View my new blog posts on my other Weebly page.
Have you ever thought about playing catch? I was thinking about classroom instruction recently and the idea occurred to me that teaching was analogous to playing catch. More specifically, it is like showing someone how to play catch. Playing catch is deceptively easy; one person throws a ball – the other person catches it and throws it back. What could be more simple that that? Or is it as simple as it first appears?
Upon close inspection, there are a number of complex skills and interactions that take place between the participants in this simple game. First, we have to define what kind of ball we are throwing; is it a baseball, softball, football, basketball, or some other object? Each object requires practice and skill to throw well. There are similarities as well as differences. Throwing a football and a baseball are both biomechanically similar. Throwing these objects well also require motions of the arm and hand that are unique to each object being thrown. In addition to biomechanical considerations, one must have strength and spatial awareness to throw well. One does not throw well immediately, although some may develop their skills more quickly than others. To improve one’s ability to throw not only takes time and practice, but a conscious effort must be made to try to improve one’s skill. Catching is an obvious skill that must also be learned in order to play catch. Just as in throwing, we have to define what object is being caught. As before, catching different objects shares some skills and has some unique differences. If we all think back to our childhood, we might remember that learning to catch is also a very different experience that learning to throw. Learning to catch is scary. Catching also has an emotional component that is often overlooked. If we really think back, learning to throw was fun compared to learning to catch. A poor throw seldom has any consequences for the thrower. Catching is quite different. The consequences of a poor catch can be a black eye, a busted lip, or a painful bruise. If we are honest, we all may remember our fear the first time we played catch with an older, more experienced player. We were afraid of the ball, afraid of being hurt, and probably afraid of being embarrassed. It should be clear by now that playing catch is actually a complex game. It should also be clear that throwing skills and catching skills are separate, even though we learn them together as children. It is also not hard to imagine that an individual can have differing abilities between the two skills. Some may throw well, others catch well. Now we need to examine how this has anything to do with classroom instruction. To define the analogy, teachers are the throwers, students are the catchers, and the different content areas are the different types of balls. An obvious and important nuance of this analogy is that there is a distinct difference in the skill level between the teacher and the student. I believe this analogy represents very well the way we approach education today. I also believe it identifies some mistakes we are making in education as well. The analogy between throwing a ball and delivering instruction is fairly obvious. For many years, that is what teachers have done – stand in front of students and throw out information. Teachers spend a tremendous amount of time and effort in developing their skill at delivering instruction. Tests measure how well the students “catch”. One of the mistakes we make in education is illustrated by this analogy. In today’s environment we measure the effectiveness of a teacher by how well the students perform on standardized tests – how well they “catch”. I believe this reveals our greatest error in education today. We believe that by focusing on instruction, we can turn our students into good catchers. Teachers certainly need professional development. We always need to improve our skills in delivering instruction. We also have to start teaching kids how to catch – how to receive and process the information we are giving them. We must do a better job of teaching literacy. There is not a teacher in the business that has not had the following experience: They have designed the perfect lesson, using all of the latest research based pedagogy identified by the current guru of education. They begin the lesson expecting the heavens to open and enlightenment to rain down on their classroom. Ten minutes into the day, they discover that the lesson they hoped would earn them teacher of the year – just ain’t working. I know I have had these types of lessons. Time and experience have taught me that these lessons are often really good – just incomplete. It’s not that I didn’t “throw” well; I just left out teaching the students how to “catch”. I did not include in the lesson a strategy to help the students absorb the information and construct knowledge. The critical thing to understand is that catching/ learning is a skill possessed by the student – one we have to teach them how to do for themselves. We cannot afford to spend all of our time as educators teaching content – throwing. We have to spend more of our time teaching literacy – teaching students how to catch. There is always a loud howl that teachers don’t have time to teach literacy; there is barely enough time to cover all the material. To anyone that thinks that, consider this – what good is the greatest quarterback in the NFL if his receivers always drop the ball? Teachers who embrace literacy instruction will be surprised that it saves time in the long run. In the beginning, teaching literacy strategies is time consuming. You have to deliver content and you have to show the students how to handle the material. Students are also reluctant to use literacy strategies. This seems counter intuitive; who wouldn’t want to be a better learner? We have to remember that literacy skills are the responsibility of the learner. Not all students are willing to take responsibility for their own learning. In the past, it was the responsibility of the teacher to fill them with knowledge – if they failed it was the teacher’s fault. In this new model, learning is a partnership and the student has an important responsibility in the process – a responsibility not all students willingly accept. This reluctance on the part of students can be frustrating for the classroom teacher as they begin teaching literacy strategies to their students. At this point it is important to remember how scary it was to learn how to catch back when you were a kid. We have to be the trained professional at this point and continue to show students how to construct knowledge through different literacy strategies. We must have some compassion for the learner. We have to remember that these are often new skills for students and that it takes time and practice for them to become proficient. The payoff for the classroom teacher is that as students learn different literacy strategies and how to employ them, they become better students. Suddenly school is less confusing, less scary. As students learn how to absorb the material we present, school becomes more fun. That being said, we must acknowledge that not every student will become a wide receiver in the NFL – some students will still struggle with school. As we recognize this reality, it should also be equally clear that struggling students need literacy instruction more than anyone. The last point to be made relates to the difference in the skill level between the teacher and the student. Teaching literacy does not have to be a daunting task. All that is required is to think about how we ourselves learn – how we learned to catch. As we prepare our lessons we have to consider ways to help our students absorb and retain the information we deliver. We have to then explicitly explain to them what their responsibilities are as the learner. Instead of giving students “something to do”, we have to explain that we are “coaching” them – showing them something they can do to be a better learner. This is a subtle but enormously important point – the student has to see the literacy strategy as their responsibility – not that of the teacher. Classrooms that are only about instruction are frustrating for teachers and students alike. No student enjoys being frustrated or failing. It is no fun for the teacher either. Content delivery must be accompanied by literacy instruction in the classrooms of the 21st century. If we do that, we can enjoy a nice game of catch. What’s not fun about that? I recently asked one of my eighth grade classes, “Why do we have school? What’s the point?” The most common (serious) answer was, “To prepare me for a better, more successful life.” That seems to be a reasonable answer, but when we dig a little deeper it becomes more complicated. What is a better life? What does it look like? What skills will the children need and how will they use them? These answers are no longer simple in today’s world and they hold some insight into our future roles as educators of tomorrow’s adults. As is often the case, perhaps some clues about our future can be gathered by examining the purpose and role of education in the past.
My view is that the role of education is influenced by two major factors: economic sectors and disruptive/ innovative technologies. If we look at education in the early 20th century our national economy was largely a primary, agriculturally based economy. Education prepared students for a better life by teaching the three R’s – reading, writing, and arithmetic. A 6th-8th grade education was often sufficient to improve one’s quality of life. Knowledge was held by teachers and in schools – in the ivory towers of knowledge – so to speak. One had to go to school to receive knowledge dispensed by those that held it. A literate person was one who could read and write as well as calculate at a middle school level. The continuing role of education shifted early in the 20th century coinciding with some emerging and maturing disruptive technologies. A disruptive technology is a term coined by Clayton Christensen. It is “an innovation that creates a new market by applying a different set of values, which ultimately (and unexpectedly) overtakes an existing market.” Disruptive technologies are the “game changers”. Important disruptive technologies in the early 20th century were the model T Ford and mass production, airplanes, nuclear power, and rocket flight. These technologies helped move our national economy from a primary (agrarian) economy into a secondary manufacturing economy. This shifted the role of education. Schools now needed to prepare students for several levels of education. We still needed agricultural workers, but now we also needed a large manufacturing work force. There was also a need for bright people who would innovate and sustain the emerging technologies. Schools were still the repositories of knowledge. Students came to school and teachers dispensed knowledge in their classrooms. The best students absorbed the knowledge at the rate it was dispensed. Less gifted students absorbed less quickly. This model of education actually served the U.S. quite well because there were readily available jobs in a growing economy for every level of education a student might attain. Agricultural jobs were plentiful for those with less education. Manufacturing jobs were available for average students receiving a high school diploma. Good students advanced to college and found jobs developing and innovating in fields such as science, manufacturing, and aerospace industries. Information in the mid 20th century was still stored in books and dispensed by teachers in school. The definition of literacy did not change, but was extended to a higher level. The literacy standard was extended to one’s ability to read, write, and compute on the high school to college level. College degrees were desirable and held by the most educated segment of the population. This model of education was successful for a long period of time, but it is necessary to look closely to begin to understand why. In these examples and models of education, the students in school knew why they were there – they knew what “preparing for a better life” meant. In the early part of the century, students could see how basic reading and writing could improve their lives. In the manufacturing age, students could still see the need and outcome of various levels of education. They knew the answer to the essential question, “Why am I in school?” They needed to absorb knowledge at a level that satisfied the requirements for work at various levels in the economy. Literacy at this point was still the ability to read and write. Teaching was still essentially dispensation of knowledge kept safe in ivory towers. The late 20th century saw our nation move into a tertiary economy that was more service based. Agricultural jobs became less common. Careers and “good jobs” required at minimum a high school diploma and preferably a college diploma. Jobs and careers were centered on manufacturing that was essentially sustaining innovations from previous decades. The tertiary service sector provided services and support for those underlying manufacturing jobs. Two major changes in the end of the 20th century have led us to the current dilemma in education that we now face. One significant difference today is a result of the tertiary, some might argue quaternary, economy of the U.S. today. As an economy moves from one economic sector into another, the jobs at the preceding levels tend to diminish, disappear, or get outsourced. We have seen that occur in the U.S. over the past couple of decades. Agriculture is big business – there are few family farms and associated jobs. Manufacturing has been outsourced to foreign countries with cheaper labor – reducing the number of jobs available. The reduction in agricultural and manufacturing jobs has created a situation where the national workforce either needs specialized skills for the upper economic sectors or low skills for minimum wage jobs. This economic shift has coincided with some specific disruptive technologies that have had a tremendous impact on education. The late 20th and early 21st century has seen the development of disruptive technologies such as personal computers, the world wide web, cell phones, blogs, digital and video imaging (YouTube). These technologies and our national economic shift have created a need for a complete paradigm shift in education. We must change our way of thinking about education. These new technologies have completely changed our access to information. Information is no longer kept and guarded in the ivory towers of our institutions of education. The towers have been torn down and the combined information of the world is now just a few clicks away in a handheld mobile device. Along with this technological change, our students no longer know why they are in school – the goal of their education. Think about the past; students in the past always knew the answer to the essential question, “Why am I in school?” They knew they would work on the farm, get a job at the steel mill, work for General Electric or NASA, work for IBM. They knew they needed to go to school and engage the process whereby teachers delivered the information necessary to meet the career goals of the student. The goal was visible and tangible. Students today must be prepared for jobs that do not yet exist. They don’t know what they are going to do. They also know how to collect information; they can Google as well as an adult – maybe better. Our students today are digital natives and are comfortable and confident in their digital world. The problem is that they confuse gathering facts with acquiring knowledge (that’s why they can’t see cut-and-paste as wrong). The teacher’s role now, whether we want to admit it or not, has changed forever. Students can no longer be consumers of facts. The teacher must now become the person who guides the students as they actively create new knowledge from easily available information. The teachers of today also must help students find a purpose for their education. Teachers must help students ask the essential questions such as, “Why am I in school?” These changes have had a profound impact on the meaning of literacy and the role of the teacher in the classroom. Not too many years ago, a student would spend 50-95% of their time in a classroom reading a textbook. It has been estimated that by graduation, a student would have spent 10,000 hours in class reading from a textbook. Literacy instruction was obviously focused on reading. The goal was to compile an ever-growing accumulation of facts from the printed word. The goal of literacy instruction today is very different; we want to help students construct knowledge. Information today comes in a variety of mediums. We must teach them to construct knowledge and make sense out of all the inputs from today’s world – books, TV, video, internet, lecture and lab activities. We no longer dispense information. The information is readily available. We must help students define the purpose for their education that is currently missing. Once purpose is established, we have to guide students in how to construct knowledge out of the mass of information available. A colleague once compared learning today to “drinking from a fire hose” – the information in today’s world comes at us quickly and relentlessly. This shift is traumatic for the students; a fact that few appreciate. If we are honest, education in the past was at the lower level of Bloom’s taxonomy. Students simply absorbed facts and perhaps learned to apply them. Today, by asking students to define essential questions and construct their own knowledge we have thrust them into the upper levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. What we must appreciate is that we have to teach students a new set of skills for how to construct knowledge. Teachers have to change their mindset. We no longer “deliver” information. We have always believed that if we were a good enough teacher – if our delivery was good enough – the students would “get it”. Now our classrooms are more subtle; we provide learning opportunities. Technology has been an asset in this area. We now have generally agreed upon national standards. Many states have standardized curriculum. CSCOPE is a “living” curriculum that evolves and improves constantly thanks to our information age. Some see this change as an opportunity to put less skilled teachers in the classroom. There is a view that we should take exemplar lessons and scale them to a large audience. This as the allure of the online environment; take a great lesson from a great teacher, video tape it and make it available to a large audience. The person in the classroom becomes a proctor that doesn’t require the skills of a traditional teacher. There are those that believe engaging software is the answer. The argument is that the hard work is done for them. Nothing could be further from the truth. We must not be deceived by technology. Technology is a tremendous resource that makes the information of the world available in every corner of the planet. Technology has truly “flattened’ the world – we can connect with people across the globe as easily as someone across the room. The illusion is that technology can teach – that the tool can replace the teacher. Technology makes information available. It can make information more palatable and provide interest. The student must still create meaning. Uniform curriculum and readily available information frees the teacher to do the hard work of helping students learn how to learn. I know when I was a student, no one taught me what to do with information – how to create meaning. Teachers stood in front of the class and delivered. Some students “got it”, others didn’t. Delivery by an online instructor doesn’t change the situation. We now have to teach students how to “absorb” information and construct meaning. We have to teach students how to learn – teach them what to do with the information they gather or receive. That is and has always been the goal of literacy strategies. If we want students to absorb information and construct meaning – learn – then we all must become literacy teachers and coaches. Students can find information on their own (with our guidance). What they cannot do on their own is put the pieces together in a meaningful way. We must also help them find purpose for their education – it is no longer clear. We have to help children once again learn how to question and wonder. If we can help students define purpose and construct knowledge then we have laid a foundation for project based learning that can be meaningful and exciting – but most classrooms are not there yet. Too many classrooms today are still teacher centered. It is not entirely the teacher’s fault. Schools today need to make real efforts to provide their teachers professional development in coaching literacy – not just ELA teachers. Every content area needs to come to grips with our changing role as educators. Teachers must see that literacy strategies are not “one more thing” that teachers do, but instead a skill we must teach students to use for themselves. We have to start helping students learn how to learn. Teachers today need professional development in teaching critical thinking. Once again we have to realize that critical thinking is not something teachers do – it’s something we help students learn to do for themselves. All of those higher order thinking skills we crave so badly for our classrooms are not created by the teacher – they are a product of the questions generated by students. We have to become models of inquisitive learners. We have to bring excitement and curiosity into our classrooms and teach our students how to regain the inquisitiveness they once possessed. Classrooms have to “flip”. We need our schools to be places where the students instead of the teachers ask the questions – and teachers help them find the answers. We must truly become the “guide on the side” as we teach literacy – the construction of knowledge – and help students learn how to find their own answers to the questions they bring to school. In fairness, there have always been outstanding educators who have done the things suggested here. I have never meant to imply that schools have not had exceptional teachers that have taught critical thinking and helped students learn to construct knowledge. I will however make the claim that they were the exception in the school and not the rule. I will further forward the opinion that few in education understood what they were doing that was in fact so exceptional. The paradigm shift we are facing today necessitates that those exceptional teachers of the past become the teacher in every classroom today. I believe we have teachers who have the will and dedication to become those exceptional teachers. For that to happen we need to recognize the need to teach new skills to our teachers to prepare them for their new roles. Being “smart” is not enough; knowing a lot of facts is no longer enough. We must help teachers in the 21 century make the transition from a dispenser of information to a guide that helps students construct knowledge. We need to recognize that teaching today is perhaps more difficult than it has ever been. There are also incredible and exciting possibilities awaiting the students in classrooms that have great teachers. |
Gary StricklandI teach middle school science in a small rural Texas school. I am also an educational consultant. I am very passionate about literacy education in the content areas. ArchivesCategories |