Tag: david perkins

85/365 Experts are Necessary

In a conference panel presentation on the crafting of public policy and the policy discussion, the floor is opened to questions from the audience.

Throughout the conversation, mention has been made of how new technologies have opened up pathways for dialogue between policymakers and citizens toward the goal of a more democratic society.

In this vein, an audience member steps up to the microphone and suggests the possibility of crowdsourcing a policy on something like telecommunications or open government policies. “Wouldn’t something like this be the ultimate in democracy?” he asks.

It is a fair question given the direction of the conversation up to this point. The answer, though, is better than the question. It is a stark reminder that, despite the proliferation of information, some of us know things other people don’t.

“I’m not sure how that would work,” one of the panelist responds, “and I think it’s a good idea to remember there are experts on these topics who understand the nuance of these issues.” She points to two fellow panelists who have worked at the highest levels of city and federal government. “I’m glad that we have people like these to whom we can turn for these complex issues.”

In the schools we need, it’s important to remember experts are acceptable.

The most obvious application of this principle is to the role of teachers. In an infopresent age, it is tempting to suggest the death of the expert. When anything from auto repair to ordination can be found within seconds, the roll of the teacher could appear to be hazy. In truth, it has never been more important to bring precision to what we see as the place of the teacher in learning spaces. Those who have paid lip service to their rolls as “facilitators of learning” and “helping students on journeys of discovery” while retaining teaching practices that feature long lectures and worksheets will be forced to decide whether they pass their own muster.

John Dewey had designs on such a role in his thinking on education as he maintained the need for an authority in children’s lives as they learned to help guide them in finding questions worth asking and materials worth utilizing. Learners need experts.

Dewey’s other major goal for education – the crafting of educational experiences – is also more within reach than ever before. Tools and connectivity mean students can take on roles as junior experts in areas they find interesting without committing to a full journeyman model that has then apprenticing for nearly a decade to vocations that they’re only interested in as hobbies.

Here too, experts are valuable. They offer a bar for comparison as students mess about in learning experiences. These bars help students remember they are not experts after completing what David Perkins refers to as the “junior version of the game.” Yes, they’ve gained understanding and ability after participating in the aquisition and synthesis of knowledge, but there’s always more work to be done, and there’s always someone to learn from.

Experts are valuable in the sense that the panelists pointed out in response to the questioner. They help us to navigate some of the more complex nuances of the issues and problems we try to solve. They’re helpful in the classroom in helping to find the right questions to ask and in the organization of learning experiences. Perhaps most importantly, experts help us to understand what we don’t know in a straightforward sense and as a basis for comparison in our own development. The schools we need see and appreciate each of these expert spaces, and the adults and children in these schools know when to turn to experts as they work to turn into experts.

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.

Things I Know 154 of 365: I found the hidden game

In other words, hidden games are hidden in ways that invite neglect.

– David Perkins

When I was young, my grandparents would watch the St. Louis Cardinals.

That doesn’t quite explain the ritual.

First, they would turn on the television and select the proper channel. When the pre-game banter flickered to the screen, my grandfather would turn down the volume to nothing.

Silence.

He would then make his way to his recliner and turn on the radio on the side table between my grandfather’s chair and my grandmother’s seat on the couch. Carefully, he would turn the radio dial to KMOX out of St. Louis, and the room would fill with Jack Buck’s earnest, gravelly announcing.

This was how you watched a baseball game.

It took me years before I realized a person did not require both a working television and radio when watching a baseball game.

For my grandparents, though, these two sources revealed the secret hidden game of baseball. Buck’s play-by-play allowed access to something the television announcers kept hidden.

The pictures on the screen added a degree of detail Buck could never create.

David Perkins’ idea of helping students understand the hidden games inherent in their learning has been rattling around in my head since I read his Making Learning Whole last summer.

The concept itself was some sort of hidden game, suspended just beyond my comprehensive reach by some gossamer intellectual thread.

“A great deal of learning proceeds as if there were no hidden games,” Perkins writes, “But there always are. They need attention or the learners will always just be skating on the surface.”

Even the metaphoric understanding provided by my grandparents’ baseball viewing habits wasn’t made whole until Friday night.

After a day of travel, I settled in to watch the recorded women’s semi-final match of the French Open between Li Na and Maria Sharapova.

I forget how enthralled I become with tennis until I realize a Grand Slam title is being decided.

Remote in hand, I attempted to power up the various pieces of my father’s entertainment system without waking everyone in the house.

I’m not sure of the key exact key combination, but for a few minutes, I could hear the match, but the screen was blank.

Tennis and baseball are different.

One can visualize the strategy and battle of a baseball game given only an announcer’s play-by-play.

Such is not the case with tennis. Hanging on every word from the announcers as well as the barbaric, womanly grunts from the players, I attempted to understand the game I was supposed to be watching.

I failed.

While it was clear that what I was hearing was a game of tennis, the game itself with all of its nuance and tension was hidden from me.

In that moment, Perkins’ argument slipped into place in my brain.

I understood the idea of the hidden game and the detriment at which we put our students without taking time to reveal the hidden game in our teaching.

“Only a small percentage of teaching-learning experiences include explicit attention to the strategic dimension,” Perkins writes of the negligence of most teachers in teaching the hidden game. “The strategic game is hidden by neglect. It’s hidden by the preoccupation of the teaching-learning process with the surface game, with getting the facts and routines right, with getting through the problem sets and other assignments.”

The tennis match’s announcers were relaying the facts of the game perfectly. The sounds from the court gave notice of the routines being followed. The strategy, though, as Li and Sharapova battled it out, remained hidden. I knew a game was being played, but could not appreciate its detail.

Such is the case when I forget to help my students understand the hidden games in the learning we’re doing in class and instead get tied up in due dates and formatting. The strategic game of learning gets left by the wayside.