Eduphoria

D-Ed Reckoning has a video up of an interview with Zig Englemann, and an  interesting observation from a commenter, one I’ve found to true when speaking with some colleagues:

This sums up the problem with DI and most explicit reading programs. The educators HATE them.

The tyranny of teacher likes and dislikes is a difficult obstacle in the classroom for several reasons.  One, teaching is an isolated job, and a job done mostly in isolation.  Cursory evaluations, no matter how detailed, are rarely accurate assessments of performance especially if, as has been my experience, the evaluator and teacher agree upon the date and time of the observation for evaluation.  Two, the heroic stigma of the teacher allows for the perfectly well-meaning to step into a classroom with heroic ideas not necessarily backed up by strategies which match the needs of the learners.  Three, student inability is often blamed on attributed to developmental progress, especially in the realms of early childhood development which Englemann says “tend to have norms about what kids typically do at different ages, but precious little about what to do if you want to induce particular learning.”

Of course, there is nothing wrong with the desire to teach, and the heroic efforts many teachers put forth in doing so. But Englemann brings up some good arguments against setting up a system dependent on, or lauded for, teacher creativity, or one in which lack of performance is blamed on the student’s developmental level:

So what do you do if a kid is developmentally behind? Hold your breath and hang on?

What you want to do is set it up so that you don’t have to wait on development unrealistically.You certainly have to wait on development in the extent that if they can’t do it, you can’t say hey, you’re age 13, you should be able to do this, you’re entering the stage of formal operations.No, you have to say well let’s see what you don’t know, we’ll teach it to you, see how fast you can learn it, and move on from there.

It is in the philosophies of how best to induce learning that education so often draws its lines in the sand. Discovery learning, or direct instruction? Developmental progression, or systematic introduction to practice and skills building?

In the video Englemann discusses one of the most over-used criticisms of his Direct Instruction program that I tend to hear – that it is “drill and kill” (PDF link), and he delineates between the type of zealotry that is often ascribed to the program (by teachers less familiar with it) and its actual goal:

Academic learning is not everything. Kids have to learn from their environment, they have to learn from their experience, they have to learn how to learn some things on their own including how to deal with problems.But in terms of the realm of academic learning you can do it – you can give them a head start…

What I see all too often at the high school level is students suddenly expected to have certain skills and knowledge – that “hey, you’re X years old and should be able to do this,” Englemann mentions. This is expected of them because they have presumably passed certain high-stakes assessment tests, their performance on which should indicate they have acquired certain basic skills and are ready to move on. What happens to derail that is social promotion, or targeting test-taking skills in students who have failed, or any manner of remediations intent on moving the student past the basic assessment without considering how that throws the student under the bus academically.

Finally, he talks about the ways in which I often observe the heroic intentions of teachers go awry as they implement their creatively (and certainly lovingly) constructed lessons:

They don’t realize how much they over talk, how much their instructions are unclear, and how impatient they get with the kids when they’re unable to say it exactly the way they want to say it.

The intent here is not to bash teachers (since I am one, and can count a host of excellent educators who have taught me in turn) or creativity, but to point out that creativity and well-meaning are not going to erase what has not been taught. Even more, they are most likely not going to teach what has not been taught because they depend on exposure to activities and ideals of engagement, rather than on consistency in building a foundation of knowledge and successful student completion of measurable tasks. A fantastic lesson on the imagery of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby will bring little appreciation to students who cannot identify an author’s purposeful construction of sensory detail (requiring at least a rudimentary knowledge of adjectives and adverbs) and motif. To expect students to enjoy activities without giving them confidence in their potential to successfully complete them too often leads to the frustration that students “just don’t get it.” It’s possible they don’t get it because they haven’t been given the means to get there.

As a bonus, go over to the Core Knowledge blog, which is talking about the website devoted to the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus.  This is a website I share with my students every year when we begin learning about effective research, and one which illustrates the darker side of creativity – that it can also be used to confuse, misinform, and misdirect, evidence of which can be found in the continual operation of Snopes, a website devoted to debunking scams, urban legends, and other proliferate email bamboozlery.