A Brief History Lesson
Public school is a fabulous invention that really got rolling during the Industrial Revolution. Eli Whitney, who everyone associates with the invention of the cotton gin, was a prominent figure in kickstarting that period. He was able to snag a government contract to make muskets which, at the time, were made individually by hand. Whitney realized that you can mass produce muskets by making them with interchangeable parts and standardizing the process. Essentially, he used an assembly line and taught people how to do one thing well that they kept doing over and over. One person bored the barrel; one person attached the barrel to the stock; another person was responsible for the flintlock. And each station was stockpiled with the individual part they needed. This approach worked so well that it was adopted for making cars and for making burgers at McDonalds.
In fact, this method was so efficient that it was adopted by the public education system. The assembly line became the K through 12 classrooms; the curriculum became the individual parts that were attached to each student; and the standardized product was a well-educated citizen.
The problem is that this approach works better for creating widgets than educating children. For one, children enter school at different starting points. They come to us with different needs and different backgrounds and different socio-economic advantages or disadvantages. However, we insist on making sure every child gets the same components as they move through the assembly line regardless of their needs or interests. It seems like the only people who have realized that this doesn’t always work are the students who we’re trying to assemble.
High Schools That Don’t Work
In order to address the disparities created by a factory approach to teaching, educators have embraced a number of new initiatives. In fact, one of the more positive things that educators and schools do is try to improve what goes on in the classroom. However, this has also proven to be a negative. We’re always trying to build a better mousetrap by pursuing a new initiative every two or three years. It’s both a strength and a weakness. It’s good that we’re striving to improve our teaching. However, right when we’re starting to get the hang of one approach, another initiative will come along and our Curriculum and Instruction Director will get swept up in the movement and lead the charge down a new path. It will involve reading a new book that describes this new approach and will be sprinkled with unsubstantiated statements that start out with the phrase, “Research shows . . .” and concluding with “This isn’t going away.”
Our district was completely taken in by one of these new initiatives called Learning-Focused Schools (LFS). Trainings were organized; books were handed out; administrators put on presentations; and we all learned the difference between a foldable and a Frayer.
The principal and curriculum director hammered the lesson plan format which was affectionately called EATS. For the uninitiated, E stands for Essential Question; A stands for Activating Strategy; T stands for Teaching Strategies; and S stands for Summary. Aside from the fact that this looked a lot like the format created by Madeline Hunter 20 years earlier, we pressed on rewriting all of our lesson plans to fit this new model.
After three years of being a Learning-Focused School, there were no grandiose results at the high school as were promised. The administration picked and chose what aspects we would employ and the staff felt overwhelmed by all thirty-two of Marzano’s effective teaching strategies, not to mention all of the cool apps our instructional coaches were trying to show us. However, we pressed on being driven by the phrases “Research says . . .” and “This isn’t going away.”
But LFS did go away, until our administrators came back from another conference where they learned about other acronyms that would surely save public education. One such movement was called High Schools That Work which is denoted by the clever label, HSTW. Bob and I sat through a number of in-services where the district brought in curriculum experts who told us how to incorporate some new method that will raise students’ test scores and save public education. After about two years of these in-services, we got to thinking, what would a movement called High Schools That Don’t Work look like? Hence, the brainchild for these blogs.
One of the things that we began to realize after thirty years of teaching is that a lot of these initiatives begin to sound alike. It’s as if the old initiative has been repackaged and given new labels and terms. At first, we wrote objectives; then we wrote aims and goals; then we had to create essential questions which became learning essential questions which sound a lot like objectives but only in a question form. We then had to come up with lesson plans which later included activities which were transformed into culminating experiences which are now called performance tasks. Yes, methods professors will tell you there’s a difference, especially if they haven’t been in the classroom in over twenty years which is often the case. And to their credit, there are some subtle differences, but the differences don’t make that much difference.
When working with college students who were taking methods classes, I had them complete classroom observations to see English teachers in action. I have found it helpful if they observe beginning teachers and seasoned teachers as well as strong teachers and weak teachers. In fact, you can often learn more from watching a struggling teacher. The reason why is when you watch good teachers at work, they make the whole thing look easy because they know what they’re doing and things usually run smoothly. Sometimes you can learn more by looking at what not to do. So, let’s look at what’s going on in a typical English class.
What is taught in most high school English classrooms and how it’s taught are strikingly similar. Our students are assigned the same novel, usually a classic, and are on the same page at the same time regardless of students' individual interests, needs, or abilities. Additionally, our methodology is quite similar. We give quizzes to make sure our students do the daily reading which is important since many of them don’t like the assigned novel that we have picked out. After the quiz, a discussion ensues based upon what we as teachers think is important. Students who can't read the book or keep up with the pace end up failing. Those who don't enjoy the novel, avoid reading it by piecing the important information together via the classroom discussion. Even our cherished academic students often avoid many touchstone pieces by resorting to chapter-by-chapter summaries at various internet sites such as SparkNotes.com.
Our writing instruction is not much better. Even in spite of all of the research into the writing process, our composition assignments have an all too familiar pattern. Most writing assignments in the high school are either research papers or involve literary analysis of the required texts. The writing assignment is created and assigned by the teacher. Once completed, it is collected and taken home and graded by exhausted instructors who spend hours writing comments and making corrections that the students dutifully ignore once they’ve seen the grade. Ironically, the entire writing process has been ignored. No student choice is given in the assignment and rarely is provision made for prewriting or conferencing or revision.
We have been entrenched in these patterns for a number of years. Our courses are often defined in terms of what classics are taught at what grade levels. Studies point out the most common activity in the English classroom was whole-group instruction on a teacher-selected novel with students reading a set number of pages each night for homework. Students write responses to teacher questions and then the teacher leads a discussion focused on teacher observations about the text. Class time is devoted to studying literature with the remaining time split between learning grammar and writing essays about literature. This approach is summarized nicely by Randy Bomer in his book Time for Meaning: Crafting Literate Lives in Middle & High School. Literature as such, mostly whole-class study of book-length works by dead white guys, still takes roughly half of the time of English class . . . Pedagogy still consists almost exclusively of teacher-centered recitation/discussion that leads to an interpretation the teacher received from someone in a university somewhere, with almost no group work or individualized instruction . . . For kids who don't love school, we just make it more boring. These same findings are also echoed in A Nation at Risk where the time set aside for reading or writing is actually filled with students filling in blanks on handouts.
This approach is good for teachers because it gives them something easy to grade. However, it may not be the best approach for students if we want them to become better readers and better writers.
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