A critical truce in the war between traditionalists and progressives

This was written by Paul Thomas who is Associate Professor of Education (Furman University). He taught high school English in rural South Carolina and co-edited (with me)De-Testing and De-Grading Schools. Follow him on twitter here and read his blog here. This post was originally found here.

by Paul Thomas

Harry Webb has launched A War of Words: “The war is between traditionalists and progressives and it is an old war.”

Yes, this is an old war, and what is most frustrating about this battle for me is that, once again, critical perspectives are left out entirely. So let me offer here a brief critical truce to this war between traditionalists and progressives.

First, Webb’s post highlights some of the essential problems with the war itself.

Since the mid-1900s, progressive educators and progressive pedagogy have been demonized (and usually misrepresented) as key sources of educational failures, but traditional practices have historically dominated and currently dominate what happens in real classrooms daily.

We have ample anecdotal (I have been in education for 31 years) and research-based evidence that even though, as Webb notes, colleges of education and education professors disproportionately claim to be progressive, that once teachers enter the classroom, they tend to shut the door and practice relatively traditional pedagogy—often teaching as they have been taught or defaulting to traditional practices since they are more efficient and more easily managed in the challenging environments of mixed-ability and overcrowded classrooms.

I invite everyone to read Alfie Kohn’s examination of this in Progressive Education: Why It’s Hard to Beat, But Also Hard to Find. Kohn offers not only a solid discussion of how rare progressive practices are, but also details how progressive practices are misrepresented along with what he considers to be genuine progressive pedagogy.

Another problem I have with this war, however, is that I am not a progressive and am not offering here an apology for progressivism.

I am noting that when I wear my history of education hat (I am the Council Historian for NCTE and wrote a biography for my doctoral work), I recognize a demonizing and marginalizing of progressives that is misleading. As a critical educator, I must add, I believe that progressives have failed and do fail in many ways similar to the failures I associate with traditional practices.

I will confess that it is likely we have failed progressivism, but that point is pretty academic.

Along with Kohn’s discussion of progressivism, I also invite you to examine what I believe is an accurate model of what progressivism is by exploring the work of Lou LaBrant, the focus of my educational biography. Her work disproves the stereotypes of progressives as “touchy-feely” educators who have no grounding in empirical evidence. LaBrant practiced classroom-based research and considered herself a scientific teacher throughout her career from 1906 to 1971. She also fiercely defended the progressivism of John Dewey (something, again, that almost no one represents accurately and then almost no one practices—even those education professors who claim to be progressives).

Another problem with the war is that once traditionalists have mischaracterized progressives in order to attack those mischaracterizations and progressives have mischaracterized the traditionalists in order to attack those mischaracterizations, little value comes from the war, and as is typical of wars, we have only collateral damage.

So let me pause on one comment from Webb: “Yet, their argument is weak and not supported by evidence,” he claims about progressives.

I must call a foul here. Education has a century of research, a research base that has been ignored by policymakers and often discredited by those with narrow definitions of what counts a research (action research by teachers doesn’t count, they say, effectively silencing teachers and indirectly the voices of women in their own profession). Thus when Webb proclaims, “There is an imbalance of power here,” there is an unintended irony since that imbalance is exactly what I am highlighting.

Just as one example, Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde have offered for many years an examination of just what the body of evidence shows regarding effective pedagogy. This work calls into question two claims by Webb: first, it shows there is a robust research base, and second, the practices that are likely most effective are fairly characterized as progressive (the sorts of practices that reflect an accurate use of the term).

However, what is most important to note about Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde’s work is that what we know about best practice includes that no pedagogy is rejected and no pedagogy is demanded; in other words, best practice is implementing the instructional practices that best meet the needs of the students and match the learning goals.

For example, the evidence on teaching writing since at least the 1930s and 1940s has shown that isolated grammar instruction does not transfer to original student compositions; in the mid-1990s, George Hillocks showed that isolated grammar instruction actually inhibits writing quality. So the most effective way to teach students to write, including the most effective way for students to learn standard grammar, is through actual writing—something most people would call a progressive perspective.

However, that same research base shows that evidence-based (the evidence being found in actual writing samples from students) direct instruction (what many would call a traditional practice) is vital, and that some students (although a minority) can benefit from targeted isolated grammar instruction.

In other words, the research base emphasizes both the effectiveness of pedagogy most would call progressive, but it certainly doesn’t discount that ultimately what works best is what each student needs. As Webb noted, lecturing can be highly effective, and it can be abysmal—but that has more to do with its delivery and appropriateness than to some default judgment on the practice itself.

When traditionalists say that all students must learn standard English, they likely have a point, but their goal often falls apart when they insist on instructional practices that the evidence has shown are ineffective. “I shall prove my pedagogy is king!” is a shallow thing against seeking ways to teach each student effectively and with compassion and patience.

When progressives say that student must be engaged in authentic activities, they also have a point (although as Webb notes, and I agree, the jargon of education offers no proof that what is claimed is what is taking place), but that goal often falls apart when they fail to recognize that having students participating in a workshop demands a teacher who also provides a great deal of structure and manages purposeful direct instruction as student work reveals the need.

In my experience, traditionalists and progressives tend to become trapped in their pedagogy and fail to see their students or the evidence of their own ineffectiveness.

If you demand all children read The Scarlet Letter, lecture on it brilliantly for two weeks, prepare a detailed study guide, and then have a class score wonderfully on the test at the end of the unit, what have you gained if most of those students never actually read the book and the entire experience taught them to hate reading?

If you invite your students to participate in writing workshop, offer no structure, fail to provide expert feedback, have no process for students to revise and improve their essays, and then bundle a portfolio of all that work with a nice decorated folder cover, what have you gained if that workshop involved more time meandering and decorating, resulting in students writing no better at the end than the beginning? (See LaBrant’s brilliant critique of failed efforts at the project method in ELA classes, a sharp unmasking of failed progressive claims.)

So, where’s the truce? Because a reasonable person could read this so far and say that I have embedded in the discussion a sneaky endorsement of progressivism (do I associate more with progressives than traditionalists? Sure. But I find they fail just as often as traditionalists, and thus, my disappointment with progressives is much more intense).

Here’s my truce.

I bet that someone as thoughtful and purposeful as Harry Webb appears in his blogs is a stellar and effective teacher, despite our differences about pedagogy.

I have seen brilliant traditionalists teachers and lousy self-proclaimed progressives. More than anything, I have seen too many teachers bound to their practices, ignoring their students and the evidence of their ineffectiveness.

Thus, my truce is that the key (the olive branch?) to this war is whether or not a teacher has a critical lens.

Let me end with a couple invitations:

I have posted before a chart that I use to introduce students to the traditionalist v. progressive divide juxtaposed with the often ignored critical alternative; please see it here.

Also consider a longer post in which I explore this dynamic in detail, Education Done To, For, or With Students?

Maybe, as Webb suggests, there is no hope for ending this war, but I would prefer a different approach, one that requires that we all step away from our commitments (as Webb critiques well, our words, labels, and jargon), take an honest assessment of the impact our commitments have on students (because the only real things that matters are ifstudents learn and that we never sacrifice their dignity and humanity in the process), and then begin again, determined to do better the next time.

Peace?

Changing School

There is an enormous gap between what we know and what we do.

Let's talk about scurvy.

Between 1500-1800, it is estimated that at least two million sailors died of scurvy. In 1753 research was formally published that scurvy could be eradicated with fresh fruit such as limes and lemons, but it wasn't until 1795 that the Royal Navy introduced fresh oranges and lemons into their sailors' diets. It took 42 years to close the gap between what we knew about scurvy and what we were doing about it.

Consider this.

In the 1950s, Dr. Alice Stewart discovered that at a rate of 2 to 1 children who died from cancer came from mothers who had x-rays while they were pregnant. In 1956, Dr. Stewart published her findings, but it took 25 years for British and American doctors to stop x-raying pregnant women.

Like scurvy and childhood cancer, education also suffers from a considerable gap between what we know about how children learn and what we do in school. Many of us have experienced this first hand, which is why so many people know that school needs to change in order for it to be a good place for all children.

So how do we change school?

While our ultimate goals for children tend to be at least in the same ballpark (happy, trustworthy, responsible, caring, creative, critical thinker, etc), how we attain these goals can pit adults against one another.

As an educator and a parent, I've worked with others to rethink some of their unquestioned assumptions about school. Along this journey, I have learned a great deal about how to (and how not to) work with others to make school a better place for children (read: I've made mistakes and turned people off). I've often been described as passionate about education which can be a compliment (he gets it) and a criticism (he won't shut up).

Whether you want to talk about homework, testsandgrades, classroom management, religion, punishment, due dates, recess, literacy, numeracy, curriculum, technology, or lesson plans, here are the steps I try and use as both an educator and parent to engage people who may have a different vision for how to do school:

1. Develop a relationship. At the heart of all learning and progress are relationships. Without a healthy relationship, it doesn't matter how right or smart you are. People won't care what you know until they know you care about them.

2. Ask and listen. You're going to be tempted to start by sharing your own knowledge, expertise or perspective, but you're better off asking questions and listening first. Consider starting by asking others for their opinion. There are two goals here: 1) whoever you are talking with needs to know that you are listening and that you are not simply waiting for your turn to talk. 2) You need to listen carefully so that you can gain insight into their beliefs and motives. We all tend to have good intentions, so try and find out what their good intentions are.

3. Share a story. After you've gained insight and they know you've listened to them, it might be your turn to talk. Again, it is best to resist lecturing on your soap box. Instead, take a highly specific example for how your child or student was affected by traditional school. If you do this right, whoever you are talking with should experience this story not as a reward or punishment but as information. No judgement. The goal here is not to win an argument, but to engage in a two-way conversation.

4. Read and share. If you want to influence others, you need to be credible so you will need to be well read and well researched. You will need to familiarize yourself with both the anecdotal evidence and scientific research that supports and counters your position. Once you've nurtured a relationship, you can start to ask questions about how and why we do things and implicitly or explicitly share examples for how and why we might do things differently. Share articles, research and books. Engage.

5. Know when to be patient and when to pursue. People don't resist change -- they resist being changed. The whole idea here is to avoid adversarial relationships. Others need to experience you less like a judge-in-waiting and more like a safe and caring ally. The only way to avoid being ignored or labelled a trouble-maker is to do nothing and remain silent, but keep in mind the slippery slope of the status quo is fuelled by silence, so you will need to be selective with when it is worth speaking up.

6. Organize and mobilize. One person with a point or problem may be easily dismissed but two, three, four, five people with a point or problem are much harder to dismiss. Talk and work with others to create a connected network that influences change through collaboration.

I have some bad news.

Even if you do all this really well, you need to know about something called confirmation bias. When people hear information that contradicts their current beliefs, we tend to go out of our way to criticize, distort or dismiss it so we can maintain our existing beliefs - this is confirmation bias.

So can anything be done to break up the echo chamber?

Yes.

Some call it surprising validators.

Dismissing information that contradicts our existing beliefs may comfort us, so the challenge may be to have information presented by a source that we would be uncomfortable dismissing. In other words, disagreeing with contradictory ideas may be easy, but disagreeing with people we trust might be enough to make us rethink our positions.

Confirmation bias is most destructive where its least acknowledged. People who are wilfully blind lose awareness of what they are doing. Drawing attention to these destructive tendencies can help reduce their hold over us.

Change is fuelled by constructive conflict brought on by cognitive dissonance inspired by engaged conversations but is stifled by needless combativeness which breeds disengagement and defensiveness.

How school can kill the desire to learn

This was written by Jay Trevaskis who is a teacher in Sydney, Australia. He tweets here and blogs here. This post was originally found here.

by Jay Trevaskis

I used this image in one of my classes earlier this year and thought I’d struck gold. I actually had but, sadly, the school “system” quickly tarnished it and gave me clearest indication that school, which is intended to increase our students desire to learn, in it’s institutionalized form can actually do the opposite.

I’ve been encouraged to use stories and stimulus materials to pique the student’s curiosity and to use the stories behind the pictures to challenge their thinking and actions. As the Olympic games were bearing down on us, we were doing a unit in our elective sports science class about “Issues in Sport”. I thought I’d use this famous image of the 1968 Olympic Games 200m Podium to discuss the place of sport in society and whether their is a place for protests in sport or at the Olympics.

As the students entered the room I had this image up on the wall waiting for them. At this time, I gave them no information about what it was, when it was or what was happening. I simply asked the students to do two things:

• Write down everything they observed in the image

• Write down any questions that you have about the image

It was slow to get started but with a little bit of prodding the students really got going, they were calling out the things they observed and others were writing down ideas they were hearing from other students, they were asking me lots of questions and I just told them to record all the questions they had. They’d wondered why they were wearing gloves, why they had no shoes, why were they facing the way they did, what was the badge they were all wearing and plenty more.

Once the observations and questions started to dry up, I shared with the class the key details: that it was a picture taken at the 1968 Olympic Games after the 200m Sprint. Once the students had this they were then able to go and find answers to the questions. The next 20 -30 mins was some of the most enjoyable moments of my teaching year. Some of the students had found footage of the race and were watching it, others were finding answers to their questions. All 18 students were ‘hooked’. They were calling out the answers they found “The two Americans were banned from going to the Olympics again. Why was that?” Good question, write it down was my response. “Peter Norman never represented Australia again after this either. Why wasn’t he allowed to compete? He didn’t make the salute.” Good question, write it down.

This went on for the remainder of the lesson. It was pretty to watch.

Then the bell rang.

I didn’t have my class for another 3 days. As they came in, again I had the same picture on the wall. The immediate response from most students was “What? Are we still doing that?”. The break had killed their enthusiasm and curiosity. It had drained all momentum that had been built as we worked toward talking about why human rights were important enough to these athletes that they’d risk being banned from competition and why an Australian who wasn’t living amongst the racial tensions of the USA at the time would stand up for the same thing. Or what we’d be willing to stand up for?

It made me realise it must be so frustrating for students to go from one lesson to the next regardless of where they are up to. To be fully immersed in a learning experience and have to stop, pack up and move to another lesson and start again.

I’ve got no answers to make it right other than to say that it’s broken. So much of our schooling is institutionalised and constructed to fit in the “timetable” to make it easier for teachers to work but how much of what we do is set up to make it easy for the students to learn and enjoy learning?

As someone who doesn’t have the power to change things, I can only ask the questions. I don’t even have a solid answer to my own questions really, but it’s becoming clearer how much of what we are doing is actually making it hard for students to grow in their love for learning.

The Parenting Trap

Check out The Parenting Trap by A.A. Gill from Vanity Fair. Here are my favorite parts:

• Forget all the advice. Forget the special tutors, camps, coaches, and therapists. A father of four argues that the biggest problem kids face is the byzantine education-industrial complex known as school, which ruins the most carefree and memorable years of their lives.

• I stand at the school gates and watch the fear in the eyes of other fathers. The barely contained panic as they herd their offspring, already looking like hobbit Sherpas, carrying enormous schoolbags full of folders and books and photocopied letters and invitations to birthdays and concerts and playdates and football and after-school math clubs. You know my younger kids carry more paperwork than I do? And my job is paperwork. And they can’t read.

• In the 100 years since we really got serious about education as a universally good idea, we’ve managed to take the 15 years of children’s lives that should be the most carefree, inquisitive, and memorable and fill them with a motley collection of stress and a neurotic fear of failure. Education is a dress-up box of good intentions, swivel-eyed utopianism, cruel competition, guilt, snobbery, wish fulfillment, special pleading, government intervention, bu­reauc­racy, and social engineering. And no one is smart enough now to understand how we can stop it.

• If you want to see the absolute proof that we’ve got it all wrong—that education is really about the fear and guilt of parents projected onto their children, then go to your own school reunion. Obviously most normal people would rather attend a naked consciousness-raising workshop. But do it once and you’ll see what the Adonises and the Venuses of your halcyon days actually did with all that promise. The boy who was captain of everything, who strode the halls like a young Alexander; the girl with the glistening hair who memorized poetry and whose golden limbs danced across a stage as a Juliet no one would ever forget. Well, they’re both sorry, seedy never-was-es now. Their finest moments are behind them. Everything after that brilliant year at school or college was mediocrity. Nothing good ever came from peaking too early.

The interesting adults are always the school failures, the weird ones, the losers, the malcontents. This isn’t wishful thinking. It’s the rule. My advice to any child reading this: If you’re particularly good at the violin or math, for God’s sake don’t let anyone find out. Particularly your parents. If they know you’re good at stuff they’ll force you to do it forever. You’ll wake up and find yourself in a sweaty dinner jacket and clip-on bow tie playing “The Music of the Night” for the ten-thousandth time in an orchestra pit. Or you’ll be the fat, 40-ish accountant doing taxes for the people who spent their school days copping a feel and learning how to roll a good joint.

Dear Beginning Teachers

I've had many student teachers over the years and we always end up having a discussion about how they are going to transition from their unconventional and progressive student teaching experience to a conventional and traditional teaching position.

Since I started blogging in 2010, I've also received emails from beginning teachers asking how they should best go about teaching progressively in a traditional system.

Here's my message for those beginning teachers who want to be the change in the world that they wish to see:

You will need to work on two tracks.

In the short term, do everything you need to do to get a job and set your students up for success in the less than ideal system we have now. You will need to resist rocking the boat until you have some job security. You can only make a difference if you are in the system. If you are too vocal or uncompromising and get thrown out of teaching, you do no one any good.

In the long run, after you get some job security and some experience, you do can do everything in your power to change and improve the system.

In your early years of teaching, I do not recommend you take on the role of a system changer. Rather, you probably should stick with being a system dodger.

Here's how things worked for me:My first 3 or 4 years, I was a system follower out of some necessity for my own sanity.

Years 5-7 I gained the research and experience (plus I got angry and tired of traditional education) necessary to be a system dodger. Years 7 and on I have now gained enough experience that I am trusted and accepted as a system changer.

In your early years, do not try and change the system or it will simply chew you up and spit you out. Until you have some experience and you've had time to read and research more in combination with your experience, focus on system following and system dodging.

Oh and never try and do this all by yourself. You will need like-minded colleagues both in the real world and virtually. Trust me, the more you try and change the system, the more you'll be discarded as an outcast and a troublemaker. You will need a network to collaborate with.