Today progressivism means pedagogical progressivism. It means basing instruction on the needs, interests and developmental stage of the child; it means teaching students the skills they need in order to learn any subject, instead of focusing on transmitting a particular subject; it means promoting discovery and selfdirected learning by the student through active engagement; it means having students work on projects that express student purposes and that integrate the disciplines around socially relevant themes; and it means promoting values of community, cooperation, tolerance, justice and democratic equality. In the shorthand of educational jargon, this adds up to ‘child-centered instruction’, ‘discovery learning’ and ‘learning how to learn’. And in the current language of American education schools there is a single label that captures this entire approach to education: constructivism.
As Lawrence Cremin has pointed out, by the 1950s this particular progressive approach to education had become the dominant language of American education.2 Within the community of professional educators—by which I mean classroom teachers and the education professors who train them—pedagogical progressivism provides the words we use to talk about teaching and learning in schools. And within education schools, progressivism is the ruling ideology. It is hard to find anyone in an American education school who does not talk the talk and espouse the principles of the progressive creed.
This situation worries a number of educational reformers. After all, progressivism runs directly counter to the main thrust of educational reform efforts in the US in the early twenty-first century. Reform is moving in the direction of establishing rigorous academic frameworks for the school curriculum, setting performance standards for students, and using high stakes testing to motivate students to learn the curriculum and teachers to teach it. Education schools and their pedagogically progressive ideals stand in strong opposition to all of these reform efforts. To today’s reformers, therefore, education schools look less like the solution than the problem.3
source:
Progressivism, Schools and Schools of Education: An American Romance (pdf file)
David Labaree
Paedogogica Historica
Vol. 14, Nos. 1 & 2, February 2005, pp. 275-288
what does an actual teacher teaching in US public schools have to say?
buzzword education
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)
Is this the fellow we have to thank for creating the current meme that constructivism doesn't really exist in today's classrooms?
ReplyDeletefrom pg 4 of the pdf file
“What signs there are of student-centered instruction and discovery learning tend to be superficial and short lived. We talk progressive but we rarely teach that way. In short, traditional methods of teaching and learning are in control of American education. The pedagogical progressives lost.”
“The other reason that reformers should not worry about contemporary progressivism is that its primary advocates are lodged in education schools, and nobody takes these institutions seriously.”
He is taking a huge leap to a conclusion that defies logic.
He obviously left out of his considerations the influence which thousands of graduates of the colleges of education have had.
These graduates actually believed what was preached in those colleges, and they now run most school districts, choose the textbooks to be used, and run the classrooms where our children are supposed to be taught.
You can thank Labaree and before him you can thank Jay Mathews of the Washington Post, who Labaree quotes in his book "The Problem with Ed Schools".
ReplyDeleteIn Mathews' book "Class Struggle", he claims: "I have yet to observe a teacher who is not putting considerable emphasis on specific information and skills…If you know of a study that shows that Dewey’s principles are actually practiced in any serious way in many American classrooms, I would like to see it, because it conflicts with what I have found.”
"Is this the fellow we have to thank for creating the current meme that constructivism doesn't really exist in today's classrooms?"
ReplyDeleteI found that assertion so astonishing that I was moved to write a post about it:
http://instructivist.blogspot.com/2007/02/buzzword-education.html
http://instructivist.blogspot.com/2007/02/buzzword-education.html
ReplyDeleteHeckuva post. Everything rattling around in my head put down in one place. Thanks!
Is this the fellow we have to thank for creating the current meme that constructivism doesn't really exist in today's classrooms?
ReplyDeleteyes
I learned, only toward the end of the year, that there is so much "collaborative teaching" in Ms. K's class that C. has been learning math from the son of "Math Dad," the math teacher I always talk about.
ReplyDeletenumber one: thank God he's grouped with Son of Math Dad
number two: son of Math Dad is not a math teacher
Another mom finally contacted the school after I sent out emails about the all-the-answers-are-belong-to-us situation.
She found out that the only people giving her child feedback on her homework were the 3 peers in her collaborative group.
I could be wrong about all this; parents are never EVER allowed inside classrooms, and we aren't informed about classroom practices.
ReplyDeleteBut this is what the kids are telling me, and it's clear that the teacher isn't correcting the homework EVER.
Nor are the kids re-doing problems they got wrong.
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.
ReplyDeleteI'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 disklie 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.
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.
ReplyDeleteYup. 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.