Category: Post-A-Day

13/365 Back to Dewey 1.2 – ‘The Need for a Theory of Experience’

Just because traditional education was a matter of routine in which the plans and programs were handed down from the past, it does not follow that progressive education is a matter of planless improvisation.

– John Dewey

Experience & Education

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

Dewey begins his second chapter with what soon becomes a familiar drum beat – we cannot create a new theory of education simply by defining ourselves as what we are not. Progressives, Dewey points out, are at risk of this if all we manage to do is say, “We are against traditional ways of playing school.”

He then turns his attention to the idea of experiences and clarifies that education based on experience is not an idea unique to progressives. All education is experience. Dewey, in contrast, is calling for a theory of experience that stakes a claim on what experience in education should accomplish, “Any experience is miseducative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience.”

If every classroom (traditional or not) is a site of experience, Dewey argues the importance we must note is the quality of experience which depends on two aspects, “agreeableness or disagreeableness” and “its influence on later learning.”

Again, as in Chapter 1, Dewey takes pains to explain experience is not meant as improvisation or as putting the things and people in a space and hoping what we want to achieve is achieved. This strikes me as humorous given Dewey was writing Experience & Education as a reflection and attempt to right the course of progressive education. Decades later, we’re misinterpreting progressive teaching in the same ways.

Here too, Dewey acknowledges the difficulty of progressive education compared to traditional schooling. Traditional schools could plug along, doing a variation today of what they did yesterday. Progressive schools, in crafting experiences need both a theory and a critical eye for how to implement that theory.

As is so often the case, the work worth doing is the more difficult work.

Progressive education is simple, Dewey admits, but that should not be confused with easy, “[A] coherent theory of experience, affording positive direction to selection and organization of appropriate educational methods and materials, is required by the attempt to give new direction to the work of the schools. The process is a slow and arduous one. It is a matter of growth and there are many obstacles, which tend to obstruct growth and to deflect it into wrong lines.”

Anyone who has ever worked within a progressive school knows this to be true. On the worst days, the struggle to re-invent schooling in a way that remains aligned with progressive philosophy can result in traditional schooling and their neo-traditional counterparts appearing appealing if for no other reason than their ease. On the best days, though, connecting students with learning experiences structured and based on the wells of knowledge provided by teachers and communities can fill the progressive experience with an undeniable sense of purpose and worth.

Still, though, this chapter reminds us of the dangers of a good idea in vague minds. Dewey closes with a prescient warning of attacks of traditionalists on progressive ideals and what must be done to rebuff those attacks:

[E]ducational reactionaries, who are now gathering force, use the absence of adequate intellectual and moral organization in the newer type of school as proof not only of the need of organization, but to identify any and every kind of organization with that instituted before the rise of experimental science. Failure to develop a conception of

organization upon the empirical and experimental basis gives reactionaries a too easy victory.

Dewey realized the need for experimentation, evidence and a well-reasoned argument if progressive schools were to take a place of prominence in American education. I can’t help feeling we’ve failed to heed that warning.

12/365 Back to Dewey 1.1

After a year and a half of grad school across two separate institutions, we’re finally moving away from paying lip service to Dewey in discussion of policy and a course is asking us to actually read what he wrote. It’s a return to the roots not only of progress pedagogy, but of the ideas that inform my own practice as well.

Specifically, we’re look at Dewey’s Experience and Education. (Read along if you like, I’ll be examining a chapter each day for the next 8 days.) Most exciting there is the fact that the text came later in Dewey’s career, at a time when he had enough perspective to stand back and look at the attempted enaction of the beliefs he championed. As much as it sets an agenda and outlines goals, Experience and Education serves a reflection on how progressives had lost their way or misunderstood the initial map.

A short text, Dewey fits his ideas into 8 chapters. Rather than a summary of the entire text, I’ll be thinking here about the content of each chapter. Famously dense, Dewey’s writing deserves a closer read than many contemporary education writers.

Ch. 1

Traditional vs. Progressive Education

Dewey begins with an analysis of our love of dichotomies and sets up the battle of progressives and traditionalists (today’s reformers).

Given students’ distance from intended subject matter, Dewey asserts traditionalists find that subject matter “must be imposed; even though good teachers will use devices of art to cover up the imposition so as to relieve it of obviously brutal features,” thus limiting much legitimate participation by students.

This matter “is taught as a finished product, with little regard either to the way in which it was originally built up or to changes that will surely occur in the future.”

Dewey then lays out the oppositions to be found in progressive schools:

To imposition from above is opposed expression and cultivation of individuality; to external discipline is opposed free activity; to learning from texts and teachers, learning through experience; to acquisition of isolated skills and techniques by drill, is opposed acquisition of them as means of attaining ends which make direct vital appeal; to preparation for a more or less remote future is opposed

making the most of the opportunities of present life; to static aims and materials is opposed acquaintance with a changing world.

Most interestingly, and where I’ve encountered the most frequent misreadings of Dewey is his understanding of controls. He argues not for an absence of control, but for control rooted in authentic and catalyzing learning experiences. What are the controls inherent to the genuine experiences we hope to provide students? How can the adults who have participated in these experiences help to control students’ experiences in a positive way?

These and other questions are key for Dewey in Ch. 1. He outlines the importance of critical thinking in the development of a new way of thinking about and organizing school experiences. “For any theory that and set of practices is dogmatic which is not based upon critical examination of its own underlying principles.” It is not enough to stand for something; one must also struggle with the questions of what it means and looks like to stand for that thing.

Dewey sets up Ch. 2 with the question of how to bridge the past with students’ present in real ways. He frames it as a question that is new to the story of education: “How shall the young become acquainted with the past in such a way that the acquaintance is a potent agent in appreciation of the living present?”

How, indeed? Stepping into this text raised several concerns for me regarding the current educational practice and policy landscapes. Dewey’s words resonate deeply with me. As I read, I find myself nodding and saying to myself, “Yes, this is what we must do.”

The problem is this is what we have needed to do since long before Dewey put these words to the page. His thoughts have served as a call to arms for generations, and still we falter, making the same mistakes on new and grander scales.

To some extent, I can understand the difficulties. Progressive thinking about education means turning away from or turning a critical eye toward the way we’ve always done things. That, on its own, is scary.

Still, we’ve had time to get over our fears. We’ve had time to ask the questions Dewey poses about our educational practices. Why, then, aren’t we working to develop better answers to those questions and then build schools around those answers?

11/365 Please Save the Kittens

My semester starts this morning, and I’m reminded of a begging pleading feeling. It’s dark and ominous, and I fear it will become unbearable once I step inside the classroom.

Please, won’t you help me save kittens from Edward Tufte?

If there’s a professor in your life, approach him or her gently today – perhaps a soft touch on the shoulder – ask them to step away from their screen for a moment, get down on your knees, and begin pleading that they reconsider the laser transitions, the flash in appearances, the gaudy color schemes. Appeal to their humanity to stop using PowerPoint.

There’s little I can do this semester to avoid the immense blocks of text, the promises of “You don’t need to copy this down; I’ll email it to you after class” (as though that somehow improves my quality of life). No, no it does not. All the emailing means is the bloated files of dubious origin will sit and fester in my inbox or dropbox on the marginal chance I might need to download them again to refer to a point that will no doubt be repeated in a future PowerPoint.

It is too late for me, dear readers. But, perhaps, if you approach an academic with a calm voice and kind eyes, you might save a kitten from Edward Tufte’s vengeful wrath.

10/365 Isn’t There Some Value in Re-Inventing the Wheel?

Inspired by Chapter 2 of Shirley Bryce Heath and Brian Street's _On Ethnography_.
Inspired by Chapter 2 of Shirley Bryce Heath and Brian Street’s _On Ethnography_.

In gearing up for this semester’s classwork, which starts this week, I read a chapter from Shirley Brice Heath and Brian Street’s On Ethnography.

Nothing too complex, the chapter serves as a refresher at the start of my second Qualitative Methods course to help remind us what we started learning last semester. I appreciated the reminder of the definition of ethnography:

…a theory-building enterprise constructed through detailed systematic observing, recording, and analyzing of human behavior in specific spaces and interactions.

 

The chapter also reminded me of a question I struggled quietly with throughout last semester’s work. Consistently, Heath and Street refer to the importance of researching those who have theorized and done the work before and letting that inform the work to be done. As I study third spaces, I should read everything I can about those who studied third spaces before me, the logic goes.

It strikes me that this approach precludes novel understandings of the spaces, people and interactions being studied. Yes, I walk into any research site with certain predispositions and understandings, but doesn’t taking in the predispositions and understandings of others further lead me to a set of understandings of the subjects of my study?

Many times last semester (and I suspect it will continue this semester), I wanted to argue against field notes, data coding, and the other established methods of the ethnographer and ask simply to walk into the space and see what I could figure out and what processes I found myself creating/adopting.

The closest thing I can relate it to is teaching the 5-paragraph essay. “This is how writers write,” was the implication when I would dust off the tired tool, “So, it will be how you write.” The thing was, that’s not how writers write, and I knew it. Later in my practice, when I’d stopped teaching the 5-paragraph essays, I realized the work my students created was much more inventive, much more interesting, and much more labor-intensive when we focused on the mindsets of writers and the questions they asked. From there, I could open up the coursework for students to meet the tasks at hand on their own terms, without restriction of “this is how it’s supposed to look.

I wonder if there is space inside qualitative research – ethnography in particular – to take the same tack.

Click here to see my annotated copy of the chapter.

9/365 We Must Blend Theory and Practice

Blender

A movement is afoot in some parts of the country to prepare future classroom teachers without regard to those educational thinkers who have come before. In order to build the schools we need, that regard is paramount. Only through the blending of theory and practice can we move toward teachers who are both thoughtfully reflective about their practice as well as adept at developing new practices based on their students’ needs. Graduate education programs that focus primarily on practice and turn a blind eye to the study of pedagogical theory cite the needs of beginning teachers to enter their classrooms with tools to help their students learn. Yes, this is important.

What, though, when the novice teacher has tried each of the 49 techniques offered in Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion and finds himself in need of a fiftieth? It is possible this teacher will begin to look more deeply at the 49 practices in his repertoire and then begin to suss out the underlying theories of learning guiding those practices. This should not be left to chance.

The study of great and deep thinkers like Dewey, Piaget, Papert, Lampert, Sizer, Lawrence-Lightfoot, and Dweck alongside the learning of a collection of beginning practices will prepare beginning novice teachers to enter the classroom feeling prepared as well as prepare them to think critically about their own practice when the tools with which they left their graduate programs are found lacking. These teachers who might otherwise feel they are discovering the practice of teaching and learning in a vacuum would do well to carry with them reminders that wise minds have spent their careers thinking and writing on those very dilemmas facing teachers in modern classroom.

Such a reminder would do well to help with the psychological health of teachers, but a reason stands for such historical understanding that is greater still than letting teachers know they are not going it alone when they enter their classrooms. Understanding the theories of learning, the theorists who developed them, and then working to synthesize that knowledge into a coherent personal philosophy and teaching practice asks teachers to be more thoughtful about their practice, to make choices through critical analysis of evidence, and to back their practice in reasoned arguments. In short, they will engage in the type of thinking we would hope they seek to elicit from their students.

By asking how children learn, how others have suggested children learn, and how teaching might assist in that learning, teachers are driven to train their minds to think critically and putting a premium on the asking of questions and the seeking of answers. This is different than a practice built around the largely unthinking deployment of a set of pre-packaged “tools” delivered absent any question of why they are being deployed.

Teaching is complex; so do not take this to be an argument that teachers well-versed in the study of the history of learning theory and various pedagogies would be able to enter a classroom, develop a curriculum, and implement that curriculum such that all students in the class are enthralled, enlightened, and driven to answer questions. Quite the opposite. This is an argument that teachers should learn the pedagogy of those who have come before concurrently with their learning of those practices thought to be most basic and effective in the hands of beginning teachers.

With such an approach, novice teachers will feel prepared to take on their first days and weeks of teaching and be prepared to meet the critical challenges guaranteed to arise later in their careers. What’s more, it is likely that the critical thinking required to blend pedagogy and practice in whatever context a teacher finds himself will lead to an inquiry-driven practice. While such inquiry within teachers does not assure that those teachers will include such inquiry and critical thought in their classrooms, it does make such an overflow more likely than the plug ‘n’ chug method of practice without theory.

8/365 ‘Right’ Answers are Overrated

As I work my way through Duckworth, I’m tempted to temporarily change the name of this blog to Reading So You Don’t Have To.

I threw the picture below up on instagram as I was reading last night, and feel like it needs a more prominent display:

A Thought on Assessment

 

My comment attached to the photo was something along the lines of this way of thinking being the only thing I needed to guide my thinking on assessment. That stands. As I continue exploring The Having of Wonderful Ideas, Duckworth is pushing my thinking on assessment even more. Actually, she’s not pushing my thinking so much as putting thoughts I’ve had before into better prose than I’ve yet managed.

It occurred to me, then, that of all the virtues related to intellectual functioning, the most passive is the virtue of knowing the right answer. Knowing the right answer requires no decisions, carries no risks, and makes no demands. It is automatic. It is thoughtless.

 

This past semester, for the quantitative methods course I was taking, we used a textbook of dubious pedagogy. At the end of each section, though, were some practice problems of the type I remember from my math textbooks of my youth.

Because statistics isn’t exactly where my innate intelligences lie, I found myself frequently stopping to attempt the practice problems. I was curious about these new ideas and this mostly new language of statistical reasoning. I filled large pieces of chart paper with my thinking on these problems with arrows and borderlines to delineate where one thought took a break and moved on to be another thought.

Not always did I arrive at the right answer. What I found, and what surprised me, was the sense of joy and accomplishment I felt when I had an answer and could explain those with whom I studied how I got to that answer. When the answer was wrong, being able to hold up the path I’d taken to reach it somehow took the sting out of its wrongness.

I wouldn’t have paused to appreciate and “meet” the thinking necessary to solve those problems if I simply knew the right answer. If it had been automatic and thoughtless as Duckworth describes, it also would have been a hollow victory if it had been any victory at all.

7/365 What If We Considered What We Want Students to Believe?

A friend of mine, a scientist, was talking to me the other day about the beauty of the scientific method. “You do an experiment,” he said, “to find out what happens.”

The conversation was centering on the idea of not trying to find a specific thing, but trying to find something. I pointed out that any scientific experiment was trying to find a specific thing, the difference is that my way of thinking was upfront about what it was attempting to find. His was looking for something, but didn’t show it until it had been found.

After a break caused by classwork and assignments, I’m back to Eleanor Duckworth’s The Having of Wonderful Ideas. The latest chapter focuses on the beliefs we want to curate in our students and the implicity of such wants.

Duckworth identifies the following four tenets of beliefs:

photo (1)Most interesting is Duckworth’s assertion that we want to do/learn things because “it’s fun” is not the same as an assertion that learning should be fun.

Hitting home for me was Duckworth’s assertion that we want to play to all of the reasons for beliefs throughout anything we are teaching, but that three of the four fall away when it comes time for assessment due to ease of execution. Yes, we want you to be interested in something because it is fun, but we will assess you based on your understanding of the real world.

Duckworth outlines beliefs as being vested in:

  • The way things are.
  • It’s fun.
  • I-can.
  • People-can-help.

While most education may hold the attempt to help students believe in all four as their driving forces, Duckworth argues (and I agree) that we end up assessing student knowledge based on their understanding of “the way things are.”

For the first few years, I wanted students to investigate reading for all four of the reasons listed above, but my projects/tests bore remarkable witness to the importance of the first only.

Later, I made the love of reading and texts my goal for each year of teaching the others were supplemental and the reading and learning in the classroom were better.

It all makes me want to turn to teachers and ask them to look at their tests. Which of the four are you looking at in your assessments? If it’s the world as it is, are you preparing students to create a world as it should be?

 

6/365 You Could Build an Entire Curriculum Around this Page

hoodA bit ago, the City of Philadelphia updated its city map to include crime reports by location. Click on the map, zoom in, and you can see who’s been breaking the law near your house.

Naturally, I clicked through to see what nefarious activities have been going on in my old neighborhoods as of late. It turns out it’s not a bad thing I moved away.

After congratulating myself on moving away from a less-than-ideal neighborhood, I started considering the implications of maps and their role in classrooms. When I started teaching 8th grade in FL a decade ago, one of our first PD meetings focused on the fact that 8th-grade students did poorly on charts, maps and graphs on the annual state test. They just didn’t get them. As a language arts teacher, I attempted to bring more of these artifacts into my curriculum – dutifully doing my part to up the scores – but it was a difficult match to make.

Looking at Philly’s map now, though, I see an opportunity. Tonight, Bud Hunt and I were discussing the lack of need for textbooks in classrooms. Maps like Philly’s seem a great replacement. With a well-made map and an Internet connection, there’s no end to the number of questions, answers, and questions again students and teachers could work through in any class in the schedule.

“Us?” teachers could say, “Oh, we’ve got a map-based curriculum.”

History, math, science, English – all the core subjects are waiting for questions to be asked and answers to be unearthed in a map like this.

What would you do with it?

(Here’s a hint.)

5/365 I’ve Been Prepping My Class

As a wrote months ago, I’ve been asked to teach a course as part of Antioch University New England’s Next Generation Learning M.Ed. program. More specifically, I have the pleasure of teaching a course called Social Media (I’m not kidding). While I’ve been collecting pieces of planned implementation since I was asked to lead the course, the last few weeks have had me seriously planning for the course’s launch.

I’d forgotten the joy of planning, the thrill of sitting down and saying, “How will I organize this pathway to learning?” and then setting about outlining the thing.

Two days ago, I tweeted out this link to the modified UbD for the course asking for comments on my plans.

Today, I offered up to the social networking populous this link to the course’s syllabus – again, asking for comments.

The plans for things are to take the course beyond Antioch’s LMS and into a more public forum. Namely, we’ll be using Peer 2 Peer University’s platform for the course. This will allow for a greater plurality of voices and situate the course in the type of social environment we’ll be talking about, rather than the (high) walled garden of other course.

My hope is participants will be a mix of those students who are completing the Antioch program for their degree, those who are dropping in to take the course for credit and those P2PU users who want to join in the learning for the learning’s sake. We shall see.

What is for sure is the excitement I’ve felt these past few weeks prepping materials and trying to craft something that goes well above and beyond those online courses I once encountered. I know it’s not going to go perfectly. Everything is about iteration. Still, it will be a new adventure. So, check it out and join in.

4/365 Let’s Learn to Draw

If you, like me, are as enamored with pretty much anything RSA Animate brings to the web or have had the pleasure of being at a conference facilitated by my friend Stacey Weitzner, when you’ve probably had the thought, “I wish I could do that.”

Making my way through the ole “ETC” folder of PDFs I’ve been meaning to read for longer than I’d like to admit, I finally read Brandy Agerbeck’s Brandyfesto (and you should too).

I’ll offer you three reasons to read it rather than pulling it apart for you. At 26 pages, it’s a brief read.

  1. While teachers are often heavy in the linguistic and logical/mathematical intelligences to make their way to the front of the classroom, we’re often pledging to bring other intelligences to our teaching and our students’ learning. Agerbeck goes one better and asks her readers to try their hands at developing their kinesthetic intelligences.
  2. Quote 1: We get far too hung up on product. It’s only one part of the whole. Build a practice you enjoy. Do the work. Do the work some more. Observe and admire your progress. Develop that challenge you. The product will follow.
  3. Quote 2: As a noun, I listen to conversation and look for its shape.

I know more has been written on the art of graphic facilitation, but this was the first piece I’ve read that asked me to join in as I considered its place in learning.

Agerbeck’s Brandyfesto brought up two thoughts for me:

  1. I wish I could do a brief “book club” examining it with a team of teachers.
  2. I can’t believe how much I missed as a classroom teacher in not asking my students if I had any graphic facilitators in the room.

What do you think?

One of my favorite RSA Animate videos: