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Balanced Literacy Constitutes Child Abuse
Joanne Gross sent us this powerful quote from Steve Dykstra, a prominent reading education and member of the Wisconsin governor's task force on teaching reading.
"Only in education do we have to resort to panels who count studies without understanding the wider body of knowledge. Only in education do we debate if the Earth is actually round, or if it might be flat based on a different philosophy, regardless of the evidence.
"The nearly universal practice of teaching children to guess at words to one degree or another, based on the theory of psycho-linguistic guessing, is wrong. There isn't too little evidence or it, there is NO EVIDENCE FOR IT. The entire myth of the three cues is nothing but folklore without so much as a single study to support it. There is clear and convincing evidence showing that all of it is wrong, going back to and including Goodman's first study that he misunderstood and misinterpreted. Yet, it persists like an engorged tick that can't be pulled loose.
"How many studies would I need to convince anyone the world is round? There are far more than that which prove guessing at words harms kids and has nothing to do with how reading develops or how to help kids become skilled readers. Yet, guessing based programs are allowed to market themselves as evidence based and aligned with the recommendations of the NRP. Part of this is because the feds are powerless and have no real interest in doing much about it. Part is because the field of education is a wasteland where virtually every important decision is made by someone unqualified to do so. Part of it is because any effort to define things more rigorously unleashes a torrent of money, lobbyists and politics that prevents meaningful action.
"More days of life have been lost to poor reading instruction (it shortens lives and puts children at risk of almost every bad thing, apply that to a few hundred million victims and my numbers are conservative) than have been lost to flammable pajamas in all of human history. Yet, flammable children's pajamas are illegal and have been for decades and we still teach children to guess at words and only use letters and sounds as a last resort."
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More Backlog
Click here for one (of many) example of US families that face jail time for sending their child to an out-of-boundary school. Did you ever? H/T RSB
Click here for new research that suggests there are cognitive benefits to putting young children to bed at a regular time. H/T Chas
Click here for the first effort at evaluating the effectiveness of education faculties. It's pretty tentative, but it's a start. H/T LJCD
Click here for a portal to challenges to the concept of compulsory schooling. Be sure to read the anti-school quotes. H/T GR
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Onwards and Downwards
Well, it seems to me that the Seven Myths discussion thread has run its course. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that the consensus is that Ms C's assertions about the under-emphasis on teacher-led knowledge-intensive instruction in the UK are not as relevant in Canada but that there is still lots of room in Canada for movement in the direction of more teacher-led knowledge-intensive instruction.
Moving on, here are a few readers' tips that have been piling up.
In Maryland, even though school enrollment dropped, the number of teachers and education spending generally continued to rise. (The same phenomenon is at work in Ontario.) H/T DW
In Washington, charter schools are making the local school board pull up its socks. H/T WF
In cyberspace, essay mills have given way to services that will take entire courses for you, for example http://noneedtostudy.com; http://www.wetakeyourclass.com; and http://boostmygrades.com. H/T TB
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Six Myths About Education
I've decided to skip Myth #7, because it's more a British thing about class snobbery that we don't have nearly as much of in Canada. So, here's a recap - followed by a statement of the next week's discussion topic.
After restating the evidence about the importance of knowledge and teacher-led instruction, the author writes as follows. "But, as we have also seen, very little of this evidence is known or taught within the English education system. The implications of this are astonishing. It is not simply a matter of saying that we have got a few bits of obscure theory wrong....The funadamental ideas of our education system are flawed. When one looks at the scientific evidence about how the brain learns and at the design of our education system, one is forced to conclude that the system actively retards education....I would argue that the myths I have discussed here are hegemonic within the education system. It is hard to have a discussion about education without sooner or later hitting one of these myths. As theorists of hegemony realise, the most powerful thing about hegemonic ideas is that they seem to be natural common sense. They are just a normal part of everyday life. This makes them exceptionally difficult to challenge, because it does not seem as if there is anything there to challenge."
As we have seen in the comments section of recent blogs, some educators are pushing back against Ms Christodoulou's assertions.
RESOLVED: The resistance to the ideas expressed in Seven Myths About Education is the result of the educational establishment's hegemony, as opposed to valid criticisms.
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Myth Number 6 - Projects and activities are the best way to learn
Disliking teacher-directed methods, most education theorists propose instead projects and activities - real-world problems as opposed to "artifical school-based structure".
As we have seen, teacher-directed learning is much more effective than the projects and activities approach, and that is because the projects and activities approach ignores the important difference between experts and novices. "Experts have a huge body of background knowledge and processes stored in long-term memory, and they have spent a huge amount of time practising using that knowledge and those processes....The way they approach and solve problems is fundamentally different to the way novices approach problems." But the projects and activities approach relies on the assumption that young children can tackle problems in the same way that experts can.
"One of the tactics experts use to great effect is to talk to themselves as they solve a problem. It works for experts because of all the hidden background knowledge and processes they have. Recommending that pupils talk to themselves as they solve a problem would not have the effect of turning them into an expert....An interesting analogy here is the famous cargo cult described by the theoretical physicist Richard Feynman:
In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas - he's the controller - and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land.
"At the root of this problem is a confusion of causation and correlation. The islanders realised that wearing coverings on your ears and gesturing towards the sky correlated with the delivery of cargo. They realised that there was some kind of link between the two events. But they leapt from this point to assume that the former was the sole cause of the latter. They did not see - because they could not - all the other factors and events that went into the delivery of cargo. The soldiers who wore earphones and gestured at the sky were just a small and visible part of a highly complex process that was mostly invisible to the islands. The visible parts of the process were important, of courses. But they were only a small part of the process. By mimicking the visible, the islanders hoped to replicate the whole.
"This seems to me the mistake we have made in encouring expert performance among our pupils. We look at what experts do and encourage pupils to copy that."
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Myth Number Five: We should teach transferable skills
Once educators drastically reduced their obligation to teach students knowledge, they had the problem of how to spend the resulting surplus time. The result was a new emphasis on "transferable skills" - critical thinking, problem-solving, analysis and evaluation - in short, teaching students how to learn to learn.
Unfortunately, research over the last few decades has proven that knowledge and skills are intertwined, and it turns out that it is not in fact possible to separate out individual skills and make students good at them in isolation. That's why if you ask real estate lawyers a question about criminal charges, chances are they will demur: although they have lawyerly skills, they can't exercise them in an area where they lack the relevant knowledge.
According to cognitive scientist Dan Willingham: "When we learn to think critically about, say, the start of the Second World War, it does not mean we can also think critically about a chess game, or about the current situation in the Middle East, or even about the start of the American Revolutionary War. Critical thinking processes are tied to background knowledge."
The author writes: "A few years ago I gave two groups of year 11 pupils an exam past paper. They were the top two sets. All 55 pupils were predicted C grades or above, and all 55 did indeed go on to get C grades or above. They had all been consistently working close to their target grades when I gave them this past paper. It consisted of an unseen extract from a short story by Arthur C. Clarke. The story is about a man who is the last human left in a futuristic London that has been submerged in ice and snow. He is constantly hearing loud noises from the North. He knows that if men were coming to rescue him, they would be more likely to come from the South, but he hopes against hope anyway. The punchline is that the noise turns out to be a glacier.
"As I read it in preparation for the lesson, I guessed what would happen - no one would get a very good mark because no one knew what a glacier was and proper understanding of the story depended on this. I was right. Out of the 55 pupils, not one fully understood what a glacier was and hence could fully understand what the story was about. Some clearly had vague knowledge that a glacier involved ice. Many of them thought that the glacier was some kind of tribe or army advancing from the North. They were supposed to spend an hour doing the paper in silence. Both were well-behaved classes who took activities like this seriously, but about 20 minutes into the task I heard groans and moans and complaints about how difficult it was. Some of the pupils were simply unable to answer any of the questions. They just did not understand what was happening. All the painstaking exam strategies and reading techniques I had prepped them with over the previous months were useless."
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Myth Number Four: You can always just look it up
The advent of easily-accessed information thanks to Google has led to an even greater inclination to downplay the importance of general knowledge and memorization, along with a belief in the importance of good research skills. The teachers are not to transmit information, but rather to give their students the tools to access and evaluate information.
There are two reasons why this trend is problematic. The first was covered in the first myth - human brains have a very limited capacity to work with short-term (working) memory, being able to juggle only a few items at a time, and so need to have as much information as possible stored in long-term memory. "Looking something up on Google uses up that space in our working memory and means we do not have that space available to process the new information or to combine it with other information."
The second problem with an emphasis on research skills over memorized information is that you can't get much out of looking something up unless you already know quite a bit about it to begin with.
"Imagine the typical dictionary entry for a word you do not know. It is often itself full of complex words and knowledge. Someone who already possesses a great deal of knowledge in their long-term memory will be able to make sense of the definition. However, someone who does not have this background knowledge will not be able to do so. This background knowledge is the schema that helps you make sense of new knowledge.
"This is why when we ask pupils to look things up in a dictionary or thesaurus we do not always get the intended results. The scientist George Miller used exactly this process to show why background knowledge matters. He asked a group of pupils to use a dictionary to learn new words. Their lack of knowledge about the words they were looking up rendered the process useless, if quite humorous. Some of the sentences they came up with will be familiar to anyone who has done a similar activity with pupils.
- "Mrs. Morrow stimulated the soup.' (That is, she stirred it up.)
- 'Our family erodes a lot.' (That is, they eat out.)
- 'Me and my parents correlate, because without them I wouldn't be here.'
- 'I was meticulous about falling off the cliff.'
- 'I relegated my pen pal's letter to her house.'"
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Myth Number Three: The 21st century fundamentally changes everything
The belief that technological advances fundamentally change students' learning requirements (they now need things like problem-solving skills, the ability to think critically and be creative, and work with others, unlike before) profoundly influences classroom teaching. "In practice, that meant adopting approaches that 'motivated students, helped them to develop their skills in real contexts, provided a clear reason and audience for their work, and made learning relevant'."
"To the extent that it [the concept of 21st century education] says that creativity and problem-solving are important, it is merely banal; to the extent that it says such skills are unique to the 21st century, it is false but harmless; to the extent that it proposes certain ways of achieving these aims, it is actually pernicious. This is because very often, the movement for 21st century skills is a codeword for removing knowledge from the curriculum, and removing knowledge from the curriculum will ensure that pupils do not develop 21st century skills."
A frequently-advanced argument in favour of 21st century education is the flood of new discoveries that results in ever-changing knowledge requirements. But....
"Of course people make new discoveries all the time, but a lot of those new discoveries do not disprove or supersede previous ones; in fact, they are more likely to build on previous discoveries and require intimate knowledge of them. The fundamental foundations of most disciplines are rarely, if ever, completely disproved....
"The scientific and technological innovators who make the headlines tend to be quire young. But behind the headlines, the median age for the first scientific discovery has been increasing steadily over the decades. That is because to make a scientific breakthrough, first of all you have to reach the frontiers of knowledge in your discipline. As scientific knowledge has advanced over the decades, that frontier has got further and further away, which means that it takes researchers more and more time to reach it. What this should show us is that making a new scientific discovery requires an intimate understanding of what has gone before. In Newton's famous words, scientific giants are standing on the shoulders of others....
"The guilty secret of the 21st century skills advocates is that it is their ideas which are rather old hat and outdated. Diane Ravitch notes how, at the beginning of the 20th century, many educators wanted to throw away traditional knowledge and embrace 20th century skills. There is little difference between what Martin Johnson calls a 21st century approach to teaching and what John Dewey was advocating at the dawn of the 20th. There is very little difference between the types of projects the RSA [Royal Society of Arts] are advocating and the types that proliferated at various points in the USA and the UK from the late 19th century onwards. Such projects have consistently failed in a variety of different settings."
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Myth Number Two: Teacher-Led Instruction is Passive
The author advances three arguments in favour of teacher-led instruction.
The first is historical, namely that while there are some abilities (like walking and speaking) that most young children acquire naturally, most of the essential parts of schooling are artificial and need to be taught. For example, "Newton may have developed the theory of gravitation when observing how apples always fall straight to the ground; however, apples had fallen straight to the ground for time immemorial without anyone else having Newton's breakthrough. The Greeks were taking baths for centruries before Archimedes worked out that an object that is wholly or partially immersed in a fluid is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object."
The second piece of evidence is theoretical. "There is a reason why it took humans such a long time to discover the laws of nature, even though the evidence for such laws was all around them in the environment. We do not find it easy to learn new information when we have no or minimal guidance. This is because of the limitations of working memory we saw in the previous chapter. When we are presented with lots of new information wiht very little guidance, it is hard for our working memories to make sense of all the new information. Because we are so busy finding ways to work withe the new information, or searching for ways to make sense of it, we find it hard to commit the new information to memory."
The third piece of evidence is empirical. "The historical and theoretical evidence presented has been amply borne out by empirical evidence which shows that guided, teacher-led instruction is one of the most effective teaching methods." The author goes on to cite John Hattie's book Visible Learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement and the results of Project Follow Through.
And, just because it is so interesting, I end with a quote from the writings of Winston Churchill, a man whose writing is now considered worthy of study. Few people realize that little Winston didn't do well in school, being required to repeat a year three times when he was at Harrow School.
"By being so long in the lowest form I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. They all went on to learn Latin and Greek and splendid things like that. But I was taught English. We were considered such dunces that we could learn only English. Mr. Somervell - a most delightful man, to whom my debt is great - was charged with the duty of teaching the stupidest boys the most disregarded thing - namely, to write mere English. He knew how to do it. He taught it as no one else has ever taught it. Not only did we learn English parsing thoroughly, but we also practised continually English analysis. Mr. Somervell had a system of his own. He took a fairly long sentence and broke it up into its components by means of black, red, blue, and green inks. Subject, verb, object: Relative Clauses, Conditional Clauses, Conjunctive and Disjunctive Clauses! Each had its colour and its bracket. It was a kind of drill. We did it almost daily. As I remained in the Third Form three times as long as anyone else, I had three times as much of it. I learned it thoroughly. Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence - which is a noble thing."
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Sunday at the Movies (Conjunctions)
Here's a cool video, this one on conjunctions, that is an example of the many other cool videos at Schoolhouse Rock - grammar, economics, civics, history, and math.