January 2013 – Autodizactic

23/365 Diffusing the Diffusion of Responsibility

I sent an email last week. In one of our classrooms, the one in which most of my classes are held, there was a table with two wobbly legs. It was annoying.

It had been so annoying last semester, in fact, that the table had been pushed to the side of the room so as not to be accidentally used. Nevermind that this also meant removing two possible seats from the classroom, the legs were wobbly, and that was annoying.

Table = Banished.

I talked about the table in my email.

I also talked about an electrical outlet. Given the age of the building, it’s not surprising that there aren’t but two outlets in the room. One is at the front of the room, one is at the back. The former outlet doesn’t work. It hasn’t since I’ve been on campus, and I’d venture to guess it’s been out of commission for quite a while before that. The thing is, we, of the laptop and tablet era, need that outlet.

So, I wrote an email to Sara, the woman in charge of managing the facilities of the School of Education, letting her know about the table and the outlet. For the outlet, I said I couldn’t fix it, but that I’d come grab a socket wrench and fix the table if she had one.

A few days later, I got an email from Sara thanking me for the email, and confirming that letting her know was the right thing to do. Sara is on it.

What’s gotten me thinking in the intervening days is the fact that hundreds of people have likely noted both of those problems in the time since they first arrived on the scene. For the table, it meant pushing it aside, giving up classroom space, and making seating tighter. For the outlet, it meant not having the power needed.

They were simple problems with a clear means of fixing them, and no one had sent the email. They had done what I’d done for over a semester – lived with the problem. When either would come up in conversation, I’d also take a few moments to admire the problem.

It turns out, according to Bud (and wikipedia), there’s a name for this, “Diffusion of Responsibility.” Our inaction is contagious. We could all see the problems in front of us. In some cases, we literally had to adjust course to avoid them. Still, we’d done nothing about them.

The principle came up today when a professor used an example of a student who scores lower than his classmates on a reading examine. It’s likely this kid wasn’t failing for the first time on the test. He’d probably been practicing not knowing how to read for a good long time before picking up his #2 pencil.

What the professor pointed out, and what I’d rather not admit to being likely true, was the fact that the student’s teacher could probably have predicted his score sans test. The teacher, my professor suggested, had likely recognized the problem of our sample student not knowing how to read, but had most likely moved along throughout the school year because he didn’t know how to fix the problem. Lacking the necessary solution, he’d let the problem stand.

In the moment today, I wanted to disagree with the professor, to accuse him of making sweeping generalizations about teachers and argue that it was incredibly likely that every teacher had done all that was in their power to help our hypothetical student.

Then, I remembered we were sitting in a room with a broken table and defunct outlet that we’d noticed while ignoring for more than a semester, and I kept my mouth such.

22/365 Stop Reading Whole-Class Novels

“Every ninth grader here reads Romeo & Juliet,” a teacher tells me. She’s explaining the unyielding nature of the school’s curriculum, and I stop her short.

“Well,” I say, “everyone receives a copy of Romeo & Juliet. Everyone probably sits in class with their copy of the book as long as it’s being taught. And, everyone probably, answers whatever quiz questions or essay prompts they’re asked. To say that they all read Romeo & Juliet, no, that’s a groundless claim.”

The teacher stares at me.

I’d acknowledged the secret of contemporary schools we’re not supposed to acknowledge. Though the classroom in question was an English classroom, that was for purposes of discussion. We could easily have been discussing a history class, and she could easily have claimed every student is required to learn about the Battle of the Bulge.

Again, it would have been untrue.

At some point, long ago, teachers and students entered into a pact that has been passed down from generation to generation – we could claim they were all engaging in the intended content so long as we turned a blind eye to the fact that they were not, in fact, engaging in this content.

In the English classroom the pattern is easy to predict. The whole class is assigned a section of a text to read. The next day, all students are in their seats, the teacher begins a conversation by asking some question or another regarding the content of the assignment. From here, our game begins.

Perhaps 5-7 students take over the role of answering the teacher’s questions. Some, but not likely all, of these students have completed the reading as assigned. The rest of this small group have read some of the text – enough to get by in conversation. From here, we have the handful of students who maybe started the reading, but decided to look online to see what others had posted rather than reading the actual text.

They enliven our conversation with reactions to the comments of the first group, agreeing and using previous language in their descriptions so as not to step too far astray from what might sound correct.

Finally, we have those students who did not read the book and have no intent of reading the book. In some cases, they cannot read the text. More often, they choose not to because what they hear in class disinterests them or they learned years ago that this kind of thing isn’t for them. No joy can be found here.

Luckily for this last group, the others take on the lion’s share of the work, and they need not worry about being called on to speak.

A teacher who does call on these students has broken the pact. The answers she receives will be fumbling if they’re answers at all. Each person in the classroom will look on uncomfortably, waiting for the exchange to be completed. For the student in question, the teacher has moved to prove the point that books are painful things, not worth their time.

This story plays out in some form or another across classrooms, subjects and schools on a daily basis. The pact remains intact.

Two ways exist for improving the experiences of both the students and teachers, but only one is worthwhile.

The first, which is most often found in those schools run by people taking on the mantle of “ed reformers” is to implement new structures and checkpoints designed to force all students to engage with the material and perform as expected on assessments. While this accomplishes the initial intentions of assigning a blanket text or assignment, it also, unfortunately, accepts that initial intent as correct.

What is preferable and much more likely to result in student learning is the allocation of choice. In the original English classroom, remove Romeo & Juliet and replace it with whatever the students choose to read. Require reading, yes, but require reading alone. While reading Romeo & Juliet may have inherent value in the education of students, that value is nothing when compared with the inherent value of reading, which so few students were doing before.

I understand this is not how most of us were taught. If we were given any choice at all in the content we consumed, it was likely in addition to some text we were reading with our class as a whole. More likely still is the idea that the majority of students read neither the whole-class text nor the choice text with ample fidelity.

For those still clinging to the idea of an entire class of students reading the same book, I would answer, they never were. And, to get them all to be, literally, on the same page, would take a managerial effort that could accomplish the goal at the loss of any joy that could have lurked within the assignment in the first place.

21/365 Name the Metaphor

In between presentations at IETA today, I was parched. I haven’t had to speak for 3 hours straight in quite a while.

Wandering the hallways of Boise State University’s Student Union, I found the fountain pictured below.

It struck me that this could fit any number of metaphors for American education. The one I stuck with:

We’ve designed a system that will allow you to get what you need and take it with you to last for a long time before needing to refuel. It’s better on the system and more sustainable. That system also has a component that requires you to be present to take advantage of it, wastes resources as you use it and can be a breeding ground for the opposite effects of its intent. Rather than working to push the system to evolve toward the former purpose, we’re throwing all of our resources into supporting both approaches at the same time, never fully committing to requiring users to do the better thing.

What metaphor does the image inspire in you?

20/365 Back to Dewey 1.8

This post continues a mini-series examining John Dewey’s Experience & Education chapter-by-chapter.

Rather than taking us a step further, Dewey uses his final chapter to remind us where we’ve been and put to the future as well.
He points out he’s not attempting to justify his call to an experience-based they of education, saying he’s well aware that both conservatives and lie rails are well-removed from the actual workings of schools. The choices as Dewey sees them are a return to the reason and ideas of the ore-scientific age or a deeper and better utilization of the scientific method – giving it its rightful place as the basis for investigating the experiences he sees as key.
Failure, Dewey points out, is only possible if teachers agree to base their practice in experience examined through the scientific method without adequately utilizing that methodology.
To be successful, experiences must be thoughtfully designed with regard to the previous experiences of students, the mature knowledge of adults, and the thoughtful reflection on the goals of the experiences. To improvise or take a shortcut to learning is to sacrifice fidelity to experience and, thereby, learning.
Dewey concludes with his belief that we will attain this simple and difficult goal only when operating under a sound philosophy of experience.
This struck me most in that it wasn’t a hopeful call to action so much as it was a torch passing. Dewey seems to be saying, “Well, I’ve given you a plan. It’s up to you to follow it. If you choose not to, that’s fine, but we are all in trouble if you don’t make a decision one way or the other.
Looking at contemporary American schools, the landscape reveals the country didn’t make the decision en masse. While many schools languish in the same uncertainty Dewey warned against, two opposing forces are working to secure as much of that landscape as possible for either a purified version of what Dewey considered “traditional” education or the more slow-moving philosophy-driven “progressive” education he was championing.
It has not “become all one thing or all the other” to borrow a phrase. Instead, it has become some things some places and other things other places.
If this remains so, Dewey’s designs of a public education as the central democratizing force in society will never be brought to fruition.

19/365 Back to Dewey 1.7 – ‘Progressive Organization of Subject Matter’

Failure to give constant attention to development of the intellectual content of experiences and to obtain ever-increasing organization of facts and ideas may in the end merely strengthen the tendency towards a reactionary return to intellectual and moral authoritarianism.

– John Dewey

Experience & Education

This post continues a mini-series examining John Dewey’s Experience & Education chapter-by-chapter.

In conversation today, I was discussing Magdalene Lampert’s Teaching Problems and the Problems of Teaching in an attempt to highlight important texts related to the idea of legitimate peripheral participation and building communities of practice.

Another teacher has expressed frustration in attempting to bring project-based learning into the math classroom. More specifically, he was trying to convince his colleagues that this was a feat that could be accomplished in the elementary math curriculum. Lampert seemed an easy sell at that point.

If I’d only thought of it, I would have sent him to Dewey as well. Specifically, Chapter 7 in which the patron philosopher of education turns his attention toward subject matter and the idea of “thick” vs. “thin” learning.

Having already set up adults as holding mature understandings of the ideas and knowledge they are working to pass on to their students, Dewey here works to encourage those adults to convince those adults to pull as few punches as possible in the teaching and learning ring.

“The next step is the progressive development of what is already experienced into a fuller and richer and also more organized form, a form that gradually approximates that in which subject matter is presented to the skilled, mature person.”

In the words of David Perkins, teachers much work to teach the “whole game.”

The subjects and disciplines of the traditional classroom infrastructure are to be ignored, Dewey suggests, in exchange for a deeper look at how to build on the past experiences of students in full and meaningful ways. Young children learn from life experiences, he points out, our job is not to get in the way.

Even more than this, in deciding content for learning, teachers are to consider earlier experiences, be mindful of the fullness of his lived understanding of the world, and attempt to craft learning experiences that thicken students’ understandings in authentic ways. As he’s done in earlier chapters, Dewey is presenting his readers with ideas that are simple, but hardly ever easy.

What’s more, he outlines a basic process for learning experiences. They must challenge because, “growth depends upon the presence of difficulty to be overcome by the exercise of intelligence.” From there, Dewey embraces the scientific method in a manner so unabashed that it could be described as devout.

Students should observe, hypothesize, organize, and build their knowledge. As Dewey called on teachers to develop a critical and thoughtful theory of education earlier on, here we find him transferring those same requirements to students in their learning.

Only when teaching is carried out thusly, Dewey concludes, will the subject matter be properly defined and organized.

18/365 Back to Dewey 1.6 – ‘The Meaning of Purpose’

Since freedom resides in the operations of intelligent observation and judgment by which a purpose is developed, guidance given by the teacher to the exercise of the pupils’ intelligence is an aid to freedom, not a restriction upon it.

– John Dewey

Experience & Education

This post continues a mini-series examining John Dewey’s Experience & Education chapter-by-chapter.

For Chapter 6, Dewey continues clarification of terms, setting his sights on purpose.

The chapter provides yet another clarification of the frequent view that Dewey was proposing a melee approach to learning, letting students loose in a situation and then cleaning them up for learning later on. In Ch. 6, we find the opposite as Dewey highlights the importance of pausing in moments of impulse so that those impulses might lead to desire.

If the earlier chapters were instructing readers on the importance of a philosophical and critically considered approach to the broader scope of progressive education, here we find that need translated to the individual classrooms and students. What is being done, at all times, must be considered thoughtfully. While this is not surprising from a philosopher, Dewey’s considerations are not philosophical as much as they are practical.

If we are to have purpose in education, we must consider our impulses regarding our experiences, hold tight to them, and reflect on how (or whether) we would like to see them enacted.

To do this, Dewey asks that teachers and students observe the surroundings of the learning and move from there to collect knowledge, organize that knowledge and then set out with purpose driven by that knowledge.

He sets it out in clearer terms:

The formation of purposes is, then, a rather complex intellectual operation. It involves (1) observation of surrounding conditions; (2) knowledge of what has happened in similar situations in the past, a knowledge obtained partly by recollection and partly from the in- formation, advice, and warning of those who have had a wider experience; and (3) judgment which puts together what is observed and what is recalled to see what they signify. A purpose differs from an original impulse and desire through its translation into a plan and method of action based upon foresight of the consequences of acting under given observed conditions in a certain way.

Rather than rejecting tools of traditional education wholesale, Dewey asks for a blending. Attend to the impulses and nature of students, yes, but do not do so without an eye to judgement, observation, consideration and guidance.

17/365 Back to Dewey 1.5 – ‘The Nature of Freedom’

It may be a loss rather than a gain to escape from the control of another person only to find one’s conduct dictated by immediate whim and caprice; that is, at the mercy of impulses into whose formation intelligent judgment has not entered. A person whose conduct is controlled in this way has at most only the illusion of freedom. Actually forces over which he has no command direct him.

– John Dewey

Experience & Education

This post continues a mini-series examining John Dewey’s Experience & Education chapter-by-chapter.

Though one of the shorter of the 8 chapters in this already-short tome, no. 5 packs a punch as I Dewey takes a moment to extoll the virtues of freedom – particularly freedom in schools.

Enforced quiet and acquiescence prevent pupils from disclosing their real natures. They enforce artificial uniformity. They put seeming before being. They place a premium upon preserving the outward appearance of attention, decorum, and obedience. And everyone who is acquainted with schools in which this system prevailed well knows that thoughts, imaginations, desires, and sly activities ran their own unchecked course behind this facade.

What sells this passage for me, which ultimately sums up the chapter perfectly, is Dewey’s own wink to the idea that, “We’ve all been there, right?” While the vast majority of his arguments and reasoning have been rooted in the language of philosophy up to this point, in Ch. 5, Dewey pulls back the curtain a bit to acknowledge that, in progressive education, he’s also describing the types of schools he would have liked to attend.

Freedom in learning, Dewey is writing, allows for action in learning. This, stands in stark opposition to the passivity he identifies in traditional school experiences.

And just as I was starting to wonder about this constant action and the criticism I could see it inviting, Dewey paused for a moment to speak to the importance of pausing. Learning, (true, active learning) my should be followed by moments of stillness and reflection so that students can take the information and knowledge they’ve gathered in their actions and organize it in a way that makes their experiences meaningful and opens questions for further experiences.

Freedom, yes. Freedom without organization and reflection, no.

16/365 Back to Dewey 1.4 – ‘Social Control’

The principle that development of experience comes about through interaction means that education is essentially a social process.

– John Dewey

Experience & Education

This post continues a mini-series examining John Dewey’s Experience & Education chapter-by-chapter.

In Chapter 4, Dewey gets to the crux of the argument against many detractors as well as his warning to those who are doing progressive education wrong. Control, as it turns out, is not a dirty word. It is also, inescapable.

Control and rules, Dewey points out, are present in even the simplest of schoolyard games. When children bristle at rules, it is more the attempt of others to circumvent or wrongly implement rules that causes the problem, not the presence of rules themselves. In education, too, Dewey acknowledges the need for rules.

“[C]ontrol of individual actions is effected by the whole situation in which individuals are involved, in which they share and of which they are co-operative or interacting parts. For even in a competitive game there is a certain kind of participation, of sharing in a common experience.”

In a learning experience, children know the difference between a fair rule and a rule brought about by an adult in the interest of asserting individual power. The latter case is toxic to learning experiences.

What’s more, Dewey begins to look up the hierarchy of schools and points that much of what is expected of teachers is not of the teachers’ devising, but from somewhere up above. These rules and expectations come not from the community, but from the individual (in some form or another). Progressive education attempts to move counter to this design, “in what are called the new schools, the primary source of social control resides in the very nature of the work done as a social enterprise in which all individuals have an opportunity to contribute and to which all feel a responsibility.”

The rules are written by the community at all levels. Here is the seed of what I firmly believe, we must want for teachers what we want for students. That goes for question asking as much as for community formation.

Most striking to me is Dewey’s acknowledgement that teachers must also prepare for those students who are uncertain what to make of this new freedom to co-create community and experience. They are, he writes, broken by their previous experiences with schools, and teachers must be prepared to adapt and align their practice to helping to repair those wounds.

To help those who have been broken by traditional schools and to implement progressive education well, Dewey stresses the need of planning in all things. The weakness of control Dewey acknowledges in progressive schools, comes not from an absence of control.

“It is much more likely to arise from failure to arrange in advance for the kind of work (by which I mean all kinds of activities engaged in) which will create situations that of themselves tend to exercise control over what this, that, and the other pupil does and how he does it. This failure most often goes back to lack of sufficiently thoughtful planning in advance.”

And in that planning, there must be the ability to adapt to individual needs as they arise while also helping to use the knowledge of those who have come before to move students to the desired learning experience.

Again, this is simple, but not easy.

15/365 Back to Dewey 1.3 – ‘Criteria of Experience’

The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning.

– John Dewey

Experience & Education

This post continues a mini-series examining John Dewey’s Experience & Educationchapter-by-chapter.

If Chapter 2 saw as its purpose the definition of the need for a theory of experience, in Chapter 3, Dewey sets about defining what need happen in education experiences. Before he can do that, though, he sets the “autocratic and harsh” practices of traditional schools in relief against the democratic goals of progressive education.

For me, the poster-worthy section of the chapter comes as Dewey asks whether we would prefer democracy to something else:

Can we find any reason that does not ultimately come down to the belief that democratic social arrangements promote a better quality of human experience, one which is more widely accessible and enjoyed, than do non-democratic and anti-democratic forms of social life? Does not the principle of regard for individual freedom and for decency and kindliness of human relations come back in the end to the conviction that these things are tributary to a higher quality of experience on the part of a greater number than are methods of repression and coercion or force? Is it not the reason for our preference that we believe that mutual consultation and convictions reached through persuasion, make possible a better quality of experience than can otherwise be provided on any wide scale?

Were it not so lengthy, I’d say I’d found the premise of my next tattoo. Schools, Dewey is arguing, should be the training grounds of citizenship and act as the vanguard of humanity and freedom. These are better goals than adequate yearly progress.

If these are our goals, Dewey moves on to explain the types of experiences necessary to help students reach those goals. They must be continuous and promote growth in general.

Those experiences Dewey is attempting to define? They must arouse curiosity, strengthen initiative, and set up desires and purposes sufficiently intense to carry a person over dead places in the future, continuity works in a very different way. To judge this, we need only ask toward and into what an experience moves an individual. Simple questions, again, with no easy answers.

Here too, Dewey argues the importance of the adult in helping to shape the experience. There’s no point to having maturity, he writes, if we are not to use that maturity of experience to help craft the conditions whereby students might better learn. It is not enough to say, “Go, have experiences.” Adults are beholden to draw on their knowledge and their own experiences to help turn students toward experiences that might fulfill our democratic goals.

All of this must ask the question, “Have I created something that increases the innate curiosity of my students?” rather than depletes it as is often the case of traditional schooling? This, in the end, is Dewey’s primary criterion for experience. The only way to accomplish this is to understand the student in the moment and work to craft experiences that build on a continuity of understanding toward the goal of increasing that student’s drive to ask and seek more.

Traditional education, Dewey writes, asks students to adapt to school, but fails to adapt to the students.

This is more to do with listening, it seems to me, than speaking. If we wish for our students to ask questions of the world, we must ask questions of our students. Often, when we speak of modeling, we have no trouble modeling how we get to the answer of a problem or how we build the finished product.

What we’re not great at, where teachers are found lacking, is the modeling of how we got to the questions and how we came to shape those questions in useful ways. If we want our students to be the builders of great ideas, they must be the askers of great questions. Too often, classroom questions fail to move past the meager, “What are we supposed to be doing?”

Dewey’s idea of “collateral learning” is diminished as a possibility when this is the case.

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