Pondering Checker 2 / Elephant In The Room?
Posted: January 6th, 2012 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 21 Comments »
In response to my Pondering Checker blog, Bryant, Mike P, and Lynette all asked: What would it take beyond solving “Checker’s 8 Barriers?”
I don’t know. I’ve been pondering that for 15 years now. If I don’t change professions soon, I may be stuck pondering this all my life.
I’d say this.
I believe there are two problems hidden in plain sight. I won’t say in this blog what they are.
Each is a largely unappealing problem. Few K-12 policy types enjoy thinking about these. Everyone touches on them a bit, but quickly shuffles off to more appealing-to-think-about problems.
For purposes of this blog, can we agree that in life there are problems of this nature? “Elephant in the living room” type?
Consider malaria.
Which I did at the suggestion of my colleague Laura. Michael Specter wrote a great article in the New Yorker: “What Money Can Buy.” It’s about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s work on malaria. From the article:
There has always been this sense of malaria fatalism. There has been the idea that this is just part of Africa and being African.
The do-gooders have always wanted to find a breakthrough cure or vaccine. That is an appealing problem for many people to tackle.
Gates learned that: 30-50% of malaria victims could be saved with…drum roll…nets sprayed with insecticide. Nets!
But nobody wanted to work hard to implement this solution.
Nets were very unappealing to experts in the field. Why? Their expertise was drug development. Not nets.
The elephant in the living room: how to deal with logistics of sprayed nets. Lots of net puzzles. How to make em, get em, spray em, train people to use em, research things like how to make the spray last longer and nets last longer, figure how to handle dead bugs lying around, find ways to solve people’s complaints (smell, feeling caged, whatever).
The experts knew nets mattered for 20 years. But nobody really worked on it.
A Tanzanian health entomologist said:
I am sitting here watching my hair go gray and waiting for those nets. Every year a million more kids die. A decade ago, they were saying “Let people die; there is nothing we can do.” Then Gates came along and he said this is not acceptable.
Do the nets solve everything? No!
“Only” 30 to 50% of the problem. Do we continue to look for cures and vaccines? Yes! Should we? Yes.
This is an example of a key problem hidden in plain sight.
I submit there are 2 key problems hidden in plain sight, puzzles we are bad at solving. Two elephants in the room. If not tackled, eroding Checker’s 8 Barriers won’t get us far by themselves, though I add once again I am entirely in favor of lifting those barriers, and lifting these barriers are essential (but insufficient — see the average charter school) to ultimately solving these 2 Elephants.
Robert Pondiscio and E.D. Hirsch, for example, believe the Elephant is: typical curriculum is unbelievably dumb. I 100% agree it’s a problem and perhaps only disagree about sizing: it’s more of a hippo. Plus half the issue is whether it’s in a box (i.e., ease of use for teachers).
Do you think there is an Elephant? If so, what?
Thanks for the shout out, Mike. OK, so curriculum is a hippo. Here are two elephants:
1) Reading is not a skill. Yes, you read that right. Reading is not a skill. Decoding–learning to translate letters into sounds, and sounds into words–is a skill. That’s why we can all agree how to pronounce “rigfap” and “churbite” even though those are made-up words. But reading comprehension, making meaning out of words, is NOT a skill. It’s a function of your vocabulary and the amount of walking around knowledge kids possess. So if you want kids to understand what they read, the key is not to learn and practice reading strategies, but to learn as much about the world as possible. You can argue that’s curriculum, and maybe it is (I think of it as an instructional orientation). Right now, most literacy instruction is process-happy and ultimately ineffective.
Here’s the best ten minutes you can spend learning this: It’s Dan Willingham’s YouTube video “Teaching Content is Teaching Reading.” Watch it, learn it, live it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiP-ijdxqEc
2) Disruption is cancer. Kids can’t learn when their classrooms are chaotic. And a joyless, dictatorial environment where teachers keep control with an iron fist isn’t much better. I have long believed that the achievement gap is really a time-on-task gap. Subtract out the time lost to disruption and enforcing dicipline, and I’ll bet low-SES kids get far less instructional time than more advantaged kids.
I tend to see these two things as related. When a bad school get serious about student achievement and ensuring an orderly school tone, scores go up. But there’s often a plateau or regression. That’s because if you fix #2 r and don’t get #1 right, you’re merely doing a better job delivering a lousy product. You’ll see some positive movement, but you don’t see transformation until or unless you get both right.
Just to be clear, understanding that reading comprehension is not a skill means that we have to stop treating it like one: no more (or at least very few) decontextualized strategy “mini-lessons” where students learn a “skill” that is really not a skill at all and then go off to practice it on whatever they feel like reading.
Language and vocabulary growth develop in context. Very, very few of the words we learned are directly taught or memorized. That means creating contextualizing machines and than means content, content, content–clear, comprehensive, and coherently delivered.
Robert,
We’re big fans of that video on this blog. And you’re right, I was counting that as part of the hippo.
Churbite is a made up word?
Yep, disruption is one of my elephants. In the same way that you’d separate curriculum and “instructional orientation” in your hippo, I’d separate disruption and “generating effort” as part of same elephant.
Generating effort refers to the room where kids are not misbehaving, but nor are they trying.
Mike,
I’m a curriculum guy. I’m a Core Knowledge guy. But I’m separating out teaching reading as a skill from curriculum for a reason. There are lots and lots of different curricula. But thinking of reading as a skill is something of a monolith. It informs how instruction is conceived, delivered and (most critically) assessed. Unless Massachusetts is different from the other 49, your reading tests assess how well kids, say, find the main idea or make inferences.
And if the data says Jose is weak at finding the main idea and Malik struggles to make inferences, my hunch is their teachers will focus on….(wait for it)….teaching Jose how to find the main idea and Malik how to make inferences.
No.
Hell, no.
Those are not transferable skills. You can make inferences and findd the main more readily when you’re familiar the subject matter. When you don’t meaning breaks down, and NOT because you don’t have a particular “skill.”
So this is not quite the same as curriculum. Curriculum is a product. The elephant is that our entire concept of reading–how to teach it; how to test it–is fatally flawed.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Yes, Robert. You’re persuasive. Maybe giant hippo. Perhaps third elephant.
We’re thinking same thing and just framing a bit diff.
A. Getting kids to try hard (which includes minimizing disruption, but also generating effort). Getting to second base is my new analogy.
B. Giving tasks that, if someone were to try hard, would pay off in learning. Getting from second to home. Both the things you describe go at what tasks a kid is asked to do.
The reason I size that as
A. Elephant
B. Hippo
is my belief that if you get kids trying hard, even at so-so curric, they learn more than if you have misbehavior and low effort, but good curric.
Good A * 1/2 B > Good B * 1/2 A
And the reason for having them try hard at a so-so curriculum instead of a good one is…..?
Hey, Mike. Although elephants are bigger, I tend to think of hippos as much fiercer and more dangerous. Just saying. I agree that generating effort is a huge part of the problem. Have you ever read Dan Lortie’s classic “Schoolteacher.” It’s written in 60s sociological style, but some of the fundamental insights about teaching are so deep and relevant. One thing that makes teaching rather unique is that it is a profession where practitioners deal with involuntary clients, and where success depends on the effort and engagement of the client. This is true of many of the helping professions that seek to change individuals in some deep manner. And educating people involves changing them.
Robert, I’m not FAVORING so-so curricula! I’m just sizing the problems.
I.e., it will be interesting to see, down the road, which NYC school does better in your trial: a district school with CK, or a Harlem Success Academy with what your amiga found was anti-Willingham curric.
Ed, yes, great book.
I do think an interesting question you pose. At MTR, we explicitly teach trainees to assume your clients will NOT want to do the work, and you will have to many things to generate effort from scratch. I.e., embrace the reluctance. Don’t hope to “contain” it and teach around it somehow.
I would say a second elephant is cultural images of the teacher as an “artist” and heroic figure, and that each individual teacher has a right to their own unique style. This is tied to norms of individualism and egalitarianism, and works against building a shared set of common practices, curriculum materials, and knowledge base for the profession. In many fields there are what is considered responsible standard procedures (like in medicine). In education, not so much. Finally, I don’t think we have the right R&D infrastructure to advance the professional. Too much disconnect between higher ed and K12–different foci and individual and institutional incentives.
Ed, that’s a very good point. I had been thinking of the second part of your statement. Bad knowledge base, per my essay in Ed Next. But you’re right to call out the teacher-as-artist as a cause of bad knowledge base.
“Sizing the problem” is…well…the problem.
Teachers have to teach SOMETHING so why not teach something that makes sense?
I get into this argument (and maybe this is another hippo/elephant) around differentiated instruction.
“Mr. Pondiscio, the teacher is the best judge of what a child needs.”
“So what you’re saying is this student needs to know his shapes and colors, but that one doesn’t? This one needs to know the three branches of government and how photosynthesis works, but it’s not important for that one?”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“Actually, it kinda is.”
If child “x” already knows her shapes and colors, why should she have to endure that lesson (again) because it’s on the teacher’s lesson plan book (for the whole class)? If child “y” already knows how to perform the algorithm for long division, again, why bore them with the redundancy?
ALL KIDS ARE DIFFERENT. How about the teacher taking that into account in the classroom?
The elephant in the room is the most disruptive 10% of the class. It’s usually 3-4 kids–1 or 2 major disrupters and 1 or 2 slightly more minor disrupters that feed off the major disrupters. I’ve worked in three schools now, and seen the same thing in every one.
As far as generating effort, I wouldn’t have believed it unless I had seen it for myself, but I’m finding a lot of the TFA nonsense actually works. I now publicly track exit ticket mastery with stickers and post each class’s homework completion percentage. I post an 80% club where I put the names of kids who got 80% or higher on the weekly quiz. I also choose a Math MVP each week for each class and write a blurb such as “Rachel got 100% on her quiz this week! Rachel, thanks for always bringing such passion and energy to math class. Keep it up!”
I’m not saying any of these are solutions, per se, but I used to think they were a waste of time. I’m finding that they’re not (much to my surprise).
Steve, good to hear.
Kay Merseth adds:
“My candidate: Everyone is different: psychologically, socially, emotionally, morally and we like that. We protect that. (e.g. antidiscrimination laws SPED etc)
At the same time we want everyone to be the same. (e.g. All men are created equal)
Read Lois Lowry’s dystopia “The Giver” or Flatland a mathematics book but both about societies that are dystopias.”
everything mentioned so far charters can deal with… what can educators not address bc it is not our direct expertise?
successful education of a child leads to a higher income…(or at least higher propensity to earn)
a higher income leads to child to a geographic move… to a place with other similar earners and children with higher propensity to learn ..
… and away from others who find it marginaly harder…
if learning is by defination social.. than in our society — educators are really only greasing the wheels of the separation.
(there are always outliers) but if we do our job well.. we are only ensuring the separation continues based on intelligence… and we are ensuring the deprivation of those who struggle to learn and to earn… from those who can help them earn and learn…
until we live and learn in deeply mixed income communities… we wont solve the disparity in education and we wont close any gaps…
To respond to Ed’s comment about teachers-as-artists and the need to standardize curriculum, I would argue that the alternative — treating teachers as technicians — is reductive. If teachers are just the intermediaries between students and a neutral curriculum, then the sooner we can replace them w/ computers, the better. But I doubt any of us actually want that.
Teachers do serve a humanistic function. We regard our work as, on some level at least, heroic (even if we don’t use that word). When I talk to teacher friends, we rarely go on about how efficiently or effectively we’ve made it through a unit; rather we spend the bulk of our time talking about the connections they’ve made, the lives we (think) we’ve changed, and so on. Shouldn’t we admit that the teacher-as-hero trope is why so many of us got involved in urban ed in the first place (problematic as this might be)?
As long as teachers are humans and not computer in the classroom I think it’s better recognized that the tension between teachers individuality and standardization will exist and should be encouraged. Teachers shouldn’t have free reign to teach whatever they want, but they should teach to their strengths and passions. At the same, for students’ sake, teachers should be horizontally aligned within grade-level and vertical aligned within the disciplines. For a (cliché) metaphor, think of a really good band. Each player has his or her instrument, takes the occasional solo, plays in a particular style, but at the end of the day keeps in time and works to produce a sound greater than the sum of band’s individual parts. That’s where a really good princip–I mean, percussionist is essential.
No disrespect intended, Chris. But I always get nervous when I hear about hero teachers who “spend the bulk of their time talking about the connections they’ve made, and the lives they’ve changed.”
Caring and connections are the starting line, not the finish line. The most positive change that can be made in a child’s life is by making sure that they leave smarter and more competent than they walked in. If that’s not happening, the rest doesn’t much matter.
If getting kids to try hard is elephant #1, then the willingness to hold teachers accountable is elephant #2.
Checker recommends removing structual barriers to teacher evaluation, hiring, firing, etc. There are, though, as teachers’ unions frequently point out, right to work states that do not have the same types of barriers.
In those states and situations (including in many charter schools), administrators are unwilling to hold teachers accountable and/or to fire ineffective teachers.
Aside from the problem of valuing harmony among adults over justice for children, I think that this unwillingness also stems from a deep belief that some kids can not learn. While it is popular to say that all kids can learn, the easy acceptance of excuses for poor results suggests that deep down most people do not believe that childen in “tough” circumstances are capable of academic achievement.
Chris K – Actually I agree a lot with you. I don’t believe teachers are or should be viewed as technicians. There is a social/relational aspect of teaching that is fundamental to the work. Teachers don’t just teach material; they lead complex social systems and communities in their classrooms. I don’t view teaching as a science/technical endeavor or an art, but rather as a craft. Crafts do have knowledge bases, whether taught and learned through formal classroom training or passed down via apprenticeship or job embedded learning. Craftspeople need to know about the properties of the raw materials they work with, certain techniques and principles of construction, some standard ways of solving problems. And they often share a vocabulary that allows them to talk about their work and learn from one another. But the work is often less standardized and predictable.
To take your musician metaphor a bit further, what we do now is expect many teachers to be both the composer and the musician. To write the score (curriculum, lesson plans) and play it. Well, actually, 180-200 different scores/lesson plans each year. This is much too much to expect for novice teachers, at least. So, I’m not a proponent of scripted curriculum at all, but I do think teachers would benefit from having more detailed, high quality curriculum materials to work with and adapt–especially materials that have specific strategies for meeting the needs heterogeneous groups of learners including English Language Learners and Special Education students. Maybe it should be something closer to a jazz score rather than a classical one, one which more room for interpretation and improvisation, but a score nevertheless.
Having a score still leaves room for musicians to interpret and enact the music in different ways.
And musicians do share a common notation system and for each instrument a common method for making notes come out of their instrument (fingering patterns, breathing methods, etc.). So, we don’t leave it up to each musician to figure these out.
Music began playing any time I opened up this blog, so frustrating!