Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
New Jersey is trying to turn laid off Wall Street traders into math teachers. So far, the three-month training program at Montclair State is flooded with applicants, many of whom majored in finance or accounting in college. They’re promised close mentoring when they’re placed in classrooms.
But will they be content with salaries that are a small fraction of what they used to earn? I’m not sure it’s a good personality fit either, though traders do know how to work under pressure.
I am not shy about expressing skepticism of the “21st Century Skills” movement. In February I attended a fascinating panel discussion in D.C. on 21st century skills, hosted by Common Core, with presentations by Diane Ravitch, E. D. Hirsch, Dan Willingham, and Ken Kay. In March I attended another panel discussion in D.C., this one hosted by the NEA. I asked questions at both events. At the second event, I was startled when Paige Kuni (worldwide manager of K-12 education for Intel and a board member of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills) referred to the life cycle of a butterfly as a “factoid.” I brought this up in a comment on Flypaper and later read a response from Kuni (excerpted here):
The careful listener at this event would have heard that I believe that students absolutely need to be taught content in combination with instruction that leads to 21st century skills like critical thinking, innovation, and collaboration. I believe that by creating schools that adopt the approaches P21 supports, students will be able to make connections of how a changing form makes butterflies more successful in the ecosystem. That they can think critically about how life cycles connect to evolution. And that they could extrapolate to other topics such as how product lifecycles in business are the same or different from butterfly lifecycles in making companies successful. When they are 25 if they cannot recall the name of one-step in the lifecycle- it isn’t important as long as they possess the learning skills that allow them to access that information when they need it (search- cut- paste).
The life cycle of a butterfly is much more than a “factoid” or a story of “success”: it is beautiful, complex, and intriguing on its own terms. One could study it for a lifetime. Comparing and contrasting butterfly and business life cycles only distracts from the subject, as the analogies are superficial. This leads to the question: When are interdisciplinary connections enlightening, and when are they distracting? How do we help students see “connections” between subjects in a way that will sharpen, not dull, their understanding?
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I am guest-blogging for Joanne Jacobs while she is away on vacation. I have been enjoying your comments and hope to respond to some of them this weekend. For the next few days I will focus on the topic of “connections” and “relevance” in learning, though other topics may pop up here and there.
I run two lunchtime literature clubs at my school. The fourth graders just finished reading A Little Princess. During our discussions, I encourage delving into the text and discussing it on its own terms. I am not a big fan of “accountable talk,” “making predictions,” “making connections,” and so forth when they assume precedence over the subject matter itself.
One student brought up the part where Sara spends her money on hot buns for a beggar girl. “She made a self-to-self connection,” the student said. I felt sorry that students are learning such ghastly terminology, however well meant. Why are students not encouraged to say, “She understood how the girl felt” or “She felt compassion for the girl”?
There is a great push in schools—in professional development meetings, training literature, evaluation rubrics, and general discussion—to make the learning “relevant” to students’ lives. The assumption is that students will learn more if they can relate the learning to themselves, consciously and explicitly, using applicable jargon (“text-to-self connections,” “text-to-world connections,” etc.). The idea of relevance goes back to antiquity, but its proponents often treat it as a recent and marketable discovery. For instance, the International Center for Leadership in Education owns the “Rigor/Relevance Framework (TM).”
In a sense, there is no arguing with relevance. Learning must pertain to us in some way, or we would be unable to understand it. The problem (to paraphrase Robert Pondiscio) occurs when teachers are required to have students make connections to their lives–when relevance becomes orthodoxy. Forced connections tend to be shoddy, and they presuppose a certain dislike of subject matter. Those who mandate connections assume that learning would be difficult, obscure, and abstract without them. In reality, the best connections are often the ones that come not from deliberate connection-making but from immersion in the topic at hand.
Consider these two contrasting lessons on the well-known Robert Frost poem “The Road Not Taken.” This poem seems to be about choosing the less popular path in life, but there is much more to it than that.
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In Detroit, 29 public schools are slated to close in the fall; 900 teachers and 33 principals will be dismissed. Robert Bobb, the emergency financial manager for the district, has created a “master plan” for improving the schools.
How did he decide which schools to close? According to the Washington Post, “… Bobb and his staff looked at the age and condition of the buildings, as well as how many students attend them. Academic performance also was taken into account.”
So farewell to Elmdale Elementary, which is underenrolled but meeting performance standards. In the meantime, millions of dollars are going to the new Cass Technical High School, “considered a model for 21st-century urban high schools.”
Bobb’s master plan “calls for improving technology and updating classrooms. Curriculum also is being reviewed to make sure students are getting what they need in reading, writing, math, science and other programs, Bobb said.”
Why not do this for Elmdale? And why does curriculum seem like an afterthought, an “also” that comes after spiffy equipment?
Yesterday I wrote about the NYC public school requirement that every student have a “learning goal” in every subject. Today I will talk about teacher goals. (What, did you think teachers could slip away without goals? Everyone must have goals!) In setting these goals for themselves, teachers must follow the Continuum of Teacher Development (you have to buy it to see it), a rubric devised by the New Teacher Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Based on constructivist assumptions, this rubric was originally devised for new teachers. Now all teachers must use it to evaluate themselves. Apparently that has been deemed such a success (in advance) that Quality Reviewers use it to observe lessons and rate schools (see slide 13).
I first encountered the Continuum of Teacher Development as a new teacher. My official mentor from the Department of Education, a gracious and knowledgeable woman, would help me fill out the sheets for each category. This took up much of our meeting time, and it had to be done. My mentor spent much time with me in the classroom and at play rehearsals, so it wasn’t all paperwork. I reconciled myself with the paperwork requirement, thinking that after my first year I would not have to deal with the Continuum again.
I was wrong. The Continuum is now for everyone. And a strange rubric it is. Each category and subcategory contains descriptions for the levels Beginning, Emerging, Applying, Integrating, and Innovating. What does it take to be an “innovative” teacher, according to the rubric? First of all, it takes a willingness to hand over the authority to the kids. Second, it takes… er, well, I don’t know what it takes. The descriptions of the “innovative” level are sometimes hard to understand.
Here is a sample of the levels from the subcategory “Facilitating learning experiences that promote autonomy, interaction, and choice”:
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As of 5:00 P.M. on May 20, twenty-four schools in New York City were closed due to “unusually high levels of influenza-like illness.”
According to the NYC DOE, “All of these schools are closed based on recommendations from the New York City Department of Health with the exception of the two charter schools in the Bronx, which made their own decisions to close.”
According to the New York Times, the total number of closed schools is now 30.
Maybe this is basically like the life cycle of a butterfly (more on that topic soon), and the closed non-charter schools will reopen as charter schools. What, then, will the currently closed charter schools become?
Diana Senechal
Low-income people aren’t always shrewd shoppers, writes Education Sector’s Erin Dillon. Even when a supermarket and a bank open up inthe neighborhood, some will keep patronizing high-priced, low-quality corner markets and currency exchange shops. School choice proponents should learn how to help low-income parents recognize high-quality schools and avoid the duds.
Suppose you are walking down the street, minding your own business, and a police officer stops you and asks you to present your goals. You can’t remember them… you don’t have them handy… and so he writes you a ticket. Everyone must have goals on hand.
Futuristic schlock? Maybe, but this is already happening in NYC public schools. All students are required to have goals in every subject—sometimes more than one in a subject. They must be prepared to recite their goals to any visitor (e.g., superintendent or other inspector) who questions them. If they cannot memorize their goals, they must have them handy (taped to their desk, for instance). The teacher is held accountable for these goals, which must be individualized, regularly updated, available as data, and communicated to students and parents.
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Smug eco-scold kids who make dad into a “better person” — on credit — annoy James Lileks, who links to a MasterCard commercial.
If they’d intimated that Mastercard can be used to placate your humorless little eco-scold, no one would have minded much. But no: the child is making his father a better man. It’s nice to see that Dad exists in a state of such unearthly perfection that the only means of betterment consist of abjuring incandescent lighting for pig-tailed CFLs, right? Alas: dad is a scoff-law who lets the tap run, uses doubleplus ungood bulbs, and doesn’t correct the clerk when the food is put in a cornstarch bag, perhaps because he’s thinking about his job, the cutbacks and layoffs, the tiresome daily scrum of adult life.
Surely, young eco-scolds should persuade their parents to stop using plastic (horrors!) to buy “stuff.”
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