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>Date: Sat, 23 Oct 1999 14:58:05 -0500
>To: jbecker@siu.edu
>From: Jerry Becker <jbecker@siu.edu>
>Subject: Getting Back to Basics
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>******************************************************
>Thanks for Carol Fry Bohlin for bringing this article to our attention.
>******************************************************
>
>>From The Washington Post, Sunday, October 10, 1999; Page B03
>[See
>http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-10/10/131l-101099-idx.h
tml ]
>
>Getting Back to Basics
>
>First Lesson: Unlearn How We Learned
>
>By Alfie Kohn
>
>We are facing an educational emergency in this country. You've heard that
>claim before, of course, but this time there's a twist: Much of the current
>crisis is the result of policies enacted in the name of improving
>schools--specifically, in the name of "standards" and "accountability."
>
>Naturally, this rhetoric finds a ready audience: Who wants to come out
>against higher standards? But the dirty little secret of American education
>in the late 1990s is that real learning is being squeezed out of classrooms
>because people who don't know much about education have decided it's time
>to get tough.
>
>The top-down, heavy-handed "Tougher Standards" movement has essentially
>taken over many of our schools, with the full support of business groups,
>politicians of both parties and many journalists. The primary opposition
>comes from those who actually do the educating--and, as our children's
>schools are transformed into giant test-prep centers, increasingly from
>parents as well.
>
>The first problem is that raising standards has come to mean little more
>than higher scores on poorly designed standardized tests. The more schools
>commit themselves to improving performance on these tests, the more
>meaningful opportunities to learn are sacrificed. Every hour spent drilling
>students to ace these exams is an hour not spent helping them become
>creative, critical, curious learners. Thus, the drive for high scores is
>tantamount to lowering standards--a paradox rarely appreciated by those who
>make, or report on, education policy.
>
>Children are tested to the point of absurdity in the name of
>"accountability," which often turns out to be a code word for more control
>over what happens in classrooms by people who are not in classrooms. This
>has an effect on learning similar to the effect that a noose has on
>breathing. Particularly counterproductive is the use of bribes and threats
>to coerce schools and students into raising test scores, including
>"high-stakes" testing that determines whether students can graduate or even
>move on to the next grade.
>
>A few years back, a group of Colorado researchers asked some teachers to
>instruct their students on a specific task. About half the teachers were
>told that when they were finished, their students must "perform up to
>standards" and do well on a test about the task. The rest of the teachers,
>given the identical task to teach, were simply invited to "facilitate the
>children's learning." At the end, when all the students were tested, the
>students in the "standards" classrooms did worse on the task than the other
>students.
>
>The teachers in the standards-oriented classrooms in effect became drill
>sergeants, removing virtually any opportunity for the students to play an
>active role in designing their own learning. The teachers were controlled,
>and they responded by becoming controlling.
>
>This transformation is taking place across the country. One example can
>stand for thousands: A widely respected middle-school teacher in Wisconsin,
>famous for helping students create their own innovative learning projects,
>stood up at a community meeting one evening and announced that he "used to
>be" a good teacher. These days, he explained, he just handed out textbooks
>and quizzed his students on what they had memorized. He had changed his
>teaching approach because he was increasingly being held accountable for
>test scores. The kind of wide-ranging and enthusiastic exploration of ideas
>that once characterized his classroom could not survive when the emphasis
>was on preparing students to take a standardized test.
>
>The consensus that we need tougher standards is closely connected to the
>notion that we need to go back to basics--what might be called the "bunch
>o' facts" model of instruction. Traditionalists typically believe we can
>make students learn by the sheer force of didactic instruction, by having
>the teacher stand at the front of the room, perhaps writing on the
>blackboard while disgorging information that everyone else in the room is
>supposed to lap up and copy down. The teacher tells; the students listen.
>And when they aren't listening, they're reading things like textbooks in
>such a way as to absorb information. Then come the quizzes, compulsory
>recitations and other ways of proving that they remember what they were
>told.
>
>Here education is conceived as transferring or transmitting facts, pouring
>knowledge into empty vessels. This transmission model is found in first
>grade classrooms devoted to the explicit teaching of phonics and in high
>school honors classes where teachers slap transparencies on the overhead
>projector and lecture endlessly about Romantic poets or genetic codes. As a
>rule, the more that standardized tests are used (and their results
>emphasized), the more we would expect schools to adopt this approach to
>teaching students of all ages.
>
>This model, which remains the dominant one in the United States, enjoys the
>advantage of being familiar to most of us from our own days in school. If
>most parents accept it--and judge teachers and schools on the basis of how
>efficiently information is poured into their children--it may be because no
>one has ever invited them to reconsider it. For us to question the reliance
>on lectures, work sheets, drills and memorization, we must confront the
>possibility that we spent a good chunk of our childhoods doing stuff that
>was exactly as pointless as we suspected it was at the time.
>
>But cognitive scientists tell us that we're not passive receptacles, and
>learning isn't just a matter of heaping new information on top of the
>knowledge we already have. It is a matter of coming across something
>unexpected, something that can't easily be explained by the informal
>theories we have already developed. To resolve that conflict, we have to
>reorganize our way of understanding so we can accommodate the new reality
>we've just encountered.
>
>The best kind of teaching takes its cue from the understanding that people
>are active learners. In such a classroom, students are constantly making
>decisions, becoming participants in their own education. Each is part of a
>community of learners, coming to understand ideas from the inside out with
>one another's help. They still acquire facts and skills, but in a context
>and for a purpose. Their questions drive the curriculum. Learning to think
>like scientists and historians matters more than memorizing lists of
>definitions and dates.
>
>It's simply not true that one must learn to read before being able to read
>for understanding; it makes a lot more sense to learn to read by reading
>for understanding. Exactly the same may be said of math: Wise educators
>don't teach addition and subtraction as prerequisites for pursuing
>interesting problems; they teach these skills through interesting problems.
>Students--including disadvantaged and "at-risk" students--learn skills most
>effectively if they're invited from the beginning to think in a
>sophisticated way about the underlying concepts.
>
>Unfortunately, that kind of instruction is rare, and we are paying the
>price. Many newspapers carried big headlines last year when U.S. high
>schoolers proved significantly less adept at math than their counterparts
>around the globe. Less attention was given to the researchers' conclusion
>that our students are at a disadvantage precisely because of the prevalence
>of back-to-basics ideology in this country. American classrooms are devoted
>more to memorizing and practicing rules and skills, at the expense of
>helping students understand what they're doing.
>
>Consider the way many 13-year-old American students dealt with a problem
>that appeared in the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The
>question was: "An army bus holds 36 soldiers. If 1,128 soldiers are being
>bused to their training site, how many buses are needed?" If you divide
>1,128 by 36, you get 31 with a remainder of 12, meaning it would take 32
>buses to transport the soldiers. Most students did the division correctly,
>but fewer than one out of four got the question right. The most common
>answer was "31 remainder 12."
>
>The shrill calls for tougher standards have had the effect of accelerating
>the kind of instruction that produces this sort of robotic calculation.
>False claims about new math and the whole-language reading approach have
>driven out progressive kinds of teaching that help students become better
>thinkers--and lifelong learners. Also, the most impressive kind of
>instruction is very difficult to sustain when a central authority decrees a
>list of disconnected (and soon-to-be-forgotten) stuff that every third- or
>seventh- or 11th-grader is required to know. That's why one of the chief
>consequences of the Tougher Standards movement is that some of the best
>teachers and principals are getting tired--or fired.
>
>The mindless phrase "raising the bar" is based on the assumption that
>harder is always better--indeed, that the difficulty level of tests or
>texts is the most important criterion by which to judge them. A growing
>understanding of the limits of this sensibility helps to explain why a
>group of Virginia parents has organized in opposition to the Standards of
>Learning being rammed into that state's classrooms. It's why some
>educators, students and parents across the country are beginning to
>consider the possibility of boycotting standardized tests.
>
>The goal here is not to make school "fun" so much as it is to create a
>learning experience that arouses and sustains children's curiosity,
>enriching their capacities and responding to their questions in ways that
>are deeply engaging. Those who share that goal are likely to work to
>support schooling that is profoundly nontraditional--and of astonishingly
>higher standards.
>-----------
>Alfie Kohn is the author of the just-published "The Schools Our Children
>Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and 'Tougher Standards.'"
>(Houghton Mifflin).
>-----------
>=A9 Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
>******************************************************
>
>Similar articles by Alfie Kohn that have appeared recently:
>
>Why Students Lose When "Tougher Standards" Win A Conversation with Alfie=
Kohn
>by John O'Neil and Carol Tell
>
>Source: Educational Leadership Sept., 1999, Vol. 57, No. 1, pp. 18-23
>--------------
>Confusing Harder With Better
>
>Source: Education Week, 15 September 1999 (p. 68)
>
>**************************************************************
>*
>Jerry P. Becker
>Dept. of Curriculum & Instruction
>Southern Illinois University
>Carbondale, IL 62901-4610 USA
>Fax: (618) 453-4244
>Phone: (618) 453-4241 (office)
> (618) 457-8903 (home)
>E-mail: jbecker@siu.edu
>
>
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