What are facts, and how many of them do you really need to know?
We have a peculiar relationship to facts. Dickens’ Prof. Gradgrind and his love of facts. Star Trek characters Spock, Data. “Just the facts ma’am.” We like facts. We’re nervous about facts. We believe in facts.
What should children know when they finish school? How will we know what they know? Some people think that knowing the facts is not only not that important, but, gasp, could be a waste of educational time.
This brief recent Washington Post blog questions just how much time we should spend on facts. It takes a little digesting, because it serves as a response to a response, but the part I’m linking you to, by Edward Miller and Nancy Carlsson-Paige, raises questions about just how we should be educating children, questions that have come up a lot lately, especially with the rise of the Common Core.
(If you don’t know what the Common Core is and have children, you should stop wasting your time reading this column and check this out: http://www.corestandards.org/.)
In our Google age, the idea of a collective “hive mind” of knowledge has grown, especially in the richer parts of the U.S., places that have reliable Internet access. People, networked, do have tremendous knowledge leveraging power for facts and information. So perhaps we could forget about shoving facts at students and use school to develop critical understanding.
After all, learning in school is a kind of zero-sum game. Time you use in one way you don’t get to use in another. So if you spend time in class going through the dates of (all things) wars, you don’t get to spend as much time thinking what caused those wars (perhaps even exploring the quixotic possibility of preventing other such wars).
There is danger when education bends too far away from how toward what. Because you can do some precise work based on “an assignment” that would get an A but is still flawed – and maybe horrific. Those who teach technical writing often make this point by looking at the Nazi’s Wannsee Conference, their final, pathetically bureaucratic planning of the Holocaust. The documents from that conference are efficient and clear, but you, of course, cannot just think about them as technical documents; you must consider just what they planned on moving around on those trains: People.
Education is about hard thinking. Miller and Nancy Carlsson-Paige quote Plutarch, who said, “The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.” Educator Paulo Freire talked about resisting the banking concept of education, the idea of depositing ideas into students’ minds. I’m struck by how many of my college students become angry when they read Freire and then think about their own educations; they feel cheated.
Facts. We have, no matter what the educational level, just a little bit of time. Could that time be better spent if we assume that most of the facts are easily accessible, almost literally at our fingertips, and our educational job is to make sense, make connections, question?
Many teachers and other educators are already taking these types of approaches. Technology can help. Education circles are buzzing with ideas like flipped classrooms, in which teachers have students process information out of class so that in-class time is spent interacting. Let them use the space when we’re together to talk. A few weeks ago I had a conversation with a friend of mine who is an internal medicine specialist and medical educator. He told me how medical education was moving in this direction, toward inquiry, problem solving, ethics. Students will always have ready access to anatomical and physiological facts, he said; they need to understand patients.
To continue to question fact-based teaching, we’d need more wide-ranging dialogue about what teaching and learning are, and a lot less focus on standardized tests. Are those making high-level education decisions ready for those types of conversations? Perhaps they are afraid they have no easy way to measure the outcomes.
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Perfect.
I “second” Chris’s “perfect” comment!
Also, my son, Jack is participating in a new honors history class that is a “flipped” class. He is incredibly engaged in the curriculum and learning. It has lead to many discussions and debates at the dinner table. Bravo to his school teacher who fought to bring this type of learning to our school.
Another teacher running away from standardized tests. Bah!
As I recall, a long long time ago, the SATs did not test your knowledge of facts. It was geared toward english comprehension, critical thinking and mathematical problem solving.
My educational experience did not rely on memorizing facts. I was taught the scientific method and when taking tests, my teachers allowed me to bring in an index card with any equations we wanted to cram on it.
Perhaps I had a unique experience, but I doubt it. I’m suspicious that we’re avoiding the tough decision to eliminate ineffective teachers. Don’t get me wrong, I admit to being an ineffective student. But the consequences for that came in the form of an F (4 times in my college career. All in my major.).
I’m not convinced that what you describe exists in our educational system; however, since your bigger than me, I’ll be quiet now.
AMEN!
I third the notion of: Perfect.
Cathy: What school does your son go to? I’d love to find one in my area where teachers are thinking this way.
Rich, no doubt there are lots of problems with education in America, but it seems to me that the peeps in charge of education are trying to “fix” it by introducing even more standardized testing and other measures that are certainly not finding and fixing the real problems.
I’m not so sure that the educational system itself is poor. I was taught well by dedicated men and women. I’m suggesting that there are poor performers within the system that need to be either coached to perform at an acceptable level or be disciplined out of the profession. There needs to be a way to measure performance. Standardized testing, in my opinion, is one acceptable metric.
I agree with Scott’s premise on the most effective way to educate. It was precisely this way that I was taught. In the 20+ years since I’ve left those ivory-covered halls, I find it hard to believe that this method was abandoned. My point is that the only standardized testing I can recall is the SAT. It did not reward memorization of facts. It measured my ability to think critically.
Rich — one problem with your perception of the SATs is that, regardless of their intended purpose (they were supposed to be reasoning tests), their code has been broken. SAT preparation teachers teach students ways to take the test; these “tricks” can lead to immense inprovement in test performance. (I’m trained in SAT prep teaching, by the way.) Because of this, some students who are not good reasoners can do well and some who are good reasoners (and who don’t have training) get baffled by the test-taking process. These tests operate under the notion that there IS a standard — that there is one type of student who is a successful thinker. Studies and advances in special education have shown that brilliant students — those with genius level IQs — have been labeled as idiots, in the past, because they don’t learn or think like others. This can be damaging — in fact, this can really turn the standardized tests into instruments of mediocrity that send the message that those with original minds are inadequate. (There is a good chance Einstein would have done abysmally on the SATs).
Where teachers are concerned, the problem is that the test, while its makers’ intentions are not to make it a recalling of the facts, becomes the cause of checklists in the classroom; teachers fret over what they have and have no covered in terms of types of questions. This leaves them unable (for fear of losing their very livelihoods, in fact) to never climb the pyramid of Bloom’s taxonomy. They dwell on the recall and process levels when they could be teaching their kids to synthesize and create — the highest levels of cognitive function. I think this is what Scott means by all of this.
If these tests were reliably a measure of intelligence, teachers could be accused of running away from them in fear or out of a reaction to their own inadequacy. But, as it stands, the tests now serve two purposes: 1) to lower the level of cognitive achievement in the classroom and to 2) cause belief in a lie: that there is a “standard” human being, in terms of academic success.
“The educational system” is perhaps too broad a term in this instance. There are good aspects and bad. I think the powers-that-be have gotten the educational priorities screwed up.
No doubt there were and still are many dedicated and fantastic teachers out there. And you’ll get no argument from me that there are poor performers who need to be held accountable or removed.
Because of what Chris said above, standardized testing does NOT measure teachers’ performances. You may also be unaware of the fact that there is more standardized testing than the SAT out there (Iowa test, the NJ ASK, Terra Nova, etc).
I think we all agree on Scott’s premise here. But the current system is not one where teachers are teaching that way with one lousy SAT thrown in for good measure. The prevalence of, and the importance that us placed on standardized test scores hinders those few teachers who do want to teach the way Scott is describing. No child left behind and all that…
I appreciate this dialogue, all. Rich, I’m glad you question the premise here: I sometimes worry that I don’t hear enough alternative voices and have thus become radicalized, and perhaps monomaniacal, about this topic. But these other comments speak eloquently to the reality in schools: Simply, there’s a lot of testing going on, and it has little to do with educating people.
Karen, my son is in Cinnaminson. AND…it is really tricky to evaluate teachers using standardized testing. There are just too many variables. For example, teacher “A” may have the lower functioning students and teacher “B” the more motivated students with higher IQ’s. Teacher “A” may be an incredible teacher and her students may have amazing growth as a result of being in teacher “A’s” class. However, they still may all fail the test. Should teacher “A” be punished for this?
I am a teacher. I love the challenge of teaching the remedial students. They usually arrive in my class functioning one to two years below grade level. My goal is to motivate them to be the best they can be. I want them to love school and have a positive experience in my class. Passing a standardized test is incredibly difficult for a student functioning below grade level. There are many reasons a student is functioning below grade level. They could have a learning disability, low IQ, emotional problems, difficult home environment, ineffective teachers in previous grades, and I could go on and on…However, every child must take the same test, (even the Special Needs Students). As I mentioned before, just to many variables to judge teachers by their students’ scores.
We should develop a test that we could give the students in September, and give the same test at the end of the year. The focus should be on the “growth” of the students. Isn’t that what good teaching is all about?