|
|
|
|
|
|
| AFT Home > Publications > American Educator |
 |
|
|
|||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
Reality's Revenge: Research and Ideology E.D. Hirsch, Jr. The first step in strengthening education in America is to avoid the premature polarizations that arise when educational policy is confused with political ideology. In the United States today, the hostile political split between liberals and conservatives has infected the public debate over education--to such an extent that straight thinking is made difficult. Here's an example. Political liberals in the United States
advocate greater equality in per-pupil spending among different school
districts within a state. Many conservatives oppose shifting funds from one
school district to another. Jonathan Kozol's book Savage Inequalities
(1991) dramatized the injustices inflicted on poor children by the unfair
distribution of public resources, and recently courts in Texas, Kentucky,
and But one's political sympathies with equitable funding have no logical or practical connection with one's views about what ought to be happening inside schools once they are equitably funded. My political sympathies are with those who, like Kozol, advocate greater funding equity. But Kozol, perhaps influenced by his study at education school, expresses many "progressive" educational ideas that I oppose. I would label myself a political liberal and an educational conservative, or perhaps more accurately, an educational pragmatist. Political liberals really ought to oppose progressive educational ideas because they have led to practical failure and greater social inequity. The only practical way to achieve liberalism's aim of greater social justice is to pursue conservative educational policies. That is not a new idea. In 1932, the Communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci, writing from jail (having been imprisoned by Mussolini), was one of the first to detect the paradoxical consequences of the new "democratic" education, which stressed "life relevance" and other naturalistic approaches over hard work and the transmission of knowledge. Il Duce's educational minister, Giovanni Gentile, was, in contrast to Gramsci, an enthusiastic proponent of the new ideas emanating from Teachers College, Columbia University, in the United States. 1 Today, Gramsci's observations seem prescient:2 Gramsci saw that to denominate such methods as phonics and
memorization of the multiplication table as "conservative," while
associating them with the political right, amounted to a serious
intellectual error. That was the nub of the standoff between the two most
distinguished educational theorists of the political Left--Gramsci and Paulo
Freire. Freire, like Gramsci a hero of humanity, devoted himself to the
cause of Gramsci took the opposite view. He held that political
progressivism demanded educational conservatism. The oppressed class should
be taught to master the In this debate, history has proved Gramsci to be the better theorist and prophet. Modern nations that have adopted Gramscian principles have bettered the condition and heightened the political, social, and economic power of oppressed classes of people. By contrast, nations (including our own) that have stuck to the principles of Freire have failed to change the social and economic status quo. Gramsci was not the only observer to predict the inegalitarian consequences of "naturalistic," "project-oriented" "hands-on," "critical-thinking," and so-called "democratic" education. I focus on Gramsci as a revered theorist of the Left in order to make a strategic point. Ideological polarizations of educational issues tend to be facile and premature. The educational standpoint from which this article is
written may be accurately described as neither "traditional" nor
"progressive." It is pragmatic. Both educational traditionalists and
progressivists have tended to be far too dogmatic, polemical, and
theory-ridden to be reliable beacons for public policy. The pragmatist tries
to avoid simplifications and facile oppositions. Thus, this article will
argue that the best guide to education on a large scale is observation of
practices that have worked well on a large scale, coupled with as exact an
understanding as possible of the reasons why Reliable guidance depends on reliable research. Ideology and
research should be disentangled as much as humanly possible. Research
findings that are accurate This discussion of educational research treks through a certain amount of technical detail. The trip is worth taking because of the practical benefits that solid, mainstream research can yield. High-quality, refereed research summarizes the most reliable accumulated educational experience available to us. Its intelligent applications usually work much better in the classroom than mere hunches, because the conclusions of good, replicated research are far more often right than wrong. Good research represents the reality principle in education. But, since much educational research is concentrated in such "soft" subjects as history, sociology, and psychology, it necessarily contains unknown factors, uncontrolled variables, and ineradicable uncertainties. There is consensus on certain important matters, however, and I try to focus on some of the most widely agreed-upon and disinterested conclusions. By "disinterested," I refer to a cast of mind, not to a lack of concern. Because educational research is applied research, the topics studied will have been generated by direct, practical goals, but a good researcher's preferences will not have predetermine the results. In good medical research, too, practical aims decide what questions get asked and what money gets allocated, but the answers and the results of this applied research are dictated by the realities, not by preferences. The questions we ask of educational research sometimes reflect conflicted aims, such as: How can we educate everyone to a fairly high competence without holding back our ablest and most motivated students? Research can describe and quantify the trade-offs involved in such questions, but it cannot evaluate how to act upon them. Such evaluation is a matter of policy, and in a democracy, educational policy should be decided openly and with the most accurate knowledge available. Research is the servant of policy, not its master. But in another sense, good research is a kind of master,
exhibiting a certain finality. Although it cannot decide policy, it can at
least connect us with reality. Many of our failures in pre collegiate
education have been caused by the lack of fit between our dominant theories
and the realities they have claimed to represent. Our educational failures
reflect reality's revenge over inadequate ideas. The history of American
education since the 1930s has been the stubborn persistence of illusion in
the face of reality. Illusion has not been defeated. But since reality
cannot be defeated either, and What Is Higher-Order Thinking? The often repeated goal of the educational community-to inculcate general thinking skills-is not, however, soundly based in research. And that is stating the point too mildly. The idea that school can inculcate abstract, generalized skills for thinking, "accessing," and problem solving, and that these skills can be readily applied to the real world is, bluntly, a mirage. So also is the hope that a thinking skill in one domain can be readily and reliably transferred to other domains. Yet broad-gauged thinking abilities do exist. Most of us know well-educated people, even some not very bright ones, who have high general competence, can think critically about diverse subjects, can communicate well, can solve a diversity of problems, and are ready to tackle unfamiliar challenges. The belief that our schools should regularly produce such people appeals to both experience and common sense. If the goal didn't make apparent sense, it could hardly have retained its attractiveness to the educational community and the general public. Rightly understood, then, the goal of general competence does define one important aim of modern education. The task is not to change that goal but to interpret it accurately so that it corresponds to the nature of real-world competency and can actually be achieved. Two traditions in cognitive psychology are useful for understanding the nature of the critical-thinking, problem-solving skills that we wish to develop in our students. One tradition has studied the characteristic differences between expert and novice thinking, sometimes with the practical goal of making novices think more like experts as fast as possible. 3 Another tradition has investigated the differences between accurate andinaccurate thinking of the everyday newspaper-reading, bargain-hunting sort that all of us must engage in as nonexperts.4 Both sorts of study converge on the conclusion that, once basic underlying skills have been automated, the almost universal feature of reliable higher-order thinking about any subject or problem is the possession of a broad, well-integrated base of background knowledge relevant to the subject. This sounds suspiciously like plain common sense (i.e., accurate everyday thinking), but the findings entail certain illuminating complexities and details that are worth contemplating. Moreover, since the findings run counter to the prevailing fact-disparaging slogans of educational reform, it will be strategically useful to sketch briefly what research has disclosed about the knowledge-based character of higher-order thinking. The argument used by educators to disparage "merely" factual knowledge and to elevate abstract, formal principles of thought consists in the claim that knowledge is changing so rapidly that specific information is outmoded almost as soon as it has been learned. This claim goes back at least as far as Kilpatrick's Foundations of Method (1925). It gains its apparent plausibility from the observation that science and technology have advanced at a great rate in this century, making scientific and technological obsolescence a common feature of modern life. The argument assumes that there is an analogy between technological and intellectual obsolescence. Educators in this tradition shore up that analogy with the further claim that factual knowledge has become a futility because of the ever-growing quantity of new facts. The great cascade of information now flowing over the information highway makes it pointless to accumulate odd bits of data. How, after all, do you know which bits are going to endure? It is much more efficient for students to spend time acquiring techniques for organizing, analyzing, and accessing this perpetual Niagara of information.
Like the tool metaphor for education, the model of acquiring processing
techniques that would be permanently useful--as contrasted with acquiring
mere facts that are soon obsolete-would be highly attractive if it happened
to be workable and true. But the picture of higher thinking skills as
consisting of all-purpose processing and accessing techniques is not just a
partly inadequate metaphor--it is a totally misleading model
A useful illustration of the point is presented by Jill Larkin and Ruth
Chabay in a study of the ways in which novices and experts go about solving
a simple physics problem.5
The problem Larkin and Chabay set up is (in simple terms) to find out how
much friction
The expert physicist goes about the problem differently. He or she analyzes
the critical components of the situation before looking up equations and
makes two critical observations before even bothering with numbers. The
first observation is that the sled is going at a constant speed, so that, in
effect, there is no net residue of forces acting on the sled; there is an
exact balance between the force exerted horizontally by the
An important feature of higher-order thinking is this "cross-checking among inferences," based on a number of "richly connected" concepts. In higher-order thinking, we situate a problem in mental space on analogy with the way we situate ourselves in physical space--through a process of cross-checking or triangulation among relevant guideposts in our landscape of pre-existing knowledge. If we look at a problem from a couple of different angles, using a couple of different cues, and if our different estimates converge, we gain confidence in our analysis and can proceed with confidence. If, on the other hand, there is some dissonance or conflict between our cues, then warning signals go up, and we figure out which approach is more probable or fruitful. The procedure is clearly a very different and far more reliable mode of thinking than the error-prone method of applying formal techniques to looked-up data.
The example also illustrates the implausibility of the claim that
school-based information quickly grows outdated. How outmoded will the
knowledge used to
The physics example from Larkin and Chabay, if viewed in isolation, might be
taken to show that higher-order thinking depends on abstract concepts rather
than on factual details. But most research indicates that while the thinking
activities through which we reach conclusions and solve problems are not
crowded with literally remembered facts, neither are they made up of
abstract concepts aIone.7
The models, cues, and schemas through which we think critically are neither
pure concepts nor a literal recall of data but a complex and varied
combination of concepts, estimates, and factual examples. The key trait to
remember about higher-order thinking is its mixed character, Some of the most useful studies of higher-order thinking have been concerned with improving our ability to make intelligent and accurate estimates on which to base decisions in our ethical, economic, and civic lives.8 Since most of us cannot remember, and do not want to take the time to learn, all the details of the U.S. budget deficit and similar matters, we follow political and economic debates with a degree of impressionism that leaves many of us open to slogans and demagoguery. What kind of critical thinking can improve our ability to reach accurate conclusions on such issues? How can we protect ourselves and our students from oversimplifications, lies, and scapegoating conspiracy theories?
It is hard to see why a generalized skepticism, unsupported by accurate
knowledge, is superior to a generalized credulity, similarly unsupported.
Indeed, uninformed, generalized skepticism expresses itself as a form of
credulity, 'despite our inclination to call I'm-from-Missouri postures
"critical thinking." Our best hope for intelligent civic thought lies in our
ability to make good ballpark estimates that are close enough to The best research on this subject shows that neither fact-filled memorization nor large conceptual generalizations are effective modes of education for higher-order thinking about the complexities of the modern world. On the other hand, it has been shown that accurate factual estimates are necessary for understanding many issues. Norman Brown and Robert Siegler summarize the underlying problem for modem education:
The breadth-depth issue will always be with us and will always require
compromises and common sense. The particular compromise one makes will
depend
Whatever the underlying psychological mechanisms prove to be, research has
demonstrated that the teaching of a generous number of carefully chosen
exemplary facts within a meaningful explanatory context is a better method
for inducing insightful thinking than is any proposed alternative. These
alternatives include (1) the teaching of the whole factual domain, (2) the
teaching of the general principles only, and (3) the This finding has strong implications for curriculum making. The conclusion from cognitive research shows that there is an unavoidable interdependence between relational and factual knowledge and that teaching a broad range of factual knowledge is essential to effective thinking both within domains and among domains. Despite the popularity of the anti-fact motif in our progressive education tradition, and despite its faith in the power of a few "real-world" projects to educate students "holistically" for the modern world, no state board or school district has yet abandoned the principle of requiring a broad range of different subject matters in elementary school. Across the land, there are still universal requirements for mathematics, science, language arts, and social studies. Is this curricular conservatism a mere residue of traditional thinking, or does it indicate that common sense has not been defeated by Romantic theory? I favor the latter hypothesis. Despite the vagueness of state and district guidelines, their continued parceling out of schooling into different subject matters, against continued pleas for a more "integrated" and holistic approach, shows an implicit understanding that breadth of knowledge is an essential element of higher-order thinking. School boards have rightly assumed that the mental landscape needs to be broadly surveyed and mapped in order to enable future citizens to cope with a large variety of judgments. No effective system of schooling in the world has abandoned this principle of subject-matter breadth in early schooling.
For later schooling, however, a good deal of evidence--marshaled in the
superb research of John Bishop of Cornell--shows that in the last two years
of high school, and later on, the balance of utility shifts in favor of
deeper and more narrowly specialized training as the best education for the
modern world.11
This finding means that breadth in earlier schooling is all the more
essential to developing adequate higher-order thinking and living skills in
our citizens-to-be. If schooling is going to become more and more
specialized in later life, it is ever more important to map out the wider
intellectual landscape accurately and well in the earlier years. Otherwise,
we shall produce not critical thinkers but narrow, ignorant ones, subject to
delusion and rhetoric. This danger was uppermost in Jefferson's mind when he
advocated teaching of human history in early years. In our age, the same
argument holds for the domains connected with mathematics, science,
technology, and communication skills. A wide range of knowledge and a broad
vocabulary supply entry wedges into unfamiliar domains, thus
Consensus Research on Pedagogy
A wonderful example of this convergence was described by Abraham Pais in his
biography of Albert Einstein. At the end of the nineteenth century, the
existence of atoms and molecules was still a matter of debate among
scientists. In 1811, a physics professor, Amedeo Avogadro, put forth the
hypothesis that the same volume of any gas under the same temperature and
pressure must contain the same number of molecules. If molecules exist, then
a mole--that is, the molecular weight in grams of any substance--must
contain the same number of molecules, no matter what the substance. This
number, N, is still called "Avogadro's number." In the early 1900s, Einstein
reasoned that if totally different experimental ways of determining N
converged on the same result, then molecules must exist. In March 1905, he
submitted a paper computing N on the basis of blackbody radiation. In April
1905, his Ph.D. thesis described a new
The independent convergence on the fundamentals of effective pedagogy that exists today is less mathematical but nonetheless compelling. The same findings have been derived from three quite different and entirely independent sources: (1) small-scale pairings of different teaching methods; (2) basic research in cognition, learning, memory, psycholinguistics, and other areas of cognitive psychology; and (3) large-scale international comparative studies. The findings from all three sources are highly consistent with each other regarding the most effective pedagogical principles. Because real-world classroom observations are so completely affected by so many uncontrolled variables, the most persuasive aspect of the current picture is the congruence of the classroom-based observations with cognitive psychology--which is currently our best and most reliable source of insight into the processes of learning. In presenting these findings, my strategy will be briefly to go through some of the classroom studies and summarize their points of agreement. Then, I will relate those points to findings in cognitive psychology. Finally, I will comment on their congruence with the results of international comparisons. Not all readers may be interested in these research details, which are included for purposes of documentation, and may wish to turn to the summary conclusions at the end of this section. First, then, the classroom studies. New Zealand
Studies. In a series of "process-outcome" studies between 1970 and 1973,
researchers from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand found that time
spent focused on content and the amount of content taught were more
important factors "Follow Through"
Studies. Jane Stallings and her colleagues observed and evaluated
results from 108 first-grade classes and fifty-eight third-grade classes
taught by different methods. Programs having strong academic focus rather
than programs using the project-method approach produced the highest gains
in reading and math. Brophy and Good summarize the Stallings findings as
follows: "Almost anything connected with the classical recitation pattern of
teacher questioning (particularly direct, factual questions Brophy-Evertson
Studies. Between 1973 and 1979, Brophy and his colleagues conducted a
series of studies in which they first determined that some teachers got
consistently good results over the years, and others consistently bad ones.
They made close observations of the teacher behaviors associated,
respectively, with good and bad academic outcomes. Teachers who produced the
most achievement were focused on academics. They were warm but businesslike.
Teachers who produced the least achievement used a "heavily affective"
approach and were more concerned with In 1982, Brophy and
his colleagues summarized some of their later findings on the effective
teaching of beginning reading. These were the most salient points: Good-Grouws
Studies. For over a decade, Good and Grouws pursued process-outcome
studies that support the Brophy-Evertson findings. Their 1977 summary The Gage
Studies. N. L. Gage and his colleagues at Stanford University have
produced a series of process-outcome studies from the 1960s to the 1980s.
These Other Studies.
In 1986, Rosenshine and Stevens listed five other "particularly
praiseworthy" studies of effective teaching modes, all of which came to
similar conclusions. They summarize these conclusions as follows: The Brophy-Good Summary. In their final summation of research in this area, Brophy and Good make a comment worth quoting directly. They draw two chief conclusions from reviewing all of this research:
Before I go on to discuss correlations between these findings and research in cognitive psychology, I will digress to make an observation connecting these results to student motivation. While common sense might have predicted the academic superiority of structured, whole-class instruction over less academically focused, learner-centered instruction, it was unexpected that these studies should have demonstrated the motivational superiority of instruction centered on content rather than on students. Why is academically focused instruction more engaging and motivating to young learners than learner-centered instruction, more engaging and motivating to young learners than learner-centered instruction? I know of no
research that explains this finding, but I shall hazard the guess that
individualized, learner-centered instruction must be extremely boring to
most students most of the time, since, by mathematical necessity, they are
not receiving individualized attention most of the time. It may also be the
case that the slow pace and progress of less structured teaching may fail to
engage and motivate students. A teacher must be There is also a
basis in cognitive psychology for the finding that students should be taught
procedural skills to the point of "overlearning." "Overlearning" is a rather
unfortunate term of art, since intuitively it seems a bad idea to overdo
anything. But the term simply means that students should become able to
supply the right answer or to follow the right procedure very fast, without
hesitation. Through practice, they become so habituated to a procedure that
they no longer have to think or struggle to perform it. This leaves their
highly limited working memory free to focus on other aspects of the task at
hand. The classroom research cited above simply reported that teachers who
Automating word recognition leaves the mind free to focus on comprehension. This is precisely what studies of working memory in cognitive psychology would lead one to predict. The classroom
studies also stressed the importance of teaching new content in small
incremental steps. This is likewise explained by the limitations of working
memory, since the mind can handle only a small number of new things at one
time. A new thing has to become integrated with prior knowledge before the
mind can give it meaning, store it in memory, and attend to something else.
New learnings should not be introduced until feedback from students
indicates that they have mastered the old learnings quite well, though not,
as in the case of procedural skills, to the point of overlearning. Research
into long-term memory shows why this slow-but-sure method of feedback and
review works best: "Once is not enough" should be the motto of longterm
memory, though nonmeaningful review and boring repetition are not good
techniques. The classroom research cited above indicated that the best
teachers did not engage in incessant review. Memory studies suggest that the
best approach to achieving retention in long-term memory is "distributed
practice." Ideally, lessons should spread a Students learned and relearned fifty English-Spanish word pairs seven times to the same criterion. They were tested for recall and recognition eight years later. The original relearning sessions were spaced either at thirty-day intervals, at one-day intervals, or all on the same day. Eight years later, participants who were trained at thirty-day intervals recalled about twice as many words as those trained ,"" at one-day intervals, and both of these groups retained more than the subjects who were trained and retrained on the same day.21 It would follow
that a two-day interval is better than one day for introducing reviews. This
feature of learning explains the importance of a deliberate pace of
instruction, as all the classroom studies showed. Whatever practical
arrangements are chosen for classroom learning, the principle of content
rehearsal is absolutely essential for fixing content in long-term memory.
Until that fixation occurs, content learning cannot be That receiving
continual feedback from the students is essential to good teaching is a
robust finding in all the studies, and also gets support from research into
both short-term and long-term memory. Feedback indicates whether the
material has been learned well enough to free short-term (i.e., working)
memory for new tasks. Moreover, the process of engaging in question-answer
and other feedback practices constitutes Finally, research
in cognitive psychology supports the finding that classes should often begin
with a review or an analogy that connects the new topic with knowledge
students already have. Psycholinguistic studies have shown that verbal
comprehension power- These few principles concerning working memory, long-term memory, and the best prior conditions for meaningful learning explain the effectiveness of almost all the practices that were found to be effective in the classroom studies. Their congruence with mainstream psychology was well observed by Rosenshine and Stevens when they stated that research in cognitive psychology
Now I shall turn to
some data from international studies on classroom practice. The fullest such
research has been conducted by Harold Stevenson and his several colleagues
in the United States, China, Japan, and Taiwan, who observed 324 Asian and
American mathematics classrooms divided between first grade and fifth grade.
Each classroom was studied for more than twenty hours by trained observers
who Classroom practice
is not of course the only factor that has caused this huge difference in
outcomes. Chinese and Japanese adults value mathematics; they are well
educated in the subject, are able to teach math to their children outside of
school. Nonetheless, classroom practice is a highly important factor in
determining these results. (In their book The Learning Gap, Stevenson and
Stigler effectively dispose of the argument that our inferior classroom
results are owing to our greater " diversity."
25)
In light of the contrast in outcomes, it is no surprise that the activities
that typically occur in Asian classrooms follow the effective pedagogical
principles deduced from small-scale American studies and from cognitive
psychology. By contrast, the activities that typically occur in American
classrooms run counter to those research findings. Lest To illustrate the agreement between the small-scale intranational studies and the international studies, I shall first summarize the small-scale research findings in each category, then the corresponding findings from the international studies. Social
Atmosphere International
studies. The most frequent form of evaluation used by American teachers
was praise, a technique that is rarely used in either Taiwan or Japan.
Praise cuts off discussion and highlights the teacher's role as the
authority. It also encourages students to be satisfied with their
performance rather than informing them about where they need improvement.
Chinese and Japanese teachers have a low tolerance for errors, and when they
occur, they seldom ignore them. Discussing errors helps to clarify
misunderstandings, encourage argument and justification, and involve students
in the exciting quest of assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the
various alternative solutions that have been proposed.26 International studies. The Asian teacher stands in front of the class as a cue that the lesson will soon start. The room quiets. "Let us begin," says the teacher in Sendai. After brief reciprocal bows between pupils and teacher, the teacher opens the class with a description of what will be accomplished during the class period. From that point until the teacher summarizes the day's lesson and announces, "We are through," the Japanese elementary school class-like those in Taiwan and China-consists of teacher and students working together toward the goals described at the beginning of the class. Contrast this scene with a fifth-grade American mathematics classroom that we recently visited. Immediately after getting the students' attention, the teacher pointed out that today was Tuesday, "band day," and that all students in the band should go to the band room. "Those of you doing the news report today should meet over there in the corner," he continued. He then began the mathematics class with the remaining students by reviewing the solution to a computation problem that had been included in the previous day's homework. After this brief review the teacher directed the students' attention to the blackboard where the day's assignment had been written. The teacher then spent most of the rest of the period walking about the room monitoring the children's work, talking to individual children about questions or errors, and uttering "shush" whenever the students began talking among themselves. This example is typical.27 Pace International
studies. The pace is slow, but the outcome is impressive. Japanese
teachers want their students to be reflective and to gain a deep
understanding of mathematics. Each concept and skill is taught I with great
thoroughness, thereby eliminating the need I to teach the concept again
later. Covering only a few problems does not mean that the lesson turns out
to be short on content. In the United States, curriculum planners, textbook
publishers, and teachers themselves seem to believe that students learn more
effectively if they solve a large number of problems rather Clarity International
studies. Irrelevant interruptions often add to children's difficulty in
perceiving lessons as a coherent whole. In American observations, the
teacher interrupted the flow of the lesson with irrelevant comments, or the
class was interrupted by someone else in 20 percent of all first-grade
lessons and 47 percent of all fifth-grade lessons. In Sendai, Taipei, and
Beijing, interruptions occurred less than 10 percent of Managing and
Monitoring International
studies. Chinese and Japanese teachers rely on students to generate
ideas and evaluate the correctness of the ideas. The possibility that they
will be called upon to state their own solution keeps Asian students alert,
but this technique has two other important functions. First, it engages
students in the lesson, increasing their motivation by making them feel they
are participants in a group process. Second, it conveys a more realistic
impression of how knowledge is acquired. American teachers are less likely
to give students opportunities to respond at such length. Although a great
deal of interaction appears to occur in American classrooms-with students
and teachers posing questions and giving answers-American teachers generally
ask questions that are answerable with a yes or a no or a short phrase. They
seek a correct answer and continue calling on students until one produces
it.30 International studies. When children must work
alone for long periods of time without guidance or reaction from the teacher, they begin to lose focus on
the purpose of their activity. Asian teachers assign less
seatwork than American teachers; furthermore, they *** Since it was predominantly research into effective
American classrooms that, in the small-scale studies, originally determined
these criteria' of effective teaching, the first question that comes to mind is: Why do
American teachers so consistently contravene the results of American research, whereas Asian teachers
consistently follow its imperatives? In an important
study of classroom effectiveness that reported similarly
The very thing that Horace Mann called upon teacher-training schools to do and that the American public assumes that such schools are doing-the teaching of effective pedagogy-is a domain of training that, according to both sympathetic and unsympathetic observers, gets short shrift in our education schools.33 Instead, it is mainly theory, and highly questionable theory at that, that gets more attention in education school courses. That point should be stated even more strongly: Not only do our teacher-training schools decline to put a premium on nuts-and-bolts classroom effectiveness, but they promote ideas that actually run counter to consensus research into teacher effectiveness. This consensus among present-day reformers is well summarized by Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde in their 1993 book, Best Practice.
Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde then list twenty-five "LESS" and "MORE" admonitions on which all these organizations agree. Among them are the following:
The authors praise the current consensus on these "child-centered" principles for being "progressive, developmentally appropriate, research based, and eminently teachable." These claims are not, however, "research based" in the way the authors imply. Quite the contrary. No studies of children's learning in mainstream science support these generalizations. With respect to effective learning, the consensus in research is that their recommendations are worst practice, not "best practice." This Alice in Wonderland reversal of reality has been accomplished largely by virtue of the rhetorical device that I have called "premature polarization." Discovery learning is labeled "progressive," and whole-class instruction "traditional." Under such descriptors, one mode is assumed to be active and engaging, the other passive and boring; one holistic and indirect, the other step-by-step and direct. As a result of such terminological polarization, the term "direct instruction," which is the mode advocated by a number of teachers and educational specialists, has come in for some heavy criticism from anti-traditionalists: The distinction, however, between direct and indirect instruction is an unfortunate simplification of some complex issues. It overlooks, for instance, the different pedagogical requirements for procedural learning and content learning and thus neglects the different pedagogical emphases needed at the different ages and stages of learning. Effective procedural learning requires "overlearning," and hence plenty of practice. Content learning is amenable to a diversity of methods that accommodate themselves to students' prior knowledge, habits, and interests. What the
international data show very clearly is that both procedural and content
learning are best achieved in a focused environment that preponderantly
emphasizes whole-class instruction but that is punctuated by small-group or
individualized work. The only truly
general principle that seems to emerge from process-outcome research on
pedagogy is that focused and guided instruction is far more effective than
naturalistic, discovery, learn-at-your-own-pace instruction. But within the
context of focused and guided instruction, almost anything goes, and what
works best with one group of students may not work best with another group
with similar backgrounds in The idea of
teaching as drama or as storytelling gains a great deal of credence from its
agreement with demonstrably effective classroom teaching and with an ancient
and highly effective tradition, particularly in that subtle domain of
teaching consensus values and virtues. How do we teach and model such values
as independent thinking, toleration, respect, aspiration, civility;
resistance to the mob, and at the same time The focused narrative or drama lies midway between narrow drill and practice (which has its place) and the unguided activity of the project method (which may also occasionally have a place). Sir Philip Sidney argued (in 1583!) that stories are better teachers than philosophy or history, because philosophy teaches by dull precept (guided instruction) and history teaches by uncertain example (the project method). The story, however, joins precept and example together, thus teaching and delighting at the same time. Thus Sidney in the sixteenth century:
Elsewhere in his
essay, Sidney makes it clear that good history can also be a good story that
combines precept and example. Excellent classroom teaching has a narrative
and dramatic feel even when there is a lot of interaction between the
students and the teacher-it has a definite theme, and a beginning, middle,
and end. This teaching principle holds even for mathematics and science.
When every lesson has a That recent
psychological research should yield insights that confirm what Plato and
Sidney said about stories should probably make us more, not less, confident
in the results of this recent research. Education is as old as humanity. The
breathless claim that technology and the information age have radically
changed the nature of the education of young children turns out to be, like
most breathless claims in education, unsupported by scholarship. Nor should
current studies surprise us when they show that a naturalistic approach,
lacking a definite story line and a sharp focus, has the defect Sidney saw
in history as a teacher of humankind: it "draweth no necessary consequence."
There is a modest place for discovery learning, just as there is for drill
and practice. But research indicates that, most of the time, clearly
focused, well-plotted E.D. Hirsch, Jr., a professor at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, is president and founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation and author of Cultural Literacy and The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. This article is excerpted from his new book, The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them. Copyright 1996 by E.D. Hirsch, Jr. Published by arrangement with Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Endnotes
Articles not posted online are available. To request a copy, please send an e-mail to amered@aft.org
Need the Adobe Acrobat Reader for our
pdf files?
|
||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||
American Federation of Teachers, AFL•CIO - 555 New Jersey Avenue, NW - Washington, DC 20001 Copyright by the American Federation of Teachers, AFL•CIO. All
rights reserved. Photographs |
