absence of instructivism

In the past couple of weeks I've had the belated revelation that one of our problems here in Irvington isn't constructivism per se, but, rather, the absence of instructivism.

Example: few educators in our district are alarmed by the high levels of tutoring going on. Not only are few educators alarmed, but school personnel refer parents to Irvington teachers when children need tutoring.

Parents seem readily to make the connection between high levels of tutoring and fairness (no disadvantaged kids enrolled in accelerated classes) not to mention tax revolts; Irvington administrators do not.

Instead our administrators apparently see tutoring as a superior form of instruction, the ultimate class size reduction to a teacher-pupil ratio of 1:1. Thus wealthy parents hiring tutors when their kids have problems in school, or teaching their kids themselves, are simply purchasing (or providing) elite instruction.

yikes

Obviously this analysis is off the mark, but it isn't constructivism. Constructivists don't believe that a tutorial with an Oxford don is the pinnacle of educational excellence. Constructivists don't believe in dons.

This isn't constructivism.

So what is it?

And where does it come from?

Arguably, it comes from the absence of instructivism in schools of education.

When you talk to younger teachers and administrators, you find that the vocabulary of explicit instruction - breaking material down into smaller units of material, teaching the units directly, providing distributed practice of material until it is mastered (i.e. lodged in long term memory), building up connections amongst the parts, performing frequent formative assessment - simply do not come up in conversation.

This is why the core moment for me in my 100 Years War with the math department was the "If students need distributed practice, parents can find worksheets online" exchange. The words "if students need distributed practice" could not come out of a direct instructivist's mouth.

The math chair, a woman in her 30s, is interested solely in student understanding; the word "understanding" is the term she uses exclusively when discussing the math instruction for which she is responsible.

"I've visited the class, and the students understand."

"If they don't understand, they need to come in for extra help."

etc.

The 6th grade teacher talks the same way. When a student does badly on a test, she tells parents the student "doesn't understand" the material.

But then, when the tutor rides in to the rescue, the tutor says the opposite. A math tutor hired by a friend of mine told her that her son understood the material well enough. The problem was that he couldn't do the math on math tests quickly and accurately enough to earn an A or a B on a test.

Of course, David Labaree would say that the math chair is not a "real" constructivist. And David Labaree would be right.

But nor is she an instructivist.

As a result, when a student fails to learn math, the only available explanation is that the student has failed to understand the material. That is the fallback and the default. The student doesn't understand.

Therefore the only logical solution is for the student to "come in for extra help" and have the material explained again.

From what I can see, extra help is all about re-explaining the material, not about diagnosing the missing skills and providing the missing practice.



once again with feeling

This reminds me of Michelle Weiner-Davis' book, Divorce Busting. Weiner-Davis says most people assume that if what they're doing isn't working, they should do the same thing more often and louder. Once again with feeling.

Which reminds me of the great story I heard about a legendary professor at Columbia medical school, a man who trained many of the most important research physicians working today.

His fundamental axiom, the central principle he drilled into all of his future Nobel prizewinners:

If what you're doing isn't working, try something else.

One of his former students told me that story.



from Steve H:

While I was writing this post, Steve & Susan were beating me to the punch:

You have to get to the details to see what's going on. Constructivism has a great influence on education, but it does not mean that content and skills are not taught. The ideology is costructivism, but schools are pragmatic at some level. This provides a certain amount of "balance" or plausible denial. We all know what balance means - the school decides and the parents go away.

I've always thought of it as the difference between a top-down approach versus a bottom-up approach. Modern constructivists never implement pure constructivism. They know that content and skills are important. The big difference is that they want to achieve the results starting from a thematic and real-world view of knowledge and having the kids work down to the basic skills. They can talk the talk, but this approach does not guarantee that basic skills and content ever get done. This is OK because they see little linkage between mastery and understanding. Only conceptual understanding is necessary.

The justification for limited content and lack of mastery is based on constructivism. Just because you can't see child-centered learning when you walk into a classroom doesn't mean that it isn't having a big impact. My son's Everyday Math class wasn't done in groups. they did the student math journal pages in class. It doesn't look constructivist, but it is top down with little emphasis on mastery.

I sometimes get the feeling that constructivism is just pedagogical cover for a dislike of hard work, mastery, memorization, high expectations, and accountability. They just can't come out and say that, so they hide behind discovery and conceptual understanding. When pushed, they talk about balance and hope you won't look at the details.

from Susan S:

The big difference is that they want to achieve the results starting from a thematic and real-world view of knowledge and having the kids work down to the basic skills. They can talk the talk, but this approach does not guarantee that basic skills and content ever get done.

Yup. That's it in a nutshell.

The odd thing is that they either don't seem to care that the basic skills didn't get mastered, or they believe that the kids that never learned the foundational blocks just aren't able to learn them.

I was talking to a friend this morning. She's been helping one of her son's high school friends review for his math final, and came out saying that both boys have difficulty doing long division. Neither of them is very good at long division, and both avoid it.

Also, both try to get by estimating answers and leaving it at that.

Neither of these kids spent a second learning math from Math Trailblazers.

David Klein has long said that all U.S. textbooks have "constructivist elements."

By now it's probably the case that all or nearly all U.S. classrooms have constructivist elements, too - constructivist elements that are so "natural" and taken-for-granted that no one connects bad grades on tests with unexamined, taken-for-granted constructivist practices.


spilt religion - Hirsch on progressive education & Romanticism
David Labaree on the 2 factions
Labaree on constructivism
Hirsch on Labaree

Hirsch, E.D., "Romancing the Child," Education Next, 1 (Spring 2001).
Labaree, David F., "Progressivism, Schools, and Schools of Education: An American Romance," Paedagogica Historica (Gent), 41 (Feb. 2005), 275–89. (pdf file)