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Written by Alden S. Blodget
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Friday, 02 January 2009 13:50 |
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Been There
Another workshop. Another late afternoon, the light fading as the enthusiasm and energy of the presenter grow. Change is in the air—new ideas about learning and teaching, new programs, new ways to motivate and engage our students. As balloons of promise fill the room, the presenter feels wariness begin to stir in her audience. She can almost read their minds: “This sounds like too much work.” “Here we go again.” “I have been doing it my way for years, and it works fine.” “If it ain’t broke …” And so she offers the inevitable reassurance: “Don’t worry. I’m sure most of you already do this.”
My god, I am tired of hearing that sentence. I’ve listened to it for years—the magic words for deflecting change, for keeping it at bay. Teachers and administrators use it to protect themselves from really having to confront or think deeply about fundamentally new ideas. “I already do that.” Presto, the new idea is safely transformed into an old idea.
Today, even those with the new ideas also use the sentence as a way of converting resistance to acceptance. It’s a sales strategy, they hope. But what’s the point of selling a new idea that is fundamentally misunderstood and, therefore, can never be implemented? You can’t change minds or practices unless people truly understand an idea and push themselves to do the hard work of thinking about it and being open to the possibility that the new idea is superior to the old one or that the old one needs to be improved, if not replaced.
I listened to the sentence just a few weeks ago at a presentation about what the International Baccalaureate program is all about. “I’m sure you already do most of this,” said the presenter. Well, we don’t. We don’t create international understanding; we don’t develop in young people the skills to think critically and rigorously or open them to the possibility that other cultures, other ideas, might be as valid as their own. If we did these things, our school would be transformed.
I listen to the sentence every summer at workshops that present new, even unpublished research on the connections among thinking, learning and emotion. The participants sigh and grumble, “We heard that in grad school. We already do that. We know emotion is important to learning.”
“We already do that,” so nothing changes. Schools really are not fundamentally different from what they were a hundred years ago when John Dewey suggested that confining children to chairs and talking at them might not be the best way to educate them. Instead of really engaging with new ideas, everyone makes nice—I’m ok; you’re ok. We already do that; you already do that.
A friend of mine who is a good salesperson believes change requires this sort of gentle, cajoling approach. “Change that announces itself and brazenly marches through the door seldom works,” she says. “Change has to sneak up on you. Change has to sidle close and worm its way into your thinking and get under your skin if it is meant to really take hold.” You get people talking about an idea, get it in the air, get people comfortable with it, and change starts to happen; it’s evolutionary.
I don’t agree with her. Here is my experience with comfort and sidling and evolution. In the ‘80s, some of us at my school thought maybe Dewey was right and learning could be improved by replacing lectures with much more open-ended discussion. So we began using discussions in our classes, and students talked about the change, and we cajoled others to try it. We did a lot of sidling, and soon everyone was pretty much saying, “I already do that.”
Superficially, they were correct. Students were generally talking much more in classes than they had been, but a closer look revealed that fundamental change had not taken place. Lectures and open-ended discussion are fundamentally different. Lectures involve the delivery of truth from authority, while discussion involves constructing truth, often several differing truths, among individuals. What we found in many classrooms (what we still find today) were lectures disguised as discussions, games of guess-what’s-in-the-teacher’s-head—which are not effective as lecture or discussion.
Comfortable change is an oxymoron, and trying to make it comfortable by suggesting or accepting that we “already do that” simply lets everyone off the hook so no one has to face the inconvenience and hard work of engaging new ideas and, perhaps, admitting that the old ways aren’t working. Comfort fuzzes the edges of change, creates safety and allows for the illusion of change. Fuzzy change has the benefit of being non-threatening and the liability of being amorphous enough to embrace just about anything with the right name attached. “Discussion” comes to mean simply allowing students to talk more, thus creating the illusion of not lecturing while maintaining the essence of the lecture—the presentation of Authority’s truth.
So what can we do instead? Well, perhaps we can do what we expect our students to do when we expose them to a new idea or a new skill: Wrestle with it. Reconstruct it in order to make sure we understand it and can explain it in our own words, can illustrate it and apply it and see its implications. Try it out to see if it works. Subject the results to peer-review. Adopt it, reject it or amend it.
Oh, right. We already do that. |
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 03 January 2009 13:27 )
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Written by Alden S. Blodget
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Thursday, 18 December 2008 13:26 |
 Note: This entry continues the focus on one of the principles on which Sustainable Teaching is founded: Knowledge in the world outside schools is not departmentalized.
Teachers Without Borders
OK, imagine this. You are in this big building with lots of rooms with different signs on each door. You come to a room with a sign saying “hammers,” and you go in and this young, enthusiastic guy shows you pictures of lots of different hammers and talks about what they can do, though you never get to hold one. A bell rings, and you go down the hall to a room for “screwdrivers,” and there is a very nice, middle-aged woman who tells you all about the wonders of screwdrivers (“Much better than hammers,” she whispers), though, again, you never get to use one. And so the day goes; you wander from room to room—to “saws” and “tape measures” and “rasps,” separate tools that you rarely get to use and whose relationships to the others are never mentioned, no word about how they might work together to accomplish anything. And then, at the end of the day, you find yourself outside in the woods needing to build a house.
Well, I don’t think I need to beat you to death with the analogy to school. Where else but in school are the skills and knowledge, the tools, we need to solve problems in the real world divvied up, claimed and jealously guarded in separate little departments? Despite decades of talk about interdisciplinary courses, it remains monumentally difficult to get these departments to work together—even those with the most obvious relationships: math and science, English and foreign languages, history or the arts and any other department. I still recall the great irony of graduate school, working on an MFA in theatre in the School of Communications and Theatre and not being allowed to take any courses in the communications wing.
This monolithic learning has consequences: it affects how we think and how we approach problems. Writing, for example, belongs to the English department. I used to teach theatre and asked my students to write analyses of characters they would play or of scripts they would design or direct, and they became outraged when I focused on the writing itself. “This isn’t an English class,” they shouted, as though the writing and their analysis could be separated when the goal is communication. At some point, most history or science teachers have heard that whining question, “Does grammar count?”
Teachers also readily reinforce the notion that writing is an English thing. Even in schools that flirt with some form of writing-across-the-curriculum, teachers tend to expect English teachers to accept primary responsibility for teaching writing and are quite comfortable saying, “I can’t teach writing. I’m a math teacher.” While they are occasionally willing to ask their students to write, they are unwilling to work with them to improve their writing—improve the clarity of their communication (which does not mean they must be grammar whizzes).
The really scary results of the general failure of schools to teach students that problems don’t come in tidy boxes marked “English” or “science” or “history” are also evident in adult blunders of immense consequence—like, for example, our decisions about Iraq. Here was a problem that demanded analysis from several vantage points: history (not just the history of that country but the history of guerrilla warfare), sociology (the relationships between Shiites and Sunnis), mathematics (how many troops do we need?), science (Hans Blix vs. distant conjecture), psychology (likely behavior following decades of dictatorship), foreign language (anyone here speak Arabic or understand the culture?), literature and the arts (what do they tell us about the Iraqis?). What we got instead was a lot of wild-west rhetoric about good guys and bad guys—not even an insightful moral analysis from the philosophy department.
The point is that the problems that confront us as adults tend to demand skills and knowledge that cross over these artificial academic departmental borders, so it is important for us to help young people develop an ability to move easily between domains by establishing the connections among them. Perhaps, at some early ages, it is more efficient to focus separately on the use of the hammer and the screwdriver, but research has certainly shown us that transference of skills from one domain to the next must be taught, not assumed, so at some point (if not from the start), students might benefit much more from eliminating the borders.
I know of at least one high school that encourages students to build their program of study around an area of interest—genetics, psychology, writing fiction, music, film-making, whatever. The belief is that as students delve more deeply into problems in an area that interests them, they will discover that they need skills and knowledge that typically get labeled as “belonging” to a particular traditional department. One thing will lead to another, so they will learn historical knowledge that is relevant to their interests, as well as research and critical reading skills, writing, problem-solving, the ability to detect bias, curiosity, creativity, skepticism—and on and on through the tools of scholarship.
Imagine this. Imagine teachers without borders, colleagues accustomed to working together. You come into the woods excited to build some kind of house, and you find all these people with the skills and knowledge of building, boxes filled with wonderful tools, and they can help you learn to build anything you want. They can even help you work with others to build a village. |
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Last Updated ( Monday, 22 December 2008 13:23 )
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Written by Alden S. Blodget
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Wednesday, 10 December 2008 13:47 |
 This blog continues the focus on one of the principles on which Sustainable Teaching was founded: Students need to do the work of writers, historians, scientists (etc.) in order to think like writers, historians, scientists (etc.).
Can Do
I had an epiphany when I was a junior in high school. I loved science and was a good student and planned to major in chemistry in college. My teacher had just assigned us the task of designing an experiment, and I can still picture the classroom as I recall the terror of that moment when the bottom fell out of my life—the cold black slab of the lab table, the rows of desks, the teacher wiping chalk dust from his hands.
I realized I had absolutely no ability to invent a question, let alone design an experiment. I couldn’t think like a scientist. The foundation that I had constructed from the tens of thousands of facts I had memorized and that had supported me for years crumbled. I quite suddenly discovered that “knowing” lots of facts did not a scientist make.
Perhaps if my teachers had spent more time encouraging me to observe the world, to notice and ask questions, perhaps if they had taught me the skills to figure out how to try to answer my questions, I might have become a scientist. Instead, they insisted I memorize answers to questions I never asked. My classmates and I were no more scientists or historians than is an encyclopedia, no more writers than is a dictionary.
If schools want to graduate students with a real understanding of the concepts they study, the skills to use the concepts and the ability to make intelligent career choices, it seems to make sense to let them begin to experience what it means to think like and do the real work of historians, mathematicians, writers and scientists. In order to do that, teachers need both to teach the required skills and to model the work. Teachers have to help students think like practitioners, which means that teachers themselves need to walk the walk. As I discovered when I became a teacher.
In my first years as an English teacher, I tried to teach writing by teaching the standard five-paragraph essay. It wasn’t until I started writing essays and (bad) short stories that I realized the distance between the writing I was teaching and the writing I was doing. Writers don’t think in terms of five paragraphs. The process of writing is so much messier and more chaotic and individual than the assembly-line approach of traditional schooling with its brain-storming-topic-sentences-introduction-body-conclusion artificiality. Becoming an amateur writer made me a better teacher. Instead of trying unsuccessfully to teach my students a formula for writing, I began working to help them think like writers. The results were a few more successes and a lot more motivation and engagement because they had to start by thinking about what mattered to them enough to want to express it.
The most effective teachers I have known are those who, in addition to being teachers, are themselves scientists or writers or mathematicians—either serious part-time professionals or serious amateurs. For many years, the majority of teacher-practitioners tended to be in the arts and sports, and, as a result of making art and playing sports, students emerged knowing much more about what it was to function and think like an artist or an athlete, even if they didn’t ultimately pursue these paths as adults. They also found the arts and sports engaging because they generally worked with teachers and coaches who were themselves artists and athletes and who loved doing what they did.
In the other areas, in the science and history classrooms, students didn’t do science or history; they memorized the results of what real scientists and historians produced. What their teachers modeled was teaching, which mostly meant lecturing and explaining and testing and grading, not formulating questions, hypothesizing, researching and drawing their own conclusions.
Over the past several years, I have been fortunate to see increasing numbers of teacher-practitioners enter the classroom. In addition to teacher-artists, I have worked with exceptional teacher-scientists and teacher-writers and teacher-mathematicians, and I have seen the effects of these teachers on their students. Michelle’s memory of her scientist-teacher is typical: “I still remember one of our term exams when we extracted copper from malachite ore in the lab and then had to act as consulting groups for a large copper mine and advise the owners on how to deal with their waste. That that one exercise has stuck with me for eight years is a testament to Jim's teaching ability.”
Jim is a teacher, and he is also an active scientist who studies bats and wolves and ecology and marine biology. He involves his students in his studies—leads them through the rainforests and oceans and jungles of Australia, Peru, Ghana and Thailand. He teaches them the skills they need to do the work of scientists and models for them the application of those skills to the real world. He had them study pollution in a local stream and meet with the town conservation commission to propose solutions to the problem.
Teacher-practitioners like Jim are exciting to be around, and their excitement often inspires their students. But most important, their example and approach tend to teach students essential intellectual skills, those needed to understand history, see the world mathematically, transform experience into metaphor—or design an experiment.
Those-who-can do—and those talented few who can also teach teach their students to do. |
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Last Updated ( Monday, 22 December 2008 13:19 )
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Written by Alden S. Blodget
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Thursday, 04 December 2008 16:29 |
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Getting Fired Up
 Here’s a story you may have heard: A little girl was watching her mother prepare a ham for cooking. When the mother cut off the tapered end of the ham, the little girl asked her why. “I always cut the end off. That’s how you cook a ham,” said the mother. The little girl persisted. “But why, mommy?” Her mother said, “Go ask Grandma. She taught me how to cook a ham.” So the little girl went to her grandmother and asked her why she cut off the end of the ham. “Well,” said her grandmother, “I never had a pan that was large enough for a ham, so I always had to cut the end off to make it fit.”
So much human behavior seems to become just the way we do things because that’s how we’ve always done them or because that’s the way others have done them before us. We tend to teach what we have been taught and as we have been taught. And people don’t like to change these traditions or habits, even when they get a larger pan.
Lord knows we have all worked with too many teachers and administrators whose animosity to change seems deeply embedded in their DNA: aggressive resisters who use politics and erect procedural obstacles, passive resisters who appear to accept change but who continue the same old practices in the privacy of their classrooms. Anyone who has tried to introduce a new idea to a school has probably felt the same sort of frustration as this colleague from Ohio: “It is hard to get others fired up here about anything that doesn't have to do with Buckeye football.”
And yet, listen to teachers talking in the faculty room, especially in the late spring right before graduation. What do you hear? Just below the veneer of cynicism are regret and guilt over the skill level of so many of the seniors. Teachers wake up at 4am agonizing about George, who seems to hate their class, or Mary, who still can’t write, still can’t solve a quadratic equation. I don’t know a teacher who focuses more on her successes than she does on her failures, and because teachers rarely succeed in reaching everyone in a class, they spend every day dealing with failure.
So while teachers may be like everyone else in not liking change, it would also seem that they would be more open to new ideas that offer some potential for increasing their success with students. Yet that is not generally the case. Why not?
Well, dealing with daily failure does something to people, especially to people who live under constant criticism and pressure to produce high test scores and cover lots of material. It can make them defensive, unwilling to admit, even to themselves, that they need to change things. Then add the crushing teaching loads, the extra duties, the meetings, the need to respond to parents and meet administrative obligations. Who has time to experiment with new ideas? Who has time to work with colleagues? Who has the energy?
Still, there are teachers and schools that manage to overcome the obstacles and become agents of exciting change, so there must be conditions that trump resistance and that foster change. In my experience, here are some of the most critical—time, money, support, leadership:
- Hiring teachers when students are on vacation in the summer so teachers have the time and space needed to investigate learning and teaching, to create, plan and work with other adults without the immediate pressure of student needs.
- Encouraging teachers to talk openly about their successes and failures in order to identify what works and what doesn’t.
- Inviting teachers to forget about teaching and revisit the experience of being a learner—the conditions that resulted in their best learning, the process of progress and regression, their motivation, the role of their emotions and social relationships, the difficulties they encountered.
- Involving a critical mass of teachers (preferably all teachers) to identify and develop ideas and strategies to help students become better learners; create a process to support changes—usually involving reading, research and workshops that focus on promising theories and practices.
- Ensuring adequate time, training and practice for implementing new teaching techniques—replace the silly one-shot “in-service” workshops with sustained professional development.
- Creating systemic changes that support curricular and teaching changes and that help everyone resist the inevitable forces of inertia and gravity—new approaches to grading systems, course loads, homework, graduation requirements, scheduling, how academic departments are formed, etc.
- Being transparent and providing constant education to parents, alumni, donors and prospective families.
- Providing meaningful administrative leadership and conceptual understanding to create bottom-up/top-down harmony, ideally involving administrators who are also classroom teachers.
- Creating a dynamic teacher-evaluation process, as well as assessment tools to track the effectiveness of the new program.
There isn’t a teacher alive who doesn’t want students to learn, who doesn’t want to find better ways to help students. The desire to improve is natural to real teachers, so resistance to change must be a symptom of a systemic problem, not a sign of stubbornness, complacency or sloth.
Time to cook the ham in a new pan. |
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 09 December 2008 13:52 )
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The Best Thing About Teaching |
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Written by Alden S. Blodget
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Friday, 28 November 2008 00:00 |
 The Best Thing About Teaching
The Seattle Times reports another major ambitious initiative by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, this one aimed at improving teaching by supporting R&D for schools: "Doctors aren't left alone in their offices to try to design and test new medicines," Bill Gates said. "They're supported by a huge medical-research industry. Teachers need the same kind of support."
Though I admire the Gateses’ commitment to education, I don’t believe they have accurately identified the problem. Educational research may not be as rich or vast as medical research—the profit motive of the pharmaceutical industry has no parallel in education (unless you consider the testing industry). But education has a long history of meaningful research that has attempted to support and guide teachers for at least a century, and the past two decades, since the invention of the fMRI, have been rich in significant discoveries about how the brain learns.
During my own years in the classroom, I had the support of thinkers and researchers like John Dewey and Jean Piaget. I still remember when Lee Kneflekamp, then a young researcher working at Harvard with William Perry, visited my school to talk about the reasons teachers have difficulties communicating with students. Since then, I have profited from the research and writing of and, in many cases, personal contact with Howard Gardner, Kurt Fischer and, especially, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, whose research into the connections between emotion and thinking offered powerful support to my teaching.
Today, researchers and educators are starting to form exciting partnerships, creating research schools that may someday resemble teaching hospitals—places where researchers, teachers, students and teaching interns come together. Increasingly, research is informing teaching, and teaching is informing research.
The support provided by researchers is not the issue. The issue is creating the time and incentives for all teachers to study the research and design new lessons and new teaching strategies that will transform education. The issue is making teaching a full-time profession like medicine or the law or business. The issue involves money and attitude.
What doctor or lawyer or CEO is paid to work 180 days of the year and then spend the rest of the year on vacation? Sure, some teachers spend many unpaid hours in the summer developing courses for the next year; some attend workshops or take graduate courses, and others read the latest research about learning. But too many do not continue to develop as professionals. Economic necessity drives many to paint houses, work in department stores, become commercial fishermen or wait tables. And some have simply died on the job and mark time until they can collect their meager pensions.
The point is that teaching isn’t yet a profession like medicine. The 180 days for which teachers are paid are crammed with large numbers of children who need constant attention. It’s monumentally difficult to find the time to read the latest research, internalize it and experiment with new ideas when your mind is on the 100 essays waiting to be corrected, the plans for tomorrow’s five lessons, the problem Mary had understanding today’s lesson, the emails and voice mails that need responses, the meetings and ancillary duties.
What education needs is a longer school year for teachers, not for students (at least not yet). Teachers need time to work together, free of the constant demands of students. Teachers spend entirely too much time professionally alone and exhausted. They are isolated from their colleagues by their teaching schedules and the needs of their students.
To achieve meaningful, real educational improvement, the kind envisioned by the Gateses, the adults in schools must work together and with researchers to develop and test the latest discoveries and theories about learning. Teaching must finally become a profession like any other—complete with professional salaries and standards. Achieving this goal will require money and an entirely different mindset about teaching—an end to the vacation mentality. The best thing about teaching must stop being the three months in the summer.
Summer is a great time for kids to get jobs painting houses and waiting tables. And it is a great time for teachers to work with each other to improve the schools to which the students will return in September. The best thing about teaching is helping students to learn, which means having paid time to apply the abundant new research to teaching. |
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 10 December 2008 16:57 )
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