What I learned in PD today

From a professional development day inspired by an ASCD presentation by Dr. Jan Jones called Building Millennial Minds: Preparing Today's Students for Tomorrow's World I learned that:

Change is exponential. Gates says technology capacity doubles every nine months. Photonics leads to unimaginable data transmission rates. Semantic Web will be our new global brain.

The world is changing four times faster than schools (Dr. Willard Daggett).* Actually, the doctor is a bit fuzzy with the number. The exact number is 4.2651.

[The vision I have is of a globe spinning so rapidly that it'll throw everyone into space, including educationists].

Kids are immersed in fancy new technology (digital natives).

People will not earn a living, they'll learn a living.

21th century skills redefine core skills. What are those new core skills? Deep conceptual knowledge, critical thinking, creativity and problem-solving, innovation, imagination.

[I am afraid the mindless repetition of the critical thinking mantra will dull the senses and stop all thinking in its track. What's needed is critical thinking about "critical thinking."]

What are the implications for teaching of all this? I quote: "Learning can no longer be full, frontal lecturing or recall of data/facts, content."

[This is a spectacular non sequitur. Doubling technology capacity (whatever that is), faster data transmission rates and kids running around with iPods have no bearing on what content should be learned and how it should be taught. If it isn't dizzying technological change but the call for "deep conceptual knowledge" that necessitates the abandonment of content recall, then there is trouble, too. How is one supposed to have "deep conceptual knowledge" without engagement with content, i.e. assimilating or learning the content? Recall is another way of saying that content has been learned. A conceptualization is an abstraction from facts, a way to bring order to otherwise disparate facts. Conceptual knowledge, deep or otherwise, is impossible without that basis. So once again, educationists are blowing smoke, apparently enamored of the high-falutin' sound of these phrases without applying some critical thinking.]

What takes its place:

Big ideas

21th century learnings [note the plural]

Melding disciplines

Unique connections

Meta-cognitive options

Focusing instruction on relevance (don't fixate on minutiae, high-stakes testing)

Digital age literacies, e.g. health & wellness literacy, visual/performing arts literacy, information literacy, multicultural literacy... [Another example of educationist corruption of a good word that is now rendered meaningless].

So just go ahead, do the critical thinking and creating. No need to know anything.

*The sound of "change" makes educationists delirious. It's as intoxicating as a bottle of vodka. The change that whips them into a frenzy is mostly of a superficial nature, like faster data transmission rates and higher flash card storage capacity, kids adept at playing with new electronic gadgets and so on. From this they draw illogical conclusions about what and how things should be taught.

To calm them down from this frenzy and to rehearse critical thinking skills, I recommend that educationists be required to write a rigorous, lenghty and critical essay before Ed. D.'s are handed out. This essay could be called Change and Continuity. The objective of this essay is to examine what changes are occurring, whether these changes are profound or superficial and what, if any, effect they should have on the academic curriculum.

Educationists should then compare and contrast these changes to what stays the same in the various subject areas, 21th century or not. Educationists could ask themselves a long list of questions pertaining to the various disciplines. For example, do faster data transmission rates and high-capacity flash cards alter the laws of gravity and motion, planetary orbits and atom bonding, or the electromagnetic spectrum and Fraunhofer lines? Do these technological changes impinge on photosynthesis and animal cell structure? Or refraction and the Doppler effect? Do they make 2 + 2 = 4 untrue? Is pi no longer the ratio of circumference to diameter because of dizzying 21th century changes and yet-unheard of electronic gadgets? Did Caesar suddenly not cross the Rubicon because Gates predicts a doubling of technological capacity every nine months?

Requiring educationists to pose and answer these questions could have a sobering effect. But I wouldn't count on it.

Critical thinking and creativity watch

It's been said that if fascism comes, it will come in the name of anti-fascism.

I am reminded of that aperçu every time an educationist, business-type or politician sings the praises of critical thinking, higher-order thinking skills, creativity and innovation.

These are all lofty aspirations. What bothers me is that the advocacy of these worthy goals is frequently accompanied by a disparagement of subject matter knowledge. These advocates seem to believe that these qualities can be taught in a vacuum. It's questionable whether they can be taught at all. More likely they develop incidentally through a struggle with subject matter. They are certainly not free-floating entities without moorings. So to get back to the fascism case, in edland anti-intellectualism comes in the name of "critical thinking" and "creativity".

I found new evidence for this phenomenon in a fight over educational legislation in Colorado as presented by the blog Mount Virtus:

On a party line vote today, the Senate Education Committee passed a bill sponsored by Senator Sue Windels (D-Arvada) to mandate standards on Colorado schools that teach sex education. Three committee members, all Democrats - Windels, Bob Bacon, and Ron Tupa - voted to support the House Bill 1292 mandate six weeks after voting against a mandate setting higher state graduation requirements for math and science (Senate Bill 131), and eight weeks after voting against a requirement that high school graduates have basic competency in English (Senate Bill 73). Suzanne Williams (D-Aurora) was the only committee member to cast votes for all three measures.

Last week the House Education Committee, chaired by Mike “Give ‘Em Hell” Merrifield, shot down the math and science requirements after hearing support from a Jefferson County teacher, a university president (could have been two if Merrifield hadn’t rescheduled the hearing at the last minute so CU’s Hank Brown couldn’t testify), and a Lockheed engineer. Said Merrifield:

And here is the kicker:

“My contention is by forcing every child into this narrow curriculum, we are not making them more innovative, we are not making them more creative,” the Colorado Springs Democrat said, citing a national report that calls a well-rounded education the “passport to a job in which creativity and innovation are the key to a good life.”

The Witwer plan, Merrifield said, would make students “more regimented and more lock-step (with) less ability to think outside the box.”

(Hat tip to Myrtle Hocklemeier commenting at KTM II.)

The twisted thinking exhibited by this chairman of the House Education Committee (of all things!) frankly leaves me speechless. It's easy to utter a stupidity. It takes considerable effort to describe the nature of a stupidity. For example, would I have to brandish logical notions like denying the antecedent or affirming the consequent to tackle this inanity?

Another juicy example comes via D-EDRECKONING. Highly prolific blogger Ken deRosa cites a Daily Mail article in which some Association of Teachers and Lecturers suffers paroxysms of anti-intellectualism:

Schools should teach children the key skills they need for life - like walking and thinking - not set subjects such as history or French, teachers' leaders have said.

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers called for the National Curriculum to be torn up and the testing system abolished.

The union said teachers in local schools should be able to adapt lessons to fit a new framework focusing on important skills for life, rather than academic subjects.

Martin Johnson, ATL's acting deputy general secretary, said prioritising academic education over other types of knowledge was "totalitarian".

"A curriculum is a selection from the total sum of knowledge, which is exploding," he said.

"For the state to suggest that some knowledge should be privileged over other knowledge is a bit totalitarian in a 21st century environment. We are arguing that knowledge which traditionally has high status should not be privileged over other kinds of knowledge.

Schools should teach children the key skills they need for life - like walking and thinking?

Walking?

Now I am waiting for an educationist to point out breathlessly that walking is an important 21th century skill.

UPDATE:
In the meantime, Rory has left a comment at D-ED RECKONING in which he reviews the massive amount of research confirming the importance of walking:

I am finally glad someone has finally decided to address the walking achievement gap.

Study after study has confirmed that the ability to walk is a critical aspect of employment.

Our new information based society heavily depends on consumption of coffee. A recent study by a leading University determined it is much more economical to provide centralized coffee pots in office environments. Without the ability to "walk" to these coffee pots, employees will soon suffer from coffee withdrawal causing severe detrimental effects on worker productivity.

L.B. Ral from Progressive University cautions against a biased approach to walking instruction though. He notes that different cultures have different styles of walking.

Meanwhile, disabled activists have called the new emphasis on walking instruction discriminatory. They point out that thousands of wheelchair bound people across the country are able to get around quite well without walking. They recommend "walking" classes be replaced with inclusive instruction on "moving".

Buzzword education

(Cross-posted at KTM II)

Wikipedia has an interesting entry on buzzwords. Buzzwords may sound impressive but have an unclear meaning. Wikipedia says: "Buzzwords are typically intended to impress one's audience with the pretense of knowledge. For this reason, they are often universal. They typically make sentences difficult to dispute, on account of their cloudy meaning."

Buzzwords should not be confused with jargon. For the most part, jargon has a well-defined technical meaning, at least to the initiated. On the other hand, buzzwords not only obscure meaning, but "can also function to control thought by being intentionally vague." As Wikipedia puts it: "In management, stating organizational goals by using words with unclear meanings prevents anybody from questioning the directions and intentions of these decisions..."

What is true for management is true for education to a high degree. Education presents a veritable cornucopia of buzzwords with vague meanings. They form the feeble corpus of the educationist Thoughtworld that would be a corpse in a more rational world. (Thoughtworld is a term coined by E. D. Hirsch to describe the nebulous educationist thought complex).

Ed schools are a rich generator of educationist fog, blasting prodigious quantities of fog into the air the way Mount Pinatubo might spew massive amounts of ash into the air until the sun is reduced to a faint glow.

And yet, astonishingly and improbably, we are asked to believe that the massive amounts of fog mixed with toxic fumes emitted by ed schools magically stop at the schoolhouse door.

It's been claimed by some, including Washington Post education writer Jay Mathews (see The Ed School Disease, Part Two) commenting on educational historian David F. Labaree's new book, "The Trouble With Ed Schools," that ed schools may be pitiful institutions and the butt of jokes, but there is no need to worry. They are not doing any harm: "Why worry about ed schools if they don't do any harm, or any good?" Mathews avers:

What I said in that column was that I had been in a lot of classrooms and had rarely seen much of this guide on the side stuff. I wasn't saying I was happy about it. We have never given the Deweyites a fair test of their theories, and I know of a few schools that have used child-centered learning to good effect. Labaree's insight is powerful and useful all the same: why worry about ed schools if they don't do any harm, or any good?

The blindness revealed in this statement is astonishing. Could armies of new teachers and educational leaders who go through the rigorous ed school indoctrination process really emerge unscathed? Not very likely.

When attempting to write about the harm done by ed school ideology, it is hard to know where to begin. One could start with relatively minor topics like the preachments about the unimportance of correct spelling and the alleged benefits of invented spelling. One could start with the promotion of disastrous creeds like constructivism that are reflected in curricula and teaching methods, and form the core of ed school ideology.

A perusal of mission and vision statements of schools show how deeply entrenched ed school ideology is in the thinking of educationists who run the schools. Take, for example, Chicago's so-called Renaissance schools. Classrooms need to be heterogeneous, disciplines must be integrated, collaborative groups must engage in peer teaching, math and science must be learned by inquiry and discovery without coherent textbooks and so on. Among my many favorites is the Al Raby school:

Educational Philosphy [sic]
The Al Raby School will embody a constructivist approach to learning. Learning will be an active process; our teachers will use lecture style instruction and worksheets sparingly. All teachers will stress collaborative groups as well as individual initiative, striving to make the classroom a model democratic community where students have choices and responsibilities. Based on a large body of research, we believe that for true comprehension and retention to occur the learning must be relevant, active and reflective.

Many of these new Chicago schools receive money from the Gates Foundation.

It is also wrong for Mathews to presume teacher autonomy. Teachers are not free agents. They must work under the contraints imposed from above. In many schools, this means having to work with fuzzy math textbooks like TERC, Trailblazers, Connected Math, CorePlus, all execrable fuzzy math programs. The CMP teacher manual tells teachers not to provide explicit instruction. Math teachers I've talked to either follow this dictum or are agonizing over it. Often it can mean working with no textbooks at all. Periodically, an ed school-indoctrinated leadership comes in and orders the removal of textbooks and workbooks from classrooms. These are then given away or end up in the trash.

Even if teachers manage to defy ed school indoctrination, the obstacles they face in actual practice are formidable. They face not only institutional constraints (e.g. constructivist materials and approaches mandated from above), but they are also facing a student body that has been conditioned to expect to be entertained and to be resistant to expository instruction.

One of the pernicious effects of ed school ideology is how it produces an indoctrinated cadre for top leadership positions which then has the power to impose constructivist texts and practices on schools, like Chicago's CMSI. This cadre could be anything from superintendents to board members to curriculum and instruction experts to principals and supervisory bodies.

The message from this cadre is that explicit instruction should be minimized or avoided altogether; that worksheets (one of the hands-on activities that make sense) should be avoided like the plague [one reason for the highly restricted photocopying allotment given to teachers here in Chicago]; that textbooks are evil incarnate and prevent teachers from being "creative". On top of everything, overworked and frazzled teachers are expected to reinvent the wheel every day. Since many elementary teachers are not well-educated to begin with (e.g. a pathetic knowledge of history, geography and science), the one source of knowledge (textbooks) that could be a corrective is foreclosed. So you have instances of textbook-free schools. Schools without basals (hated by educationists), history and science textbooks, except for science "inquiry" manuals.

Part of this hatred for textbooks is the belief -- a component of ed school ideology -- that "information" (this is how educationists view knowledge) is exploding like supernovae, and what is true today is hopelessly obsolete tomorrow. Another reason is plain educationist disdain for facts. It interferes with "critical thinking" and "creativity" and stunts the mind.

One can see the hand of ed school ideology everywhere in school. At least I see it everywhere. I see it when DEAR (Drop Everything and Read insipid, vacuous and vapid fiction) is the first thing on the agenda in the morning when students are most receptive for more substantial stuff. This reading then takes place silently for an hour without teacher feedback. I see it in block scheduling to provide ample opportunity for time-wasting activities. I see it in contrived interdisciplinary instruction and in coloring and more coloring. I see the hand of ed school ideology indirectly when new elementary teacher candidates are released from the citadels of anti-intellectualism with scant knowledge of math, science, history, geography, grammar and languages, and subsequently validated by laughable state "content" tests.

The list goes on and on. I haven't even adressed ed school staples like learning styles, multiple intelligences, developmentally appropriate injunctions that often slide into low expectations, project and activities mania, heterogeneous grouping, expanding horizons, the travesty form of Bloom's taxonomy, and the disdain for factual knowledge. Moreover, once out of ed school, teachers continue to be assaulted with ed school ideology in the form of professional development requirements.

Arrested development

Constructivism reigns supreme in ed schools. It is the unquestioned doctrine that guides all aspects of teacher preparation. It should therefore be of some interest to find out what it is all about, if there is an empirical core that can be discerned from the thick fog that envelops hapless teacher candidates. The prospects are not good. Von Glaserfeld calls constructivism "a vast and woolly area in contemporary psychology, epistemology, and education."

Trying to pin down constructivism -- to see if it can be defined in a meaningful way and whether there is any sense that can be separated from nonsense -- is like searching for the unicorn.

At this point of my search, the best I can do is conclude that constructivists display a case of arrested development. Constructivists are stuck in the Piagetian sensorimotor or, at best, pre-operational stage. This infantilism that manifests itself in constructivists goes a long way in explaining educationist hostility to knowledge and educationist anti-intellectualism. But this infantilism is golden compared to the denial of objective reality by radical constructivist gurus like von Glaserfeld.

Let me elaborate a bit.

Constructivists cite Piaget and Vygotsky as their progenitors. Piaget did groundbreaking work on how toddlers develop intellectually and came up with different stages (really a continuum divided into stages to get a better handle on this development). For example, a toddler might recognize at some point that an object that is moved behind another object and disappears from sight does not cease to exist (permanence). Or a toddler might discover on his own that an object falls when released or that bumping into a wall is not a good idea or that a flame is hot.

The constructivists' fallacy is to carry this notion of discovery and individual experience to absurd lengths and apply it to later years -- to adolescence and even adulthood. Learning then becomes solely a matter of discovery and individual experience from which one constructs one's own knowledge and meaning. But you cannot "construct" broader knowledge ex nihilo and keep reinventing the wheel endlessly. You need external input. You need to benefit from the knowledge accumulated over thousands of years. This is where constructivism breaks down. Constructivism presents itself as a theory of learning based solely on experience. But personal experience is limited. Broader learning also needs to tap into an existing body of knowledge that constructivists disparage.

This otherwise imcomprehensible educationist hostility to knowledge and especially imparting knowledge becomes clearer when one considers the views of leading radical constructivist gurus like von Glaserfeld who seem to come straight out of the loony bin:

Von Glaserfeld is one of the leading apostles of radical constructivism. Radical constructivism rejects the traditional philosophical position of realism and adopts a relativist position. The traditional view of realism sees knowledge as a representation of an absolute reality - a world "out there" prior to having been experienced. The radical constructivists sees knowledge as "something that is personally constructed by individuals, in an active way, as they try to give meaning to socially accepted and shared notions." As von Glaserfeld himself says "knowledge is the result of an individual subject's constructive activity, not a commodity that somehow resides outside the knower and can be conveyed or distilled by diligent perception or linguistic communication"

This explains why educationists don't believe in an external body of academic knowledge that should be communicated to students. It explains why teachers are not allowed to teach, i.e. give explicit instruction.

On the other hand, how constructivists can claim Vygotsky as one of their own still remains a mystery to me. His notions of the zone of proximal development and scaffolding are sensible and don't rule out explicit instruction (despised by constructivists). His emphasis on socio-cultural factors doesn't fit in with "constructing one's own knowledge" either.

I wish someone could explain all these mysteries to me.

UPDATE #1: In the meantime, reader Rob has helpfully directed me to a scholarly article called Does No One Read Vygotsky’s Words? Commentary on Glassman that exposes attempts to Deweyize Vygotsky through omissions, distortions and inventions.

From the abstract:

In the May 2001 issue of Educational Researcher, Michael Glassman proposed several commonalities in the thinking of John Dewey and Lev Vygotsky. However, in addition to general problems in the article (misstatements about scholars’ writings and a reliance on unsupported inferences), the discussion misconstrues major concepts and topics addressed by Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive development—psychological tools, the role of the cross-cultural study, the zone of proximal development, and the nature of conceptual thinking. In addition, Glassman attempted to force Vygotsky’s goals into a Deweyan framework. The result is a misportrayal of Vygotsky’s work.

UPDATE #2: I dug out my ed psych text (Anita Woolfolk) we used in grad school to see what it says about Piaget and constructivism. From it I learn that knowledge is "constructed by transforming, organizing, and reorganizing previous knowledge. Knowledge is not a mirror of the external world, even though experience influences thinking and thinking influences knowledge. Exploration and discovery are more important than teaching." The quote is Woolfolk speaking and giving a summary of Piaget's purported views under the heading "Assumptions about Learning and Knowledge."

Woolfolk goes on to helpfully explain how knowledge is constructed citing Moshman (1982). Knowledge construction is directed by internal processes like Piaget's organization, assimilation and accommodation. This means that new knowledge is "abstracted from old knowledge." It turns out that "[k]nowledge is not a mirror of reality, but rather an abstraction that grows and develops with cognitivie activity. Knowledge is not true or false; it just grows more internally consistent and organized with development."

Talk about being self-referential. Where is the external input?

I don't know what to make of this. I can understand that we might have to readjust our thinking when we learn new things that might conflict with or supplement our previous knowledge. But apparently there is no input of new knowledge from an external source. Saying that knowledge is constructed by transforming, organizing, and reorganizing previous knowledge is purely self-referential. Previous knowledge is simply remixed and stirred the way you might mix the ingredients of a cake. Nothing new is added. How relevant is all this to teaching reading and writing skills, math, science, history, geography, literature or languages?

Neither relevant nor helpful. It's all nonsense -- nonsense on stilts that has managed to become the dominant creed of the ed establishment. Constructivism is to education what creationism is to science. Both lack an empirical basis and rely on some unfathomable, ineffable, magical, supernatural thing said to "construct" something out of nothing.

How refreshing, then, to have someone like Prof. Plum rip the mask off this pretentious drivel:

What is Constructivism?

Constructivism is big word that makes education perfessers think they are intelligent.

Constructivism is an invention that makes education perfessers think they know something that everyone else doesn't.

Constructivism is a set of statements about learning that are quite simpleminded and generally false.

"Knowledge can't be transmitted from one person to another. 'Learners' have to construct knowledge." [This very statement shows that constructivists don't believe what they say. Isn't the statement an effort to transmit knowledge?]

"Therefore, teachers should not teach directly by telling or showing (e.g., how to solve math problems). Instead, they should guide students as STUDENTS figure out concepts (what granite is) and strategies (how to sound out words, how to solve math problems)." [Constructing knowledge means NOTHING more than comparing and contrasting, identifying sameness and difference, making inductions and deductions. This is all OLD news. There is NO reason why teachers can't teach in a direct and focused fashion. In fact, students "construct knowledge" (figure things out) better--faster and with fewer errors--when they ARE taught directly, rather than expected to "discover" knowledge--which makes no sense, anyway. If knowledge is constructed, what IS there to discover?]

"How each person constructs knowledge is unique. Therefore, teachers should not arrange instruction in sequences. Instead, students should select learning tasks. Don't worry. They will select what they are ready for." [Unique in the DETAILS but not in the general logical operations by which human beings learn. If each person is unique, I guess physicians should not take their blood pressure.]

"Drill (distributed practice) is bad. It is boring. It is not needed." [Baloney!]

"Tasks should be 'authentic.' Holistic. Teach the fundamentals of chemistry in the CONTEXT of chemistry experiments. Teach phonics skills in the context of reading." [This is the prescription for keeping kids ignorant and unskilled and for leaving them demoralized.]

"Since each student's learning is unique and INTERNAL, you cannot use quantitative and standardized methods of assessment. It should be qualitative--how students feel and think about what they are learning." [This makes no sense. Body temperature is also "internal," but you can measure it quantitatively and with a standard instrument. Likewise, you can easily count how many math problems kids do correctly. This is a cop-out to protect constructivists from data that would ruin them.]

And from this set of sophomoric beliefs, you get whole language, fuzziest math, inquiry science, literature without literacy, and history without moral and political lessons.

...

Constructivist "theory" is a mishmash of overlapping platitudes and absurdities--"empty words and poetic metaphors" (Aristotle, Metaphysics). Taken separately, constructivist "propositions" are merely simpleminded. Taken together, they are indistinguishable from the verbal behavior of a person suffering from chronic schizophrenia.

"Reality is a construction."
"Knowledge is a construction."
"Experience is a construction."
"Experience is constructed with constructs."
"Constructs are constructed out of experience."
"Reality is knowledge."
"Knowledge is reality."
"Experience is reality."
"There is no knowable reality external to the knowing subject (the constructor)."
"Individuals and groups construct meaning as they interact with environments."
"Therefore, no statement can be more than relatively true."
"A current body of knowledge ('reality') is a context that shapes the construction of knowledge."
"Therefore, environment, knowledge, experience, meaning and reality are the same thing."

What does progressive/constructivist education actually look like in practice. Here we have a smartly written account from someone who is experiencing it first hand:

In my lesson during the first block, we read a lot of the primary source documents out loud together, and then I led a discussion about them and we took notes together. This was roundly condemned as the wrong approach, and so the next period I had to let them read and interpret in groups. As usual, they wasted a lot of time and I don't really think they understood it. Not that I'm sure they had totally understood it in the first block, since they didn't have the proper historical background and I can't give them quizzes, but at least I got some reasonable answers out of the class discussion. In the second block, everyone got something different, depending on their group. It was so frustrating. I don't want to learn to teach like this because I don't think it's right. But I can't contradict the teacher. But I need the practice. It's an education grad school moral dilemma. The best kind.

This is just the last paragraph of a fairly long post. Read the whole thing.

UPDATE #3: Here are more sources on constructivism:

http://mathforum.org/mathed/constructivism.html

What is Constructivism?

"Students need to construct their own understanding of each mathematical concept, so that the primary role of teaching is not to lecture, explain, or otherwise attempt to 'transfer' mathematical knowledge, but to create situations for students that will foster their making the necessary mental constructions. A critical aspect of the approach is a decomposition of each mathematical concept into developmental steps following a Piagetian theory of knowledge based on observation of, and interviews with, students as they attempt to learn a concept." [Emphasis added].
- Calculus, Concepts, Computers, and Cooperative Learning (C4L)

These prescriptions would explain the surfeit of math cripples. I know from my own experience teaching math that students thrive when having things explained to them combined with guided practice and independent homework in the form of distributed practice and overlearning.

Trivial hands-on activities

Educationists waste endless time on trivial hands-on activities and projects and then whine that requiring basic skills in reading and math is an onerous requirement that takes too much of their time. Endless, trivial, often pointless and time-wasting hands-on activities and projects are an integral part of the anti-knowledge progressive/constructivist ed ideology. It has its roots in the progressive belief that learning must be "experiential" and that one only learns by doing. That creates a bias against book learning and explicit instruction.

Here is a terrific article from American Educator that might explain why schools have such dismal results.

Lost In Action
Are time-consuming, trivializing activities displacing the cultivation of active minds ?

By Gilbert T. Sewall

A third-grade social studies student in California builds an Endangered Species "portfolio." For the entire year. This portfolio is given over to the demise of the toucan and the Galapagos tortoise. The portfolio is brightly colored, laminated and spiral bound, containing lots of glossy photographs clipped from magazines. Each page is thick with adhesive stick-ons and glitter. The portfolio contains many, many misspelled words and exhibits almost no understanding of the South American continent's natural history.

As traditional learning gives way in a growing number of classrooms, students encounter more and more projects and activities like the one above:

A seventh-grade suburban Maryland student builds a shoebox-sized replica of the items in his school locker for Spanish class. The academic content: He then labels the items in Spanish. Total time for the project: approximately 20 hours. Ninth-grade French class students in New York City scout cookbooks for crepe suzette and omelet recipes. They create photo montages of the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame, making posters for display on classroom walls.
Selected members of a 10th-grade world history class receive cookies. The rest of the class goes empty-handed. This creates a room of haves and have nots. Students discuss how it feels to be left out, and how it feels to be the privileged few given the cookies to eat. The purpose: to prepare for the study of the French Revolution.
Leading textbooks, new tests, and academic journals reinforce these practices:

A third-grade math program devotes a week to the concept of 1,000. One lesson centers on "Thousand skits," in which students figure out things the class can do cooperatively to accomplish 1,000 repetitions and then try to act them out. "Work in groups of four to make up your skit. Decide what you will do, how many people you will need, and how many repetitions each person will do. Write down the directions for your skit." This lesson is taken from a textbook series the U.S. Department of Education recommended last year to school districts across the country.
A sixth-grade social studies textbook suggests: "Imagine you are a television reporter covering the Roman assault on Masada. Prepare a news report on this event."
An "authentic assessment" in "integrated science" designed to replace ordinary tests asks students to write a poem about mitosis. A journal of chemical education encourages high school science students to construct a new periodic table of the elements as it might appear on some unspecified alien planet.
No one contests some legitimate place for projects and activities in classrooms. But lost in the whirlwind, this doing and doing, is a sense of where the real action should be--in the minds of students. Activities enthusiasts are right not to want passive students. But they have made a dangerous error. They have substituted ersatz activity and shallow content for the hard and serious work of the mind.

Whether projects and activities are good or bad, successful or unsuccessful, they are without question popular. They elicit warm and positive feelings that are lodged in persuasive learning theories and sentiments held almost universally: that a variety of tasks, assignments, and methods makes education more pleasurable and memorable.

Activity-based learning is not confined to early childhood education or the lower grades, to a handful of "innovative" classrooms, to public education, or to mediocre schools. In elementary and high schools alike, public and private, it is taking the place of traditional lessons, essays, tests, and research papers. The trend is not a matter of a pendulum swinging a little too far in one direction. In many schools, activities more than supplement the text and lesson. Activities are the lesson.

Such teaching strategies have a long pedigree. Some call them the project method, a term often used interchangeably with "activities-based learning" and "hands-on learning." Content is tied to prior experiences or known student interests. In a 1996 report on how teachers try to stimulate interest in learning, John A. Zahorik at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee defined these hands-on activities very broadly, including lessons in which the "student is an active participant rather than a passive listener. The term includes the use of manipulatives such as pattern blocks in mathematics; playing games of all kinds; participating in simulations, role playing and drama; engaging in projects. "

Education publishers, eager to keep up with pedagogical trends, have responded. Flip to any lesson in any up-to-date textbook. You'll find projects and activities at the core of the editorial apparatus. The most ambitious of the nation's new secondary-level history textbooks, McGraw-Hill/Glencoe's American journey --whose authors include a former president of the American Historical Association and a Pulitzer Prize winner--features a Taffy Pull, complete with a recipe and an invitation for students to relive the social event of the 1800s and early 1900s.

Hands-on enthusiasts claim that traditional pedagogy and content are at the center of the "interest" problem. They assume project- and activity-based learning to be superior forms of instruction, kinder and more humane than the opposite, which is often lumped under the term "verbal learning. " Language and letters, the many-splendored world of mathematics, the vast terrain of history and science, at least in pure form, according to this outlook, are limiting, boring, and possibly emotionally harmful to children.

Traditional classroom activities and content lose out--crowded and trimmed in order to accommodate projects. There's only so much school day, and projects and activities consume time greedily. To make room, time allotted to reading, writing, listening, critical dialogue, and directed inquiry inevitably shrinks. Serious learning takes a back seat.

Activities expand exponentially because teachers think that's what they are supposed to be doing. Administrators, curriculum specialists, education gurus, workshop presenters, psychologists, academic journals, and textbook publishers have told teachers that activities are the only way to engage students. "Chalk and talk" and "drill and kill" are the derisive names given to traditional approaches. Teachers, understandably, shudder at the thought of being associated with such dreary pedagogy. Should they resist the traditional wisdom, they may face scorn and intimidation for being instructionally out of date or even insensitive to student needs.

Lack of variety and imagination in assignments does lead to dull classrooms. Whole-class, teacher-led instruction is not always of high quality. But it certainly can be, frequently is, and would be much more often if it weren't caricatured as inevitably boring and ineffective, thus discouraging teachers from perfecting the art, as Japanese and Chinese teachers work so hard and successfully to do.* (* See below).

Activities-based learning often suspends valid educational premises: that the ability to communicate derives from verbal training; that the ability to absorb, filter and process information requires facility with words and numbers; that general knowledge leads to project mastery; that getting there requires hard work and even then is not universally conferred.

The fear of passive learning may be spectacularly misdirected, but the chalk-and-talk caricature has done its work. Pressed to be events coordinators and social directors, teachers have been robbed of traditional pedagogy's vision of quality: the carefully prepared lesson, rich with analogy, illustration and anecdote; focused and guided; demanding and lively; peppered with good humor; with frequent interchange between student and teacher, student and student; interspersed with small-group work when appropriate; and with a clear sense of direction at the beginning and summary at the end, leaving all participants with a feeling of completion and satisfaction.

Sometimes teachers must inform directly; at other times they guide students to figure things out for themselves. Active, attentive listening--on the part of both teacher and students--is an imperative. Repetition, practice, and memorization have their part, as does learning to take organized notes. At the core, always, is serious content approached seriously. Knowledge builds on knowledge. Thirteen years of carefully sequenced content and jealously guarded classroom time allow students to build an enormous storehouse of knowledge and skills and the ability to use them. And since knowledge and success are the best breeding ground for interest to take root and expand, the more students know, the more they will want to know.

Under the leadership of their teacher, students work to unearth meaning; to evaluate, interpret, compare, extend, and apply; to analyze their errors, present their findings, defend their solutions; to attend carefully to what others say; to get their thoughts down clearly on paper; to understand. This is not boring and it is not passive. This is real action learning. This is the mind at work. Those who would banish such teaching by dismissing it as dull and ineffective are better advised to put their efforts into helping teachers sharpen these familiar and research-validated approaches.

There is much more of this important article.

Expanding horizons

Recent reports on the dismal state of knowledge of history and geography among pupils again calls attention to so-called "social studies" education.

The Fordham Foundation released a collection of essays on the subject called Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong? that examines the different aspects of the malaise. It would make superb reading in ed schools.

This brief excerpt discusses an entrenched dogma that goes by such names as "expanding environments," "expanding horizons," "expanding communities," "widening horizons," "expanding interests," "widening interests" that invariably leaves pupils ignorant of history and geography.

The same is true in education, and specifically in the social studies: you have to possess some basic skills and knowledge before you can begin to tackle the higher tasks of analysis and critical thinking. Content knowledge is also the backbone of good teaching. To be effective, pedagogy must begin by identifying the specific knowledge a teacher expects students to learn and establishing clear assessment procedures. Only then can teachers begin to determine how to teach content to their students.

Unfortunately, the delivery of content in elementary social studies is frequently hampered by two popular but misguided theories— "expanding environments" and "constructivism." Both are ineffective because they focus on how social studies should be taught in elementary classrooms rather than on the content knowledge that should be the centerpiece for teaching and learning.

Expanding environments is the basic curriculum that most states, textbook companies, and curriculum leaders use to organize elementary (K-6) social studies, and it has dominated elementary school social studies for nearly 75 years. The basic premise is that at each grade level, each year, students are exposed to a slowly widening social environment that takes up, in turn, self/home (kindergarten), families (1st grade), neighborhoods (2nd), communities (3rd), state (4th), country (5th), and world (6th). While this approach appears to provide an organized curricular sequence, it lacks substantial content, especially in the early elementary grades, and children tend to find its narrow focus deeply boring. In fact, expanding environments actually impedes content knowledge because of its trivial and repetitious sequence. For example, students in grades K-3 are taught about "community helpers" like mail carriers, milkmen, and fire fighters. Such lessons are superfluous (what kindergartener does not know about firefighters?) but more damagingly do not even begin to lay the groundwork for later study of history, heroes, struggles, victories, and defeats. Instead, they limit children's instruction to persons and institutions with which children are already familiar.

Constructivism is a theory that holds that humans learn when they analyze, interpret, create, and construct meaning from experience and knowledge. At its root is a belief that only self-discovered knowledge is understood and remembered. Constructivists believe that students must be self-directed while learning in order to create their own meaningful experiences that will be retained when moving forward in life. While there is no doubt that some worthwhile learning may occur this way, it is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve self-created meaning unless specific content knowledge is a prerequisite.

Proponents of both approaches—expanding environments and constructivism—stress the importance of active learning over content knowledge as a necessary component of historical or geographical understanding. Yet just as the chess player needs to know how to move the pieces before he or she can begin the process of mastering chess, the elementary student needs content knowledge as the basis of thinking critically about history, civics, geography, economics, and all the other disciplines that make up the social studies. Content knowledge, we argue, must come first when making teaching and learning decisions.

Critical thinking mania

"Critical thinking" (most frequently known by the endlessly repeated phrase "higher-order thinking skills" or HOTS) is a particular conceit of the pretentious constructivist crowd -- a crowd averse to thinking and analysis. This crowd wallows in false dichotomies. It establishes a false dichotomy between learning subject matter and "thinking" to justify its profound hostility to knowledge. It's either one or the other. According to this crowd, "thinking" somehow can take place in a vacuum.

The saprozoic crowd's obsession with so-called higher order thinking skills has its basis in a misunderstanding of Bloom's fabled taxonomy. Bloom's taxonomy -- a scheme bandied about endlessly in ed schools -- attempts to classify levels of intellectual behavior important in learning. The scheme is viewed as a hierarchy consisting of knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. This hierarchy supposedly proceeds from lower-order to higher-order thinking skills.

In this scheme, as interpreted by the constructivist crowd, knowledge and comprehension have a lowly, contemptible amoeba-like existence and may be disregarded because of their lowness in the hierarchy. This suits the anti-intellectual constructivist crowd just fine. However, I doubt that Bloom ever envisioned such an interpretation. Most likely he viewed each category as being inextricably intertwined with each other. In other words, you cannot think in a vacuum. You need something to think about. This commonsensical and pedestrian insight is beyond the grasp of the mindless, but pretentious progressive/constructivist education herd.

Combating anti-intellectualism in schools

This fascinating article from the American School Board Journal argues that schools by and large fail to be a counterbalance to society's distaste for intellectual pursuits and what can be done about it.

A brief excerpt:

The idea that children must be entertained and feel good while they learn has been embraced by many well-meaning educators. In many classrooms, as a result, students are watching movies, working on multimedia presentations, surfing the Internet, putting on plays, and dissecting popular song lyrics. The idea is to motivate students, but the emphasis on enjoyment as a facile substitute for engagement creates a culture in which students are not likely to challenge themselves or stretch their abilities. After all, if students are not shown the intrinsic rewards that come from working hard to understand a concept, they won't do it on their own. The probable result? A life spent shying away from books, poetry, art, music, public policy discussions -- anything that takes an effort to understand or appreciate and has no immediate or obvious payoff.

Project-based learning always has the potential to be based on fun rather than content, says former teacher and administrator Elaine McEwan, who wrote Angry Parents, Failing Schools: What's Wrong with Public Schools and What You Can Do About It. She uses the example of a class of academically struggling elementary school students in Arizona that spent 37 hours -- more than a school week -- building a papier-mache dinosaur. The local newspaper even ran a photo of the students and their handiwork. "Those kids couldn't read well, and they spent all that time messing with chicken wire and wheat paste," says McEwan.