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At least 10 Upper East Side nursery schools are closing their doors today to make time for a conference on an Italian teaching philosophy that is challenging American methods.
Nearly 900 people will crowd the 92nd Street Y to learn about Reggio Emilia — named after the small Italian town, population 140,000, where the approach was developed and that is known for its fine wines and parmigianas — and hundreds more are scheduled to tune in to the 92nd Street Y's first major Internet broadcast of a conference.
Unlike many foreign countries, Italy does not outscore America on standardized tests (its children score about the same), but its approach to teaching 4- and 5-year-olds has captivated educators across this country. They say the philosophy elicits more from the young children than ever seemed possible.
Reggio eschews traditional lesson plans and instead encourages 4- and 5-year-olds to develop their own projects.
About 500 Americans visit Reggio schools in Italy every year to marvel at these projects, and a traveling exhibit of the projects has been making its way across the country. The U.S. liaison to the nonprofit Reggio Children group that organizes the exhibit, Lella Gandini, said interest appears to have grown "immensely" in the past several years, especially in New York.
The director of All Souls School on the Upper East Side, Jean Mandelbaum, one of the school directors who allowed children to skip a day so staff could attend the conference, said that when she first visited Reggio she was astonished to see the quality of work produced by the schools' method. "It looks like they're geniuses, but they're not geniuses. These Italian kids who are wonderful are no more wonderful than our American kids," she said.
By giving children more time to do longer projects and allowing them to dictate their own curriculum, the Reggio method brings out the best in them, she said. At her school, she said, children have created a life-size penguin; several robots, and a model of the 79th Street cross-town bus — all through their own ingenuity. Through the process, teachers make sure to pass on certain skills. They also push students to revisit projects, making them months-long endeavors rather than the fancy of just a few hours.
"The idea is not to just splash something off and bring it home to mommy. Rather, most of the work is considered work in progress," she said.
etc.
Oh yes. Yet another "challenge" to American teaching methods. Nobody here in America has ever heard of the project method.
It's hopeless.
We're all going to have to band together and start charter schools to teach the liberal arts disciplines via direct instruction. We'll hire Siegfried Engelmann and the precision teaching folks to oversee.
We'll also recruit a disciplinary specialist or two to see to it we're teaching the actual disicplines as they exist in the real world, not the fantasy interdisciplinary world of the American ed school.
When it comes to the liberal arts disciplines, the "real world" is the world of the professors and researchers who produce the knowledge our schools are supposed to teach.
the liberal arts disciplines:
- mathematics
- English
- science
- philosophy
- history
- foreign languages
- music
- art
Ed says many colleges include the social sciences as a liberal arts discipline.
Ed speaking:
Each discipline has a corresponding set of skills that emerge from the discipline. In mathematics you have quantitative reasoning; in science you have the scientific method; in history you have historical analysis. Some form of competency in writing is usually attached to English.
Ed thinks it's important to have the disciplines "first" and the skills second, because it's too easy to get into "interdisciplinary mush" when it's the other way around. If your requirement is "social scientific reasoning" as opposed to history, then a student can take a smorgasbord of courses in anthropology, sociology, etc, without taking a history course, thus missing a fundamental discipline in the liberal arts canon.
Ed again:
There's no question there are social scientists who would disagree with this, but it's not for nothing that public and private schools both require history not social science. That's true because most people see history as a fundamental liberal arts discipline. Most people also make the rightful assumption that every citizen needs to know something about the history of his own country to exercise his citizenship rights effectively. The social studies movement agreed with this premise, but got rid of the study of history and kept the study of citizenship.
23 comments:
I just added an update on the liberal arts disciplines.
"By giving children more time to do longer projects and allowing them to dictate their own curriculum..."
If this trend continues, babies will be dictating their own curriculum in the womb.
"...an Italian teaching philosophy that is challenging American methods.
Nearly 900 people will crowd the 92nd Street Y to learn about Reggio Emilia..."
Reading this is like entering the twilight zone. Does this frenzied crowd live on the moon? Activities and projects has been the order of the day in elementary schools for a long time. Soon it will grind up high schools if Gates's wrecking ball proceeds apace. Could it be that this frenzied crowd is like the proverbial fish that can't tell water?
A while back I posted the best summary of this ideology I've ever seen. It's from illinoisloop.
http://instructivist.blogspot.com/search?q=illinoisloop
Here my comment followed by the illinoisloop summary:
The project method was widely acclaimed by progressive educationists upon its publication by William H. Kilpatrick in 1918. It has become a mainstay in education thanks to a convergence of educationist fads, tenets and theories. Illinoisloop has one of the best explanations of this mania that I have ever seen:
• Constructivism:
The pervasive education religion of "constructivism" holds that a child learns best through active "doing". To some extent, this is of course true. However, the Achilles heel of constructivism is that this is a painfully plodding and tedious way of learning, while forcing a drastic reduction (dumbing down) of the content of a course. While an active project may often be a good technique for making a difficult concept clear, it is often used when a simple direct method would be just as effective and far more efficient.
• Groups:
The pressure for "collaborative learning" or "cooperative learning" is frequently met with more projects and activities.
• Interdisciplinary curriculum:
Teachers are under pressure to find "thematic" or "interdisciplinary" links between subjects. There is nothing inherently wrong with that -- the Core Knowledge Sequence used in the Core Knowledge schools is carefully constructed to encourage learning in this way. But without a rigorous, well-reasoned curriculum like the CK Sequence, the result too often is time-wasting art or writing projects linking vague language arts goals with minimal content points.
• Multiple Intelligences:
The fevered success of another fad, Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences (click for much more info on that), pressures teachers into coming up with separate projects for each of this theory's supposed categories. So, we have one project to appeal to "kinesthetic" children, another project for the "intrapersonal" learners, we sing a song for the "musical" learners, and so on. Of course, since the MI mindset offers no method to identify or quantify these supposed differences, the bottom line is lots and lots of projects for all the children in the class.
• Anti-Fact Mentality:
Starting in ed school and throughout their careers in most schools, teachers are subjected to a barrage of rhetoric about the dangers of teaching facts. They are told not to teach "mere facts" to be "regurgitated." Learning of specific content knowledge is called "low level" and nothing more than "memorization." What used to be called "learning" is now disparaged as "brain-stuffing". A teacher is to be "a guide on the side" rather than "a sage on the stage." This drumbeat from the ed schools and education orthodoxy is pervasive and relentless, and teachers are drilled incessantly (ironic, isn't it?) that direct teaching is to be avoided. So, if the teacher isn't teaching, what are the kids likely to be doing? Yup, more projects.
• Anti-Fact Assessments:
If facts are bad, then testing whether children know facts is even worse -- or so teachers are told. Thus, chapter tests and other quantitative measures of learning are deemphasized in favor of so-called "authentic" assessment, in which we look at a whole "portfolio" of a child's "work" which largely consists of (ta da!) projects.
• "Authentic" Skills:
If the purpose of a school is not to build knowledge, then what is a school for? The progressivists have a ready answer for that: to learn supposed "skills." They argue that since knowledge is always increasing, it is hopeless to try to teach very much at all (using a twisted logic that defies comprehension). What kids need, they say, is to learn how to look things up. Well, guess what? Projects give them an "opportunity" to look things up instead of being taught.
• Innovation:
School administrators suppose themselves to be seen as "creative" or "innovative." We often read of a school calling itself "innovative" or a teacher said to be "creative" ort "imaginative." Those are fine attributes, but not when they take the place of words like "effective" or "knowledgeable." One teacher might be extraordinarily effective and captivating in teaching children a rich, detailed and memorable introduction to American history, while another teacher gains more recognition from parents and maybe the local newspaper not by teaching much of anything but by staging a marathon dress-up pageant, puppet show or enormous craft project.
• Finding a Use for Computers:
Projects provide a convenient raison d'etre for the expensive computers that schools have been buying in bulk.
• Smaller Class Sizes:
For all of the above reasons, the teaching industry is obsessive about urging more dubious classroom projects. But when class sizes are large, it's extremely difficult to manage the hubbub of activity and to try to keep a semblance or order. But as class sizes shrink, it becomes ever more practical for a teacher to assign more and more projects.
Great comments, Instuctivist. Twilight zone is right. This Sun article looks like it belongs in The Onion.
Kinda like the story about how Underfunded Schools Forced To Cut Past Tense From Language Programs.
Despite concerns that cutting the past-tense will prevent graduates from communicating effectively in the workplace, the home, the grocery store, church, and various other public spaces, a number of lawmakers, such as Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, have welcomed the cuts as proof that the American school system is taking a more forward-thinking approach to education.
"Our tax dollars should be spent preparing our children for the future, not for what has already happened," Hatch said at a recent press conference. "It's about time we stopped wasting everyone's time with who 'did' what or 'went' where. The past tense is, by definition, outdated."
Said Hatch, "I can't even remember the last time I had to use it.".
It’s hard to tell satire from reality these days.
Tex,
Wow! This is priceless!
I love The Onion. Maybe the Onion folks can teach the schools how to be satirical, since schools crave creativity but don't seem to be able to pull it off.
I should have said intentionally satirical. They are already unintentionally satirical, farcical and comical.
While on the whole I agree with you, Instructivist, can we remember we are talking about 4 and 5 year olds here? And the insane drive for "academic kindergarten" --30 minutes of homework in kindergarten?
And in roaming about looking for the data on age to begin formal literacy training (i.e., citation to support the assertion that delaying formal literacy training to age 7 may be beneficial -- I know I've seen it, just can't put my finger on it) ran across this article from Spring 2006 issues of American Educator, the quarterly journal of the American Federation of Teachers, reprinted at Reading Rockets:
How we Neglect Knowledge and Why
But perhaps even more serious than skill deficiencies are knowledge deficiencies that arise for children who have limited access to the informal informational lessons that can be transmitted through day-to-day interactions. Although a significant amount of research has focused on differences in early language learning (McCardle and Chhabra, 2004), in vocabulary and phonemic awareness and how they might be acquired, there has been relatively little discussion of differences among children in content knowledge and its relationship to achievement. This is a critical oversight because indications are that limited content knowledge might ultimately account for what appear to be comprehension difficulties (Vellutino et al., 1996) or higher-order thinking difficulties in older children. Therefore, if children’s developing conceptual knowledge becomes subordinated to a focus on the relatively small number of necessary procedural skills early on, then the gap between socioeconomic status groups may widen with each successive grade level, building to insurmountable gaps after just a few years of schooling.
[big snip]
Little classroom time is devoted to informational text
According to a recent literature review, there is a “scarcity of informational text in primary-grade classrooms (and, to some extent, throughout elementary school)” (Palincsar and Duke, 2004, p. 189). Just how scarce is it? Duke (2000) studied the prevalence of informational text in 20 first-grade classrooms in and around Boston. Half the classrooms were from very high socioeconomic status (SES) districts and half were from very low SES districts. By visiting each of the classrooms four times during one school year, Duke found that, on average, only 3.6 minutes per day of instruction were typically devoted to informational text. The situation was even worse in the classrooms from low SES districts - a mere 1.4 minutes per day, on average, were devoted to informational text.
I've actually toured a hotsy-totsy Reggio Emilia preschool in Georgetown (DC), tuition for morning enrollment around $10K. It was small (located in an Episcopal church) and they had a very well educated staff, kids that ran like Mussolini-era trains, an attractive facility, an incredible array of media for the kids to work in artistically, and gorgeous student work. The parents who toured with me were all dressed to the nines, and almost all oooold, and asked a lot of questions about philosophy, and none about potty and snack routines (which was what I wanted to hear about). I can see why people are so wowed by Reggio Emilia. I never got a call-back from the preschool after the tour, and a fellow mom said the same thing happened to her. The school's so small and popular that with sibling preferences and parish preferences, a non-insider didn't have a prayer of getting in. Not getting my daughter in was a bummer at the time, but good heavens, what a silly thing to do with $10K! (We ultimately went with the city co-op which cost us $4 a morning, or some other ridiculously small sum.)
Waldorf is another educational orientation that's progressive, and seems to attract a well-heeled clientele. I hear rumors that while it's OK for preschool, their kids eventually fall behind standard school kids. Same thing with Montessori schools in the later grades. But that's not a well-informed opinion, just based on something I heard from a relative.
I wonder about that claim about informational text. It might be true for text the kids were reading by themselves, but come on--aren't the early grades full of books on dinosaurs, lions, bugs, etc.? Except the actual reading would be done by the teacher, not the kids. I was just organizing books this morning at my daughter's school's resource room, and the shelves fairly grown with picture books about penguins and polar bears and children's atlases.
Sorry! The comment above was me, Amy P.
We looked into Waldorf and Montessori schools for our son when he was young, but saw a use only for the pre-school years. After that, we wanted more structure and more specific goals than they offered. Actually, the local Montessori school exuded a really snooty attitude. Our son ended up in a home-based preschool that did all sorts of things, including putting on plays.
"...can we remember we are talking about 4 and 5 year olds here? And the insane drive for "academic kindergarten" --30 minutes of homework in kindergarten?"
"insane"?
That's a loaded word, so you have to be more specific. If you're talking about the 30 minutes of homework part, I might agree, but I would expect to see a lot of this happening before I would call it an "insane drive", especially used as a general argument about academics in Kindergarten.
"academic kindergarten"
If the kids aren't there for academics, then what are they doing there? Town-paid-for babysitting? Our town went to full-day Kindergarten back when my son entered Kindertarten. One of their goals was to assess kids and try to get them onto a (somewhat) equal basis when they got to first grade. Kindergarten was academic, but there was no homework.
RE: Formal literacy training
The results of PIRLS 2006 were just released, I believe, a few days ago.
http://timss.bc.edu/pirls2006/intl_rpt.html
Somewhere in the hundreds of pages I remember seeing a table refering to the age at which children are first taught to read in the participating countries. Lots of good stuff about amount of time spent on fiction and "reading for information" as well.
Americans are obsessed with earlier and earlier academics when they need to be concerned with why we fall behind in middle school. (I don't know if that's reflected in this particular report or not, it's my observation based on TIMSS)
Why do all these people think the pinnacle of educational brilliance is reached when kids build robots?
Excuse me.
I meant: when kids build "several robots."
I wish I could remember Ed's best friend's story about touring UES at UCLA. (That's the lab school everyone tries to get into.)
I think the story was that the walls were plastered with student work in which none of the words was spelled correctly. (Take this with a grain of salt - I'm probably remembering correctly, but not necessarily.)
They rejected the school on this ground alone.
Their kids went through a very good private school in L.A. & his older child is now at Columbia doing brilliantly well. The sky's the limit for her.
This kid is the model for what I want. She's not an obvious "genius." She is your standard-issue bright high-SES kid who has the advantages of educated parents and books in the home along with good native ability.
This girl shows you what "value-added" is for an advantaged child. She is soaring at Columbia. "Soaring" means that if she wants to go to graduate school in history (which last I heard was what she wanted to do), she'll get into a good one -- and she'll have enthusiastic professor recommendations to support her application.
If you want to be a professional historian you have to get into a good program period.
She'll get into one because she did well at Columbia, and she's doing well at Columbia because she was very well prepared by her K-12 program.
That's what her dad says.
"She had superb preparation."
Once you get to places like Columbia, "family background" and "high SES" mean nothing without sound academic preparation.
EOS
Twenty to thirty minutes of "homework" in kindergarten is not necessarily insane. I have a kindergartener in a half-day program. If I do not work with her at least 20 minutes a day on core skills (I'm teaching her how to read and she's doing Singapore 1A), I don't believe she'll be where she needs to be in first grade. My son was in first grade last year and the expectations for first are certainly NOT in line with what is happening in kindergarten.
They are expected to come to 1st grade reading, really reading, and yet too many aren't there yet. This sets them up to fail and fail miserably. As for math, our district has Everyday Math K-5 so if I expect her to have a command of foundational skills, that's not going to happen in the classroom either.
If I want my daughter to read and learn how to add without the constant aid of manipulatives, I'll have to take it upon myself. Schools are charged with making learning fun; parents are charged with making sure actual learning is taking place at all.
Finally found the article I was mis-remembering. Written by Neil Swidley, it was published in the Boston Globe Magazine on 10/28/07, title Rush Little Baby
Long quote:
A classic study in the 1930s by noted researcher and Illinois educator Carleton Washburne compared the trajectories of children who had begun reading at several ages, up to 7. Washburne concluded that, in general, a child could best learn to read beginning around the age of 6. By middle school, he found no appreciable difference in reading levels between the kids who had started young versus the kids who had started later, except the earlier readers appeared to be less motivated and less excited about reading. More recent research also raises doubt about the push for early readers. A cross-cultural study of European children published in 2003 in the British Journal of Psychology found those taught to read at age 5 had more reading problems than those who were taught at age 7. The findings supported a 1997 report critical of Britain's early-reading model.
What might explain this? In her fascinating new book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Maryanne Wolf offers some answers. True reading requires the integration of complicated functions from different regions of the brain - visual, auditory, linguistic, conceptual - a process that takes time. The speed with which these regions can be integrated depends on something called myelination, in which the tails (or axons) of neurons in the brain are wrapped in a fatty sheathing that makes them perform better. For these regions of the brain to interact efficiently, they need one neuron to talk to another neuron in rapid succession. And to do that well, those neuron tails need lots of myelin. Myelination rates can vary, but Wolf says generally these pivotal regions aren't fully myelinated until sometime between the ages of 5 and 7, with boys probably being on the later side.
That's why many kids can master some components of reading at an early age, such as the visual. But other components, such as phonemic awareness - the idea that a word is made up of discrete sounds - typically take longer. Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist and child development professor at Tufts, relates how a colleague once asked a kindergartner what the first sound in the word "cat" was. The child perked up and replied, "Meow."
"There is a really good reason why, across the world, literacy training is not begun until 5 to 7," Wolf says. "Some countries, such as Austria, don't want children taught reading until 7." For what it's worth, that's the same Austria with a per-capita Nobel-laureate rate many times higher than that of Japan, the land that spawned Junior Kumon.
After poring over the available research, Wolf concludes in her book, "Many efforts to teach a child to read before 4 or 5 years of age are biologically precipitate and potentially counterproductive for many children." The danger in pushing reading too early, Wolf says, is that, for many children, we may be asking them to do something for which their brains are not ready. "You run the risk of making a child feel like a failure before they've even begun," she says. And while the gains from early reading may fade away, the damage from being tagged a slow kid at a young age has the potential to be permanent.
BTW, I highly recomend Wolf's Proust and the Squid on the reading brain. ISBN-13: 978-0060186395
Thanks for that excerpt -- I've always wondered about this.
Back in L.A. the principal of our local elementary school used to tell parents that the age at which their kids started reading didn't matter...but I always wondered partly because of my own experience with early reading. I was one of those kids who taught herself to read and I've always been an extremely good reader. I've seen this correlation time and again; precocious readers stay precocious (or, rather, don't lose their advantage down the line).
It doesn't follow that "artificially" teaching other kids to read earlier is a good idea, of course.
I'll have to order his book - thanks for the tip!
"While on the whole I agree with you, Instructivist, can we remember we are talking about 4 and 5 year olds here?"
I wasn't addressing what's good for 4 and 5 years olds. I was commenting on the teachers' excited discovery of projects in Italy, when projects are routine in this country.
"True reading"???
"And to do that well, those neuron tails need lots of myelin."???
"'Some countries, such as Austria, don't want children taught reading until 7.' For what it's worth, that's the same Austria with a per-capita Nobel-laureate rate many times higher than that of Japan, the land that spawned Junior Kumon."
That isn't worth anything to me. If you want to wait to begin even trying to teach kids to read until they are seven, go ahead. Just don't expect others others to hop onboard that train.
"The danger in pushing reading too early, Wolf says, is that, for many children, we may be asking them to do something for which their brains are not ready."
What's too early, before age 5? Before Kindergarten? How do you know when they are ready? Do you wait until age 7 just to be safe? If a child can't learn to read using Whole Language, is it because they aren't ready yet? Is it because they don't have enough myelin on their tails?
I was told something like this by the principal when my son was in first grade. "Lots of kids start learning early, but they all come together by fourth grade."
That's because the more able kids are not allowed to get ahead!!!
My son's Kindergarten teacher went out of her way to tell us that some kids can read dictionaries in Kindergarten, but they don't know a word they're reading. Baloney!
That's the plan. Full-inclusion. All kids are equal, they just learn differently. Now we have another excuse for low expectations ... it doesn't make any difference! Besides, we don't want to damage their poor little psyches.
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