For those of you who are new to Trinity, every Friday during the school year I send out a summary of an interesting, provocative article I’ve recently read.
I also post this on my blog site, yet more people seem to prefer getting the article summary via email.
The purpose is to have the articles be a catalyst for thinking about why and how you teach and what your philosophy of education is. Sometimes you might agree completely with an article’s premise, recommendations, or conclusions—other times you might passionately disagree. Some of the articles will resonate with you—others won’t. It’s not ‘required reading’ but I hope most of you most of the time find the weekly article interesting.
As we close out a great first week of preplanning, the article below--which was originally published in 1989 but was recently re-published in memory of Grant Wiggins (Learning by Design curriculum guru) who died last spring--is a good example of the vital balance I discussed on this week between the educational extremes of knowledge acquisition and student empowerment.
The article is entitled The Futility of Trying to Teach Everything of Importance.
Wiggins influenced me as a teacher by posing a challenging scenario: Pretend you only have one hour with your students. What would you share with them and have them learn (in my case it was 8th grade history) in that hour that you normally have an entire year to cover.
This question helped me to see that I had been teaching history as an endless list of facts and concepts. I then focused my class on discussions around open-ended questions.
In class we debated questions like ‘ Are humans innately selfish or selfless’, ‘Is the study of history about the study of mankind’s continuous progress?’, ‘Is democracy the best form of government?’ My students loved debating these questions and used evidence from history to support and substantiate their ideas. Rather than have history’s facts be the outcome, students used them to justify their opinions. History class was much more fun, interesting, relevant, and interactive for my students — and for me!
As we continue to plan for a new school year, think about Wiggins' sage advice below about the danger of trying to teach so much content.
Thank you all for a productive first week of preplanning: I am always awed by the amazing talent and creativity you all posses.
Enjoy the weekend!
Joe
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What’s worth learning by high-school graduation.
Those who would treat schooling as designed to educate students on all important subjects are doomed to encounter the futility that faced Sisyphus: the boulder of ‘essential content’ can only come thundering down the (growing) hill of knowledge.
The inescapable dilemma at the heart of curriculum and instruction must, once and for all, be made clear: either teaching everything of importance reduces it to trivial, forgettable verbalisms or lists; or school is a necessarily inadequate apprenticeship, where ‘preparation’ means something quite humble: learning to know and do a few important things well and leaving out much of importance.
The negotiation of the dilemma hinges on enabling students to learn about their ignorance, to gain control over the resources available for making modest dents in it, and to take pleasure in learning so that the quest is lifelong. They must leave school with the passion to question, without the fear of looking foolish, and with the knowledge to learn where and how the facts can be found.
My concern is that curriculum coverage, committee-written textbooks, didactic teaching, and short-answer tests turn education into Trivial Pursuit. Under this regime, it’s very difficult for students to acquire solid habits of mind and high standards of craftsmanship and understand that some ideas are much more important than others – touchstones of such power that our own worldviews must change as a result of encountering them.
The acid test for modern curriculum is whether it enables students, at any level, to see how knowledge grows out of, resolves, and produces questions.
In short, the aim of curriculum is to awaken, not ‘stock’ or ‘train’ the mind.
Curriculum should therefore be organized around essential questions to which content selection would represent (necessarily incomplete and always provocative) ‘answers.’
Some examples:
- What is a “great” book?
- Is “history” the same as “progress”?
- Does art imitate life or vice versa?
- What is an adequate proof?
- Is there a fixed and universal human nature?
- Are there really heroes and villains?
We need to rethink and reorganize the curriculum, spelling out clear inquiry priorities in each course that help organize and give meaning to the facts.
This calls into question the traditional lesson plan, since teachers and students should be following the essential questions where they lead within the syllabus, using textbooks as reference books, not as the curriculum. Like the music or athletic coach and the vocational education teacher, the classroom teacher’s job is to help the student ‘play the game’ of the expert, using content knowledge, as contextually appropriate, to recognize, pose, and solve authentic knowledge problems.
Much more important than accumulating facts is acquiring these intellectual virtues:
- Knowing how to listen to someone who knows something you don’t know
- Perceiving which questions to ask to clarify an idea’s meaning or value
- Being open and respectful enough to imagine that a new and strange idea is worth paying attention to
- Being inclined to ask questions about pat statements hiding assumptions or confusions
Knowledge’ remains a forgettable patchwork of adult sayings in the absence of our own questioning and verifying. The ultimate test is whether an idea illuminates student experience or provokes new thought. Anything that doesn’t do that clutters up the curriculum.
Curriculum needs to make students more thoughtful about what they know and don’t know:
The most essential habit of mind we can provide students is the ability to suspend disbelief or belief as the situation may warrant. For example, one school prompted students to ask, From whose point of view did that argument originate? What is the evidence and how credible is it? How do things fit together? What if? Could it have been otherwise? What are the alternatives? What difference does it make? Why should I care?
All students don’t need to learn the same things. This comes from the painful realization that there are far more important ideas than we can ever know. The teacher should be an intellectual librarian constantly making it possible for students to be challenged anew to pique their curiosity and raise their standards and expectations.
If teachers say everything is important, then nothing will seem important to students. Teachers need to abandon adult logic, specialized priorities, and coverage and ask:
- What must my students demonstrate to reveal whether they have a thoughtful (as opposed to thoughtless) grasp of the essentials?
- What will successful student understanding actually look like?
The ultimate test is when students say, without adult prompting, This is important! A sign of successful curriculum and instruction, where priorities are clear, can be found in the students’ ability to anticipate the final examination in its entirety and provide accurate self-assessments of their finished work.
Curriculum is inseparable from assessment. Standard school tests don’t challenge students. What’s needed are authentic performance tasks in which students show what they know in real-life situations – sometimes in idiosyncratic ways. Craftsmanship and pride in one’s work depend on ‘tests’ that enable us to confront and personalize authentic tasks.
The essentials are not the basics. We should teach the minimum basic content necessary to get right to essential questions, problems, and work, within and across disciplines. Pride in one’s work leads to greater care for the basics; pride depends on authentic and engaging work, and a product ‘owned’ by the student.
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