After Jerome Bruner finished The Process of Education (see my previous blog), he took several years to work with children and teachers to uncover the guiding principles of quality instruction. By the title of his 1966 book, Toward a Theory of Instruction, you can guess that Bruner does not provide a specific answer, but moves us "towards" a theory of quality instruction.
But now the question - 50 years after Bruner's book:
Do we have a theory of instruction today?
Charlotte Danielson has a Framework for Teaching.
James Stronge gives us Qualities of Effective Teachers.
Todd Whitaker tells us What Great Teachers Do Differently.
Doug Lemov offers a program to Teach Like a Champion.
The list goes on and on, and many of these books also come in versions for administrators.
But do we have an actual theory of instruction?
Should we? Is it even possible?
Bruner makes some important points that would serve us well to remember.
Going to school has become so commonplace for us, that we have forgotten that:
• Schools are an artificial environment for learning. As a species, our natural environment for learning and problem solving is the world itself.
• Humans are the only species that does not begin learning anew with each generation (113).
• Schools exist not to "get knowledge across" (73), but to transmit culture - the skills, values, style, technology, and wisdom that "produces more effective and zestful human beings" (149) with each succeeding generation.
• We are intrinsically wired to learn. Bruner list four motives for learning - curiosity, competence, the desire to emulate a model, and social reciprocity (114).
• Instruction is really just an effort to assist and shape growth (1).
If we take those points into account, then a teacher's vocation is to:
• channel curiosity through real-world problem solving
• allow students to demonstrate efficacy
• be a model learner for students to emulate
• create social environments where students want to give to each other by taking on various roles
So what is a theory of instruction according to Bruner? It is prescriptive (meaning it sets forth the best way to achieve knowledge or a skill) and it is normative (meaning it is generic and comparable across all subjects and ages). Returning to our initial question: Why don't we have a theory of instruction after all this time?
Probably because Bruner (and others before and after Bruner such as Dewey and Robinson) realized that "people do not come in standard shapes and sizes" (Robinson, 2015, p. 25). That doesn't just mean students - it means teachers, too! Every learner is different, which means every teacher is different. What remains is moving constantly and relentlessly towards a theory of instruction - listing the qualities of effectiveness and a framework for quality as we seek to transmit the fabric of a culture forward.
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
Monday, June 22, 2015
The Educator with a Time Machine
Jerome Bruner must have had a time machine when he wrote The Process of Education in 1960, because nearly everything he predicts and advocates for has come true in the last 55 years. It must be amazing to look back over your entire career and say "I was right!" Bruner, who will be 100 years old on October 1, is a professor of psychology who taught at schools such as Harvard and Oxford.
Bruner was part of a 35-member conference in 1959 at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, at a time when the United States felt the need to revolutionize its teaching of science and math to compete with the Soviet Union. After the conference, Bruner wrote The Process of Education.
Reading The Process of Education is like getting in a time machine and going to a spot in educational history when people didn't spend much time thinking about curriculum or instruction. There were no standardized tests. And no brain research to understand how and why we learn. From this vantage point, Bruner writes of the purpose of education, makes predictions, asks questions, and points out areas requiring research.
Here are just a few of the things that have come true because of Bruner in the last 55 years:
• Spiral curriculum - Bruner believed that any subject could be taught in an intellectually honest way to a chid at any stage of development. Solving for x in math or composing in music in first grade? It's spiral curriculum - revisiting a topic over and over, each time in a deeper way.
• Standards-based grading/Personalization - "Ideally, schools should allow students to go ahead in different subjects as rapidly as they can ... The answer will probably lie in some modification or abolition of the system of grade levels in some subjects" (11).
• Predictive thinking - As a professor, Bruner knew the importance of predictions, hypotheses, and intuition in advancing knowledge. Every elementary literacy lesson includes prediction today.
• Heuristic process - a "nonrigorous method of achieving solutions of problems" (63). This is opposed to an algorithm, which is a step-by-step method. Guess what model reform math curriculums use today? Heuristic, open-ended problem solving and "math talk".
• Motivation in learning - Today, we talk all the time about what teachers do to engage students. An entire publishing business has sprung up around student engagement, and teachers are rightly evaluated on the level of student engagement they create. Bruner again.
• Differentiation - Bruner called aiming at the average student "inadequate" (70) and that materials must challenge superior students while not destroying the confidence of others. Bruner thought differentiation was the key to student motivation.
• Scaffolding - Bruner coined the term
• Increases in federal funding and investment in education - another correct prediction
• The devaluation of subjects not rewarded by the National Merit Scholarship - before standardized testing, Bruner predicted that subjects outside of science and math would suffer in the years ahead because students would strive for scholarships. Bruner desperately warned society not to let literature, history, and the arts suffer devaluation in schools.
• The role of technology - In a time of changing technology, Bruner said "the teacher constitutes the principal aid in the teaching process" (88) - not technological aids. Said quality curriculum cannot be dodged by purchasing the latest tech device (which to him was 16-mm film)
• Educational Risk-taking - Bruner says "To be so insecure that he dares not be caught in a mistake does not make a teacher a likely model of daring. If the teacher will not risk a shaky hypothesis, why should the student?" (90)
Find The Process of Education and read it - it's only 92 pages. It's in your library, probably not checked out for decades. For anyone trying to get back to the core of education, Bruner's book reminds you of a landscape when curriculum and instruction were idealistic new concepts before plagues of regulation and testing muddied the environment.
Bruner, Jerome. (1960). The Process of Education. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.
Bruner was part of a 35-member conference in 1959 at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, at a time when the United States felt the need to revolutionize its teaching of science and math to compete with the Soviet Union. After the conference, Bruner wrote The Process of Education.
Reading The Process of Education is like getting in a time machine and going to a spot in educational history when people didn't spend much time thinking about curriculum or instruction. There were no standardized tests. And no brain research to understand how and why we learn. From this vantage point, Bruner writes of the purpose of education, makes predictions, asks questions, and points out areas requiring research.
Here are just a few of the things that have come true because of Bruner in the last 55 years:
• Spiral curriculum - Bruner believed that any subject could be taught in an intellectually honest way to a chid at any stage of development. Solving for x in math or composing in music in first grade? It's spiral curriculum - revisiting a topic over and over, each time in a deeper way.
• Standards-based grading/Personalization - "Ideally, schools should allow students to go ahead in different subjects as rapidly as they can ... The answer will probably lie in some modification or abolition of the system of grade levels in some subjects" (11).
• Predictive thinking - As a professor, Bruner knew the importance of predictions, hypotheses, and intuition in advancing knowledge. Every elementary literacy lesson includes prediction today.
• Heuristic process - a "nonrigorous method of achieving solutions of problems" (63). This is opposed to an algorithm, which is a step-by-step method. Guess what model reform math curriculums use today? Heuristic, open-ended problem solving and "math talk".
• Motivation in learning - Today, we talk all the time about what teachers do to engage students. An entire publishing business has sprung up around student engagement, and teachers are rightly evaluated on the level of student engagement they create. Bruner again.
• Differentiation - Bruner called aiming at the average student "inadequate" (70) and that materials must challenge superior students while not destroying the confidence of others. Bruner thought differentiation was the key to student motivation.
• Scaffolding - Bruner coined the term
• Increases in federal funding and investment in education - another correct prediction
• The devaluation of subjects not rewarded by the National Merit Scholarship - before standardized testing, Bruner predicted that subjects outside of science and math would suffer in the years ahead because students would strive for scholarships. Bruner desperately warned society not to let literature, history, and the arts suffer devaluation in schools.
• The role of technology - In a time of changing technology, Bruner said "the teacher constitutes the principal aid in the teaching process" (88) - not technological aids. Said quality curriculum cannot be dodged by purchasing the latest tech device (which to him was 16-mm film)
• Educational Risk-taking - Bruner says "To be so insecure that he dares not be caught in a mistake does not make a teacher a likely model of daring. If the teacher will not risk a shaky hypothesis, why should the student?" (90)
Find The Process of Education and read it - it's only 92 pages. It's in your library, probably not checked out for decades. For anyone trying to get back to the core of education, Bruner's book reminds you of a landscape when curriculum and instruction were idealistic new concepts before plagues of regulation and testing muddied the environment.
Bruner, Jerome. (1960). The Process of Education. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.
Friday, June 12, 2015
Your Classroom is NOT a Makerspace
"Industrial processes commonly overlook the value of raw materials that are not relevant to what is being made. The same is true in education." (Robinson, 2015, p. 37)
What are we trying to "make" in education?
The answer is simple - we're not trying to make anything.
Factories make something when machinists do something with raw materials.
Artists create by using raw materials to make something original.
In these cases, the raw materials don't change on their own.
These people makes something out of the raw materials in order to resell them for a profit.
Not so in education.
The students "make" themselves.
The raw material must change itself into a finished product (though, I doubt, we ever become finished products). Students use their own raw materials (talents, skills, strengths, questions, wonders, character, values) to become a more finished version of their former self, as Ken Robinson might say. The teacher's role changes drastically in this view - one who holds up a mirror, offering feedback to the student as he/she "makes" him/herself.
What we have here is a classic "goods" vs. "services" debate for education.
And this, I propose, is why we find education in its current political predicament.
If education is meant to make something, what do you focus on?
You focus on outcomes and how you measure those outcomes - like a factory.
In education, that would be standards and assessment.
The focus on standards and assessment in recent years is an attempt to "make" students into something - people who can be put to work. Look at the debate over Common Core and standardized assessments. This was not the original intent of curriculum design.
But if education is meant to make people a better version of themselves, what do you focus on?
You focus on the process and the feedback that is provided to students.
That's instruction.
Quality instruction is a service, not a good.
Referring to the quote at the top of this post, standards and assessment "overlook the value of the raw materials" that students bring to your classroom. Only quality instruction can take into account the skills, talents, and curiosities of students and use them in the service of learning.
This means that our triangle of Curriculum ~ Instruction ~ Assessment must be reimagined.
Yes, we must have a clear - very clear - vision of what students need to accomplish. (See Grant Wiggins great article on how thorough planning helps, rather than hinders, creativity.)
And we need a way to provide ourselves and our students feedback on that journey through assessment that the student can use.
But at some point, we must admit that quality instruction needs to prevail over the other two, lest students become cogs in the machine. A colleague of mine rightly refers to the idea that when we pull on one side of the triangle too much, the others get out of whack. Society has pulled at the curriculum and assessment sides too much in the past few years without regard to the side that has the greatest effect on student achievement - instruction.
So in that sense, your classroom is not a makerspace.
Experimentation with reflection for improved achievement? Yes.
Clear goals accomplished through creative means? Yes.
But a place where you "make" a student into something? No.
Your classroom is a "Becomer Space" - a place where students become better versions of themselves. A place where talents and wonders take root and blossom.
But now my question is this:
Who is arguing about quality instruction?
Even in places enacting new accountability and educator effectiveness measures, are they debated amongst the public? Not likely, and then only if it is tied to assessment and compensation.
What about in your school or district?
How many committees are dedicated to quality instruction vs. curriculum and assessment?
The longer we ignore instruction at a system-wide level, the longer we ignore the "raw materials" present in all of our classrooms.
Despite government's best efforts at "accountability", the people moving the needle on instruction are teachers themselves. That's why EdCamps, Twitter chats, ADE/GCT certifications, Teachers Pay Teachers, and teacher Pinterest sites are so popular. Teachers love to talk pedagogy. Teachers are creating "Becomer spaces" for their own improvement and for that of their students.
What are we trying to "make" in education?
Factories make something when machinists do something with raw materials.
Artists create by using raw materials to make something original.
In these cases, the raw materials don't change on their own.
These people makes something out of the raw materials in order to resell them for a profit.
Not so in education.
The students "make" themselves.
The raw material must change itself into a finished product (though, I doubt, we ever become finished products). Students use their own raw materials (talents, skills, strengths, questions, wonders, character, values) to become a more finished version of their former self, as Ken Robinson might say. The teacher's role changes drastically in this view - one who holds up a mirror, offering feedback to the student as he/she "makes" him/herself.
What we have here is a classic "goods" vs. "services" debate for education.
And this, I propose, is why we find education in its current political predicament.
If education is meant to make something, what do you focus on?
You focus on outcomes and how you measure those outcomes - like a factory.
In education, that would be standards and assessment.
The focus on standards and assessment in recent years is an attempt to "make" students into something - people who can be put to work. Look at the debate over Common Core and standardized assessments. This was not the original intent of curriculum design.
But if education is meant to make people a better version of themselves, what do you focus on?
You focus on the process and the feedback that is provided to students.
That's instruction.
Quality instruction is a service, not a good.
Referring to the quote at the top of this post, standards and assessment "overlook the value of the raw materials" that students bring to your classroom. Only quality instruction can take into account the skills, talents, and curiosities of students and use them in the service of learning.
Yes, we must have a clear - very clear - vision of what students need to accomplish. (See Grant Wiggins great article on how thorough planning helps, rather than hinders, creativity.)
And we need a way to provide ourselves and our students feedback on that journey through assessment that the student can use.
But at some point, we must admit that quality instruction needs to prevail over the other two, lest students become cogs in the machine. A colleague of mine rightly refers to the idea that when we pull on one side of the triangle too much, the others get out of whack. Society has pulled at the curriculum and assessment sides too much in the past few years without regard to the side that has the greatest effect on student achievement - instruction.
So in that sense, your classroom is not a makerspace.
Experimentation with reflection for improved achievement? Yes.
Clear goals accomplished through creative means? Yes.
But a place where you "make" a student into something? No.
Your classroom is a "Becomer Space" - a place where students become better versions of themselves. A place where talents and wonders take root and blossom.
But now my question is this:
Who is arguing about quality instruction?
Even in places enacting new accountability and educator effectiveness measures, are they debated amongst the public? Not likely, and then only if it is tied to assessment and compensation.
What about in your school or district?
How many committees are dedicated to quality instruction vs. curriculum and assessment?
The longer we ignore instruction at a system-wide level, the longer we ignore the "raw materials" present in all of our classrooms.
Despite government's best efforts at "accountability", the people moving the needle on instruction are teachers themselves. That's why EdCamps, Twitter chats, ADE/GCT certifications, Teachers Pay Teachers, and teacher Pinterest sites are so popular. Teachers love to talk pedagogy. Teachers are creating "Becomer spaces" for their own improvement and for that of their students.
Monday, June 8, 2015
"Creative Schools" by Sir Ken Robinson
Look around ...
Everywhere you find increased mandates and regulation in education, you will find teachers with grit, determination, and resilience to make an impact. When politicians talk about "local control" in education, it is indeed local - classroom by classroom, school by school, each doing what can be done to move the needle on achievement. Not because someone said to, but because it's the right thing to do.
That is the idea behind Sir Ken Robinson's latest book, Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That's Transforming Education. The subtitle says it all. "Grassroots" means bottom-up transformation, and that means teachers, parents, students, administrators, and school boards. People making a difference by using the pieces that nobody is regulating. Now that's local control.
I found Creative Schools to be incredibly affirming. If you are an educator who believes in personalization of learning, 21st century skills and tools, and the critical role of the teacher like I do, you may not find much "new" in this book, but you will be strengthened in your journey and find plenty to chew on.
Robinson's book is incredibly timely. Creative Schools looks at nations and states that were early to get on the standards bandwagon to see what they do when the wheels fall off that vehicle. As the greater United States starts to emerge from the standards movement and ask "What's next?", the answer is not more standards or higher standards. The answer is a re-imagining of the purposes and processes of education. Read it now or the revolution might pass you by.
Everywhere you find increased mandates and regulation in education, you will find teachers with grit, determination, and resilience to make an impact. When politicians talk about "local control" in education, it is indeed local - classroom by classroom, school by school, each doing what can be done to move the needle on achievement. Not because someone said to, but because it's the right thing to do.
That is the idea behind Sir Ken Robinson's latest book, Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That's Transforming Education. The subtitle says it all. "Grassroots" means bottom-up transformation, and that means teachers, parents, students, administrators, and school boards. People making a difference by using the pieces that nobody is regulating. Now that's local control.
I found Creative Schools to be incredibly affirming. If you are an educator who believes in personalization of learning, 21st century skills and tools, and the critical role of the teacher like I do, you may not find much "new" in this book, but you will be strengthened in your journey and find plenty to chew on.
Robinson's book is incredibly timely. Creative Schools looks at nations and states that were early to get on the standards bandwagon to see what they do when the wheels fall off that vehicle. As the greater United States starts to emerge from the standards movement and ask "What's next?", the answer is not more standards or higher standards. The answer is a re-imagining of the purposes and processes of education. Read it now or the revolution might pass you by.
Sunday, June 7, 2015
Top Quotes from "Creative Schools"
I just finished Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That's Transforming Education (link here). I tweeted out the quotes that were most impactful to me along the way, and here they are all in one place. A full blog post on the book is forthcoming.
So excited to read this book this weekend pic.twitter.com/MJUk2LxnnO
— Chris Sepersky (@sepersky) May 23, 2015
Industrial processes commonly overlook the value of raw materials that are not relevant to what is being made.The same is true in education.
— Chris Sepersky (@sepersky) May 24, 2015
(Robinson, 2015, p. 37) What “raw talent” do we overlook b/c it isn’t what we are trying to “make”?
— Chris Sepersky (@sepersky) May 24, 2015
And exactly what ARE we trying to make?
— Chris Sepersky (@sepersky) May 24, 2015
When mathematics was added to curricula in 1700s, it was met with resistance by traditionalists believing only in “classical” education
— Chris Sepersky (@sepersky) May 30, 2015
Sound familiar?
— Chris Sepersky (@sepersky) May 30, 2015
Students drop out of school when schools drop out of the real world. (Paraphrased from Mojkowski)
— Chris Sepersky (@sepersky) May 30, 2015
2013 U.S. Domestic movie gross: $11 billion. NFL is a $9B business. Educational testing & support is $16.5 billion (Robinson, 165)
— Chris Sepersky (@sepersky) May 30, 2015
“Standardized” is not the problem in education. The issue is what we choose to standardize (adapt Robinson, 176).
— Chris Sepersky (@sepersky) May 31, 2015
How do schools “banish the culture of anonymity that allows so many students to slip through virtually unnoticed”? (Robinson, 201)
— Chris Sepersky (@sepersky) June 2, 2015
“The role of a creative leader is not to have all the ideas; it is to encourage a culture where everyone has them” (Robinson, 205)
— Chris Sepersky (@sepersky) June 2, 2015
“Our children are always sending us signals about who they are becoming” (Robinson, 208). Are schools listening?
— Chris Sepersky (@sepersky) June 2, 2015
Find this book. Read it now. Start a revolution. http://t.co/RzVX7td4Ca
— Chris Sepersky (@sepersky) June 7, 2015
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