Wired explores child-directed education. I never know what to think of these proposals, which sometimes sound like such obvious good sense and at other times degenerate into stupid chaos. If the article is at all accurate, though, one dirt-poor school in Matamoros stumbled onto a winning formula. The class did have the advantage of one clearly exceptional student:
To test her limits, [the teacher] challenged the class with a problem he was sure would stump her. He told the story of Carl Friedrich Gauss, the famous German mathematician, who was born in 1777.
When Gauss was a schoolboy, one of his teachers asked the class to add up every number between 1 and 100. It was supposed to take an hour, but Gauss had the answer almost instantly.
“Does anyone know how he did this?” Juárez Correa asked.
A few students started trying to add up the numbers and soon realized it would take a long time. Paloma, working with her group, carefully wrote out a few sequences and looked at them for a moment. Then she raised her hand.
“The answer is 5,050,” she said. “There are 50 pairs of 101.”
Not only this budding little Gauss but the whole class responded well to the teacher's style of provoking their curiosity and then making them figure things out on their own. After a year of his approach, standardized tests showed a decrease in failing math scores from 45% to 7%, and in failing language skills from 31% to 3.5%. Excellent scores increased from 0% to 63%. Paloma's score was the highest in Mexico. I liked this story, which the teacher told his class:
One day, a burro fell into a well, Juárez Correa began. It wasn’t hurt, but it couldn’t get out. The burro’s owner decided that the aged beast wasn’t worth saving, and since the well was dry, he would just bury both. He began to shovel clods of earth into the well. The burro cried out, but the man kept shoveling. Eventually, the burro fell silent. The man assumed the animal was dead, so he was amazed when, after a lot of shoveling, the burro leaped out of the well. It had shaken off each clump of dirt and stepped up the steadily rising mound until it was able to jump out.
Juárez Correa looked at his class. “We are like that burro,” he said. “Everything that is thrown at us is an opportunity to rise out of the well we are in.”
What works with one exceptional teacher in a classroom may not necessarily work when aplied to hundreds or thousands of classrooms.
ReplyDeleteI am reminded of the failure of New Math- I am an exception. My exposure to New Math, a.k. UICSM- Illinois Math, increased my liking of math, and most likely also my math achievement. Before Illinois Math, I didn't see Math as my strength. From exposure to Illinois Math I saw that math was my strength- with SAT scores to verify. Illinois Math used a lot of discovery, such as requiring constructing proofs of theorems- which is what I liked.
I surmise that there were at least two problems with the mass introduction of New Math: less capable students and less capable teachers. At my high school, I saw that quite a few students did not like the Illinois Math/New Math approach- but the most capable students did like it. Less capable teachers, especially the many math-challenged teachers at the elementary level, could not teach it. Many less capable teachers assumed that New Math/Illinois Math meant that emphasis on traditional multiplicaiton and division skills could be abandoned- which was NOT what Max Beberman, the founding father of Illinois Math believed.[Source: conversation with a math prof who knew Beberman.]
I would see a similar problem with less capable teachers using such discovery methods. There is research which has already documented problems with using discovery methods: Why unguided learning does not work: An analysis of the failure of discovery learning, problem-based learning, experiential learning and inquiry-based learning.
My suspicion is less capable teachers could not handle it.
I struggle with this too, because every time someone tries to implement a child-directed education program in a real school, somehow it becomes a joke. But the students in this Matamoros classroom were not exceptional, except for the one extraordinary little girl. So it's not, apparently, that it works only with certain students. And the teacher was not some kind of genius, either, or a great communicator; his task mostly seems to have been to bite his tongue. I can't get a handle on why education so often goes so disastrously wrong. I just know I'm glad I've never had any kids in public school, because I'd probably be in jail now.
ReplyDeleteWhich reminds me of something I read the other day: "Lord, give me patience, because if you give me strength, then I'll probably need bail money, too."
ReplyDeleteAll I know is, I was raised with "new math" and, when I was in high school, I transferred to another school. At that time, I remember somebody in the school office commenting (about my A) that "everybody does well in geometry."
ReplyDeleteFlash forward a few decades, and my youngest son (a math-oriented kid. We used to call him the "count") is doing poorly in geometry, and I am in the office with a principal who tells me that "everybody has a hard time with geometry." I told her with all the respect I could muster, and as gently as I could, that if "all" the kids had trouble with geometry, she might want to consider the effect of the teacher.
My son has had at least two math teachers who are speak english as a second language.
Flash forward 18 months, and I am in a "cluster" meeting, which means principals and vice principals of the feeder schools to my son's high school, with the new superintendent, and the new superintendent asks what they need, and the new (male) vice principal of my son's old school says, "We need better teachers."
Valerie
Well, if they really think it's child-directed and teach it that way, it will fail. Children haven't developed all the tools needed to make use of the opportunity. I teach college freshmen and most of them haven't gotten there yet. If they realize that 'child-directed' is just a new buzzword term to sound 'empowering' and it's really guided exploration in the Socratic way, then you can have exceptionally good results- but not always- there are many variables in a system like this, such as classroom chemistry between the students, and the ratio of good/poor and exceptional/really bad students.
ReplyDeleteSo much of this is so misleading- "Mitra conducted experiments in which he gave children in India access to computers. Without any instruction, they were able to teach themselves a surprising variety of things, from DNA replication to English." They didn't teach themselves anything- that only happens when you do something- they learned from the sources they connected with via the computer, instead of the teacher in the room. Also, learning facts, or even processes, however novel, isn't learning in a complete sense.
"Juárez Correa didn’t know it yet, but he had happened on an emerging educational philosophy, one that applies the logic of the digital age to the classroom. That logic is inexorable: Access to a world of infinite information has changed how we communicate, process information, and think. Decentralized systems have proven to be more productive and agile than rigid, top-down ones. Innovation, creativity, and independent thinking are increasingly crucial to the global economy." Doesn't sound new- Sounds like home schooling.
"Inside, students will gather in groups around computers and research topics that interest them" The problem, of course, is that not everything we need is something we want.
There is much to be said for these techniques and I'm pretty sure they would have been good for me, but they can't do it all.
My 13 year old son has already written the principal about a shift in his honors Algebra class to an indirect teaching method. He hates it with a passion. He thinks it is just a waste of time. He comes home and goes to the Kahn Academy to learn how to do the problems. A 5 minute lesson replaces a wasted hour of indirect learning.
ReplyDeleteI love the Khan Academy and I definitely appreciate having an instructor who will quit wasting my time and show me how to do it. But then I'm already curious and want to learn. It sounds like your son is, too. Once someone gets to that state, it's hard to mess up his education too much, though it's still easy to waste tax money with pointless educational fads.
ReplyDeleteThe point of an education should be to get a child to become a self-directed learner. They do need a few tools to get there, first.
ReplyDeleteValerie
I agree with wanting him to be a self directed learner, Valerie. I just believe that the basics should be taught. Feed them all the knowledge that we have accumulated and then let them explore new things from that base. Our ceiling should become their floor.
ReplyDeleteI love the burro story.
ReplyDeleteI also look at teacher quality as one reason these things fail. Being a good teacher requires a solid understanding of the subject, but not genius in it. The genius in teaching is in reading the students minds and knowing what they need right now: more instruction, more challenge, a break?
However, the structure of our educational system is also to blame. Teachers are encouraged (or in many cases required) to get through X amount of material in a semester. This means they break X into 16 weeks (or whatever the local semester is) and each week's material into five days. They have to get through that much material in a day, or they won't teach everything required.
This kind of requirement leads to teachers sticking fairly rigidly with a lesson plan. When it becomes obvious that students are not getting something, the teacher has a choice: soldier on anyway, or break the rules and toss the lesson plan to address the real problem.
Dead Poets Society and all, we cheer the rule-breaker, but there are consequences. You'll have to rearrange future lesson plans to cover the material you missed, and if you do this very much, you won't teach everything required, and that shows up on your performance evaluations.
It's a difficult situation: I am all for teacher accountability, but the easiest way to design that into a system is by standardization and regimentation. The schools are turned increasingly into educational factories and the teachers into assembly line workers expected to add their widget to each student. That is a particularly dehumanizing and, in my opinion, institutionally stupid way of running an education system.
However, the proposed alternative often seems to be to let teachers do whatever they want. If there is no accountability, if we can't expect schools to impart X amount of knowledge each year, why do we send our children there?
My proposal is to focus on individuals. The research shows that the one common feature of the best educational systems in the world is very high quality teachers. I say, require teachers to be excellent, then give them the freedom to do what needs to be done in the classroom.
Also, we need to stop moving our children down an assembly line by linking grade level to age. Age is important for developmental reasons, but we should focus more on what an individual student can achieve than on age. A student should be able to be in different levels in different subjects: 4th grade social studies & 6th grade math, for example.
I apologize if I've told this story here before. I had a teacher in 8th or 9th grade, whenever we were supposed to learn about factoring binomial equations. She started us off with how you can turn "x[squared] -2x +1 = 0" into "(x-1) [squared] = 0," and then easily solve for x. I don't know why, but we all drew a total blank. This went on for a week or so. She never berated us or lost her cool, but it was clear something was wrong.
ReplyDeleteOne day she announced matter-of-factly that we were going to start all over as if this were the first day of the semester. The second time was a charm; we all got it. Catching up for the lost time wasn't too much of a problem, especially compared to where we'd have been if she had stayed on autopilot or turned the interaction into a contest of wills.
Now, this was a class for kids who actually liked math and wanted to learn it, so maybe she could more readily assume that the problem wasn't that we couldn't be bothered to try.
Texan99
ReplyDeleteOne day she announced matter-of-factly that we were going to start all over as if this were the first day of the semester. One day she announced matter-of-factly that we were going to start all over as if this were the first day of the semester. One day she announced matter-of-factly that we were going to start all over as if this were the first day of the semester.
Which reminds me of an experience teaching honors math [3rd year] to 9th graders. I forget the topic, but the whole class bombed the quiz that covered the topic.
I threw out the tests and retaught. The second time, they got it. As these were good students who wanted to learn math, I concluded that the problem wasn't the students but that they needed more time on the subject.
The second time around, they did fine. The second time around, it was easier to understand.
A lot of STEM topics take time to assimilate into the brain.
Which reminds me of a old saw about professors who teach thermodynamics. They will encounter thermodynamics three times: as undergrads, as grads,and when they teach it. A professor told me that profs don't really understand thermodynamics until they third time they encounter thermo, when teaching it.
As these were good students who wanted to learn math, I concluded that the problem wasn't the students but that they needed more time on the subject.
ReplyDeleteI've found that to be true with both Calculus and Algebra - it isn't that kids can't learn, but more that we don't give them the time to absorb the subject.
I hated math as a kid. Then I went back to school in my 30s and ended up loving it. It taught me patience and the value of structured thinking (I've always been more of an intuitive thinker who would often flash on the right answer without being able to explain how I got there).
It's surprising how many people do very badly in Calculus the first time around. If they persevere, they often end up getting an A the second time they take it.