Reforming a curriculum or moving a cemetery?

Well, that’s the comment that a former Harvard president, Derek Bok, once made: that the two were about as easy to do. His replacement, Larry Summers, wrote in the NY Times recently that in 21st century universities “students (still) take four courses a term, each meeting for about three hours a week, usually with a teacher standing in front of the room. Students are evaluated on the basis of examination essays handwritten in blue books and relatively short research papers. Instructors are organized into departments, most of which bear the same names they did when the grandparents of today’s students were undergraduates. A vast majority of students still major in one or two disciplines centered on a particular department”.

And so the cemetery of education sits. In a recent Huffington Post article, Laura Shaw suggested that there are entrenched interests that keep the system as it is.  One thing simply screams as intuitively true: in a world that is remaking itself on so many fronts, surely the approach to what education is and how it should be achieved needs to be rethought.  Innovation guru Seth Godin just published an online manifesto arguing that “School was invented to create a constant stream of compliant factory workers to the growing businesses of the 1900s. It continues to do an excellent job at achieving this goal, but it’s not a goal we need to achieve any longer.”

So what are the new goals?  Well, I’ve written about that in this space for two years now.  The question is, why is there so little demand out there?  Why are parents willing to put up with a system that is so clearly out-of touch, out-of-synch, and utterly broken?  Stories abound about the decay of the education system.  Creativity experts  decry the destructive style of  conventional schools which strip all the inventiveness and engagement that is natural to people. Yet, the system persists.

Larry Summers identified six elements of an appropriate education, if we were to make a change.  Some of his focus is on:  processing information over retaining facts, collaboration over “keep your eyes on your own work”, and active learning.  Not a bad start.

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A Degree or an Education?

Said the Columbia University student: ” You have to  understand, I’m paying for a degree, not an education.”

And there you have it.  This is what it’s become for so many.  How did we get here?

It’s not far-fetched to see this as the logical conclusion of a system that emphasizes test scores as a measure of who climbs to the next rung.  Teachers teach the test so they get solid student scores (and the school/district gets better/more funding), students cheat and do what they can in order to get the scores because they sense the nature of the game is to get the grades, not the learning. (See here).  By the time they are in college they have mastered the game: don’t worry about asking a lot of questions or really engaging, just find out what’s necessary to get the grade/degree and do that.  Nothing more.

Our culture supports this by having created  this sense that “without a college education you’re nothing”.  Reports of  earning potential as correlated to level of education tell the same tale: if you have a high school education you’re going to be stuck at the bottom.  It’s a funny phenomenon.  Sure, going to college can make you a better and more thorough thinker, more generally informed, more able to function at a higher intellectual/conceptual level.  But this is only true if  you’re in college for the right reasons and taking the kinds of classes that will lead you to this place.  If college grads actually have the above qualities as people then they are likely to do better in their careers.  The problem seems to be that when we started talking about this we focused on the fact that they went to college, rather than on why this mattered.  We were too concrete in our analysis.

It’s what happens while in college that matters, not the fact of attending and graduating.  That is, it’s about learning and becoming, not just showing up for class and getting the grades.

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Self-Organized Learning

A case has been made that universities need to shift from the present top-down and insular style to a more “learner”-based style.  It is argued that if we look at the end-users (students) and see how they already modify the system to met their needs, we can create a better system that relies on the self-organization of people: people taking ownership and control of their lives (learning) and making it fit.

While the point being argued for has merit, the premise that it relies on is weak: that college is getting too expensive and courses too often don’t relate to the problems faced in the real world. A stronger argument would be based on the premise that this style/model of learning simply makes more sense if you look at how people learn and are motivated.  Further, the model can and should be applied beyond the college level: younger students would also benefit from a more learner-centered approach, engaging them in problem-solving such that their learning will be the result of the efforts, mistakes and experimentation that they will themselves conceive of.

Actual learning occurs like the scientific method: conjecture and test -  try something and see what happens, repeat, learn.

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Education and Parenting

Some parents do a very good job of messing up their children’s lives.

Some fail to prepare their children for their futures. Some think they are preparing them and are in fact doing harmful and destructive things.  In the latter category you can squarely place the recently published law prof-cum-author Amy Chua.  Her recent memoir, as she presents it, tells of her successful efforts to see to it that her two daughters turn out to be perfect, or just shy of it.  That’s right, she wants to “see to it” (my words) that her daughters turn out “just so”.   She will stop at nothing to get her girls to reach perfection: only As, top of all their classes, top musical performances, and so on.  She resorts to threats, punishments, insults – all are fair tools in Chua’s mind to get her girls to turn out as she has planned.  You can read the N.Y. Times article.

Is this what parenting is?  Are children clay in the hands of parents, to mold as they see fit?  I thought parenting was about child-rearing: fostering independence and health and preparing children to live in the world.  Is it the role or responsibility of parents to shape their children’s lives? to select careers? Do parents  have this right even?  Is it a crazy new-age, “soft” idea to allow children to “discover themselves” or make of their lives what they would like? Chua’s approach is controlling and totalitarian: she sees her children as tools for her to manipulate for her own ends. Like a benevolent dictator she claims to know what’s best and they’ll become that, like it or not.

Chua doesn’t allow sleep-overs, parties, or after school activities. “No time”, she says, must practice!. They need 2-4 hours a day to practice piano and violin.   And she stands over them, literally, seeing that they put their all into it.

What are these children learning in the process?  To not love learning or making an effort.  To not care about things. To feel like your life is not yours to direct. How is that going to help them in life?  It’s the very opposite outcome that we’d want.  We want children to become able thinkers who enjoy putting forth all the effort that it takes to work hard, practice and persevere.  When you force people to do this they do not learn how to do it, i.e. make the effort, for themselves because you’re the one doing the doing. Just as traditional schools do too much for students- scheduling their time, controlling when they do their work, focusing on remembering instead of understanding, this approach of forcing children to “work hard” will not teach them to work hard but to hate work.

Has Chua been successful?  If by this we mean “did she achieve what she set out to do?”, then yes.  Her girls have performed beautifully in all areas.  So what?  Who are they as people?  Are they happy? Will they contribute to the world anything meaningful?  Or will they be two more frustrated adults who don’t know what they want and don’t have a sense of personal accomplishment?

The end does not justify the means. Punishing children is highly effective to get them to do what you want – just keep increasing the punishment as they get older and they’ll acquiesce.  It works as a form of discipline.  But it’s wrong. It’s a horrible way to treat children- all people for that matter.  Punishment works in the short-term, but in the long term the recipient has not learned how to be self-disciplined because someone else, the one holding the punishment over their head, did the doing.  You only learn to be self-disciplined when you have to control yourself- make the effort.  This is a huge area in developmental psychology these days (often called self-regulation or executive functions).

Parenting plays a HUGE role in how and what children learn.  If we’re sending them off to school every day fearful of the next test score and stressed out about always having to “be the best”, what are we doing to them? What are we saying life is about? Has Amy Chua not seen the recent film Race to Nowhere?

Here’s a quote from Chua about her own experience as a student in law school, where she didn’t really care, she admits, about the rights of criminals and never wanted to be called on in class: “I also wasn’t naturally skeptical or questioning: I just wanted to write down everything the professor said and memorize it”.  There you go, nothing’s hidden.  All that mattered to her was “pass the test”.  Learn something?  Care about what you’re learning or doing?  Who has time to care?  This is who she’d like to populate the world with.  You want to live in that world?

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What education should be

So I have posted to the online magazine Slate.  They have a crowdsourcing project up around the question of what “schools should look like in the 21st Century”.  Below is what I posted.  It’s partly a distillation of what gets posted here.

 

If we look at what we’ve learned from developmental psychology, neuroscience research and leadership training we’ll see that this is what a school should be like:

1. mixed-age group environments: it is not chronological age that determines what a student can learns and we all take the time we need to learn. Living things develop in a non-linear process. How long does it take to learn to ride a bike?  The answer is: it takes the time that it takes you and that’s all there is to it.
2. self-directed, lengthy periods of work to accommodate the fact that intrinsic motivation leads to engagement and meaningful learning. When we work based on interest we invest far more time than anyone could require us to. When a child can choose what to work on based on her interest at the time she is far more likely to find herself productively engaged in the work.
3. allow for results-oriented assessment and student participation in assessment rather than raw test scores.
4. allow for exploration and open-ended questioning in order to foster real learning through meaning-making activity rather than focus on “content delivery” from a teacher. Students truly learn when they explore and arrive at conclusions rather than being fed “answers”. In this manner the resulting knowledge will be “owned” by them because they figured it out: that’s called learning.
5. deliver outcomes that truly prepare students for living their lives effectively and successfully: collaboration, leadership, creativity, adaptability, communication, empathy and resourcefulness. We need a culture of adaptability and creative innovation that will allow students to develop into people who can solve the problems when they do emerge.

 

 

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deep into learning

“Yes, I know that… I just can’t explain it”.  Ever heard this? Ever SAID it?  If you “can’t explain it”, you DON’T know it.  Very simple.  It’s one of the reasons why writing things down in your own words is so valuable: it’s a test of your understanding.  When writing you have to use complete sentences, which are complete thoughts.  If what you are writing about is clear in your mind you can do this fairly easily.  If you have a weak grasp of your material the words will not flow,  or they will be vapid and vague.

There is significant research which delves into this area painstakingly.  It looks into what takes place in our mind, in our psychology, when we “think we know”.  It asks “what is going on in a student’s mind when they study and sense that ‘this is familiar to me’ and so moves on with a sense of knowing and thus being prepared?”  It turns out that familiarity is no indicator of understanding and so leads the learner away from further work on the topic prematurely.  Then you take the test (yes, the test!) and find you didn’t do so well despite “feeling like you knew the material”.  This also helps to begin to explain why there is often such poor ability to apply knowledge: that true test of understanding.

It turns out that in order to build understanding you need to do certain things in your mind: you need to actively think about the material.  This is the key.  Actively thinking means “turning over ideas”, it means “seeing how this content relates to other content”, it means helping your mind to integrate ideas.  THIS is what learning is.  And sadly, our schools do very little of this because they are geared towards memorization and regurgitation- not meaning making.  (You can read further about this claim here).

Once again, it is clear that if education is doing what it needs to do, namely, prepare young people to be able to live their lives successfully and contribute to society, then they need to learn with deep understanding.  We need schools that allow this to take place, which means a lot more than sitting and listening.  We need schools with ACTIVE LEARNERS.

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one’s pace in learning

As we continue to explore and define what a school should look like (\”education needs to be…\”) let’s look at how the pace of learning is determined: how fast or slow one moves through the material in question.  After “interest” this is a pretty significant topic.

Again, the intuitive approach is to start at the beginning and to move along as you are able to, right?  Once I grasp the first things I’m ready for the following steps or whatever comes next.  To not take this approach would mean either lingering with something that I’ve already taken in, mastered or grasped (and then to risk having interest drop) or to move along before I’m actually ready to, to take on the next step before I’ve really taken in the present one.

This is quite basic- when you teach a child how to ride a bike you don’t move them on to turning and riding in circles when they are barely able to manage “balance” by riding ten feet.

But what is the model of a traditional school?  Once again, we find that the design here has little to do with how people actually learn.  This model attaches a set of content, the curriculum, to a time line.  It has been determined in advance how long it takes to master the material.  One size fits all.  Sounds incredible doesn’t it?  Does it really take every student the same amount of time to learn how to read, to grasp the first principles of geometry or how to play a scale on the recorder?  Of course not.

We need  a model that allows for the unique learning pace of every student.  If we want to maximize interest we need to make sure that we’re not losing students due to being left behind or being asked to languish with material they are ready to move beyond… stalled in the middle ground.

So next let’s look at how we can accommodate this very basic and obvious necessary component of learning environments.

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the role of interest in learning

Based on the post describing the conditions for optimal learning, lets explore what a school should look like.  We’ll take the position that schools don’t exist and we’re trying to create one based on what we know about learning (I know, crazy idea, right?)

Interest.  Let’s start there.  Interest is, quite simply, HUGE in learning.  If you’re not interested there’s nothing anyone can do to force you to learn.  That’s because there’s a physiological piece involved.  Your whole body, lovely integrated system that it is, participates in learning: hormones, enzymes and other chemicals are activated/release based on your emotional state.  Interest is an emotional state.  Think of when you suddenly hear a new piece of music, your ears tune in and your whole being is suddenly “awake” with interest in what this is, who’s playing, etc.

You can’t fake interest.

When your interest level spikes you are primed for learning.  It’s like “brain glue” or something.  Seriously.  Learning is highly facilitated when you are sincerely interested in the thing you’re working at/on.  If you really want to learn how to tune your car engine or learn how to play tennis, then you’re fully “present” when someone is showing you what you need to know.  Imagine the reverse.  Imagine having to learn something that you really couldn’t care less about…. yeah, nothing going on.

Back to school (tis the season…).  If our new model is to accommodate interest-oriented learning, what will it look like?

For starters, the learner has to be able to decide what s/he is going to tackle at any given time – the younger the student the more essential this is.  Older students, for example, can choose a selection of courses (like in college) and then follow a “set for them” schedule because they selected the courses based on interest and so can tune-in to that specific interest when it’s time for Psych 101 or calculus 2.  The younger child, say a 7 year old, can’t do this.  The younger child really needs to be able to self-direct throughout the day because he hasn’t developed the ability to control his intellect sufficiently.  Between the ages of 6-12 or so the student really isn’t going to be able to manage their interest the way a college student is able to.  High school – you’re getting there.

So, for elementary school we need a model that allows the child to be able to select what to work on throughout the day. The problem here is that this means doing away with what we know as the traditional classroom structure of “teacher at the front of the class”.  It means that you’ll have many different things going on at the same time because, you  guessed it, not everyone is going to have the same interest at the same time.

OMG – disaster!  chaos!  Well, not so fast.  Let’s slow down and see how this could possibly happen. Tune in for that….

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