It's the pedagogy, stupid
In order to stop beating what I hope is a dead horse, let's just stipulate for the moment that our schools aren't where they need to be and no current policy is impelling them forward adequately. The question then becomes: What's going wrong, and how do we fix it?
Many possible answers immediately come to mind: Funding, teacher quality, administrative structure, school choice, etc. All of these areas are certainly critical -- funding and teacher quality especially -- but they are all overlaid on a central tenet.
It's all about the pedagogy.
What our schools are set up to teach is information, not understanding. One only needs to look at the tests which assess "proficiency" to see endless reams of evidence for this truism. Teachers are now being given "pacing guides" telling them not only what to teach but when to teach it and when to move on to the next topic. To suggest that schools are teaching the lowest common denominator of skills isn't new or profound; what most people miss is that failing to teach thinking skills results in a failure of teaching any skills whatsoever.
There was an important report authored by Lauren Resnick back in 1987 that still rings with urgency on this subject. Resnick, tremendously well-respected in the field, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh and director of the New Standards project, wrote "Education and Learning to Think" for the National Research Council's Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Resnick writes:
How often have advocates of the Standards Movement responded to criticism about the degree of rigor with "let's get these kids the most basic skills; thinking comes later"? It's a reasonable thought, and, as I've said before, it's great that the Standards Movement is putting all kids and quality education in the same sentence for the first time. But it's an incorrect thought. You want to know why NCLB isn't doing the trick, why I say we need a fundamental evolution? Here's the start of my hypothesis: By ignoring the teaching of thinking skills, growth is being stunted across the board.
Many possible answers immediately come to mind: Funding, teacher quality, administrative structure, school choice, etc. All of these areas are certainly critical -- funding and teacher quality especially -- but they are all overlaid on a central tenet.
It's all about the pedagogy.
What our schools are set up to teach is information, not understanding. One only needs to look at the tests which assess "proficiency" to see endless reams of evidence for this truism. Teachers are now being given "pacing guides" telling them not only what to teach but when to teach it and when to move on to the next topic. To suggest that schools are teaching the lowest common denominator of skills isn't new or profound; what most people miss is that failing to teach thinking skills results in a failure of teaching any skills whatsoever.
There was an important report authored by Lauren Resnick back in 1987 that still rings with urgency on this subject. Resnick, tremendously well-respected in the field, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh and director of the New Standards project, wrote "Education and Learning to Think" for the National Research Council's Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Resnick writes:
The most important single message of modern research on the nature of thinking is that the kinds of activities traditionally associated with thinking are not limited to advanced levels of development. Instead, these activities are an intimate part of even elementary levls of reading, mathematics, and other branches of learning -- when learning is proceeding well. In fact, the term "higher order" skills is probably itself fundamentally misleading, for it suggests that another set of skills, presumably called "lower order," needs to come first. This assumption -- that there is a sequence from lower level activities that do not require much independent thinking or judgment to higher level ones that do -- colors much educational theory and practice. Implicitly at least, it justifies long years of drill on the "basics" before thinking and problem solving are demanded. Cognitive research on the nature of basic skills such as reading and mathematics provides a fundamental challenge to this assumption.
Indeed, research suggests that failure to cultivate aspects of thinking such as those listed in our working definition of high order skills [nonalgorithmic, complex, yielding multiple solutions, involving nuanced judgment, uncertainty, imposing meaning, etc.] may be a source of major learning difficulties even in elementary school.
[...]
Cognitive theory... suggests that processes traditionally reserved for advanced students -- that is, for a minority who have developed skill and taste for interpretive mental work -- might be taught to all readers, including young children and, perhaps especially, those who learn with difficulty. Cognitive research suggests that these processes are what we mean by reading comprehension. Not to teach them is to ignore the most important aspects of reading.
How often have advocates of the Standards Movement responded to criticism about the degree of rigor with "let's get these kids the most basic skills; thinking comes later"? It's a reasonable thought, and, as I've said before, it's great that the Standards Movement is putting all kids and quality education in the same sentence for the first time. But it's an incorrect thought. You want to know why NCLB isn't doing the trick, why I say we need a fundamental evolution? Here's the start of my hypothesis: By ignoring the teaching of thinking skills, growth is being stunted across the board.
This entry was posted
on Monday, September 05, 2005 at 3:36 PM.
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