In an earlier post, Humanities and the DY/DAN Method, I linked to Dan Meyer’s blog and his take on assessment and homework in the mathematics discipline as a way to start thinking through similar issues in terms of the English discipline.

In this post, I want to clarify what I mean by “the English discipline” and, related, what I think the goals of an English class are (or should be) at the secondary level. It might also be good to consider what the goals aren’t. This is nothing new or revolutionary, just my take on it all.¹ In a later post, I’ll write about some ways to move students toward those goals and to assess whether or not they’ve reached them.

However, I won’t be developing much of a classroom-ready system in these posts, and don’t have the ability to test it even if I did, since I’m not currently in the classroom. I’m offering my idealistic take based on my experiences and the benefit of a year away. Maybe someone can do something useful with it (which could include proving me wrong).

Of course, trying to define “the English discipline and ways to assess it” in a few blog posts is foolish, or arrogant, or both. Many people, with more brains and experience than I, have spent decades debating this (and centuries debating related questions), and there’s no universal consensus yet. Maybe tomorrow.

On the other hand, I think the ultimate goal of an English class is pretty simple: teach students to read and produce texts. There’s a lot to unpack from those terms, though, and even after all the unpacking, the devil is still hiding in the details of the execution.

Despite all this, I’ll still play the fool, but I reserve the right to revise this later using the phrase “that’s what I meant.” If I’m lucky, the discussion might go further through comments or other reactions.

Skills not Content

English should be approached not as a subject or field of study but as a discipline that focuses on and organizes itself around essential skills rather than a body of knowledge.

The question becomes not “What do you know?” but “What can you do?” After four years in secondary English classrooms, students should — with some skill and with an awareness of the their own ability — be able to read, interpret, criticize, discuss, and produce texts in a wide range of modes, genres and media.²

It’s more important to me that a student be proficient with these skills than that she know about a particular collection of texts, a particular set of terms, or a particular hierarchy of grammatical sins. Of course, this isn’t an anti-knowledge curriculum– skillful doing isn’t possible without relevant knowledge — but the knowledge should serve the mastery of the skills. The development of those skills is central, and everything else should support that purpose.

I think it’s worth quoting Robert Scholes here from The Rise and Fall of English:³

We are not artisans shaping the impressionable minds of our students. We are — or should be — masters of our craft helping others to master it, and human beings of integrity helping others to achieve it in their own ways in their own lives.

I think we may at present be too concerned with teaching the right ideas in the classroom and not concerned enough with teaching the most effective ways of speaking, listening, reading and writing.

The one thing a curriculum in English must do, whatever else it accomplishes on the way, is to lead students to a position of justified confidence in their own competence as textual consumers and their own eloquence as producers of text.

An advantage of this approach is that it’s scalable and adaptable: given a group of students, discover where their skill levels are and take steps to move them to the next level using texts and approaches best suited for those purposes and those students.

I want to clarify, however, that by “skills,” I do not mean reductive, “back to basics” skills, exemplified by units on “writing an effective sentence” or “nouns and pronouns.” Specifics of this sort are, in my experience, best addressed within the context of larger pursuits, namely, wrestling with texts that are relevant and engaging to the student. Instead, I mean the primary skills listed above: reading, interpreting, critiquing, and producing texts.

Texts not Literature

“Text” includes a variety of modes, genres, and media (film, magazine articles, song lyrics, advertisements, television shows, blog posts, etc.), and texts should be selected primarily to support the teaching of the desired skills — serving as effective or deficient models — while still openly acknowledging (though not “preaching”) the other implications (ideological, cultural, or otherwise) of those selections.

This isn’t to say that the texts should serve only as examples. Texts can serve multiple purposes, and one way to effectively organize them is by topics that are relevant to contemporary concerns and interests. This makes for a dynamic canon, and frees us from the “dead white men” syndrome without denying the importance of those works (see below).

This is also why I believe the texts of “pop culture” are the doorway to further developing students’ competency with writing and engaging their interest in texts of all types. As should be clear by now, I don’t agree with those who believe only “serious literature” is worthy of study. And anyway, to a large extent, “pop culture” is culture, and those things not labeled part of “pop culture” are often in reaction to it. Popular texts (in all varieties) provide the primary lens through which culture is mediated for students, and students are already familiar with and interested in them, which makes them well-suited for study.⁴

While I agree that having an understanding of literary history is important, I also believe that history should provide context for contemporary and personally-relevant concerns. History of any kind, taught in isolation as a collection of facts, is uninteresting and, worse, useless — which leads students to the logical conclusion that history is boring and irrelevant. Of course, understood properly, history is fascinating and vitally important. That’s why we should start with texts relevant to the interests and concerns of the now and help students to situate those texts in historically-appropriate contexts. Any other approach is just an exercise in really slow Googling.

We should also remember that any “literary history” we do tell, even when skillfully told, is still only one way of telling the story of text and culture. This should be demonstrated, over and over to students, and ultimately, we should help students to discover appropriate contexts for themselves, along with the relevant critical and rhetorical moves.

I am aware of and concerned about criticisms of a “shallow” curriculum,⁵ where the students never wrestle with anything more complex than a cartoon. That’s not what I’m advocating. I’m arguing that the texts students encounter every day are the ideal starting points for understanding and mastering how to read, interpret, critique, and produce texts of ever-increasing depth and complexity.

Workshop not (Only) Lecture Hall

Placing skills at the center of the curriculum requires that students practice the execution of those skills, examine effective and deficient models, receive guidance and critique relative to their ability, and reflect on their own progress individually and collectively. The class then functions more like an artist’s studio or craftsmen’s workshop, where students produce texts in as wide a range of modes, genres, and media as possible, and where the ultimate test is an examination of the work students produce and the processes they used to achieve it.

On the other hand, direct lecture is, at times, appropriate and necessary, particularly when students require information before moving forward and the process of having students discover that particular information on their own doesn’t justify the time it would take to do so.

A few conditions on lectures:

• Make sure a lecture is the best approach. Helping students discover relevant information for themselves can serve multiple purposes: research skills, plurality of opinion, critical reading skills, etc.
• Make lectures focused and brief, because whatever information is delivered through the lecture should be immediately put to use by the students. The more information you present at once, the more difficult it will be to employ (and thus usefully retain) that information.
• There are effective, engaging ways to lecture. Discover those ways and adapt them.

However, approaching a course as a workshop or studio requires establishing an appropriate environment. At least four major concerns need to be addressed if this is going to work:

• Safety: Students must feel safe enough to exert genuine effort and to share the results of that effort.⁶
• Value: Students must feel that their interests, opinions, and efforts are valued by the teacher and by the majority of their classmates. By maintaining rigorous standards for the work students produce, we give value to the work. By allowing legitimate choice in what the student pursues, we give value to the student’s interests and opinions. By actually caring about the student’s success, we give value to the student’s efforts.
• Integrity: Teachers must mentor academic truth and integrity in their approach to students, texts, and the texts students produce, and they must require that integrity in response.⁷
• Space: A workshop approach will not work in a classroom where desks are arranged in long rows with the teacher’s desk taking a position of command in the front or threat in the back. Also, put generally: the space should be arranged for the kind of work you’re doing in it,have the tools you need for that work, and feel like the kind of place you’d actually like to work in.⁸

I realize this kind of environment is not easy to create or maintain, but I still think it’s necessary.

Process not (Only) Product

The workshop model implies a focus on the process, not on the product exclusively. If we believe we have a craft to teach, then the how of this craft is just as essential as the final what. This is true for both reading and creating texts. After all, it is in the doing, not the having done, where learning occurs, so process is where/when all the real work occurs. The products are the aftermath. This is not to say that products should never matter, but from an educational perspective, they matter mainly in terms of what they reveal about how to improve our process the next time.

However, I don’t want to suggest that there is one process to follow (the writing process, for instance). Instead, process merely recognizes that interactions with text, either in their production or their consumption, does not happen all at once. It involves moving from concept to critical investigation to expression to refinement; from reading, to interpretation, to criticism; from disorganized collections, to selection, to arrangement, to presentation.

Therefore, certain responses — from both teachers and students — are appropriate at one stage of the process that aren’t appropriate at another. Students need to recognize this in terms of how they work with texts and how they respond to their own efforts and the efforts of others. Teachers need to recognize this in order to offer appropriate and effective critique and help the student move successfully from stage to stage, skill level to skill level.

All of this is tied directly to assessment, but I’ll say more about this in the follow-up post.

Open not Closed

I mean a lot of things by this. For one, teachers hide too much from their students. English class shouldn’t feel like a sadistic game: the teacher standing at the front of the room, ready to punish, asking students to guess hidden answers to obscure questions without offering any advice on how the answers might be discovered or evaluated, other than by the say-so of the teacher. If they don’t already believe that we know what we’re doing (and so, buy into the game) then they soon become convinced that we don’t know what we’re talking about (and so, rebel) or that they are the hopeless problem (which is expressed either through disdain or despair).⁹

Assuming that we do know what we’re talking about (ahem), then we need to be honest and explicit about the reasons behind whatever we’re asking students to do … which means we need to have reasons, and they better be good. Good reasons are ones that don’t waste students’ time. In part, this means having a clear purpose grounded in sound pedagogy and tied to an appropriate skill. It also means giving them every opportunity we can for them to explore and invest their efforts in topics that matter to them.

Related to the above, we should encourage student-generated texts that have, whenever possible, an authentic audience, a real purpose beyond the classroom, and a genuine appeal to the students’ interests. It’s here, more than anywhere else, that I see the power of online technologies to benefit the teaching of the English discipline.¹⁰

Another remedy is to provide students with the critical and rhetorical moves they need to help them enter the work of the discipline while making that work as explicit as possible. Too often, we hide the mechanics of “how” texts are decoded and produced. Instead, we should be giving them all the tools and showing them how each one works. In other words, don’t be afraid to be provide formulas with the goal of moving students beyond these formulas as their skills develop. To quote Gerald Graff: “If we refuse to provide such formulas on the grounds that they are too prescriptive or that everything has to come from the students themselves, we just end up hiding the tools of success.”¹¹ On the other hand, please don’t beat up and enslave your students with these formulas: they’re steps, training wheels, meant to be left behind.

Similarly, make the questions of and conflicts within the discipline known to students and invite them into the conversation. Most students love a good fight, so show them some. Don’t know where to start? Select a few articles from either side of the music and copyright debate, then decode the texts, pull out strategies, talk about academic integrity, and away you go.¹²

Finally, we need to help students to recognize why we hold the standards we do for what they produce by inviting them to determine standards based on their own work with texts. This collaborative approach to standards doesn’t mean we’ll have lower standards that vary from class to class. We are (or should be) the master craftsmen and women, and we can guide students to recognize aspects they miss. We can also scale these aspects to their current level of ability. However, if we don’t involve them in this process, not only do we reinforce the “us and them” tension in the classroom (which is even less helpful in a workshop setting), but we also miss an opportunity for students to genuinely practice their critical skills and become invested in the quality of their own work.

Craftsmen not Priests

First, to any female readers: I apologize for the sexist terms, but “craftspeople not priests or priestesses” just doesn’t roll nicely.

This last section is brief, as it wanders a bit from discussing the English discipline specifically to my own ideas about teaching generally. Still, I think these are important.

An English teacher’s primary responsibility is to teach students to work effectively with texts; teachers should not be using texts to promote ideologies — political, religious, aesthetic, or otherwise. I’ve seen rifts develop in a classes based solely on ideological conflicts between teacher and student. To me, this shouldn’t even be a possibility. Certainly, there are academic truths, schools of theory and criticism, and controversies within the discipline that can inform our practice and become the subject of study, but we aren’t there to indoctrinate students into any ideology other than the primary ideology of the discipline: reasoned argument from multiple perspectives.

Additionally, English teachers should be practitioners not just theoreticians — they should do what they teach. That means they should work with academic integrity and be effective readers, interpreters, critics, and producers of texts in a wide range of genres, modes, and media.¹³

Finally, teachers should be reflective observers and researchers of their craft, working from clear pedagogy, not mandates. They should be aware of information relevant to their field specifically (textual theory, history, production, and consumption) and generally (education, learning, creativity, etc.).

What Did I Miss?

These are the principles that matter most to me (except for the ones I forgot, of course). I’ll also admit I never held to these principles even half as well as I should have. They’re not easy, which is part of why I think they’re worth pursuing.

I would appreciate any reactions, here or elsewhere, to this list. I’ll try to connect these principles with specific goals and assessments in a later post.

1. Outside of my own experiences in the classroom, my thoughts have been strongly influenced by Peter Elbow, Donald Murray, Tom Romano, Barry Lane, Don Gallehr, Gerald Graff, Sheridan Blau, Robert Scholes, the National Writing Project, and the many excellent teachers with whom I’ve worked over the past nine years.
2. Robert Scholes calls this a “canon of methods,” and much of this comes from his writing on this subject.
3. These quotes are presented out of order.
4. Related, I’d recommend reading Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You.
5. Related, see The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein and “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (The Atlantic) by Nicholas Carr
6. Peter Elbow wrote about this extensively.
7. Scholes defines academic truth and integrity as: “accuracy in citation, regard for what is already known about our subject, and rigor in situating and interrogating whatever material we are considering” — The Rise and Fall of English (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) 57.
8. I’ve written about the importance of physical space before here and here. Also consider Michel Foucault’s work, particularly Discipline and Punish.
9. If I’m being kind, I attribute this to a desire to keep things simple for students on the one hand (not confusing them with things they don’t need to know) and to keep things from being too simple on the other (not encouraging their laziness by providing them with the answers). If I’m not so kind, I attribute this to a desire to protect our position of authority by pretending the answers are known and we possess them, to hide the fact that we don’t have a good reason for asking them to do something, or to avoid the embarrassing admission that we don’t know the answer and aren’t sure if anyone does.
10. Blogging, collaborative work, manipulation of image and sound, etc.
11. Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) 11.
12. See Gerald Graff’s Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1993).
13. This is one of the guiding principles of the National Writing Project: the best teachers of writing are teachers who write. Also, I wrote about this in “Teaching is Consequential“

For point of reference: I taught in Prince William County, a large and mostly-affluent suburban school district.

On Being Supported

I’m not sure the people who proclaim the not-supportedness could even articulate the nature of this not-supporting or how it could possibly be rectified.

I felt unsupported in my job, and I can articulate a number of ways this is so: over-crowded classrooms; administrators uninformed about what the teachers they supervise even do; unfunded initiatives; teacher recommendations about school decisions, county curriculum, and county tests routinely ignored; parents’ desires trumping the conclusions of teachers; etc.

To be fair, there were also a few ways in which I was supported, but that side’s the short stack.

On the Pay

I’m paid pretty darn well relative to my peers, and certainly well enough for an unmarried fellow whose biggest expenses after rent continue to be whiskey, books, and college loans.

That’s great for teachers in their first few years of teaching, but it’s not a model for a successful profession, and it doesn’t help keep people in the profession, especially when people continue growing up and doing things like getting married, taking on mortgages, and having kids. The set pay scale with its small steps and the minimal raises from additional degrees is a recipe for a young workforce with little depth. Couple that with tenure and whoever does stay has little reason to work hard to improve performance. Which is exactly the system we have.

On Being a Good Teacher

I’m not happy unless I’m being the teacher I see in my head, but the process of finding that guy and living as him no longer makes me happy.

Teaching is (or should be) a profession, and professionals should feel that drive to become effective in their field. Unfortunately, there are so little external reasons to do so, and so many external hindrances, that it’s made absurdly difficult for teachers. The students make it hard sometimes, too (see below). Still, teaching is a profession … but it’s only a profession, not social-work, not surrogate parenting, not volunteer-work (despite the condescending commercials and “just work harder” films).

Much of the difficulty here is how much teachers must rely on themselves to first clarify what the ideal should be and then find ways to realize that ideal in practice. That’s another part of what teachers mean when they say they’re “not supported.”

First, there’s no set of professional standards that are commonly recognized. Also, there’s no support (or driving force) for teachers to keep moving toward that ideal.

For example, my school offered $300 a semester for continuing education. That’s about one credit. And the majority of “inservice” offerings were a joke. I’ve never understood why public education does so little to support the continuing education of its teachers.

Here’s another example: the administrator who supervised and assessed my performance as a teacher had no background in my discipline, rarely observed me more than once a year for half an hour, and couldn’t discuss, with any real competency, best practices in relation to my curriculum. Teachers in the same discipline were as stretched as I was, with no common planning time, and so with limited ability to help each other improve.

On Being More Than a Teacher

the kids are, in the words of Don DeLillo, “an open wound of need and want.” There is no free time, no mental energy, no chunk of your finances that cannot be poured in that gaping [wound] like the most potent of Hydrogen Peroxides, a pouring that fuels the kind of consumption that only reinforces the pouring, justifies it, encourages it, emboldens future pourings and the expansion of the pouring into a variety of other areas.

Which is also what I think is meant by the assertion that teaching should be a profession, not a calling. It’s also why the complaint that teachers cannot and should not be responsible for all of this is legit. Teachers are there to teach … or should be. I don’t mean teachers should be heartless, or shouldn’t take the needs and concerns of students into consideration, but teachers can’t heal these open wounds and still teach all the things they’re required to teach. Teachers end up trying to fill wounds that they have no business and no real ability to fill. This is a societal problem, not solely an educational problem.

Best of Luck

I’m always conflicted when I hear about another good teacher leaving the classroom. Part of me is saddened by the loss students in that school will suffer but probably not realize. Part of me is hopeful that the teacher may find identity and fulfillment somewhere else. Part of me is angry that the system keeps grinding up effective teachers and forcing them to leave what should be one of the best professions around.

I still miss teaching … sometimes painfully so. I’ve never missed the educational system. Not once.

Time in School

From birth until the age of 18 …¹

• Total conscious hours = 118,260²
• Total conscious hours in school = 16,380³

That’s 14% … and the percentage drops to 10% if we add sleep time to the total hours.

• Total conscious hours with one teacher (elementary) = 1,260, or almost 1.5%
• Total conscious hours with one teacher (middle/high) = 180, or 0.15%

Petrilli’s argument is undoubtedly correct: schools have the ability to significantly impact students despite the relatively small amount of time that schools actually have to do so.

On the other hand, it seems to me that we should remember these numbers when having discussions about what schools can and can’t or should and shouldn’t do, particularly when discussing students’ values and habits of mind.

This isn’t a defense of lazy teachers or poorly-functioning schools (if you’ve been following me at all, you know I vehemently oppose both), but when we assess an 18-year-old, a good portion of the praise or blame resulting from that assessment belongs somewhere other than the schools. This doesn’t let schools off the hook of accountability for teaching students (because a good portion of that praise or blame does belong to the schools), but it does put that accountability in a more appropriate context.

And when we assess a teacher’s value based on the performance of hi/r students, we might also keep in mind that those students have spent a very small percentage of their time with that individual teacher.

So What?

For one, this points to the need for more cooperation between the 14% and the 86%, which means (again) more community involvement. As Kelly Christopherson notes on his blog:

… work with our communities in order to create a dialogue about people being accountable for what they do. The reason I say communities and not individual parents is because some parents will not join the conversation. However, if there is a community understanding of issues, there is a greater likelihood that there will be a congruence between the school and the community.

So even if we round up dramatically for the potential influence of schools, it is at best a 50/50 effort. Rather than passing more legislation about testing, perhaps we could create and fund more programs to help develop this type of cooperation. Schools have enough to worry about without having to do that, too.

Second, a revised approach to teacher assessment — based on the teachers’ actions and performance, not just the students’ — would also be helpful. Eduwonkette discusses some thoughts about this approach in a recent post.

My own experiences outside the classroom so far persuade me that a more comprehensive approach to school and teacher assessment is necessary, but I’ll have to wait until I’ve had more time to collect those thoughts.

Finally, I hope we can move beyond the polarizing arguments around teacher accountability.

• Schools and teachers are, almost exclusively, responsible for the progress of students and therefore teachers need threats and/or incentives to make them work harder; therefore, performance-based pay, no unions, no tenure, no sympathy or patience.

… or …

• Schools and teachers can’t combat the other influences in students’ lives and therefore, given the limited amount of time, resources, and other support, teachers need to be defended and protected from the angry mobs; therefore, unions, tenure, sympathy and patience.

Of course, neither side is categorically wrong, thus the debate continues. For me, the first step in this is to acknowledge the truths in each position, and, with those truths in mind, attempt to find solutions that address those truths.

I want to say clearly, though, that in neither scenario is the student to bear the brunt of the blame: students are raised, for better or worse, by their communities, of which schools are a part.

1. On average, and rounding for convenience
2. Total hours minus sleep time, assuming an average of 6 hours per night: 157,680 – 39,420 = 118,260
3. Assuming an average of 7 hours per school day, 180 days per year; and assuming no sleeping in class

A few days ago, Deborah Meier posted “Let’s Play with ‘Overarching’ Agreements,” in which she listed some points of potential agreement between Diane Ravitch and herself. Diane found most of the list agreeable (and so did I, if that matters for anything), but she did have a few specific objections which she discusses in her response post “Our Overarching Disagreements.”¹ Both are worthy of the few minutes it takes to read them in full (as are most posts on that blog).

In brief, Ravitch has these main points:

• Schools are institutions of social conservation, not revolution
• Popular culture has no real place in schools
• Citizenship and “character-formation” are important goals for schools²
• A specific science syllabus should be developed (instead of the more general approach to teaching science that Meier proposes)
• External assessments are an important part of an effective public school system (though Ravitch agrees the current method is unhelpful)

Two of my reactions/thoughts are listed below³

Education and Popular Culture

Ravitch doesn’t see a place for pop culture in school. In her words:

Parents do not send their children to school to learn the vulgar language, misogynistic and homophobic attitudes, racism, violence, and crude behavior that are common on “the street,” but to learn language, values, and behavior that is better than what they encounter outside school. Kids have plenty of time to indulge in the highs and lows of popular culture without wasting precious time in school.

I wonder what Steven Johnson (Everything Bad is Good for You) would say here.⁴

On the one hand, his argument is that pop culture is becoming increasingly more complex and therefore not only worthy of our time but actually beneficial: it’s making us collectively smarter.⁵

On the other hand, if pop culture is doing its work just fine without any “official” sanction (i.e., people participate in pop culture because they want to, not because someone tells them to) then perhaps Ravitch is correct: in school, focus on those necessary things that students will not likely acquire on their own outside of school.

External Assessments

Ravitch also wants external assessment of schools, though she does want it put “into perspective” and used “more wisely.” I agree with her, but I still worry about who determines what that external assessment will look like.

To my mind, an external science test should be created by three cooperative groups: teachers who are well-versed in the syllabus; practicing scientists who have a real-world understanding of what and how science students should “know”; and an independent group of people experienced in effective methods for assessment (i.e., people who don’t think “multiple choice” is the best method to assess everything). The same goes for other disciplines, replacing “practicing scientists” with the appropriate corollary.

Either way, I heartily agree with her closing statement:

The question that must somehow be solved is how to provide public accountability while ditching the stupid and non-educative regime of sanctions and incentives that is now being fastened around the necks of American educators.

1. My annotated version
2. I wondered: “whose character?”
3. With a thanks to Diigo’s “Send to Blog” tool for doing much of the work.
4. I’m working on a full post related to this text, which was a very interesting read … coming soon!
5. Related to Ravitch’s concern with the “base” aspects of popular culture, the morality of pop culture is not the important or interesting aspect for Johnson.

I discussed forums, blogs, and wikis–first in general, then in Blackboard specifically.  My main point was that the two most powerful elements "Web 2.0" technologies bring to the classroom are audience and ownership.  It’s these elements, and not the tools themselves, that are significant and that can result in genuine learning if teachers know how to respect and protect these elements, take advantage of them, and guide students to opportunities for discovery.

The notes are available on my wiki: "Working with Blackboard."  Feel free to edit the pages or to argue/expand in the comments here or the discussion tab there.

1. Not to mention it’s questionable legal tactics.

Should there be less standardized testing in the current school system, or more? Should all schools, including colleges, institute exit exams?

Of the five responses, W. James Popham and Thomas Toch had the more interesting ones. Gaston Caperton, of the College Board, offered what amounts to a plug for the SAT, and Monty Neill sounded like a remix of the various anti-testing statements issued by the teachers’ unions.

Popham thinks tests are necessary and can be good things, if prepared correctly:

… we definitely do need more standardized tests that are sufficiently sensitive to instructional quality, so we can accurately tell which schools are truly successful and which ones aren’t. Standardized tests can be written that accurately measure a school’s instructional effectiveness, yet also stimulate teachers to do a better job of teaching.

Toch also thinks testing is good, provided the tests are testing for what we claim to value:

… the majority of today’s state-level standardized tests are multiple-choice measures of mostly low-level skills … they largely sidestep higher-level skills … This presents a problem, because when tests are high-stakes events, as they are under NCLB … educators have a strong incentive to “teach to the test.” In this case, that means teaching low level skills at the expense of the more demanding material that everyone says students need to master in today’s complicated world.

Toch takes for granted that, once a “high-stakes” test is in place, the majority of teachers will inevitably “teach to it.” I would agree. Which is reason enough to make sure that those tests are worthy measures of what we value in education.

I’d also suggest that teachers should teach to tests, if the tests have been designed as the best possible method for measuring success and mastery for a given discipline or skill set. To design curriculum without a clear goal in mind and a clear sense of how to assess whether or not that goal has been achieved is to lead blindly.

This might raise objections: Should teachers really be “leading”? Shouldn’t teachers allow student interest to guide what happens in the classroom? Shouldn’t teachers be “facilitators” of learning, not “dictators”?

For me, this is another false dichotomy. There’s room (and lots of it) for student interest to guide instruction, but I don’t think that means that teachers should therefore abdicate their responsibility to lead and instruct.

As I often say: I think it’s about balance.

That argument sounds a lot like Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, in which he asserts that there is a common body of knowledge that a culture shares, and one must know about it in order to become fully functional and literate within that culture.  Many have read Hirsch as suggesting that knowing about these things is the same as knowing these things, and that knowing about literature is enough.² This idea is at least partially responsible for the reliance on standardized, multiple-choice testing as a measure of intelligence and academic worth.

I don’t completely disagree with either argument: the social and intellectual context of a work, and the cultural tags associated with it, are important (else Cultural Studies majors and critics in any school other than New Criticism would have nothing to talk about).  And we can think, sometimes deeply and rewardingly, about ideas presented in a work, or about the idea of the work itself, without having read that work.  I’m doing that to some degree in this post.

The problem is, there are important things I miss by doing so: the development of my thinking on the topic is limited because it’s not rich in detail (details that the reading, one hopes, would supply); the mental connections surrounding the ideas are also limited (because the details are limited); and nuances within the argument are flattened, leading to an oversimplified understanding and oversimplified thinking.

Ray Bradbury attacked this idea in Fahrenheit 451 and suggested that there’s more than one way to burn a book, not reading it being one of them.  Faber talking to Montag:

Do you know why books such as this are so important?  Because they have quality.  And what does the word quality mean?  To me it means texture.  This book has pores … Telling detail.  Fresh detail.  The good writers touch life often.  The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her.  The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies …

The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless.  We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.³

I’m not calling Bayard a book-burner.  I know his argument is built on a given: there are too many books worth reading to have time to actually read them all.  And so, the real question becomes: is it better to gloss the ideas or not read them at all?

I say, go for the gloss, but remember what you have and don’t have as a result.  To forget that is dangerous.  Then find a few good books and sink way down into the rich loam of their details.

1. “Were We Right or Were We Right?: Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read,” Publishers Weekly 18 November 2007 <http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6501611.html>.  PW not only lists its own review here, but also the reviews of others.  It then asks for readers to comment on which review is “right” … if you’re interested.
2. His argument is more complex than this, but that’s the danger of this line of thinking: the complexity is often missed.
3. Ray Bradbury,  Fahrenheit 451 (New York: Del Rey, 1991) 83.

I’ve been really interested in what the Digital Ethnography Working Group is doing and think there’s some good, helpful thinking going on there. I’m not saying any one video is completely “right” or revolutionary, but the project as a whole is important.

What I’m interested in for this post is a point that came up repeatedly in the exchanges around Stager’s post: that students aren’t as “native” or as skilled as we often assume they are.

On Stager’s post addressing the immigrant/native idea, “James and Tom” comment:

If you want to quickly disprove the idea of “digital natives” visit a school with a 1:1 laptop program and test the basic skills of 100 students. You’ll find about 20 who can barely enter text, let alone create folders or know where their saved documents will end up. On the other hand you might have one or two who are at the upper end in terms of skills. Most sit in the middle with basic knowledge. [emphasis added]

And in a response to what he calls “misreadings” of the video, Michael Wesch raises the same point:

The great myth is that these “digital natives” know more about this new information environment than we do. But here’s the reality: they may be experts in entertaining themselves online, but they know almost nothing about educating themselves online. They may be learning about this digital information environment despite us, but they are not reaching the levels of understanding that are necessary as this digital information environment becomes increasingly pervasive in all of our lives. [emphasis added]

My own experience supports both of these assertions, and I think they’re important points to remember, particularly for teachers who plan to start “working with” technology in their classrooms. Many students are quite capable when manipulating aspects of technology they find entertaining, but if pushed outside that realm, they often lack even basic skills and usually lack the ability to think critically about the technology or the content it delivers. This means that it’s our job, as educators, to push them outside of that realm and help them find success working there … which implies we first need to be there ourselves.

Yesterday, during my freshman comp course, my students provided two examples.

Before class started, one student gave an exasperated sigh from where she sat in front of her computer, did some quick typing and clicking, and then settled back into her chair.

Her friend asked, “They block it again?”

She responded, “When are they gonna learn we get around it as soon as they change it?”

They were talking about internet filters for Facebook.

However, during the lesson, I was showing them how to format their papers according to MLA style using Word. The sounds of shock and amazement at simple actions, like increasing the indent or inserting a header, were clear indications that they hadn’t been asked to work with a word processor for academic purposes and certainly weren’t doing so on their own.

If that’s the case for an “ancient” tool like the word processor, imagine the implications for wikis, blogs, and social networks. And that’s just the basic skills. Wanna lay odds on how much thought they’ve put into the effective and ethical use of those tools? How about moving beyond the tool and returning to critical analysis of the content, the interplay between content and form, or the connections to any content created more than five years ago?

Would your odds change for teachers?

¹ The main problem was that the presentation was way too full. I wanted to focus on theory. I wanted to discuss the ways in which these tools, if used thoughtfully, could encourage fluency and reflection in student writing. ² And I wanted to talk specifically about forums, blogs, wikis, and social writing tools, suggesting ways that each can be used to achieve those goals.

First, I should have stuck to one or two tools. It was just too much to cover in the time we had. Second, I should have had more student-generated examples for us to read and discuss. I couldn’t do this because I’d planned too much for the session to take the time to do that. Third, and most significantly, I over-estimated the level of familiarity my audience had with these tools. This meant I spent too much time simply defining what the tools are and how they work, and not enough time considering the theory.

I wonder when/if they’ll come a time when I can go into a technology presentation assuming a basic understanding of the tools and move directly into thinking more carefully about how best to leverage those tools to encourage fluency, reflection, or whatever the goal. We’re definitely still not there for the majority of teachers. When can/should we expect this? We’ve finally reached that point with word processing and (I think) with multimedia presentation software. Another five years for blogs and wikis? And will those technologies be eclipsed in the meantime?

Not that I blame my audience for not being at that point today … I didn’t know the people to whom I was presenting and wasn’t sure of their level of comfort. At any rate, people are where they are, and what they needed was not a theoretical discussion of best practices for these tools but a workshop introducing the tools and providing the chance to set up and play with them.

So, I think I need to take a step back and return to workshop sessions that address on one tool at a time and focus on the basic functions of the tool. What I would really like is the chance to conduct more multi-week sessions, where we cover functions for a week or two and then move into more theoretical considerations of best practice.

If you’re a presenter, and you have a single session to deliver to an unfamiliar audience, what do you? Any tips or suggestions are appreciated.

1. Phelps, James. Fat Boy. Photograph. 12 Nov. 2006. Flickr. 6 Nov. 2007 <http://flickr.com/photos/mandj98/295343848/>.
2. There are many other aspects we could have talked about: social learning and networking that can develop around these tools, the way students are using online services to help construct their identities, etc. My focus was increasing the amount of writing and level of comfort (fluency) and encouraging thoughtful reflection.

Online writing tools that allow for asynchronous and/or collaborative writing can help improve the fluency and reflection of student writers in all disciplines provided the instructors facilitating the use of these tools have a clear and practical understanding of the tools (through personal use and experience) and have established specific goals and protocols that logically relate the use of these tools to the larger objectives of the curriculum. The main advantage of these tools is that they provide an authentic audience for the writer. The best use of these tools occurs when the writer is able to explore ideas and topics in which he/she has a personal interest within the context of a network of others who share those interests that has evolved around these writings. On the other hand, the mere addition of these tools to classroom practice will not, on its own, add any educational value, particularly if the tools serve only as digital substitutions for pen-and-paper work. All of this is easier said than done.

Any thoughts or critiques are appreciated.