I care about equity issues, and when I read through the syllabus prior to starting the course, I was very glad to see the issue on our agenda. Now that I've read through the articles, though, I've realized that before I can tackle them frontally, on the class blog as per the assignment specifications, I have first to do a little sidebar analysis on where I see technology as supporting educational aims. My hope is that this effort will provide a structure for the Digital Divide discussion and also a framework for the Educational Philosophy assignment downstream; I am, therefore, going to use this blog as my venue for hashing it out.
Evolution of an Educational Philosopher: A True and (Not-yet) Digital Story
Scene I: Thesis
I started out as progressive as they come. I swallowed John Holt hook line and sinker. I gave the Guinea Pigs unfettered access to dress-up clothes and art supplies and magnified bug-boxes. I surrounded them with books of all sorts, and read to them extensively every night: fairytales and myths and Lord of the Rings; but also biographies and Childcraft encyclopedias and The Way Things Work. Alone amongst my fellow Fairfield County moms, I was ruthless in defending their downtime, fiercely protective of their right to be left alone. When they got old enough, I sent them to marvelous schools dedicated to child-led, inquiry-based, collaborative project-oriented pedagogies. For quite some time, this all seemed to work. They all were creative, imaginative, engaged and delightful. My eldest learned to read, early and effortlessly, exactly as John Holt and the Whole Language proponents said kids should, as naturally and organically as she'd earlier mastered walking and talking.
Scene II: Antithesis
A few years later, though, my middle child didn't learn to read, even after his Montessori school provided substantially more explicit and more structured instruction than my eldest, or other students in his class, ever needed. As well, I noticed that my eldest, by then ensconced in a similarly progressive Quaker school, was not making progress in certain areas. On the creative stuff, she was positively blossoming: she wrote poetry, she wrote and acted in plays, she assembled decahedrons out of straws to study engineering principles; she was grappling with conflict resolution strategies and learning lots of international affairs; and she was very, very happy. But she wasn't learning discrete skills: math facts, computational sequencing, spelling rules, mechanics of paragraph writing. I wrote earlier about the limits of the child-led, inquiry-based model: this is the point at which I began to realize that, left to their own devices, many kids won't choose to practice their penmanship, or memorize their multiplication tables, or master the difference between its and it's. Nonetheless, these things are still worth learning.
As is my habit when confronted with any kind of problem, I hit the library ("just like Hermione," groans the eldest, now). Two very different sets of educational philosophers ultimately helped me make sense of where we were. The first were practitioners in various facets of learning disability research, notably Sally Shavitz and Louisa Moats. Their research was quite persuasive: struggling readers could succeed, but they required certain, well-documented, interventions: direct instruction, highly structured and carefully sequenced skills instruction, many more rounds of practice than kids without disabilities generally need, and frequent review of material already mastered.
Not a lot of scope for child-led choices or lounging-on-the-rug or inductive learning, here.
The second set of educational philosophers who served as my Virgil at this stage of my journey were, somewhat implausibly given my attitudes and circumstances at the time, advocates for a return to what they call "classical" education, notably Dorothy Sayers and her most avid intellectual heir, Susan Wise Bauer. The classical education movement, which currently seems to have its greatest traction within the homeschooling community, views education in terms of developmental stages: in the first stage, from about grades one through four, students should focus on amassing facts, mastering discrete skills, and absorbing stories and poetry. In the second stage, from about grades five through eight, students should increasingly learn how to organize and analyze what they know, through increased focus on skills like outlining, learning the mechanics of good writing, and studying logic itself. In the third stage, from about ninth to twelfth grade, students should increasingly take on higher-order tasks of evaluating and synthesizing their learning and presenting their conclusions forcefully.
I hadn't, then, come across the model of Bloom's taxonomy that we discussed in class several weeks ago. But it's presenting the same idea; and also linking Bloom's construct of lower-order cognitive processes based on recall up through higher-level cognitive processes based on evaluating and creating to stages in human development, much along the lines of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The idea is that before kids can write symphonies, they need first to learn their fingering and scales; then move to reading notation fluently; then learn to transpose keys; then learn the mechanics of theory and the structure of the symphonic form. Then they can write symphonies.
We spent over a year wandering in this particular circle of hell, but ultimately my guides led us out of it: based on the research of Shavitz and Moats, we sent Guinea Pig #2 to the Windward School, which, just as the research indicated, enabled him to become fully literate in about two years. And we supplemented Guinea Pig #1's skills in math and spelling with specific, highly structured, sequenced work at home.
Scene III: Angst
At a tactical level, we'd solved the specific needs of our specific Guinea Pigs at a specific moment in time. At a theoretical level, though, my head was still reeling. Which was better, inquiry-led or direct instruction? Which was right, whole language or multisensory Orton-Gillingham-based? Which is a better use of a second grader's language arts period, creating original books in writers' workshops or, as Susan Wise Bauer recommends, memorizing poetry and doing dictation?
As well, a still small voice kept nagging at me: so kids whose parents can afford it, get to go to inquiry-based Quaker schools with tiny classes and long blocks of time, where they can follow their bliss and build decahedrons out of straws... but the public school kids have to drill and kill to show improvement on CMTs? What's up with that?
And then, even within our own family: the kids without learning disabilities get to put on full scale Shakespeare productions and fly off to Florida to do Original Play with the manatees... but the one with disabilities sits in a traditional desk facing forward reciting the letters of common but non-phonetic works in unison with his classmates? What's up with that?
As usually happens, it was the Guinea Pigs themselves who pulled me out of analysis and back into the real world. After a year or so, I realized that my daughter, who had grown to hate math because (however good her grasp on the underlying concepts) she kept getting wrong answers (due to computational errors), was vastly more contented once she got the basics down cold. On the flip side, I realized that my son was vastly more contented sitting straight up in a traditional desk before an extremely directive teacher and actually learning to read than he ever had been lying on cushions on the rug and declining invitations to create Little Books in the absence of skills.
I realized that both of our kids, who were in schools as far apart on the pedagogical spectrum as was possible, were in a school that was "reasonably right" for them. That there's no best model; just better and less good fit between model and particular child.
I also realized that neither school was perfect, even for the specific kid for which it was pretty good. Every choice has attendant trade-offs. My daughter's school, which is marvelous at deep delves into content areas, necessarily trades off breadth -- there's only so much time -- and is hit-or-miss on skills. My son's school, which is all about skills and also is absolutely ruthless about time management around clearly defined priorities, is not particularly good at fostering creativity and wonder.
I realized that as parents, we were in charge of ensuring that the holistic needs of our Pigs were met. It was our job to supplement our daughter's inquiry-based, child-led school experience with structured, sequenced skills; and to supplement our son's highly structured, skills-focused school experience with experiences that fed his heart and soul.
Scene IV: Synthesis
I end up here:
Any school that has made a strong commitment to any defined pedagogy, even out-there pedagogies like Waldorf, has something precious that most schools lack: clarity of purpose. This is extremely valuable: to administrators and teachers, in making the inevitable tradeoffs; and to parents, in communicating a vision to determine the appropriateness of fit. My daughter's school ultimately is about matters of heart and soul (and they are very good at it); my son's is ultimately about imparting skills (and they are very good at it). There really is a difference, and what is really right for one kid can be really wrong for another.
That said, there actually are quite a few things that both schools, radically different though they are, do; things that have come to characterize, for me, the elements of schools that are happy places where kids can flourish. In both schools, every single adult-- from the head of school to the office secretary to the bus driver -- makes eye contact and greets every kid by name. In both schools, kids of all ages have time, every day, to run around and get some air. In both schools, the kids are dismissed early on Fridays so the teachers have a block of time for development and preparation. In both schools, the teachers communicate early, often, formally and informally with parents, about small triumphs and everyday matters as well as about Problems. In both schools, kids and teachers alike laugh a lot. Well, that stuff matters too, doesn't it.
I see a lot of value in the child development model proposed by Piaget: the notion that kids move through a cognitive progression, starting with very sensory-based and egocentric experiences and progressing, over time, to increasingly abstract and symbol-based reasoning.
I therefore end up, in the preschool years, very attracted to Montessori methods of education: a carefully defined environment filled carefully limited, sensory based materials; within which children make their own choices of what they want to work on. Teacher-led definition of space; child-led autonomy on how, within those parameters, they'll spend their time.
As children reach elementary school age, Piaget's model suggests they progress to more concrete and logical operations. At this point, the educational philosophy laid out by the proponents of classical education appeals to me. Work diligently on mastering symbol systems (reading and numeracy); teach facts and simple classification tools in content areas; take them on nature walks armed with field guides and sketchbooks and teach them to look. And feed their souls by flooding their environment with quality literature, music, and art.
As they get to middle school age, both Piaget and the classical educators say they are ready to shift to more abstract skills: outlining, expository writing, comparing, and discussing. They're ready for logic as a subject and ready for multi-step operations in math.
By high school, they'll have both skills and background knowledge. They'll be ready to take on higher-order tasks of evaluating and synthesizing their learning and presenting their conclusions forcefully. They'll be able to speak with discipline and order, out of knowledge beyond their own immediate experience.
There ya go.
