Joel Westheimer's talk on citizenship and education

I had the pleasure of skipping hockey tonight to listen to Joel Westheimer talk about citizenship and education. Here is some of what I learned:

• Students may rarely see teachers being human because they see them so often just in their classroom teaching. Students rarely get to see teachers engage with other adults and agree and disagree in a way that model citizenship.
• In the last few decades, we have seen a narrowing of the curriculum to literacy and numeracy. We have moved away from broad goals of schooling to very narrow academic goals that can be measured on bubble tests.
• Imagine you were visiting a school in a totalitarian nation governed by a single-party dictatorship. Would the educational experiences be markedly different from the ones experienced by children in your local school?
• Should anything be different from schools in a totalitarian dictatorship and a school in a democracy?
• What responsibility do schools have to be democratic so that children can grow up to be adults who are democratic?
• Having standards is not the same as standardization. 
• Census testing is an unnecessary burden. Sample testing tells what we need to know and more efficiently. 
• There is no teacher who belongs to the group of teachers who don't care about whether children learn how to read, write or do arithmetic. Most teachers want more than the basics for every child they teach. The back to basics movement is a straw man argument that needlessly attacks teachers.
• The Alberta Teachers' Association's A Great School for All is impressive. 
• We don't remember teachers who successfully made their classroom more uniform or standardized with other teachers.
• Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) may be an unintended consequence to standardization of curriculum and assessment in schools. 
• There is a disturbing trend among teachers' professional learning communities. Standardization is trumping quality.
• Teacher's "subjective" grades are a better predictor of students' successes in post-secondary than the "objective scores" from standardized tests and the SAT.
• Opt out movement from standardized testing in the United States is picking up remarkable steam.
• Economists don't know much about the economy and yet they speak about education like they know what they are talking about.
• Less of life is about individual accomplishments and more about collective teamwork.
• In the workplace, people who work together are called collaborative. In school, students who help each other out are called cheaters.

Students from a totalitarian nation

No Child Left Thinking

This was written by Joel Westheimer who is the author of What Kind of Citizen? Westheimer tweets here.

This is an excerpt from Westheimer's book.

by Joel Westheimer

Imagine you were visiting a school in a totalitarian nation governed by a single-party dictatorship. Would the educational experiences be markedly different from the ones experienced by children in your local school? That may sound like a facetious question, but I do not intend it that way. It seems plausible that good lessons in multiplication,  chemistry, or a foreign language -- perhaps with some adjustments for cultural relevance and suitability -- would serve equally well in most parts of the world. So if you stepped into a school somewhere on the planet and politely asked to observe some of the lessons, would you be able to tell whether you were visiting a school in a democratic nation or a totalitarian one? Or, conversely, if students from a totalitarian nation were secretly transported to a school in your neighbourhood to continue their lessons with new teachers and a new curriculum, would they be able to tell the difference?

The children in your local school would probably learn how to read and write, just like students do in, say, North Korea or China. Students in your local schools might learn to add numbers, do fractions, and solve algebraic equations. But that's what students in Uzbekistan learn too. Maybe students in your local school learn how not to hit one another, to follow the rules, and not to break any laws. They might sing the national anthem and learn about steroids and the life cycle of the glowworm. Maybe they even put on plays, learn a musical instrument, and paint pictures. I know of schools in Eritrea and Belarus that do those things too.

My point is that citizens in nondemocratic countries governed by a single-party authoritarian regime, or even a military junta, learn a lot of the same things in school that our children learn. So what goals would be different for schools in a democratic society? For example, do students in democratic countries learn how to participate in public decision-making (the kind of participation that is required for democracy to function properly)? Are they taught to see themselves as individual actors who work in concert with others to create a better society? Are they taught the skills they need to think for themselves and to govern collectively?

Most of us would like to believe that they do. While a school in North Korea or China might be teaching students blind allegiance to their nation's leaders and deference to the social and political policies those leaders enact, we would expect that schools in the United States or Canada or Finland would teach students the skills and dispositions needed to evaluate for themselves the benefits and draw backs of particular policies and government practices. We would not be surprised to learn, for example, that North Korean children are taught to abide by an "official history" handed down by the single-party authoritarian regime. After all, a school curriculum that teaches one unified, unquestioned version of the "truth" is one of the hallmarks of totalitarian societies. Democratic citizens, however, should be committed to the principles and values that underlie democracy -- such as political participation, free speech, civil liberties, and equal opportunity. Schools might develop these commitments through lessons in the skills of analysis and exploration, free political expression, and independent thought.

What Kind of Citizen? Educating Our Children for the Common Good

Joel Westheimer is the author of the book What Kind of Citizen: Educating Our Children for the Common Good and is speaking in Red Deer this Thursday, November 5, 2015.

Joel's book asks us to imagine the kind of society we would like to live in and shows how schools might best be used to make that vision a reality.

Westheimer challenges us to answer some pretty tough questions about our schools:

• What does an ideal school look like in your mind?
• What lessons are being conveyed?
• How are children and teachers interacting?
• What kinds of responsibilities are students being asked to take on?
• What vision of the "good" society is this school asking students to imagine?
• Are they learning the skills and habits they would need to help bring that society into being? Are they learning to recognize injustice and work with others in their communities to diminish it?

Westheimer writes:

I prefer to think about schools, not as vehicles of transmission of knowledge (though they are that too), but as places where children learn about the society in which they are growing up, how they might engage in productive ways, and how they fight for change when change is warranted. 

Schools have always taught lessons in citizenship, moral values, good behaviour and "character". Even before there was formal schooling, informal education was replete with these kinds of goals. Contemporary schools inevitably teach these lessons as well. For example, schools teach children to follow rules, and to be sure, sometimes following the rules is necessary. But does being a "good" citizen ever require questioning those rules? What is the proper balance between rule following and thinking about the origins and purpose of those rules? We can imagine classrooms that aspire to that balance.

Teaching children content like reading, writing and arithmetic in isolation of morals is developmentally inappropriate. 

I did not become a teacher so that I could merely prepare children to live in a cruel and unjust world. I became a teacher so that I could help children grow up and make the world a better place.

The real world is not a fixed and known place -- the real world can be made and unmade by the people who live there. I want to teach my students to be prepared to live in the real world while inspiring them to make it better.

I'm reading Joel Westheimer's book What Kind of Citizen? and looking forward to hear him speak this Thursday, November 5, 2015 in Red Deer. 

Joel Westheimer on Citizenship & Education.

Joel Westheimer will be in Red Deer on Thursday, November 5, 2015. Joel tweets here.

Register for this free event here.



Here are the highlights from this 8 minute video featuring Joel Westheimer discussing citizenship and education:

• Students should be inspired to talk an active role in our democracy, taking an important place in history as more than an audience member.
• Democracy is not a spectator sport -- it's a participative sport.
• Schools should be more than job-training institutions.
• If citizens are not well educated enough to govern their own affairs, the solution is not to take that power of governance away from them but to educate them. 
• It is a popular trend for schools to focus less on critical and creative thinking and more on making sure that all students are learning the same thing.
• There is a big difference between standardization and having high standards.
• There are some unintended consequences with obsessing over higher standards.
• We have to stop pretending that we can meet all student's needs by treating them all the same.
• There are no teachers who do not want students to learn the "basics". 
• Should schools just get back to basics? When did we ever leave?
• The child who can read but chooses not to holds no advantage over the child who can't read.
• We need to care about whether children want to read at least as much as whether they can read.
• Standardization has become the tail that wags the education dog.
• Just like how mandated sentences strips judgement from judges, so too does standardization deny teachers the ability to teach.
• It is important to teach controversy in our schools. It is important that children understand that intelligent and successful adults disagree about important things.
• We have to teach kids that intelligent, well-meaning adults differ on important matters of social concern.
• Politics is how we come together as a democratic society to work together through our differences and make good decisions for us all. In that sense, we shouldn't get politics out of our schools, we need to get more politics in.

Joel Westheimer in Red Deer November 5

On Thursday, November 5, Joel Westheimer will be speaking in Red Deer, Alberta. Joel is an education columnist for CBC Radio and professor of democracy and education. Joel is the author of What Kind of Citizen? and he tweets here.

To attend this free event, register here.

I'll see you there!

Here is a nice preview of Joel Westheimer's message around Citizenship:

Caring about what we can measure

I've written before about how we find what we look for by using a popular parable that involves a man looking for his keys late at night.

In his article titled Once Upon a Time, Not Too Long Ago, Teaching Was Considered a Profession, But Then Came Standardization, Tests, and Value-Added Merit Pay Schemes That Ate All Humanity for Breakfast... Joel Westheimer writes:

There is an old parable about a man searching on his hands and knees under a streetlight. A passerby sees him and asks, “What are you looking for?” Hunched over, eyes not leaving the ground, the man replies, “I’ve lost my car keys.” The kind passerby immediately joins him in his search. After a few minutes searching without success, she asks the man whether he is sure he lost the keys there on the street corner. “No,” he replies, pointing down the block, “I lost them over there.” Indignant, the woman asks, “Then why are you looking for them here?” The man replies, “Because there’s light here.” 

Behind the onslaught of testing and so-called “accountability” measures of the last decade lurks the same perverse logic of the man looking for his keys. We know what matters to most teachers, parents, school administrators, board members, and policy-makers. But we are far less sure how to find out whether teachers and schools are successful in teaching what matters. Since we have relatively primitive ways of assessing students’ abilities to think, create, question, analyze, form healthy relationships, and work in concert with others to improve their communities and the world, we turn instead to where the light is: standardized measures of students’ abilities to decode sentences and solve mathematical problems. In other words, since we can’t measure what we care about, we start to care about what we can measure. 

Of course, I am not being entirely fair. Educational testing enthusiasts do have some ways of measuring, for example, skills related to critical thinking. And the reading comprehension tests are evolving to consider not only whether students can understand the words and structure of a particular sentence or paragraph but also whether they can articulate something about its meaning and implications. But when researchers examine education policies broadly, and the classroom practices and habits that follow those policies, it is becoming increasingly clear that our educational goals and the methods used to assess educational progress are suffering from an appalling lack of imagination.

All this reminds me of the profound difference between measuring what we value and valuing what we measure.

The special momentum of the status quo

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Michael

Have you ever noticed how little schooling has changed since your parents or even grandparents' classroom days?

I've often wondered how a classroom in 1985 Communist Russia would differ from one in 2011 Canada or America. Oh sure, there would be nuances with what kids were learning, but I fear how they were expected to do so would look freakishly similar. Regardless of time, place and political affiliation, behavioral conformity, worksheet completion and pre-test memorization would be the name of both games.

So why is school such a timeless institution where the more things change, the more things stay the same? Why does so much of school reform feel like the equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?

Why is this?

Joel Westheimer writes in his review of Ted Sizer's book Horace's Compromise:

One of the most stable structures in card house building, my nine year old cousin informs me, is the triangle. Three cards placed just so, leaning against each other in a three-way system of support, can be used as an "awesome foundation. On one architectural design occasion, as she happily laid cards for level four, I couldn't resist asking if her house could survive a slight change - adjusting one of the base triangles, for example. She tried, rotating one card gently counterclockwise. The house giggled for a moment and collapsed. It was a messy sight, a young architect's nightmare. "The foundation," she reported, "can't change without a whole lot of trouble!" 

"The status quo," writes Sizer in Horace's Compromise, "... has special momentum."

It's been said before that Old School is not a place - rather it is a state of mind that thinks very little of the mind - which is built on the premise that the teacher 'teaches' and the student 'learns' and never shall the two roles be confused. Paulo Freire aptly outlines this pseudo-learning environment well in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed while Robert Fried properly indicts the Game of School in his book:

I see no despicable plot, no conspiracy by educators to deny children their right to learn. The problem is not that those who work within schools and colleges regularly force us to abandon our own learning goals and submit to their indoctrination. It's just that too many of us - students and teachers alike - agree to substitute lesser, symbolic goals for greater and truer ones. When we allow ourselves (or get convinced) to gear ourselves up so as to complete school tasks that have little meaning for us aside from the value of getting them done and over with, we lose touch with our own learning spirit. We become alienated from the natural learning desires and inquisitiveness within us. We tend to become compliant rather than creative, docile instead of courageous, inwardly passive instead of assertively engaged, cynical at a time in life when we should be idealistic. We become game players by reflex, and learners only one occasion... 

My argument with the Game of School is not an argument against school, much less against the teaching profession. Teachers, schools, and school systems are themsleves often the victims of this self-same game, played out according to the rules set down by those who have power over us. My hope is to bring this phenomenon to the attention of educators and learners at all levels; it is most destructive where least acknowledged. Those caught in the Game soon lose awareness of it; it begins to seem like the only way of doing business.

Like Robert Fried, Ted Sizer and Paulo Friere critique Old School not as an argument against school (or teachers) anymore than Joel Westheimer's nine year old cousin would argue against triangles. Rather, the point to be taken from all of this is one of awareness.

Because one of the largest obstacles to improving school is our own memories, we need to be aware that until school ceases to be merely something done to kids, rather than by kids, reform will only ever improve school while changing nothing.

Until we stop selling 'more of the same' as a daring departure from what we've always done, the status quo will continue to gain more and more momentum. Real change will require school to look a lot less like school - and to do that would require a whole lot of trouble.