Next Steps

[1,840 words]

In my previous entry, I elaborated on step one, which was to make all learning begin in text and step two, which was to limit oral reading of text in class to the service of objectives. These two steps go hand in hand. Students should not only be reading much more content area text, but they should be doing so silently and independently. From what I have observed, in all manner of classes from the 4^th to the 12^th grade, this transformation will not be an easy one. Teachers and students have become extremely comfortable with, and dependent upon, teacher talk and oral rendering of text. Even if convinced of the value of change, it will be a 2^nd order change at most school sites. It is possible that Steps 3-5 will not be on anyone’s radar for years to come. However, administrators and department chairs, in the normal course of observing classes may wish to note evidence of the next three steps and to raise questions about their efficacy in subsequent conferences.

Step Three: Limit cooperative learning to those situations where such a learning design directly supports content standard mastery.

Collaborative learning, or cooperative grouping, has become the norm in virtually every class for the past 15 years or more. Such grouping serves a myriad of functions, some of which include:

Large class sizes limit the amount of teacher-student contact. More able students, working with less able peers, can function as surrogate teachers, especially during the guided practice phase.
Teaching is a step in the learning process. Those students who are able to teach their peers embed the learning more deeply and remember it longer.
Materials are often highly limited and must be shared. Grouping allows for students to work together with limited materials and master them in pairs or small groups.
The business world highly prizes teamwork. Since most students will eventually have jobs in such a marketplace, learning teamwork and how to function as team members, is appropriate preparation for future career paths.
The teaching standards call for promoting social development and group responsibility. Cooperative learning is the most common path to meeting this standard. It has been institutionalized.

The problems arise with the implementation of cooperative learning. As an observer in scores of classroom, I have rarely observed any of the 5 criteria above. What I have observed is the following:

Students are so accustomed to grouping that it is an expectation daily in every class. These groups tend to be highly social and a good percentage of students break immediately from task, or fairly soon thereafter. This is truer the higher you observe by grade level. In other words, 4^th grade groups are largely much more on-task than 10^th grade groups. I know this seems like a sweeping generalization, and so I invite you into classrooms to witness for yourself.
Teacher-training programs stress grouping and students expect to be grouped and thus, grouping becomes an expectation of lesson planning. The problem is, there has to be a learning result tied to the activity or it has very little value, except to burn up a lot of instructional minutes. I would raise the stakes even higher. Not only should there be a learning result expected, but grouping should be the best way to accomplish the objective. If it is not the best way, it should not happen. Period. What is accomplished during a secondary math lesson, when, during guided practice, students are asked to pair up or form trios and work the problems together? When asked, teachers usually respond with, “We haven’t been in groups for a few days. They need the variety.” Wrong. That is not a good enough reason to take the risk of sending a good percentage of your students off-task. If the students worked the problems independently and then formed pairs to compare answers and steps to the answer, that may, in fact, have significant value.
Tasks which should be done independently and skills which must be mastered individually are often assigned to pairs or small groups. However, this does not follow the corporate model, even for those companies most committed to teamwork. With the exception of teams who write for television shows, most employees spend most of their time working alone in cubicles. Teams often meet at the beginning and end of projects and sometimes for progress assessments. Oftentimes the teams meet only after a good deal of independent inquiry has occurred on a project to share ideas and divide up tasks. In the classroom, however, students are often divided into groups from the incipience of the task or project and expected to work together every step of the way. In reality, most teachers will concede that one or two able students in a group will take over and complete the majority of the task. Some students have been skating on the periphery of tasks since at least middle school. Committed teachers often devise ingenious ways to hold every member of the group responsible, with mixed results. To what end is this obsession with learning together?

When observing a class engaged in group work, I would want to know what is the objective of the task and how performing in groups serves that objective better than independent work. We don’t take group tests, for the most part, and students entering the university are expected to possess high level competencies which are the result of countless hours of independent work. The academic life has seminars, public readings, conferences and debates. But these are but slivers from a branch that takes years and years to grow. Most academics spend an inordinate amount of time in solitary study. In preparing today’s students for such a future life, we have very nearly purged every one of these hours from their preparation.

Step Four: Discourage or seriously limit the 'crayola curriculum.'

The visual representation of concrete details or abstract ideas is the most enduring legacy of a dedication to the multiple intelligences. When Gardiner convinced educators that there are multiple paths to learning and to follow only one path is to fail to serve all the learners in your room, many teachers latched onto art work as a path to serving alternate learning styles. The result was what Mike Schmoker calls the ‘crayola curriculum.’ While walking through elementary classrooms, Schmoker witnessed vast amounts of time given over to students drawing on art paper. Schmoker calls for at least 50% of class time to be given over to reading and writing, of the silent and independent kind. I have often observed a combination of cooperative learning and the crayola curriculum in secondary classes, that is students working in groups to draw visual representations of what they have read or studied. I am not opposed to visual representations of abstract ideas; often they serve nearly every learner’s needs. But, once again, I would ask what the objective of the art project is? Often, it is for no reason other than variety. Sometimes it is an acknowledgement that students need a break from the rigor of the class.

Step Five: Place the theory of multiple intelligences on the back burner.

Recently the entire theory of the multiple intelligences has been called into question. There are researchers who claim that Gardiner’s theory, while seductively intuitive, has no data to back it up. My objection has more to do with unintended consequences. It is an unintended consequence of Gardiner’s theory that learning from text has evolved into just another path to learning. If you can learn it visually or orally, do you really need to learn it from text? I would most emphatically insist that learning from text is not a learning style, or simply one path to learning. Everyone must learn from text. There may be an extremely small number of learners whose disabilities make reading and comprehension very difficult for them, but how large is this number? Concern for them and their special needs has worked its way into the main stream classroom. There are a vast number of dormant readers, students who test in the middle, who can read and comprehend, but do not, and current pedagogy supports their inertia. The first step to bringing them back to task is to de-emphasize the multiple intelligences and return to high standards of accountability for reading and writing.

What follows is a brief review of all five ‘first steps:’

Step One: Make all learning begin in text.

This may involve significant staff development to explore ways in which learning may begin in text, even in mathematics, and to insure that the writers of text are ceded the responsibility for engaging their readers and activating their prior knowledge. Writers have first crack at learners; teachers come second. Only in this way can reading and writing be privileged discourse in classrooms.

Step Two: Eliminate most oral reading of text in the classroom.

This is really a corollary to step one and can happen simultaneously. At the same time learning is beginning in text, readers must be acting silently and independently in this first layer of learning. Nearly all students can do this, if given the opportunity. And the more they do this and are held accountable, the better they become at it.

Step Three: Limit cooperative learning to those situations where such a learning design directly supports content standard mastery.

This is not as much a crucial step as it is an awareness issue. All practitioners and observers should pause in the presence of group work and ask what objective is being met by such an activity. My own opinion is that, as long as materials are plentiful, the vast majority of educational tasks should be tackled independently, until either mastery, near mastery, or failure has been established. There is a proper place for cooperative grouping, but, given the demand for content standard mastery, which is individually assessed, it should be a much rarer and more meaningful event than it is.

Step Four: Discourage or seriously limit the 'crayola curriculum.'

I mentioned in an earlier weblog entry that art should be left to art class. I suspect that drawing in some core classes, especially language arts, is more an attempt to teach to the ‘multiple intelligences’ than it is a sense that the content standards call for this, which they do not. The biggest problem created by the crayola curriculum is the loss of instructional time occasioned by it. The students are already doing very little independent reading of academic text. Time spent drawing is time not spent reading and writing.

Step Five: Place the theory of multiple intelligences on the back burner.

Learning from text is not a learning style; it is not an alternate path to knowledge. It is THE PATH, and all students can do it and should be doing it daily in school. Moving this controversial theory to the back burner is one way of creating an opening for text to return to the center of educational pedagogy.