firing, of course,  had more to do with a culture of cronyism that has infected SPS, but it gives us now the opportunity to change directions, but she was a member in good standing of this education reform community, and we are fortunate she did not have more time to implement her agenda. The school board that Seattle elects  this fall will have to take aggressive steps to clean up the cronyism, but the more important task is to hire a superintendent who does not live in this ideological "education-reform" bubble.

Americans across the country have suffered the leadership of people who lived in this bubble for most of the last decade because they know that the schools have problems, and they were willing to give these "reformers" a shot.  These reforms have failed across the board, and now it's time to change the model.

I hope to make clear in future posts what I think that model should look like.

(Cross posted at Jack Whelan for School Board)

 

Refocusing

I've been refocusing my energy on local issues, and so haven't been thinking about the things that I usually think about here. This ridiculous incident with Anthony Weiner is the most recent absurdity. I'm tired of pulling my hair out in disgust or dismay. It's just so pointless and so it's better to refocus one's energy where one has a chance of having an impact.

That focus will be for me local public education. The local school district in Seattle has been disaster for going on ten years now.  I'll get into some of the details later, and what happened recently that got me so riled up about it. It's really rather intriguing in a way how all the national themes play out on the local stage--tax policy, the allocation of scarce resources, privatization, the role of unions, local vs. central, etc.

As with most things on the national level, there is a lot of confusion and muddled thinking.  But what makes Seattle different is that almost everybody is "liberal" at least by national standards, and yet the rifts are just as fiercely defined. But the difference lies in that on the local level, there's a possibility of doing something--or so it seems. We'll see.  Money is power here as it is everywhere, and we'll see if there is enough of a popular will to counterbalance it.

So I'm probably going to run for the school board in my district. I'm not likely to win, but I thought I'd put some skin in the game and see if I can find a way to have an impact on something that is so very important on a level so many  people experience and which is so important for the future of the country.

I may use this space to occasionally talk about the old themes, but more likely will use it more to think out loud as I dig deeper into broader issues of educational philosophy the local scene. I would loosely call myself a Ravitchian in a district that is very much under the sway of Bill & Melinda Gates money and reform philosophy. I don't question the good intentions, but I see that approach as deeply misguided suffering from a flawed top-down corporate mentality. And I look forward to having that argument with people who see it otherwise.

More later.