Catapulted out of the rift between paradigms

[velvetpage]

When I started teaching, I taught the way I had been taught.

In fact, regardless of the quality of teaching in a faculty of education, most teachers start out this way, because that first year of teaching is a trial by fire and when under stress, people fall back on what they know. So, having come through a school system where grades were used to determine who was smart and who wasn't, where the only way to prove your knowledge was to write about it, where marks were taken off for poor spelling or less-than-perfect handwriting or not underlining the title in red with a ruler, I taught that way, too.

The paradigm was deeper than those things, which were just a surface expression of it. The paradigm said that school needed to teach the basics to everyone as a baseline for the middle class, but it also said that some people would never achieve in school because they were not smart enough. It said that basics had to be taught before enrichment, and that enrichment - as the name implies, which is why I no longer use that term very much - was for the top students, the ones who proved they could do it. If you hadn't mastered the basics, you were doomed to read books and regurgitate their information, practise handwriting and multiplication, and get more and more bored of the whole thing until you eventually dropped out of school, thankful that it was finally over with. The only ways to master the basics were through rote learning, called "drill and kill" by its detractors. You had to learn either orally or through reading or writing - but orally didn't mean talking, it meant listening or repeating by rote. The whole class was given the same things to learn and it was the students' job to keep up with the teacher.

It worked for a lot of people. It worked for me. In fact, I was probably one of the kids for whom it worked best, because I had a good memory for lecture-style learning and I loved to read and write as my primary modes of learning. There were a lot of other people for whom it worked sufficiently, like my brother, who managed to come out of school with a massive chip on his shoulder from the methods used on him that didn't work, but also with a good education to take with him to university. (I'll talk more about this second group further down.) It worked all right for a lot of people in the middle - people who assumed that B's and C's were fine, they were just that kind of student, and they could get what they needed out of education so long as they were allowed to drop math (or some other subject they were having trouble with - math was the most common example but not the only one.) Many of this group did just fine in university later on - they'd learned to play the game of school and they'd learned enough about how to learn to make up for the deficits in their actual knowledge and problem-solving skills. In fact, having to work hard and work through boredom usually worked to their advantage later on. (Again, more about them later.)

Then there were the ones for whom it didn't work. Some of these people would have been invisible to me as a student. It wasn't until the early 1980's that Ontario law even required that this group all be in school, so some of them wouldn't have been part of my primary experience until much later - middle school, IIRC. Some of them didn't appear different, and I know I didn't really notice most of them when I was a student, but they were there. There were the kids labeled as stupid because their learning disabilities were such that pencil-and-paper, drill learning was the worst possible way to get them to learn. There were the ones who spent most of the time in the principal's office for not doing the homework, or for acting out in class, or whatever it was. For whatever reason, an estimated 20% of kids did not receive enough education to be considered literate when they left school. A further 10-15% were able to function at literacy tasks, so long as they weren't asked for anything too strenuous. The system's answer? Of course some students aren't going to do well. It's normal, and we can't give them intelligence if they have none. They'll find perfectly good jobs as workers and they'll be fine. (More on this later, too.)

The paradigm shift started just before I entered teacher's college. Most of it hadn't made its way into the faculty of education at that time; it was still new enough that the research was being done but the application wasn't. It was being applied in Australia, consistently, via a program called First Steps - an early developmental model of learning that has had profound effects on the research over the last two decades, though Australian teachers don't use its specific formulae anymore. The National Council for Teachers of Mathematics had come out with a document some years earlier that espoused the new paradigm - and it was met with such stiff resistance by everyone involved that it's still being slammed nearly twenty years later.

In Canada, textbooks were being written that would work well with the new methods, but since the new methods were not yet being taught to teachers with any consistency, many teachers didn't know how to use them to best effect (if such a thing were even possible - it's actually really hard to use a textbook as a primary resource in the new paradigm, but those textbooks were a good starting point to do so.) It took several years for the paradigm shift to make it as far as the revised Ontario Curriculum, which started to be released shortly after the current Liberal government took power in 2003. (This paradigm was in the documents that the Harris government released starting in 1997, but it was not fully-developed in them and that government didn't support the teacher learning that would have been necessary to ensure full implementation.) I've looked at similar curriculum documents for three provinces and half a dozen states, and all of those that have been revised within the last ten to fifteen years contain varying levels of the new paradigm. (Interestingly, the further south one went, the less of that paradigm was evident in the curriculum for the public school system.)

The new paradigm states that all students are capable of learning, given high expectations and high support. It grew out of psychological research begun by Piaget and continued in theories of multiple intelligences. (One of the great tragedies of the former paradigm was that it looked to Skinner's behavioural model instead of Piaget's developmental model for its research base.) The key points in this model are:
1) Students learn in many different ways. It's the teacher's job to find out how his students are learning and design lessons that will activate as many different ways of learning as possible, so that the maximum number of students will be able to access the learning.

2) Students bring a great deal of knowledge and experience of the world into the classroom with them. The corollary here is that all new learning is built on previous learning (this is called "constructivism" and it's the central tenet of this educational paradigm.) The teacher's job is to find out what the student already knows and help them build on it, again by accessing as many modes of learning as possible.

3) All students can and need to learn to think critically and present their thinking to others in a variety of ways. Critical thinking and problem-solving are not add-ons for after kids have mastered the basics; they're vehicles through which the basics can be taught. Bloom's taxonomy has pride of place in this model, because the upper levels - especially synthesis - are where student should spend the overwhelming majority of their time.

4) When students aren't succeeding, the correct response is to increase the support through group work and/or individual help, paired with resources that meet the student at their level. It is not to dumb things down, go back to low-level questions, or limit the student to drill and practice. Those things perpetuate the problem instead of solving it.

Now, I'll be the first to admit this is a dramatic shift in focus. It changes the entire purpose of public education, which has traditionally been to prepare the middle class to be worker drones in an industrial society. The new purpose of education is to maintain the middle class while also preparing students for an information-based economy. In other words, it's not good enough now that nearly 50% of our students will graduate unable to function in an information-based economy. Our society will collapse in on itself in a few generations (if it's not already) if we continue to teach in ways that encouraged that rate of failure. At its best, this paradigm should allow students to acquire basic skills while pursuing the topics that are of interest to them, developing a deep level of reflective learning to support future learning - starting from the very beginning. (Yes, I do ask my three-year-old reflective questions about what she's reading, starting with, "Why do you think x happened?" And yes, she answers them in a three-year-old way. I'm not expecting rocket science, but I am definitely expecting that she will learn her ideas have value and should be expressed and used as the basis for new knowledge.)

It's not surprising, though, that the people for whom the old system worked just fine are up in arms about it. They don't see the need for change, because it worked just fine for them and would probably work just fine for their children. (If their kids turn out to be LD, they often change their tune on this.) Their worldview when it comes to human intelligence and psychology leads them to believe that basics first, enrichment second, works better than a problem-solving approach. They're building on their previous knowledge, which isn't broad enough to support the need for change. They didn't see the kids for whom the system failed, or they did but felt it was acceptable, or inevitable, for them to fail. Or they blamed the failing students for their failure rather than the system. Or some combination of the above - I've known them to switch back and forth on these points, apparently not realizing that some of them are contradictory.

The second and third groups - the people for whom the old system worked all right - may see the need for change. They may also have a lot of trouble with certain elements of the new model, especially the bit where advanced students get more independent work while less-advanced students get more individual attention. They're right to have concerns about this, because it's one of the stickiest areas of the new model. When they express those concerns, they often fall back on what they know again, which is streaming into advanced classes for those who are capable of handling it. Most of this should be unnecessary if the new model is being implemented fully - only the top and bottom 3-5% should need more than the classroom teacher can provide. But this group is also the group with stable jobs, the group most likely to vote, and the group most likely to write to their political representatives or their newspaper. They're the group most likely to show up for parent-teacher interviews or to take concerns to the principal. And they often don't realize that they're operating under a different paradigm from their children's teachers. So when they ask for something that would have been forthcoming under the old system and find that it's no longer available, they get upset. It's a lack of communication on the part of the school and school board, but it's a serious one because it leads to parents thinking the new paradigm isn't working.

The last big problem: paradigm shifts do not happen quickly. They take a bare minimum of fifteen years, according to some business theory experts. So far, in education, we're at 12 years and counting in Ontario, and we're not there yet. My student teacher last year had a placement in a grade two classroom before she came to me. That teacher had her class sitting in desks arranged in rows, doing worksheets and then being tested on their contents. Sound familiar? That's the old paradigm in action. My student teacher was totally flabbergasted to realize that the number of fill-in-the-blanks worksheets I gave in a year could be counted on one hand; that kids sat in groups not because it made better use of space, but because I paused lessons every three or four minutes to get the kids to discuss an idea or problem amongst themselves; that anytime she suggested a drill-style activity, I was going to veto it and suggest ways to add higher-order thinking into it.

The reason I am so well-versed in this paradigm is quite simple: my school used to be one of the ones failing under the old paradigm. The Ministry and Board of Education decided to pour money and training into our school and others like it, to make them models of the new way of teaching. They did this right across the province, with the result that perhaps 20-30%% of Ontario teachers have now been immersed in the new model for several years running, and have seen its results. Teachers' colleges are actually teaching it now, though they still have trouble finding mentor teachers who know these methods well enough to mentor all the new teachers. (My school was approached by three different teachers' colleges for this fall, and I've got two who want me to take a student teacher this year. I know of another school where teachers have taken on three or more student teachers EACH per year, so great is the need for teachers who understand these methods and apply them well.)

I used to teach the old way. I did not simply accept everything I was told by a faculty of education. I am not a parrot. I worked through the old paradigm, and it did not work for what I needed it to work for - educating my students. Gradually, I switched to the new paradigm, adding pieces, discussing, reading, arguing about pieces I felt were wrong, and eventually coming to the place I'm at now. I can look back at the route that brought me here and know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I'm serving my students far better than I ever did before; that I'm serving my students better than any of my own teachers ever did; and that the shift of paradigms must continue, because it works. I look at the road ahead of me and know, again beyond a shadow of a doubt, that my career will be spent teaching within this paradigm and teaching other teachers to implement it; that my master's degree will investigate this trend and suggest ways of speeding up the implementation process; and that at the end of it, I may not win accolades in the profession at large, but I will have contributed to society at large on a much broader scale than a classroom teacher gets to do.

That's not arrogance, as some have alleged. It's professional expertise, and it was hard-won.

Comments

[kores-rabbit.livejournal.com]

Thank goodness for people who think the way you do. I have always found fault with the educational system as it stood when I was grinding through it. I was classed as "gifted" by them because I could read and write "beyond my age-group" level. I watched others get left behind because they didn't absorb written material the way I did. I watched others struggle and flounder because they couldn't get everything the instructor said down in note form fast enough.
Thank goodness for people like you who want to help change that.
And, thank goodness for a shift in thinking.
I worked as a note-taker and scribe at Seneca College while I was attending classes. This was for all the folks who had a hard time staying focused in a classroom. This was for the people who had a hard time organizing their thoughts into coherency in an essay.
I commend thee. Carry on!

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

[lee-in-limbo.livejournal.com]

A very articulate and insightful essay on a topic I've been wondering about for some time. I hope you get your wish.

Lee.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I think we're on the right path in Ontario, and the process is nearing the point of critical mass where it would take more effort to go back than it would to go forward. But I'm not sure we've reached it yet, and it's easy to be dragged down by other jurisdictions, especially those to the south, where progress has been far slower and the political will to create a climate for positive change is far weaker.

[r-caton.livejournal.com]

Expertise is always hard won. The art of utilising it is sometimes harder.
Congratulations!

[athelind.livejournal.com]

There were the kids labeled as stupid because their learning disabilities were such that pencil-and-paper, drill learning was the worst possible way to get them to learn.

At the risk of getting tarred with the "Politically Correct" brush, I'd "learning disabilities" in this sentence to "learning abilities".

I'm one of those kids who got into the "gifted" programs in the '70s, and, arrogant little son of a bitch that I was, I still knew that what "gifted" really meant was "adapts well to the way we teach". My learning "abilities" were well-suited to the educational techniques of the day, and would probably serve me just as well in the modern paradigm.

However, there are learning techniques that DON'T mesh well with my particular "learning abilities". The fact that I spent my entire academic career simultaneously excelling in "gifted" and "advanced placement" classes while getting Cs, Ds, and even Fs in other courses demonstrates that.

I have no trouble imagining a culture in which those techniques dominated the educational paradigm -- in fact, since my performance often seemed inversely proportional to the amount of rote memorization a topic required, I doubt I would have done nearly as well even ten years before, and certainly not twenty. In such an environment, I might have been considered "learning disabled" -- and, conversely, some students currently labeled "disabled" might excell.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

You're right; "learning differences" is a better term.

[docmom.livejournal.com]

I would venture to say that neither paradigm is perfect for the first group you mentioned, but those who feel the old one was just fine may be short-changing exactly those upper echelon kids--the kids who learned well from the "rote memorization and lecture" style of teaching. I was one of those kids, labeled as "gifted," and I spent most of my time in class doing something else, because I was bored out of my skull. By the time I was in middle school, I was snarking the first month of class with my declaration that I'd be happy to come back in January when we were ready to cover something new, since I'd known the parts of speech since I was 4 and really didn't get why I had to learn yet again that a noun was a person, place, thing, or idea. (And, yes, I did believe that those who didn't get it were irretrievably stupid, and were either not trying, or too stupid to ever get it, so perhaps some of the folks who are complaining about the new way simply haven't grown past being 12?)

As I see your class plans and their implementation when you share them, the new paradigm does allow some freedom to run further with a lesson for those kids who already get it. Rather than making them simply listen to the same material again. Sure, they are doing more independently, without quite as much guidance as the stragglers, but that was true in the old paradigm, as well... with the added drawback that there was very little "above and beyond" that they could do even if they wanted to.

I like modern teaching better. Keep thinking in these lines, about how to get everyone thinking critically, and you'll have gone a long way toward getting all the kids where they need to be.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

I had very similar experiences to yours as a gifted kid. Lack of challenge for me led to my becoming contemptuous of the other kids. I was actually in gifted classes, but even those often weren't academically challenging enough. On the other hand, the system also taught me that the ONLY thing I was good at was being smart, because I got neither diagnoses nor adequate help for my ADHD and Asperger's syndrome. As a result, I crashed and burned when I started university as a result of burnout from an overly intense high school program, poor executive functioning, and social immaturity. Eight years later, I am still working on my bachelor's degree and still damaged from that horrible first year and its precursors. Students need to have both their abilities and their disabilities recognized and supported, and that will reduce both the contempt of the more able for the less able and the frustration of the less able with the more able.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I wonder if you had those ideas because you were subtly being fed them by the attitudes of the teachers and parents around you? It's a very deep and pervasive idea that only a few people are "smart" and they're somehow separate from everyone else; the alternative model, that everyone is smart in different ways and all those ways have value, feels too wishy-washy for those who see a society that has built itself around the former model (or pretends it has.)

I have been maintaining for a while now that if parents want what is best for kids - all kids, including their own - they'll push for smaller class sizes, training for teachers in the constructivist model of teaching, and the resources to support it. I could meet the needs of 98% of the kids who came through my room that way.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

I think that when gifted kids are not challenged enough because the system is tailored to meeting the average kids' needs (or, worse, the needs of the lowest common denominator), they naturally become contemptuous of the kids whose lack of understanding keeps the teachers from giving the gifted kids adequate challenge.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I question anything that says someone comes up with these ideas out of a vacuum - especially when it's a widespread phenomenon and happens to mesh so well with the traditional paradigm. I think that, subtly, gifted kids do pick up on the attitudes of the adults around them, and sometimes they're fed them outright. (I know I was - "They're not as smart as you" was said to me more than once to excuse someone else's bad behaviour.)

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

See, I was taught "you are smarter than them", but I was actively discouraged from being contemptuous. I still remember a lecture my dad gave me when I was eight or so that was along the lines of "Do you think you're a better person than Mother Teresa because you're smart?" But when it appeared to me that the other kids' lack of intelligence was causing problems for me, I naturally ended up resenting the other kids. Now I know that the problem was bad teaching, but as a child I didn't understand that differentiated instruction within the same classroom was possible. (And I still don't think it's capable of eliminating the need for special ed, though I know you don't go that far either.)

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Actively discouraged from feeling something that made perfect sense, while encouraged outright to continue the line of thinking that led to that feeling? And you don't think you were picking up on anyone's attitudes? Your parents (and anyone else who said that) were trying to validate your experience using the paradigm they had, and at the same time, trying to force your behaviour to be in line with the kindness you were expected (as a human and a Christian and, most importantly, a woman) to show to everyone. It was recognized that you had a reason to be upset but no RIGHT to be - or at least no right to show it. It's a classic example of tolerance not going far enough. It's also a seriously screwed-up mixed message to give to a kid.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

Hmm, you have a point--especially about the womanhood part.

However, I was exposed to the "everyone is smart in different ways, and everyone can do equally well if they try hard enough" ideas as a kid, and I thought they were bullshit. My reasoning was that it was transparently obvious that I did better at some things and worse at others than other kids did, even without discernable differences in my level of effort, and that most kids didn't seem to have either the unusual abilities or the unusual disabilities that I had. I realize that "everyone is smart in different ways" and "everyone can do equally well if they try hard enough" are different ideas, and the first has some validity (though I don't buy into it as much as you do) while the second is unadulterated bullshit, but as a kid I tended to hear them from the same people.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

You may have heard "everyone is smart in different ways," but at the same time, you were hearing, "They're not as smart as you" and having intellectual, school-type intelligence held up as the standard against which all other intelligences were judged. And to be fair, they probably didn't realize they were sending a mixed message. It's really, really hard to change this kind of belief - it's foundational to a worldview, after all.

(Note: this post is public. Not sure how far into this you want to get.)

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

The second is not complete bullshit, though it's not as clearly true as you may have been led to believe. There are studies, fairly recent ones, about highly effective schools, that study what made them highly effective, and it was found that it is possible for 95-98% of students to achieve a high level in high school mathematics - given both high expectations and high support. The study I read dealt specifically with schools that served the poor, so socio-economic factors should have been greater there, not less. And yet success was almost universal.

It's not just "trying hard enough" that leads to that kind of success. It's teaching methods that lead through concrete to abstract understanding; it's tutoring support offered through the school, by the math teachers; it's remedial help in conjunction with, rather than instead of, high-level mathematics. It can be done. But the vast majority of schools aren't doing it - because they haven't made the paradigm shift that would allow them to even think it's possible, let alone attainable for them. They're still mentally stratifying their students exactly as you did, as you picked up on them doing.

[saomigray.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, I am incredibly proud of the teacher you are and wish there were more like you down here. You put a great deal of thought into your teaching methods, and it is clear from reading your posts on the subject that you care for each and every one of them - even Grasshopper and Lawyer - and want them to fulfill their potential as students and as people.

I know that because of your dedication in making sure that you teach each student as much as they are willing to learn, your students will not be left behind.

Keep up the good work.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

As for the situation where you are: it's politicized, so take it to the politicians. Insist on more money for education, for teacher training in the standards they themselves have put into the curricula, for smaller class sizes, for manipulatives in math. Write letters about how important it is for teachers to develop expertise in their profession, but if they're underpaid and not offered good PD through their districts, they'll leave and take their expertise with them. Ask your kids' teachers about the NCTM and what they're doing to address different learning styles in their classroom. You're a journalist - write articles comparing what you see with what's in your state's curriculum or the NCTM.

You don't have to settle for a few overworked and frustrated teachers who know what needs to be done but lack the resources to do it.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

I have one question about manipulatives in math. I had high school classmates who were taught eighth grade math by a teacher who apparently wrote textbooks and was widely viewed as an expert in math education, using primarily manipulatives. These students felt that they had not been prepared well for high school math at all, weren't able to solve math problems they should have been able to solve (at least, not in writing with their work shown), and had trouble with the (somewhat more traditionally taught) high school curriculum. What do you make of that?

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

There is a huge, huge rift between elementary and high school. Math isn't the only subject where this comes up - it comes up absolutely everywhere, because in Ontario at least, the divide between elementary and secondary is enshrined in every element of teacher education.

I think we need to streamline so that the gulf isn't so large, but the solution is not to go backwards on elementary math; it's to improve the high school math program. I used to be able to solve equations with the best of them, but I couldn't have told you what those equations actually meant, or what situations they might be referring to, to save my life. I still can't go from word problem to algebraic equation in order to solve a problem, though I can usually figure out the simpler ones without an equation. The theory I got was fine, but I didn't get the application, and I was a pretty good math student. That says to me that high school math teachers are not doing their jobs. They're starting with symbolic and abstract learning, and they're skipping over the concrete and representative stages entirely, to the point where many students never figure out the uses to which the math they're learning can be put.

In my experience, high school teachers are mostly way behind on the implementation of the new paradigm. They need to catch up, and they need to start NOW.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Perhaps the eighth-grade teacher wasn't getting to symbolic and abstract learning, and was failing to teach the language of math (i.e. equations), and the high school teachers were mostly skipping over the concrete and representative stages (though we did do one concrete/representative project in ninth-grade math).

I do think it's important to teach students to use the language of the academic fields they are learning about, and to understand and present their learning in the ways used by those fields. In the case of math, that would be learning to work with equations. That's particularly important at the high school level, but I don't think it should be completely ignored in the younger grades.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I'd be very surprised if the grade eight math expert wasn't getting to abstract math at all; I'd be equally surprised if he couched it in the same terms as the high school teacher. For example: for the equation x-8=9, a kid growing up in the problem-solving model is going to model it or draw it somehow, and realize that x is going to mean adding eight more to the nine. When they represent that, they're likely to write it as x=9+8, which is correct.

The grade nine math teacher might use the terminology, "Move the 8 to the other side of the equation and change the sign to positive." No explanation for why that works - the explanation would be part of a problem-solving model, but not part of a "this is how you do it" model. So the kid gets confused because the terminology is different, even though the way he explained it is actually a better explanation for what's happening than the high school teacher's.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

We did get explanations of why things worked in high school, but they were in traditional lecture format and taught abstractly. I do think there's a problem with math teaching that is so concrete it doesn't teach kids how to use standard academic methods and terms by the time they start high school, though. Kids should be able to do math problems using both concrete and abstract methods, not exclusively concrete ones or exclusively abstract ones (barring learning disabilities).