Escape from Pl@n3t Sc@ntr0n

Arguing against a dichotomous view of the world through the use of a dichotomy:

“Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

Oscar Wilde

“Of course there is no us and them
But them they do not think the same”

Gogol Bordello/Illumination

Some people see the world in black and white; everything is a dichotomy. Things are right or wrong, successes or failures. Others tend to view the world as a series of continua – seeing issues as one thing or another is to oversimplify them. I have a continuum brain. Unfortunately for me, and others like me, dichotomous thinkers have currently gained ascendancy in education – an arena I feel is more suited to continuum thinkers.

One of the biggest problems with having the dichotomous folks in charge is that, while I recognize the need and value of dichotomous thinkers, they do not reciprocate. Their brains do not allow for context – either a student is successful or she is not; a teacher teaches “the right way” or he does not. I’ll be the first to state that if everyone taught like me, that would be a bad idea. But if we all drink the kool-aid and teach the way they want us to, it would be the worst idea … ever. A good faculty is comprised of variety. There is value to having me on one side of the hall and Mr. Ducks-in-a-Row on the other side.

The notion that all of us doing the same things, in the same ways – consistency – is preparing students for college and/or the workforce is absurd. I challenge you to find a group with a greater variety of styles, behaviors and expectations than college professors. Being able to quickly adapt to different professors is one of the keys to surviving college. The workplace is the same. Think of all the bosses you’ve had in your life, from after-school jobs as a teenager to now. How alike were they all? I’ve worked under four different principals so far. All have been different, emphasized different things, had wildly different personalities and expectations.

The world is not consistent. Why do we believe that consistency is the best way to prepare for it?

Public Education is messy and complicated. It is not easily boiled down to a specific set of goals or methods that apply to every student, every teacher, every class. It’s more complicated than that.

The Alfred Hitchcock Instructional Strategy: The MacGuffin

I’ve lost track of how many trainings I’ve sat through to learn the latest pedagogical innovation. Over the years I’ve heard that this particular strategy, that lesson plan format or this other writing program is it. Whatever we used to do is the teaching equivalent of a lime-green leisure suit. If we really do hope to save our kids from imminent non-achievement, we must adopt this new idea. I remember being trained in reciprocal reading, cooperative learning, History Alive!, and Foldables to name a few. Most recently I’ve learned the crucial place of the Think Aloud in modern education. And I’ve been made aware that peace in the Middle-East is attainable if only we would all implement the use of sentence frames. Indeed, my district and site administrators are convinced that these are the two most important pedagogical devices ever conceived – use of them in my classroom is crucial to achievement. After doing this for thirteen years, though, I’ve come to the conclusion that teaching strategies and learning activities, pedagogical devices, if you will, are so many MacGuffins.

If you’re not familiar with it, The MacGuffin is a film term popularized by the great Alfred Hitchcock. It’s basically a plot device that makes the characters act the way they are supposed to. The Miriam Webster definition is, “an object, event, or character in a film or story that serves to set and keep the plot in motion despite usually lacking intrinsic importance.” Hitchcock himself explained that in a spy movie, the MacGuffin might be a set of secret documents or a code. Chasing the secret papers makes the characters in the story act like spies, but what the MacGuffin is, is really irrelevant – interchangeable. Perhaps the most famous MacGuffin of all is the Maltese Falcon. It could just as easily be the Cypriot Emu. As long as it got Bogey and Peter Lorrie to act like Bogey and Peter Lorrie, it worked.

I do not believe that there is an instructional strategy, learning activity, or lesson plan format that is, in and of itself, anything more than a MacGuffin. I don’t think it matters which one you use as long as it gets the students to do what you want them to do, which I believe most of us would agree, is to interact in a meaningful way with the content being covered at some desired level of Bloom’s taxonomy. From the lowly reading handout to the most elaborate research based project they can all work depending on what I call the RAF. To my knowledge, neither Dagget nor Marzano have ever mentioned this term, despite its vital role in the educational process. The RAF is the Rat’s Ass Factor – as in, do you give a …

For my money, the variables to be considered when choosing how to present a particular lesson are; what will get the students to do what you want them to do – learn stuff, analyze, discuss, evaluate, classify, practice a procedure, etc.; and what will produce the highest combined RAF between you and the students? After all, we, the teachers, have personalities and teaching styles – the MacGuffin has to work on us too. So, use the Maltese Falcon or the Arc of the Covenant. Doesn’t really matter; as long as it works well with the thirty five individuals sitting in your classroom at the time. It just depends; are your students Sam Spades or Indiana Joneses? Students (and even, at times, whole classes) have personalities and learning styles – play to those. I truly believe that most any learning activity that is engaged honestly by teacher and students can produce positive results.

And that is down to my, or any teacher’s, ability to establish rapport. Getting the kids on my side; getting them to buy in to the value of whatever we’re doing, is more important that the activity itself.

Let me make clear that I’m not disparaging professional development or the study of pedagogy in general. I enjoy going to some seminars and trainings. Sharing best practices with colleagues is a process I find particularly useful. For me, though, the purpose of being exposed to new teaching strategies should not be the wholesale adoption of a given strategy by everyone at my site, but rather a chance to increase the number of effective MacGuffins at our disposal. What I am pooh-poohing is the presentation of instructional ideas as panaceas that, if adopted wholesale, will solve our problems. It’s more complicated than that.

I’ll see your sports analogy and raise you one

The standards based movement is now encouraging us to base grades solely on assessments. – and a fairly narrow range of assessments at that. Homework, class work, participation and the like should no longer be considered in formulating grades. The nice, participatory kid can no longer pass a class by being nice and participatory – this is presented along with the assumption that we all agree this would be a positive development. Advocates of this position, by the way, don’t use the word participation, they call it compliance – a clever bit of linguistic trickery. Their dichotomous minds can’t seem to allow for a distinction between compliance and sincere participation in an academic process, something I believe still has inherent value.

Their weak, ill conceived analogy:

The analogy I’ve heard — more than once— to justify this new “fixed,” as in repaired, grading system is sports related. It is as follows: “In football (insert other preferred sport if you wish) we don’t score practice, we only score games.” Ugh, please, bring a lazy lay-up of an analogy up in here, I’ll slap it away like I was Hakeem Olajuwon!

Ok, here’s what’s wrong with this. First, most people don’t play sports to win necessarily. In fact, unless someone is a professional or otherwise elite athlete, most people participate in sports for other reasons – especially in high school. Most participate because it’s fun, it’s something they enjoy. They want to stay active, to be athletic. They want to be part of a team. To be sure, they want to challenge themselves, to improve, to play the best they can as individuals and as a team. Certainly they will try their best to win as many games as possible, even a few they aren’t supposed to win. But the bottom line is that we, coaches, players and fans, are fairly flexible in defining success – and we honor strong effort and work ethic – the player or team that performs admirably, even in defeat. If our not-so-great football team is playing against the local powerhouse, a team that is clearly bigger, stronger, faster and more talented than us, we can’t tell our guys that they’ve failed (no achievement has taken place) because they lost the game. If we scored a touchdown or two, got a few first downs, made them punt a couple of times, lost by 20 instead of by 40, we can tell our team, in all sincerity – and they should believe – that they have achieved something. Sometimes in sports, our goal is to do ourselves proud through our effort, by competing with honor while enjoying the game. Not winning is not always a failure. It’s more complicated than that.

Second, let’s go back to the assumption that the nice, participatory kid deserves nothing more than a pat on the head. Most high school sports teams have a kid that rides the bench but is still a contributing member of the team. Maybe through attitude, through personality, through positive contributions in the locker room, through dogged participation in practice, that player has elevated the performance of those around him. Even if he rarely sets foot on the field, he has contributed to whatever success the team has achieved. Is that worthless?

Now, I’m not entirely opposed to assessment-heavy grading, but I don’t think it’s the slam-dunk no-brainer that it’s presented as. My discomfort is that assessment-only grading reduces learning, education and academics to simple results. I have to believe that at the High School level we still need to encourage and reward the notion that learning is a process and inherently worthy.

My clearly superior analogy:

Currently, my school is like the Olympics. But an Olympics that only gives medals for the high jump. We say we appreciate the weight-lifters, swimmers, wrestlers and badminton players – they’re welcome to attend and compete in their events, but they will also be required to attempt the high jump. The only official record of their participation will be the height they can clear. After all, they are athletes and athletes should be able to jump. Ivan, the 350 pound weight lifer who can clean and jerk 500 pounds, but has a three-inch vertical leap will, sadly, be regarded as far below basic. We will have meetings where we look at charts and graphs – analyze the data. We will figure out how to “re-teach” or “tutor” Ivan into better high jump results. We will denigrate what he does well, and has a natural aptitude for. We will try to make him lose 200 pounds and teach him proper form. But Ivan’s never going to be more than a mediocre high jumper, and in trying to make him a decent one, we’re going to make him a pretty crappy weight lifter as well.

It’s no better for the high jumpers either. Once they’ve cleared a respectable height, we really don’t care what they do. We’re not going to push them to set, strive for, or reach higher goals. We’re too busy working on poor Ivan. At a recent professional development training, I heard a well respected educational expert, consultant and author tell us that our job is to teach the low performing kids … the smart kids will take care of themselves. The following day at a breakout session, the principal of a local school said the same thing. That’s a remarkable position, and one I’d like to see either of these men explain to the parents of the smart kids. Or better yet, to the smart kids themselves.

Some Things I Don’t Hate:

“I know what I hate. I don’t hate this.”

C. Montgomery Burns

Okay, before this Blog goes any further, I want to advance some evidence that I’m not simply a naysayer. When I started writing this stuff I didn’t know I’d be posting it publicly a bit at a time, it was simply a form of catharsis. Therefore, you’ll have to bear with me through the first half-dozen posts or so while I get some things off my chest. Later, I’m assure you I will begin to offer constructive ideas of what I would consider helpful educational reform. But, just to ward off any inclination to write me off as nothing but a whiner, I thought I’d offer up some things I don’t hate:

Tests

I don’t hate tests. I don’t even hate multiple choice tests. Further, I don’t hate machine scored tests. (For the record, I use Scantron products regularly and I gotta say, they make a mighty fine product!)

Quite the contrary. I believe a good old-fashioned end-of-unit test is a high school staple – and an important variable for determining what we call grades. I realize, though, that some students, even good ones aren’t very good test takers. It’s a skill after all. There must be other ways to determine whether a student has learned, or better yet, understood what they were supposed to. But here’s the thing, the problem is not necessarily with multiple-choice tests, the problem is with the notion that there is any ONE instrument of measurement that will do the job.

And while I’m vehemently opposed to standardized tests the way we now use them, I’m not necessarily opposed to them in concept. In an upcoming post I’ll elaborate on how standardized tests, if we must have them, could be better used, the results more legitimate.

Data

Sometimes I feel like if I see one more bar-graph of test scores at a faculty meeting I’m going to stab my own eyes out with a number 2 pencil. However, I’m a recreational poker player (I know, I know, great role model right?). As such I understand and value the collection and analysis of data to improve my play. I don’t mind data analysis in a school setting either as long as we keep the following in mind:

1. The data must be relevant: More than once I have attended a benchmark test debrief where, from the get go, everyone present acknowledged that in the TR (Transitional English) classes, the results were more representative of the students’ ability to decode the questions rather than their actual knowledge of the historical content – and then proceeded to analyze the daylights out of that data as though it represented the latter.

2. Never, and I mean ever, forget that every one of those data points is a real live human. They’re not Model-Ts, they’re people … with names, personalities, concerns and a hierarchy of needs that may be wildly different from ours.

3. Don’t let the tail wag the dog. The analysis and application of data to the classroom has to be tempered with conventional, experience-based common sense. The data is at the service of instruction, not the other way around. At one of the previously mentioned benchmark debrief meetings, every teacher in attendance agreed that one particular test item was invalid, as it had more than one legitimately correct answer. The administrator running the meeting asked, in all sincerity, how we could teach that topic next year so that the students would answer that question with the “right” correct answer. As Vincent Vega from Pulp Fiction might have said, “I seen ‘im do it!”. He really said that. Well … we could teach the term incorrectly – that’s about it.

Innovation

I don’t hate innovation. I don’t believe that having everyone do everything the same way, so that it produces an easily bar-graphable outcome is very innovative. Reducing science and history courses to the memorization of tested terms, names and events is certainly not innovative. Let’s try to minimize pedantry, not venerate it. Innovation removes shackles, it doesn’t impose them. If you want to be innovative, give students more control over what they learn, not less. Why not let students decide what to study during a U.S. History class? Why not present a variety of grading/assessment options that students choose from at the beginning of the semester? Why not ask students to create their own assignments? Why group students by age, why not some other way? I don’t know, these are just some ideas off the top of my head. The point is, true innovation is exciting. What’s happening now is soul-crushing. If “reform” were truly innovative, I’d be at the front of the line.