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Harvard Education School is kind enough to offer, on its website, an insight into the research interests of its faculty. Their centers for research include: “The Center on the Developing Child; Change Leadership Group; Chartering Practice Project; Civil Rights Project; Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education; Dynamic Development Laboratory; Everyday Antiracism Working Group; the GoodWork Project; Harvard Family Research Project; Language Diversity & Literacy Development Research Group; National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy (NCSALL); NICHD Study of Early Child Care & Youth Development; Project IF; Project on the Next Generation of Teachers; Project Zero; Projects in Language Development; Project for Policy Innovation in Education; Public Education Leadership Project (PELP); and Understanding the Roots of Tolerance and Prejudice.”The mission of some may be less clear. The “GoodWork Project” explains that: “The GoodWork® Project is a large scale effort to identify individuals and institutions that exemplify good work—work that is excellent in quality, socially responsible, and meaningful to its practitioners—and to determine how best to increase the incidence of good work in our society.” There is no indication that they are interested in good academic homework. Project IF is about “Inventing the Future.”
[snip]Perhaps academic schoolwork has comes to seem mundane, banal—really beneath them—so they decide to give their attention to “higher” concerns like multiple intelligences, child care, everyday antiracism, inventing the future, and "dynamic development." To some, it may appear that many of these topics might better be studied in a school of social work or in a graduate department of psychology, but if Harvard Education School feels that academics are not that important for teachers and students in the schools, they have to do research on something, I suppose, and to me it seems that what has occurred as a result might be called the psychologyzation of an education school.
Now, if our public school students were already doing splendidly in academic work, perhaps there would be a need to look beyond plain academics as a subject of study, but my impression is that this is not yet the case in the United States.
I think it would be great if Harvard Education School, and others, would, until our students are more proficient academically, spend more time working on ways to teach academics and to encourage our students to do academic work in the schools. Then, when our students are doing a lot better in academics, the Ed Schools can go back to roaming around in social justice, everyday antiracism, child development, inventing the future, and all the other subjects to which they are now devoting themselves.
Will Fitzhugh at School Information System
The Concord Review
Monday, April 14, 2008
the Harvard Education School
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4 comments:
A while back, I went to a large college education school web site at random. I picked Ohio State and this is what I saw.
"The new College of Education and Human Ecology"
i.e. The college of (research-based) low expectations and excuses. It's no fun talking about the three R's at cocktail parties.
It's no fun talking about the three R's at cocktail parties.
Horsefeathers! One of the greatest parties of my dissolute life was during a recent International Reading Association conference (naturally, it was an unofficial party, not sponsored by IRA) where the, ah, consumables were spectacular in quality and quantity and one could converse animatedly with giants in the world of reading instruction.
I was starry-eyed yakking it up with Blouke Carus, the developer of the original Open Court Reading (an engineer! Maybe that's why he understood good instructional design), Dr. Carl Bereiter, who operated the groundbreaking preschool in conjunction with Zig Engelmann back in the 60's, some pioneering young teachers (maybe they were from Gering!!) all enthusiastic about the results they were getting with DI in their prairie district, a former student of Dr. Michael Pressley (shake the hand that shook the hand....) and on and on it went.
Wow. Absolutely incredible. I didn't come down for days.
Beats gabbing about semiotics any day.
Not horsefeathers, but birds of a feather. Unfortunately, there are few of those birds.
Sounds like my kind of party!
School Phonics by Didax is the true follow-on to the old Open Court, not the new Open Court which I haven't seen but have heard many bad things about from people I trust. I have seen School Phonics, but lent it out to a friend to help out a 5th grader.
The engineers and scientists get it right with reading--they're open to what works and what's logical. Another book by an engineer/scientist that I like is Rx for Reading: Teach Them Phonics by Dr. Ernest H. Christman, an optomologist who wrote his own phonics method to help his struggling 3rd grader. It's set up a little differently than most phonics systems, so is a nice change up for a student that needs to work through the system a few times before they get it.
Another person with a science background, Robert Sweet, in an interview with Children of the Code:
"I used to teach physics when I was a high school teacher back in the 1960’s. My background was in science, and I think that may have contributed to the fact that I was looking for evidence. I really didn’t have, as they say, a dog in that fight. If someone could have demonstrated or proven that learning to read was a natural process like learning to speak and that really, you could just surround people with books and that they’d automatically pick it up. It would have been fine with me if that could have been demonstrated in research, but it was not. So Mike really provided me with a lot of good articles from many well respected researchers that validated the approach to reading instruction that we now know works."
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