You Say you want this, so why are you doing that...Redux

It is with mixed emotions that I write on Joe’s blog today.  His wife Tamara has asked me to do this, and I feel ready just after a year of losing my best friend.  

Joe Bower  will always have a profound impact  on my life, just like he has on many people he came into contact with and I am a better teacher and person for knowing him for over 15 years.  Joe and I talked about so many topics over that time, most of those represented well in his blog.  Joe was a prolific writer, and suggested I pen some of my own thoughts.  We would be talking and he would  yell “That’s a blog post Kelly!”   so here I  go…

You Say you want this, so why are you doing that… Redux

In 2011, Joe wrote a blog post about this topic and I aim to expand it a little.  

After teaching for 27 years, I have come to the conclusion that the vast majority of people in education are in it for the right reasons and are principled in their intentions.  I also find, however, that there are many educational practices that do not jive with what I feel kids really need.  

  Now, I am not SO arrogant that I think all share my progressive values, so I try my best to have conversations with my colleagues from time to time about educational philosophy.  Most of the time, the dialogue is engaging, messy, and thought provoking ( at least to me…). I see the passion in these people, they love kids, they love teaching. They DO see the chasm between what they know kids need and what schools often deliver- and it often makes them sad.

So….If teachers want to make changes, why don’t they act on it?  Some of the answers, I believe, are:

• They think they need permission
• They do not want to hurt peoples feelings or feel they are being unprofessional by not doing what others are doing
• They often do not have a forum for such discussion

For the sake of brevity, I will focus on the last point.

I find it interesting that we find it important to have teacher education programs that include philosophy of teaching and learning, but once student teachers  graduate, we seem to limit the discussion to pedagogy.  Good teaching practice is important, but if we are not sure of the REASONS for doing things, we can drift from some of our main goals of education like  ensuring children  love learning.  

Alfie Kohn writes:

“We need to be transparent about our premises and goals.  If we don’t bring them to the surface and defend them, others will take their place by default.  If we don’t ask, “what are we looking for here? What matters most to us,and how can we tell if we have been successful?”  Then we’ll just be evaluated on the basis of standardized test scores.

If we are to have these discussions about what is important to us in education, we must also discuss what is NOT important and try to get rid of those things.  Many things we do as teachers and teacher leaders, are being done because they seem to have always been done that way or we want to do as much as humanly possible for children and parents.  The problem is, we don’t have that much capital to spend.  We are maxed out.  We need to put our energy into what matters most and there is only so much time in the day.  

These will be difficult conversations, but ones that will help steer you back to why you got into this awesome profession in the first place.  We all cannot be like Joe, but we can and should talk about things that matter to us.

Here is hoping that loads of you have many messy, engaging, enraging, philosophical education talks with your colleagues.  I sure miss mine with Mr.  Bower

Cheers,

Kelly

P.s.  I would love to hear your thoughts about my post or respond to me on Twitter @flamesstamp

3 Reasons why Alberta's Provincial Achievement Tests are inappropriate

Today I have to administer a standardized test for the Alberta government. (Here's how I live with myself)

In Alberta, we have Provincial Achievement Tests and I have to administer Part A for Language Arts. My students are required to write a news article and a story in 2 hours.

Here are 3 reasons why this test is not an appropriate use of our limited time, effort and resources.

1. Collaboration should not be Cheating. My students read and write almost every single class. My students sit at tables with their laptops, devices and peers so that they can accelerate and enrich their learning by collaborating. While students are encouraged to work together during our 50 minute classes, we routinely have 15 minutes of silent reading and writing; however, I would never ask students to complete anything that is worth doing in complete isolation from their peers, parents, books or the Internet. I've worked hard to encourage my students to see collaboration as a critical characteristic of learning.

Alfie Kohn reminds us that, "I want to see what you can do not what your neighbour can do" is really just code for "I want to see what you can do artificially deprived of the skills and help of the people around you. Rather than seeing how much more you can accomplish in a well functioning team that's more authentic like real life."

In the real world, there simply aren't that many times you are expected to solve a problem or perform a task in complete isolation - and even if you were, it would be awfully archaic to refuse you the opportunity to reach out for the help you needed to get the task done.

2. Writing should not be canned or rushed. It's true that a written response standardized test is better than multiple choice but that isn't saying much. In my class, we read and write every single class -- we blog a lot. The few blog posts that we actually start and finish on the same day are some of the most shallow and superficial writing my students produce. My students' best writing involves a process that takes days and sometimes weeks. This year, we have written many current event blog posts and news articles where the students play an active role in researching primary and secondary sources to discover the who, what, where, when, why and how for real events.

In sharp contrast, this test shutters up the real world and reduces authentic student research to reading a pre-packaged point-form list of fiction-filled "facts" that merely demands students regurgitate point-form into sentences. This is writing's equivalent to paint-by-numbers.

3. There is no substitute for what teachers and parents observe while children are learning. Through out the year, I tell parents not to bother wasting their time looking at their child's marks on Pearson's PowerSchool. If anyone wants to know the extent to which my students are learning, you can look at their blog which features a wide-range of writing assignments that occur over a 10 month period.

In my classroom, testsandgrades are replaced with projects and performances collected in portfolios.

I routinely remind myself of a powerful classroom teacher's testimony:

In the real world of learning, tests, and reports and worksheets aren't the most meaningful way to understand a person's growth, they're just convenient ways in a system of schooling that's based on mass production... I assess my students by looking at their work, by talking with them, by making informal observations along the way. I don't need any means of appraisal outside my own observations and the student's work, which is demonstration enough of thinking, their growth, their knowledge, and their attitudes over time.

From Detesting to De-Testing

This post was featured in Cathy Rubin's The Global Search for Education: Our Top 12 Teacher Blogs.

How do you balance preparation for high stakes assessments with teaching and learning in your classroom?


In my classroom, I have replaced tests and grades with projects and performances collected in portfolios. It’s been 10 years since I used a multiple choice test to assess my students, so it’s safe to say that I do not agree with having to administer a standardized multiple choice test for the government at the end of an entire year of making learning visible via blogging.

Teachers are repeatedly told that the best way to prepare students for standardized tests is to teach the curriculum, but this is at best misleading. We know that multiple choice tests require a certain amount of test taking skills, and that students who have a better understanding for the nuances of multiple choice tests can score well without having learned what the tests claim to be measuring.

So how do I live with myself when I have an obligation to administer standardized tests that I don’t support?

In his article Fighting the Tests: A Practical Guide to Rescuing Our Schools, Alfie Kohn writes:

Whenever something in the schools is amiss, it makes sense for us to work on two tracks at once. We must do our best in the short term to protect students from the worst effects of a given policy, but we must also work to change or eliminate that policy. If we overlook the former – the need to minimize the harm of what is currently taking place, to devise effective coping strategies — then we do a disservice to children in the here and now. But (and this is by far the more common error) if we overlook the latter – the need to alter the current reality — then we are condemning our children’s children to having to make the best of the same unacceptable situation because it will still exist.

In the short term, I teach the curriculum the best I can, and I waste as little time as possible preparing students to fill in bubbles. However, as test day approaches we do a practice test in small groups to reduce anxiety and increase familiarity. The best teachers act less like conduits for the tests and more like a buffer that protects students from the harmful effects of testing, so I also assure students and parents that I do not use the standardized test as a part of their report card.

In the long term, I tweet, blog, write articles and talk with anyone and everyone about how and why standardized tests are broken and how and why the alternatives to the tests are far more authentic. I go out of my way to make the alternatives to standardized tests so obviously better that parents and students see the tests as an unfortunate distraction from real learning.

To advocate for authentic alternatives to standardized tests I actively work with my Alberta Teachers’ Association to create local public events with speakers such as Sir Ken Robinson, Alfie Kohn, Pasi Sahlberg, Yong Zhao and Andy Hargreaves. I’ve joined a political party in Alberta and influenced their education policies. I wrote Telling Time with a Broken Clock: the trouble with standardized testing and co-edited De-Testing and De-Grading Schools: Authentic Alternatives to Standardization and Accountability.

Together parents, students and teachers join together to opt-out of testing.

Four Reasons to Worry About "Personalized Learning"

This was written by Alfie Kohn who writes and speaks on parenting and education. Kohn tweets here and his website is here. This post was originally found here.

by Alfie Kohn

Tocqueville’s observations about the curious version of democracy that Americans were cultivating in the 1830s have served as a touchstone for social scientists ever since. One sociologist writes about the continued relevance of what Tocqueville noticed way back then, particularly the odd fact that we cherish our commitment to individualism yet experience a “relentless pressure to conform.” Each of us can do what he likes as long as he ends up fundamentally similar to everyone else: You’re “free to expand as a standardized individual.”[1]

A couple of decades ago, that last phrase reminded me of how our pitiful individuality was screwed to the backs of our cars in the form of customized license plates. Today it brings to mind what goes by the name “personalized learning.”

A suffix can change everything. When you attach -ality to sentiment, for example, you end up with what Wallace Stevens called a failure of feeling. When -ized is added topersonal, again, the original idea has been not merely changed but corrupted — and even worse is something we might call Personalized Learning, Inc. (PLI), in which companies sell us digital products to monitor students while purporting to respond to the differences among them.

Personal learning entails working with each child to create projects of intellectual discovery that reflect his or her unique needs and interests. It requires the presence of a caring teacher who knows each child well.

Personalized learning entails adjusting the difficulty level of prefabricated skills-based exercises based on students’ test scores. It requires the purchase of software from one of those companies that can afford full-page ads in Education Week.

For some time, corporations have sold mass-produced commodities of questionable value and then permitted us to customize peripheral details to suit our “preferences.” In the 1970s, Burger King rolled out its “Have it your way!” campaign, announcing that we were now empowered to request a recently thawed slab of factory-produced ground meat without the usual pickle — or even with extra lettuce! In America, I can be me!

A couple of decades later, the production company that created Barney, the alarmingly friendly purple dinosaur, sold personalized videos called “My Party with Barney.” You mailed them a photo of your kid’s face and they digitally attached it to a generic animated child’s body that “plays” with Barney in the video. Your kid’s name is also inserted into the soundtrack every so often to complete the customization, with Barney enthusing: “Have a balloon … Abigail!”[2] The result may have delighted, or even fooled, some three year olds. But why in god’s name are adult educators buying the equivalent of My Party with Barney in order to boost their students’ reading scores?

*

How can we tell when the lovely idea of personal learning has been co-opted[3] and then twisted into PLI? Here are four warning signs:

1. The tasks have been personalized for kids, not created by them. With PLI, the center of gravity is outside the students (as Dewey once put it), and their choices arelimited to when — or maybe, if they’re lucky, how – they’ll master a set of skills mandated by people who have never met them. In the words of education author Will Richardson, “’Personalized’ learning is something that we do to kids; ‘personal’ learning is something they do for themselves.”[4]

Sometimes one of the corporate folks will let slip an acknowledgment of just how student-centered their programs aren’t. “In education,” a publishing executive explained to a reporter, personalization is “not about giving students what they want, it’s about a recommended learning path just for them.”[5] A term like “mass customized learning,” meanwhile, may sound Orwellian but it’s not really an oxymoron because what’s customized is mass-produced – which is to say, standardized. Authentic personal learning isn’t.[6]

2. Education is about the transmission of bits of information, not the construction of meaning. Closely related to the pseudochoice provided to students is the underlying model of learning. Behaviorism, the beast that just won’t die, lurks at the core of PLI just as it animates “competency-based progression,” “mastery learning,” and programs that tweak the “delivery of instruction.” (Hint: Unless someone is sending out for pizza at a faculty meeting, the word delivery is always troubling in the context of schooling.)

In fact, the perceived need to personalize probably comes from this way of thinking about education in the first place. If the point is to dump a load of facts into children, then it may be necessary to adjust the style and rate of dumping – and to help teachers become more efficient at it. But if the point is to help kids understand ideas from the inside out and answer their own questions about the world, then what they’re doing is already personal (and varied). It doesn’t have to be artificially personalized.

3. The main objective is just to raise test scores. This explains PLI’s constant use of instruments that resemble standardized tests. When we hear a phrase like “monitor students’ progress,” we should immediately ask, “What do you mean by progress?” That word, like achievement, often refers to nothing more than results on dreadful tests. And here’s the next logical question when something is described as a way of “personalizing” instruction: What’s the effect of this on kids’ interest in reading or math or writing – or in school itself? Personal learning tends to nourish kids’ curiosity and deepen their enthusiasm. “Personalized” or “customized” learning – not so much.

But the red light flashes here not just because of the focus on standardized tests but because of the larger preoccupation with data data data data data. Elsewhere, I’ve written about the folly of believing that everything can and should be reduced to numbers.[7] PLI shamelessly clings to this myopic and outdated worldview. One of those ads in Education Week not long ago featured a comically enthusiastic cartoon owl in a tuxedo wearing an “I [heart] Data” button. This drawing was followed by boasts about the company’s “computer-adaptive assessments and instruction” that “constantly generate data to personalize learning.” (Honest — it appeared in Ed. Week, not in The Onion.)

The assumption here is that curriculum can be broken into little pieces, that skills are acquired sequentially and can be assessed with discrete, contrived tests and reductive rubrics. Tracking kids’ “progress” with digital profiles and predictive algorithms paints a 21st-century gloss on a very-early-20th-century theory of learning. It not only assumes but perpetuates a bunch-o’-facts approach because it counts only what lends itself to being counted – namely, the number of facts and skills memorized or the percentage of coursework completed.

4. It’s all about the tech. Two overlapping groups of educators seem particularly enamored of PLI: (1) those who are awed by anything that emanates from the private sector, including books about leadership whose examples are drawn from Fortune 500 companies and filled with declarations about the need to “leverage strategic cultures for transformational disruption”[8]; and (2) those who experience excitement that borders on sexual arousal from anything involving technology – even though much of what falls under the heading “ed tech” is, to put it charitably, of scant educational value.[9]

“Follow the money” is apt advice in many sectors of education — for example, in language arts, where millions are made selling leveled “guided reading” systems, skills-based literacy workbooks, and the like. Simpler strategies, such as having kids choose, read, and discuss real books from the library may be more effective, but, as reading expert Dick Allington asks drily, “Who promotes a research-based practice that seems an unlikely profit center? No one.”[10] Personalization is an even more disturbing example of this phenomenon because the word has come to be equated with technology – perhaps because it’s far more profitable for the purveyors that way and, at the same time, “It’s so much cheaper to buy a new computer than to pay a teacher’s salary year after year.”[10]

This version of “personalized learning” actually began 60 years ago when B.F. Skinner proposed setting each child before a teaching machine, an idea rooted in “measurability, uniformity, and control of the student,” according to Canadian educator Philip McRae. Today’s adaptive learning systems still promote the notion of the isolated individual. . .being delivered concrete and sequential content for mastery. However, the re-branding is that of personalization. . . [with a] customized technology platform delivering 21st century competencies. . . .At its most innocent, it is a renewed attempt at bringing back behaviourism and operant conditioning to make learning more efficient. At its most sinister, it establishes children as measurable commodities to be cataloged and capitalized upon by corporations.[11]

Certain forms of technology can be used to support progressive education, but meaningful (and truly personal) learning never requires technology. Therefore, if an idea like personalization is presented from the start as entailing software or a screen, we ought to be extremely skeptical about who really benefits.

One final caveat: in the best student-centered, project-based education, kids spend much of their time learning with and from one another. Thus, while making sense of ideas is surely personal, it is not exclusively individual because it involves collaboration and takes place in a community. Even proponents of personal learning may sometimes forget that fact, but it’s a fact that was never learned by supporters of personalized learning.

NOTES

1. John W. Meyer, “Myths of Socialization and of Personality,” in Reconstructing Individualism, ed. by T. C. Heller et al. (Stanford University Press, 1986), p. 211.

2. www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYVzRjWvalA. Recommended only for those with strong stomachs.

3. I wrote about this general phenomenon in “Progressive Labels for Regressive Practices,” blog post, January 31, 2015.

4. Will Richardson, “Personalizing Flipped Engagement,” blog post, July 2, 2012.

5. Vikram Savkar, a senior vice president at the Nature Publishing Group, is quoted in Michelle R. Davis, “Moving Beyond One-Size-Fits-All,” Education Week Technology Counts, March 17, 2011, pp. 10-11. This special insert was devoted to the theme of “individualized digital learning.”

6. See Maja Wilson, “Personalization: It’s Anything But Personal,” Educational Leadership, March 2014: 73-77.

7. Alfie Kohn, “Schooling Beyond Measure,” Education Week, September 19, 2012; and“Turning Children into Data,” Education Week, August 25, 2010.

8. Or is it “disrupt leveraged strategies for cultural transformation”? I may have nodded off there for a few minutes.

9. See under: “SMART Boards, dumb curriculum.” Similarly, “innovation” in some districts consists of taking the usual menu of forgettable facts, isolated skills, grades, tests, textbooks, and homework — and slapping it onto an iPad. Other educators, meanwhile, radiate self-satisfaction because they assign their students to watch online lectures at home, as if flipping the place and time in which dubious pedagogical practices take place – while continuing to make students work a second shift after they get home from school – constituted a daring pedagogical advance. For a thoughtful discussion of useful and useless uses of technology, see Sylvia Libow Martinez and Gary Stager, Invent to Learn (Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, 2013).

10. Richard L. Allington, “Proven Programs, Profits, and Practice,” in Reading for Profit:How the Bottom Line Leaves Kids Behind, ed. by Bess Altwerger (Heinemann, 2005), p. 226.

11. Lizanne Foster, “Personalized Learning Means Kids with Computers, not Teachers,”Huffington Post, November 28, 2014.

12. Philip McRae, “Rebirth of the Teaching Machine through the Seduction of Data Analytics: This Time It’s Personal,” blog post, April 14, 2013. Italics omitted.

Classroom Technology: Nightmare or Dream?

Technological advances in our schools in the last 10 years have been remarkable, and there is no doubt that technology will continue to disrupt our schools in both helpful and harmful ways. To be clear, I love technology and use it every single day. I teach with it and learn with it. It's important to remember, however, that technology cannot be allowed to have a monopoly on innovation in our schools. If public education is to survive the next 10 years, we need to see how technology and personalization can be read as either a dream or a nightmare, depending on who is writing the story.

If Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Arne Duncan, and Michelle Rhee are writing the plot, then personalization in learning is about using technology for union busting, test score analytics and the marketization of our children's minds. In this story, the rich get a computer and a teacher but the poor get just a computer. Herein, technology and personalization isn't about learning – it’s about money. In this story’s final chapter technology functions as a Trojan horse, sneakily shouldering an army of economists and shadow industries that have been stalking public education for a very long time, waiting for an in.

If Sir Ken Robinson, Pasi Sahlberg, Alfie Kohn, Yong Zhao, Linda Darling-Hammond, Will Richardson and Diane Ravitch are writing the plot, then personalization is about student excitement, creativity, intrinsic motivation, curiosity and citizenship. In this story, all children are given computers and teachers, even when it’s cheaper to deny some students the latter. Herein, personalization and technology is used for the purposes of universal education not subordinated to the interests of big business.

Personalization and technology can be about collaborating to discover our passions (the dream) but it can also be about competing over profits (the nightmare). Worse still, personalization can turn into a kind of hyper-personalization, where computers are given to students with zero facilitation from real life teachers. This is akin to pilotless flying and surgeonless surgery and yet this is precisely the vision of many in power, a vision where technology uses the learner, instead of the learner using the technology. However, this can only become a reality if good people remain silent. Classroom innovators and public educators must speak out against the nightmare narrative of technological implementation (of Gates and Murdoch) so that technology and personalization can assist the dream of learning for all.

What if a child is manipulative?

When compliance becomes an adult's ultimate goal with children, we will resort to, and justify, manipulation, which includes rewards, punishments, carrots, sticks, bribes and threats.

So what's the problem?

Show me a child who manipulates others, and I will show you a child who has grown up being manipulated.

Not only does the end not justify the means, but a well intentioned, but misdirected, means can ruin the end.

Here's what I mean.

Many years ago, I made a conscious decision to try and abolish rewards and punishments from my teaching and parenting tool box. (Here are all of my posts on rethinking discipline)

The inspiration for this move came from being a miserable teacher, looking for change. When I read Alfie Kohn's book The Schools Children Deserve, I came across a quote that would re-shape my mindset for working with children. The quote belongs to Jerome Bruner, but it has become my teaching and parenting mantra:

"Children should experience their successes and failures not as reward and punishment but as information."

There are many profound reasons to adopt such a mindset, but here's one of my favourite.

When my students or son and daughter try and manipulate me with bribes and threats or rewards and punishments to get me to do whatever they want me to do, I can turn to them and honestly say, "I don't use rewards and punishments on you, so don't you bribe and threaten me."

When I call children on their attempts to manipulate me, I don't get into power struggles or arguments because they know I don't use manipulation to get them to do what I want. They know that I don't do things to them to get what I want -- I work with them. I inspire them. I don't manipulate them.

So when they try and manipulate me, I have the best argument for rejecting their manipulation.

I don't manipulate them, so I won't tolerate them manipulating me.

And they know it.

The problem with tests that are not standardized

This was written by Alfie Kohn who writes and speaks on parenting and education. Kohn tweets here and his website is here. This post was originally found here.

by Alfie Kohn

I’m baffled by the number of educators who are adamantly opposed to standardized testing yet raise no objection to other practices that share important features with such testing.

For starters, consider those lists of specific, prescriptive curriculum standards to which the tests are yoked. Here we find the same top-down control and one-size-fits-all mentality that animate standardized testing. Yet from the early days of the “accountability” movement right down to current efforts to impose the Gates-funded Common Core from coast to coast, an awful lot of people give the standards (and the whole idea of uniform standards) a pass while frowning only at the exams used to enforce them.[1]

Example #2: Elaborate rubrics used to judge students’ performance represent another form of standardized assessment that’s rarely recognized as such. The point is to break down something, such as a piece of writing, into its parts so that teachers, and sometimes the students themselves, can rate each of them, the premise being that it’s both possible and desirable for all readers to arrive at the same number for each criterion. Rubrics are borne of a demand to quantify and an impulse to simplify. One result, argues Maja Wilson, is that “the standardization of the rubric produces standardized writers.”[2] But, again, even many teachers who are outraged by standardized tests don’t blink when standardization is smuggled in through the back door. Some insist, against all evidence to the contrary, that there’s no problem as long as one uses a good rubric.

It’s my third example, though, on which I’d like to linger. When teachers test their students, the details of those tests will differ from one classroom to the next, which means these assessments by definition are not standardized and can’t be used to compare students across schools or states. But they’re still tests, and as a result they’re still limited and limiting.

As with rubrics (and grades), there’s a reflexive tendency to insist that we just need better tests, or that we ought to just modify the way they’re administered (for example, by allowing students to retake them). And, yes, it’s certainly true that some are worse than others. Multiple-choice tests are uniquely flawed as assessments for exactly the same reason that multiple-choice standardized tests are: They’re meant to trick students who understand the concepts into picking the wrong answer, and they don’t allow kids to generate, or even explain, their responses. Multiple-choice exams can be clever but, as test designer Roger Farr of Indiana University ultimately concluded, there is no way “to build a multiple choice question that allows students to show what they can do with what they know.”

We can also concede that some reasons for giving tests are more problematic than others. There’s a difference between using them to figure out who needs help — or, for more thoughtful teachers, what aspects of their own instruction may have been ineffective — and using them to compel students to pay attention and complete their assignments. In the latter case, a test is employed to pressure kids to do what they have little interest in doing. Rather than address possible deficiencies in one’s curriculum or pedagogy (say, the exclusion of students from any role in making decisions about what they’ll learn), one need only sound a warning about an upcoming test — or, in an even more blatant exercise of power, surprise students with a pop quiz — to elicit compliance.

Even allowing for variation in the design of the tests and the motives of the testers, however, the bottom line is that these instruments are typically more about measuring the number of facts that have been crammed into students’ short-term memories than they are about assessing understanding.[3] Tests, including those that involve essays, are part of a traditional model of instruction in which information is transmitted tostudents (by means of lectures and textbooks) so that it can be disgorged later on command. That’s why it’s so disconcerting to find teachers who are proud of their student-centered approach to instruction, who embrace active and interactive forms of learning, yet continue to rely on tests as the primary, or even sole, form of assessment in their classrooms.

While some of their questions may require problem-solving skills, tests, per se, are artificial pencil-and-paper exercises that measure how much students remember and how good they are at the discrete skill of taking tests. That’s how it’s possible for a student to be a talented thinker and yet score poorly. Most teachers can, without hesitation, name several such students in their classes when the exams are designed by Pearson or ETS, but may fail to see that the same thing applies in the case of performance on tests they design themselves.

Not only do tests assess the intellectual proficiencies that matter least, however — they also have the potential to alter students’ goals and the way they approach learning. The more you’re led to focus on what you’re going to have to know for a test, the less likely you are to plunge into a story or engage fully with the design of a project or experiment. And intellectual immersion can be all but smothered if those tests are given, or even talked about, frequently. Learning in order to pass a test is qualitatively different from learning for its own sake.[4]

***

Many years ago, the eminent University of Chicago educator Philip Jackson interviewed 50 teachers who had been identified as exceptional at their craft. Among his findings was a consistent lack of emphasis on testing, if not a deliberate decision to minimize the practice, on the part of these teachers.[5]

The first reason for this, I think, is that exemplary educators understand that tests are not a particularly useful form of assessment. Second, though, these teachers learned at some point that they didn’t need tests. The most impressive classrooms and curricula are designed to help the teacher know as much as possible about how students are making sense of things. When kids are engaged in meaningful, active learning — for example, designing extended, interdisciplinary projects — teachers who watch and listen as those projects are being planned and carried out have access to, and actively interpret, a continuous stream of information about what each student is able to do and where he or she requires help. It would be superfluous to give students a test after the learning is done. We might even say that the more a teacher is inclined to use a test to gauge student progress, the more that tells us something is wrong — perhaps with the extent of the teacher’s informal and informed observation, perhaps with the quality of the tasks, perhaps with the whole model of learning. If, for example, the teacher favors direct instruction, he or she probably won’t have much idea what’s going on in the students’ minds. That will lead naturally to the conclusion that a test is “necessary” to gauge how they’re doing.[6]

Assessment literally means to sit beside, and that’s just what our most thoughtful educators urge us to do. Yetta Goodman coined the compound noun “kidwatching” to describe reading with each child to gauge his or her proficiency. Marilyn Burns insists that one-on-one conversations tell us far more about students’ mathematical understanding than a test ever could — since all wrong answers aren’t alike. Of course this assumes that we’re really interested in kids’ understanding, not merely their level of phonemic awareness or ability to apply an algorithm. The less ambitious one’s educational goals, the more likely that a test will suffice — and that the wordstesting and assessing will be used interchangeably.

One can fill a bookshelf with accounts of other forms of authentic assessment: portfolios, culminating projects, performance assessments, and what the late Ted Sizer called “exhibitions of mastery”: opportunities for students to demonstrate their proficiency not by recalling facts on demand but by doing something: constructing and conducting (and explaining the results of) an experiment, creating a restaurant menu in a foreign language, turning a story into a play. In other words, when some form of evaluation is desired after, rather than during, the learning, tests stillaren’t necessary or even particularly helpful. They needn’t be used for “summative,” let alone for “formative,” assessment.

Many of us rail against standardized tests not only because of the harmful uses to which they’re put but because they’re imposed on us. It’s more unsettling to acknowledge that the tests we come up with ourselves can also be damaging. The good news is that far superior alternatives are available.

NOTES

1. See my essay “Beware of the Standards, Not Just the Tests,”Education Week, September 26, 2001. This phenomenon is even more pronounced in Canada. Its education system is completely decentralized; each province controls its own policies. Despite the considerable variation in the amount of testing from one to the next, however, all of the provinces have very specific grade-by-grade curricula that every teacher is expected to teach. Objections to this level of control, with the concomitant diminution of autonomy for teachers, are rarely heard — even in provinces where there is outspoken resistance to testing.

2. Maja Wilson, Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment(Heinemann, 2006), p. 39.

3. A spate of recent studies that attracted considerable attention in the popular press argues that frequent tests (including self-tests) are more effective than other forms of studying. But the outcome measure in these studies is almost always limited to the number of facts that are correctly recalled on later tests. Rather than offering an argument in favor of conventional assessment, these experiments actually illuminate how words like “learning” and “achievement” — as used by researchers and journalists alike — often mean little more than the successful, and presumably temporary, process of memorizing facts. For a close look at one such study, see this essay.

4. I recently made this point — about how the anticipation of being tested can distract students from engaging with ideas — in a Twitter post that was retweeted more than 400 times. This degree of popularity led me to suspect I had been misunderstood. I followed up with a clarification that all tests have this effect, not just standardized tests. The retweet rate dropped off by 90 percent.


5. Philip W. Jackson, Life in Classrooms (Teachers College Press, 1968/1990).

6. Frank Smith once wrote, “A teacher who cannot tell without a test whether a student is learning should not be in the classroom.” I see what he means, but his formulation strikes me as a bit harsh. Teachers need help to learn how to assess without tests, and they need support and encouragement to eliminate a practice that is still used by most of their colleagues and widely expected by administrators, parents, and the students themselves. Moreover, the barrier to gauging how successfully students are learning often lies not with the teacher but with features of the school structure, such as classes that are too large or periods that are too short. That’s an argument for organizing to change these problematic policies, not for continuing to test.

4 reasons to rethink competition in children's sport

"The race to win turns us all into losers."

-Alfie Kohn

There is an enormous gap between what we know and what we do. Too often what we admire and aspire to does not align with our actions. Sometimes this is true in school -- sometimes it's true in sport. 

Here are 4 reasons why we need to seriously rethink how keeping score and winning can distract good intentioned adults from being better coaches, better parents and better people.

1. Adults should not be fans while children play sports because fans are not expected to do the right thing. Consider this: A "fan" is short for a "fanatic" which literally means a person with an extreme and uncritical enthusiasm or zeal, as in religion, politics or sports. The origin of the word fanatic comes from Latin fanaticus which means "mad, furious, zealous, frantic, and characterized by excessive enthusiasm".

Too often "fans" are unable to control their passion and emotions for winning and defeating others. Too often fans don't understand that excellence and winning are products of positive participation and learning, and that an intense focus on winning comes at the expense of learning and having fun.

If you only cheer, encourage or support your own child or your own team, or actively cheer against other people's children, you are not only a bad parent -- you are a bad person. "It takes a village to raise a child" applies to sport just as much as it applies to school and community. If it would be wrong for teachers in schools or parents at home to be fanatics in favour of a select few children, what makes it right in children's sport?

Adults should be less like fans and more like coaches or teachers for every child, regardless of whether they are your child or if they are on your team. Coaches and teachers, unlike fans, are associated with an entirely different set of characteristics -- they have integrity and are unconditionally supportive and encouraging while making decisions that are in every child's best interest.

2. The problem with keeping score for young children is that adults get distracted by winning at the cost of player development and learning. Winning can have the same affect gambling and alcohol have on addicts. Just like the gambler who forgets about their loved one's while sitting at the blackjack table, coaches, parents and athletes tend to forget about having fun and learning the game when winning becomes the point of sport.

The point of school and sport is to learn and have fun -- regardless of the score or the situation. We place children in classes like language arts and sports like baseball not because they are already good at reading and running, but because we believe reading and running are important for all children to learn to love, regardless of their ability. If we coach differently when the game "counts", we teach children that winning counts more than learning and having fun.

You do not teach children to win by keeping score -- you teach children to win by coaching them to love to learn the game.

Competition is for the strong -- sport and school should be for all children. See the problem?

3. Too often all of the statistics, standings and awards cheapen the games we love. Out of one side of our mouths we say that there is no "I" in team, and yet too many sports relish the opportunity to rank and sort teams and athletes. Too many teams keep statistics and records. Too many teams have Most Valuable Player awards, and too many tournaments have A Finals. All of this counting and quantifying leads us to compare and rank children in ways that we shouldn't be doing at all.

Competition is a zero-sum game which by definition means that one person or team can succeed only if others fail. Sports can be naturally competitive enough without adults adding more emphasis on winning arbitrary and artificial awards. If we want children to play sports for the right reasons, we need to stop awarding them and just let them play.

4. The purpose of sport is more sport. Whether you are 7, 37 or 77 -- whether you believe you can win or not, we want children and adult's alike to maintain a sustainable healthy, active and pro-social life-style. 

When we convince children that the purpose of sport is winning artificially scarce awards, we encourage too many children to play for the wrong reasons and others to quit. As an athlete, teacher, coach and parent, it is my experience that the children who play sports through out their childhood believe they have a chance at winning and the children who quit believe they will lose. And yet ironically, the children who play sports into their adulthood, while balancing family and work, are those who figure out that winning has little or nothing to do with why they play.

So what do we do when we want to raise a noncompetitive child in a competitive world? 

I did not become a teacher, a coach or a father so that I could merely prepare children to live in a cruel and cut-throat world. I became a teacher so that I could help children grow up and make the world a better place. Yes, the real world is full of competition that makes winners and losers out of everyone, but we don't need to immerse children in competition to learn this. When we teach children about racism, we don't immerse them in racism. I refuse to subscribe to the notion that because children will one day grow up and have bad things done to them that means we need to do bad things to them in school to get them ready for it.

Alfie Kohn makes a solid case against competition and offers 4 ways to minimize the damage:

• Avoid comparing a child's performance to that of a sibling, a classmate, or yourself as a child.

• Don't use contests ("Who can dry the dishes fastest?") around the house. Watch your use of language ("Who's the best little girl in the whole wide world?") that reinforces competitive attitudes.

• Never make your love or acceptance conditional on a child's performance. It's not enough to say, "As long as you did your best, honey" if the child learns that Mommy's attitude about her is quite different when she has triumphed over her peers.

• Be aware of your power as a model. If you need to beat others, your child will learn that from you regardless of what you say. The lesson will be even stronger if you use your child to provide you with vicarious victories. 

Raising healthy, happy, productive children goes hand in hand with creating a better society. The first step to achieving both is recognizing that our belief in the value of competition is built on myths. There are better ways for our children -- and for us -- to work and play and live.

The education question we should be asking

This was written by Alfie Kohn who writes and speaks on parenting and education. Kohn tweets here and his website is here. This post was originally found here.

by Alfie Kohn

“While we’re at it, maybe we should just design classrooms without windows. And, hey, I’ll bet kids would really perform better if they spent their days in isolation.” My friend was reacting (facetiously, of course) to a new study that found kindergarteners scored better on a test of recall if their classroom’s walls were completely bare. A room filled with posters, maps, and the kids’ own art constituted a “distraction.”

The study, published last month in Psychological Science [1] and picked up by Science World Report, the Boston Globe, and other media outlets, looked at a whopping total of 24 children. A research assistant read to them about a topic such as plate tectonics or insects, then administered a paper-and-pencil test to see how many facts they remembered. On average, kids in the decorated rooms were “off task” 39 percent of the time and had a “learning score” of 42 percent. The respective numbers for those in the bare rooms were 28 percent and 55 percent.

Now if you regularly read education studies, you won’t be surprised to learn that the authors of this one never questioned, or even bothered to defend, the value of the science lessons they used — whether they were developmentally appropriate or presented effectively, whether they involved anything more than reading a list of facts or were likely to hold any interest for 5-year-olds. Nor did the researchers vouch for the quality of the assessment. Whatever raises kids’ scores (on any test, and of any material) was simply assumed to be a good thing, and anything that lowers scores is bad.

Hence the authors’ concern that children tend to be “distracted by the visual environment.” (Translation: They may attend to something in the room other than the facts an adult decided to transmit to them.) And hence my friend’s wry reductio ad absurdum response.

Alas, “sparse” classrooms had their own problems. There, we’re told, children “were more likely to be distracted by themselves or by peers.” Even if we strip everything off the walls, those pesky kids will still engage in instructionally useless behaviors like interacting with one another or thinking about things that interest them. The researchers referred to the latter (thinking) as being “distracted by themselves.” Mark that phrase as the latest illustration of the principle that, in the field of education, satire has become obsolete.

Our attention seems to be fixed relentlessly on the means by which to get students to accomplish something. We remain undistracted by anything to do with ends — what it is they’re supposed to accomplish, and whether it’s really valuable. Perhaps that’s why schools of education typically require “methods” classes but not goals classes. In the latter, students might be invited to read this study and ask whether a child could reasonably regard the lesson as a distraction (from her desire to think, talk, or look at a cool drawing on the wall). Other students might object on the grounds that it’s a teacher’s job to decide what students ought to do and to maximize their “time on task.” But such conversations — Time on what task? Why is it being taught? Who gets to decide? — are shut down before they begin when all we talk about (in ed. schools, in journals, in professional development sessions) is how to maximize time on whatever is assigned.[2]

Those of us who are disturbed, even outraged, by what’s being done to our schools in the name of “reform” — imposing ramped-up, uniform, prescriptive standards; high-stakes testing; and pressure that’s both vertical (with kindergartens now resembling really bad first-grade classrooms) and horizontal (with little time for music and the arts, recess, student-designed projects, or any subjects not being tested) — ought to consider how this agenda is quietly supported by research that relies on test scores as the primary, or even the sole, dependent variable.

Then, too, there’s the way such research is described by journalists. Most articles inEducation Week, for example, ought to include this caveat:

Please keep in mind that phrases such as “effective policies,” “higher achievement,” “better results,” or “improved outcomes” refer only to scores on standardized tests. These tests are not only poor indicators of meaningful intellectual accomplishment but tend to measure the socioeconomic status of the students or the amount of time they have been trained in test-taking skills.

The idea that kindergarteners ought to block everything out but facts about plate tectonics reminded me of an essay called “Can Teachers Increase Students’ Self-Control?” (as usual, the question was “can,” not “should”) written by a cognitive psychologist named Daniel Willingham. He offered as a role model a hypothetical child who looks through his classroom window and sees “construction workers pour[ing] cement for a sidewalk” but “manages to ignore this interesting scene and focus on his work.”[3]

But what was the “work”? Was it a fill-in-the-blank waste-of-the-time that would lead any child to look out the window or at the wall? Or was it something so intellectually valuable that we’d be justified in saying, “Hey, this really is worth it”? I don’t know. But for Willingham, as for so many others, it apparently doesn’t matter: If the teacher assigned it, that’s reason enough to ignore the interesting real-life lesson in how a sidewalk is created, to refrain from asking the teacher why that lesson can’t be incorporated into the curriculum. An exemplary student is one who stifles his curiosity, exercises his self-control, and does what he’s told.

Is a given lesson worth teaching? I may not always be sure of the answer, but I’m pretty sure that’s the question we should be asking — rather than employing discipline, or demanding self-discipline, or pulling stuff off the walls in order that students will devote their attention to something whose value is simply taken for granted.

NOTES

1. Anna V. Fisher, Karrie E. Godwin, and Howard Seltman, “Visual Environment, Attention Allocation, and Learning in Young Children: When Too Much of a Good Thing May Be Bad,” Psychological Science, DOI: 10.1177/0956797614533801. Published online 21 May 2014.

2. A couple of years ago I wrote an article called “Teaching Strategies That Work! (Just Don’t Ask ‘Work to Do What?‘)”, which focused on a research review challenging the effectiveness of discovery-based learning without ever asking what constitutes effectiveness. There, too, my point was that if we don’t ask what we’re looking for and argue about the values that underlie our answers, we’ll end up by default with a goal like higher test scores — or, in the case of classroom management strategies, compliance.

3. Daniel T. Willingham, “Can Teachers Increase Students’ Self-Control?” American Educator, Summer 2011, p. 23. I offered this example in my book The Myth of the Spoiled Child (Da Capo Press, 2014) and, in the same chapter, cited a pair of studies by Angela Duckworth and her colleagues that found an elite group of middle schoolers performed better in the National Spelling Bee if they were higher in grit, “whereas spellers higher in openness to experience — defined as preferring using their imagination, playing with ideas, and otherwise enjoying a complex mental life — perform[ed] worse.” The study also found that the most effective preparation strategy was “solitary deliberate practice activities” rather than, say, reading books. Thus, if enjoying a complex mental life (or reading for pleasure) interferes with performance in a one-shot contest to see who can spell more obscure words correctly — and if sufficient grittiness to spend time alone memorizing lists of words helps to achieve that goal — this is regarded as an argument in favor of grit. But of course the unasked question once again concerns ends rather than means: How important is it that kids who are exceptionally good spellers win more championships? Should we favor any strategy or personality feature that contributes to that objective (or to anything that could be described as “higher achievement”) regardless of what it involves and what it displaces?

Alfie Kohn keynote in Saskatchewan

Here is the video of Alfie Kohn's keynote at the 2014 Regina Teachers' Convention in Saskatchewan, Canada.

The Myth of the Spoiled Child

Alfie Kohn's latest book has just released.

The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting.

From the Book Flap:

Somehow, a set of deeply conservative assumptions about children -- what they’re like and how they should be raised -- have congealed into the conventional wisdom in our society. Parents are accused of being both permissive and overprotective, unwilling to set limits and afraid to let their kids fail. Young people, meanwhile, are routinely described as entitled and narcissistic. . . among other unflattering adjectives.

In The Myth of the Spoiled Child, Alfie Kohn systematically debunks these beliefs -- not only challenging erroneous factual claims but also exposing the troubling ideology that underlies them. Complaints about pushover parents and coddled kids are hardly new, he shows, and there is no evidence that either phenomenon is especially widespread today -- let alone more common than in previous generations. Moreover, new research reveals that helicopter parenting is quite rare and, surprisingly, may do more good than harm when it does occur. The major threat to healthy child development, Kohn argues, is posed by parenting that is too controlling rather than too indulgent.

With the same lively, contrarian style that marked his influential books about rewards, competition, and education, Kohn relies on a vast collection of social science data, as well as on logic and humor, to challenge assertions that appear with numbing regularity in the popular press. These include claims that young people suffer from inflated self-esteem; that they receive trophies, praise, and A's too easily; and that they would benefit from more self-discipline and “grit.” These conservative beliefs are often accepted without question, even by people who are politically liberal. Kohn’s invitation to reexamine our assumptions is particularly timely, then; his book has the potential to change our culture’s conversation about kids and the people who raise them.

Progressive Education: What it isn't

This was written by Alfie Kohn who writes and speaks about parenting and education. His website is here and he tweets here. This is an excerpt from a larger article found here.

by Alfie Kohn

Misconceptions about progressive education generally take two forms. Either it is defined too narrowly so that the significance of the change it represents is understated, or else an exaggerated, caricatured version is presented in order to justify dismissing the whole approach. Let’s take each of these in turn.

Individualized attention from caring, respectful teachers is terribly important. But it does not a progressive school make. To assume otherwise not only dilutes progressivism; it’s unfair to traditional educators, most of whom are not callous Gradgrinds or ruler-wielding nuns. In fact, it’s perfectly consistent to view education as the process of filling children up with bits of knowledge — and to use worksheets, lectures, quizzes, homework, grades, and other such methods in pursuit of that goal — while being genuinely concerned about each child’s progress. Schools with warm, responsive teachers who know each student personally can take pride in that fact, but they shouldn’t claim on that basis to be progressive.

Moreover, traditional schools aren’t always about memorizing dates and definitions; sometimes they’re also committed to helping students understand ideas. As one science teacher pointed out, “For thoughtful traditionalists, thinking is couched in terms of comprehending, integrating, and applying knowledge.” However, the student’s task in such classrooms is “comprehending how theteacher has integrated or applied the ideas… and [then] reconstruct[ing] the teacher’s thinking.”[3]There are interesting concepts being discussed in some traditional classrooms, in other words, but what distinguishes progressive education is that students must construct their own understanding of ideas.

There’s another mistake based on too narrow a definition, which took me a while to catch on to: A school that is culturally progressive is not necessarily educationally progressive. An institution can be steeped in lefty politics and multi-grain values; it can be committed to diversity, peace, and saving the planet — but remain strikingly traditional in its pedagogy. In fact, one can imagine an old-fashioned pour-in-the-facts approach being used to teach lessons in tolerance or even radical politics.[4]

Less innocuous, or accidental, is the tendency to paint progressive education as a touchy-feely, loosey-goosey, fluffy, fuzzy, undemanding exercise in leftover hippie idealism — or Rousseauvian Romanticism. In this cartoon version of the tradition, kids are free to do anything they please, the curriculum can consist of whatever is fun (and nothing that isn’t fun). Learning is thought to happen automatically while the teachers just stand by, observing and beaming. I lack the space here to offer examples of this sort of misrepresentation — or a full account of why it’s so profoundly wrong — but trust me: People really do sneer at the idea of progressive education based on an image that has little to do with progressive education.

***

NOTES

3. Mark Windschitl, “Why We Can’t Talk to One Another About Science Education Reform,” Phi Delta Kappan, January 2006, p. 352.

4. As I was preparing this article, a middle-school student of my acquaintance happened to tell me about a class she was taking that featured a scathing indictment of American imperialism – as well as fact-based quizzes and report cards that praised students for being “well behaved” and “on-task.”

The trouble with calls for universal 'high quality' pre-K

This was written by Alfie Kohn. His website is here and he tweets here. This post was originally found here.

by Alfie Kohn

Universal pre-kindergarten education finally seems to be gathering momentum. President Obama highlighted the issue in his 2013 State of the Union address and then mentioned it again in this year’s. Numerous states and cities are launching or expanding early-education initiatives, and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has made this his signature issue. Disagreements persist about the details of funding, but a real consensus has begun to develop that all young children deserve what has until now been unaffordable by low-income families.

But here’s the catch: Very few people are talking about the kind of education that would be offered — other than declaring it should be “high quality.” And that phrase is often interpreted to mean “high intensity”: an accelerated version of skills-based teaching that most early-childhood experts regard as terrible. Poor children, as usual, tend to get the worst of this.

It doesn’t bode well that many supporters of universal pre-K seem to be more concerned about economic imperatives than about what’s good for kids. In his speech last year, for example, the president introduced the topic by emphasizing the need to “start at the earliest possible age” to “equip our citizens with the skills and training” they’ll need in the workplace.[1] The New York Times, meanwhile, editorialized recently about how we must “tightly integrate the [pre-K] program with kindergarten through third grade so that 4-year-olds do not lose their momentum. It will have to prepare children well for the rigorous Common Core learning standards that promise to bring their math, science and literacy skills up to international norms.”[2]

The top-down, test-driven regimen of Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” and Obama’s “Race to the Top” initiatives in K-12 education is now in the process of being nationalized with those Common Core standards championed by the Times — an enterprise largely funded, and relentlessly promoted, by corporate groups.[3] That same version of school reform, driven by an emphasis on global competitiveness and a determination to teach future workers as much as possible as soon as possible, would now be expanded to children who are barely out of diapers.

That doesn’t leave much time for play.[4] But even to the extent we want to promote meaningful learning in young children, the methods are likely to be counterproductive, featuring an emphasis on the direct instruction of skills and rote rehearsal of facts. This is the legacy of behaviorism: Children are treated as passive receptacles of knowledge, with few opportunities to investigate topics and pose questions that they find intriguing. In place of discovery and exploration, tots are trained to sit still and listen, to memorize lists of letters, numbers, and colors. Their success or failure is relentlessly monitored and quantified, and they’re “reinforced” with stickers or praise for producing right answers and being compliant.

This dreary version of early-childhood education isn’t just disrespectful of children; decades of research show it simply doesn’t work well — and may even be damaging.[5] The same approach has long been over-represented in schools that serve low-income African-American and Latino children; indeed, it was described by the late Martin Haberman as the “pedagogy of poverty” and it continues to find favor in inner-city charter schools.[6] If we’re not careful, calls to expand access to preschool will result in more of the same for younger children whose families can’t afford an alternative.

***

Consider the basic equity argument. Proponents of universal pre-K cite research about the importance of early-life experiences, arguing that children in low-income families are at a real disadvantage in terms of intellectual stimulation, exposure to literacy, and so on. That disadvantage, they point out, can reverberate throughout their lives and is extremely difficult to reverse.

It is true that, on average, children in affluent homes hear more words spoken and have more books read to them. But, as Richard Rothstein points out, it’s not just a matter of the number of words or books to which they’re exposed so much as the context in which they’re presented. “How parents read to children is as important as whether they do, and an extensive literature confirms that more educated parents read aloud differently.” Rather than “sound[ing] out words or nam[ing] letters,” these parents are more likely to “ask questions that are creative, interpretive, or connective, such as, ‘What do you think will happen next?’ ‘Does that remind you of what we did yesterday?’ Middle-class parents are more likely to read aloud to have fun, to have conversations, or as an entree to the world outside. Their children learn that reading is enjoyable.”[7]

To oversimplify a bit, the homes of advantaged parents look more like progressive schools, while the homes of disadvantaged parents look more like back-to-basics, skills-oriented, traditional schools. It makes no sense to try to send low-income children to preschools that intensify the latter approach, with rigorous drilling in letter-sound correspondences and number recognition — the sort of instruction that turns learning into drudgery. As Deborah Stipek, dean of Stanford’s School of Education, once commented, drill-and-skill instruction isn’t how middle-class children got their edge, so “why use a strategy to help poor kids catch up that didn’t help middle class kids in the first place?”[8]

Alas, that is precisely the strategy that tends to follow in the wake of goals offered by most politicians and journalists who hold forth on education. If schooling is conceived mostly an opportunity to train tomorrow’s employees, there’s a tendency to look to behaviorist methods — despite the fact that behaviorism has largely been discredited by experts in child development, cognition, and learning.

Lilian Katz, a leading authority in early-childhood education, once observed that we tend to “overestimate children academically and underestimate them intellectually.”[9] This is why a school that is exceedingly “rigorous” can also be wholly unengaging, even sterile. If those who favor prescriptive standards and high-stakes testing equate rigor with quality, it may be because they fail to distinguish between what is intellectual and what is merely academic. The rarity of rich intellectual environments for young children seems to leave only two possibilities, as Katz sees it: Either they spend their time “making individual macaroni collages” or they’re put to work to satisfy “our quick-fix academic fervor.”[10]

Happily, these do not exhaust the possibilities for early-childhood education. One alternative is sketched out in a wonderful book by Katz and her Canadian colleague Sylvia Chard called “Engaging Children’s Minds: The Project Approach.” Here, teachers create extended studies of rich themes that resonate with young children, such as babies, hospitals, or the weather. Children might spend a month learning about such a real-life topic, visiting, drawing, discussing, thinking.

And there are other, overlapping educational models, including two with Italian roots:Montessori education and the Reggio Emilia approach, where “young children are not marched or hurried sequentially from one different activity to the next, but instead encouraged to repeat key experiences, observe and re-observe, consider and reconsider, represent and re-represent.”[11] Educators who have been influenced by Jean Piaget’s discoveries about child development, meanwhile, have built on his recognition that children are active meaning makers who learn by constructing reality – intellectually, socially, and morally. One of my favorite practical resources in this vein for early-childhood educators is “Moral Classrooms, Moral Children” by the late Rheta DeVries and Betty Zan.

All of these approaches to educating young children offer opportunities to learn that are holistic and situated in a context. They take kids (and their questions) seriously, engage them as thinkers, and give them some say about what they’re doing. The trouble is that current calls for “high-quality” universal pre-K are unlikely to produce learning opportunities that look anything like this — unless political activists begin tp educate themselves about the nuances of education.
_____________________________________________________________________

NOTES

1. See www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/02/12/remarks-president-state-union-address.

2. See www.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/opinion/pre-k-on-the-starting-blocks.html.

3. Some sample headlines in Education Week over the last year: “Business Executives Push Common Core Hard,” “Business Groups Crank Up Defense of Common Core,” “Chamber [of Commerce] President Calls for Support of Common Core in 2014.” In 2009, Bill Gates defended the Common Core, a significant proportion of whose start-up costs have been paid by his foundation, for its capacity to eventually produce a “uniform base of customers.” (See http://ow.ly/pxALx.)

4. Note I say “for play” – not “for opportunities to learn by playing.” The point of play is that it has no point, and children deserve the opportunity to engage in it even if it doesn’t teach skills or anything else. See http://ow.ly/ta2uT.

5. Alfie Kohn, “Early Childhood Education: The Case Against Direct Instruction of Academic Skills.” Excerpted from The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and “Tougher Standards” (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), and available at www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/ece.htm.

6. Alfie Kohn, “Poor Teaching for Poor Children…in the Name of Reform,” Education Week, April 27, 2011. Available at www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/edweek/poor.htm.

7. Richard Rothstein, “Class and the Classroom,” American School Board Journal, October 2004, p. 18.

8. Stipek is quoted in David L. Kirp, “All My Children,” New York Times Education Life, July 31, 2005, p. 21.

9. Lilian Katz, “What Can We Learn from Reggio Emilia?” In The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Approach to Early Childhood Education, edited by Carolyn Edwards et al. (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1993), p. 31.

10. Lilian Katz, “The Disposition to Learn,” Principal, May 1988, p. 16.

11. Carolyn Edwards, Lella Gandini, and George Forman, Introduction to The Hundred Languages of Children, op. cit., p. 7.

12 characteristics of progressive schools

This was written by Alfie Kohn who writes and speaks about parenting and education. His website is here and he tweets here. This post was originally found here.

by Alfie Kohn

To create the schools our children deserve, it’s probably not necessary to devise specific policies and practices for every occasion. Rather, these will follow logically from a few core principles that we devise together. Here’s a sample list of such principles, intended to start a conversation among educators, parents, and (let’s not forget) the students themselves:

1. Learning should be organized around problems, projects, and (students’)questions -- not around lists of facts or skills, or separate disciplines.

2. Thinking is messy; deep thinking is really messy. Therefore beware prescriptive standards and outcomes that are too specific and orderly.

3. The primary criterion for what we do in schools: How will this affect kids’interest in the topic (and their excitement about learning more generally)?

4. If students are “off task,” the problem may be with the task, not with the kids.

5. In outstanding classrooms, teachers do more listening than talking, and students do more talking than listening. Terrific teachers often have teeth marks on their tongues.

6. Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.

7. When we aren’t sure how to solve a problem relating to curriculum, pedagogy, or classroom conflict, the best response is often to ask the kids.

8. The more focused we are on kids’ “behaviors,” the more we end up missing the kids themselves -- along with the needs, motives, and reasons that underlie their actions.

9. If students are rewarded or praised for doing something (e.g., reading, solving problems, being kind), they’ll likely lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.

10. The more that students are led to focus on how well they’re doing in school, the less engaged they’ll tend to be with what they’re doing in school.

11. All learning can be assessed, but the most important kinds of learning are very difficult to measure -- and the quality of that learning may diminish if we try to reduce it to numbers.

12. Standardized tests assess the proficiencies that matter least. Such tests serve mostly to make unimpressive forms of instruction appear successful.

Private schools should not be publicly funded

The Alberta School Board Association (ASBA) announced a new policy calling for the end of funding private schools with public dollars. 

The Alberta Government funds provides public funds to private schools with 70% of the per student basic education grant that public school boards receive.

Newly-elected president of ASBA Helen Clease made a statement that included:

• We don't have an issue with there being private schools. But we believe that the public dollars should go to public schools where every child can have access to that education.

• At a time where every bit would help in the public education system, whether it's substantial or not, I think we have to support public education.

• We're there to take every child and we have to make sure that we can meet many, many diverse needs with our children in our communities.

We all would like to believe that education is the great equalizer. Some even go so far as to say that the antidote to poverty is education.

However, without mindful and purposeful policies that fund and support public education in pursuit of equity for all, schools will merely perpetuate and reinforce the worst injustices and inequities of our society. Funding private schools with public money is a kind of pyramid scheme that benefits the wealthy few and is ultimately unsustainable.

Too many private schools have selective admissions -- which means private schools get to use public money to select which children will and which children won't attend their private school. In his article Whom We Admit, What We Deny: The Meaning of Selective Admissions, Alfie Kohn explores the ugly truths behind schools with selective admissions. Here are some of Kohn's key points:

• When schools deny a student admission by saying they are "not a good fit", they are really saying that the child is "not good enough for this school."

• There are two assumptions driving the admissions process: (1) Schools falsely believe that they can predict which students will be academically successful in the future -- standardized tests make this assumption even more damaging. (2) Schools come to see their primary role as sifting out all but the most promising children and then persuading their parents to enroll.

• Because accurately predicting a student's future successes can be very difficult to do, schools often end up evaluating children on their past successes which usually is a reflection of the student's affluence and opportunity and the family's socioeconomic status. This is how private schools with select admissions privilege the privileged and reproduce it in another generation.

• The troubling truth is that selective schools help to perpetuate the deep inequities that define our society, not just failing to make things better but actively making them a little worse.

If we are to believe those who like to rank schools according to their standardized test scores, then many private schools that have select admissions are the best schools in Alberta. And if these private schools with select admission are the best schools, why would we only admit the most capable students to these schools? If these private schools with select admissions are the best, shouldn't we populate them with students who need the most help?

The sad irony is that Martin Haberman was right when he said: "The children we teach best are those who need us least." 

David McLelland put it another way: "One would think that the purpose of education is precisely to improve the performance of those who are not doing very well." 

James Moffett coined the (unofficial) mantra of private schools with select admissions to be: "Send us winners and we'll make winners out of them." 

Alfie Kohn puts it this way: "Institutions that get to choose whom to admit tend to look for the applicants who are good bets to succeed: those who seem smart and compliant, will require the least time and effort, and are most likely to make the school look good. And that means those who most need what your school has to offer are turned away."

As bad as schools with select admissions are, I can think of few things more morally bankrupt and intellectually indefensible than publicly funded private schools with select admissions. 

I've been an outspoken critic of the Alberta School Boards Association. Despite my affinity to the idea of locally elected school board trustees, I've often wondered whether the Alberta School Board Association is relevant.

And yet, I'm fully prepared to give credit where credit is due. The Alberta School Boards Association may have just taken a step towards being relevant by rightfully rejecting the idea that private schools should be publicly funded.

Well played, Alberta School Boards Association. 

Well played.