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Education and the Next President
I can't for the life of me figure out why Barack Obama appears to be sticking with Linda Darling-Hammond, assuming that's what is happening. Flypaper has predicted she'll be gone, and I've been assuming the Flypaper people know what they're talking about in these matters. But perhaps not.
Here is Darling-Hammond twinkling her way through eight and a half minutes of blather re: [S]ocial and emotional learning is a crucial part of teaching the whole child. Darling-Hammond and her legions of colleagues, students, and disciples in the business world are the reason why parents like me who want a classical education in the liberal arts disciplines for their children are having to pay the Jesuits to provide one.
The word "parents" does not cross Ms. Darling-Hammond's lips.
snippets:
When you think about how you want to educate the whole child, it’s critical to be sure that you’re helping kids be able to engage with one another, understand themselves and how they think, be able to handle the stresses and challenges in their lives which are increasing all the time.
We are still struggling to get past the factory model school that we inherited in the early 1900s, which adopted age-grading so that students go to different teachers every year. ... [M]uch of the environment, particularly in big, urban factory model schools is punitive and coercive because it’s about control of large numbers of people being asked to do things that are not natural.
Interesting, that.
Punitive and coercive are precisely the words I would choose to describe public schools in which children are forcibly enrolled in emotionally invasive project-based, experiential learning activities and graded on the outcome.
[snip]
If you think about the ways we have to be functioning adults, it’s in context where we have to work in groups on hard problems that need creative solutions, that require problem solving, and it’s getting to do that work well that is really part of the major goal of education in the 21st century. So when you think about project-based learning, learning that results in demonstrations of performance, exhibitions of what kids can do in real tasks that have brought these kind of novel challenges to them to solve, you can see that when an individual student or a group of students come together to solve a hard problem to figure out how to do research how to do inquiry, how to investigate, how to put their ideas together, how to figure out which ideas have the most grounding, how to present what they’ve done, they have to do a lot of social, personally intelligent work. They have to be able to figure out how to relate to one another, how to divide tasks, how to solve problems, how to probably run into dead ends, pick up the pieces, reorient, and go in a different direction — all of that develops children’s abilities to be socially capable, emotionally capable and grounded, and, in the long run, also intellectually capable. And those pieces all come together when you’re working on project-based, experiential learning activities.
All your children are belong to us.
4 comments:
They're saying the traditional model of the school is not natural. Learning facts is not natural. It's superficial. How did they learn? Never mind that; you'll never get a straight answer out of them.
I was reading some email list serve that was essentially a Math Investigations support group for teachers. One teacher said that Investigations took some getting used to because we're used to teaching students facts and having them do "mindless drill and kill" exercises; it's much more difficult to teach concepts. Yes, it would be . Concepts without mastery of facts is indeed difficult, but this is the road they've selected for themselves. And they've convinced themselves that they're succeeding. Parents who disagree are "only parents".
There's been enough protest from parents, though, that they now have to pay lip service to certain things. So now you'll hear "Traditional math has worked for some people." The implication is that traditional math has not worked for others. Could they define who are some and who are others? I suspect, but cannot prove, that "some" means low-income minority. I would also venture to say that the reform programs work for very few if any.
It's also a relative and absolute problem. I can put together a project-based curriculum that is better than what you find at many schools. I can get people excited and find outside funding. I can hire good teachers. Many more kids will go to college.
I could do an even better job if it wasn't project-based with differentiated instruction.
I can put together a project-based curriculum that is better than what you find at many schools. I can get people excited and find outside funding. I can hire good teachers. Many more kids will go to college.
Especially when the parents are hiring tutors!
My favorite piece of evidence re: the emporer has no clothes is the fact that no parent ever hires a tutor to help his kid discover knowledge via project based learning.
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