Chapter 5 from School transformation
Thank you to Wayne Jennings for allowing us to provide chapter 5 from his wonderful book. While some of the context for the chapter is learning at school, the information is a wonderful synthesis of what science and experience tells us about all learning and what conditions help make it happen!
We encourage you to order the book and benefit from all of Wayne's experiences, insights, and ideas.
"This guide to school transformation sends a wake-up call about the out-moded current school system. As educator and advocate during a sixty-year career, Wayne B. Jennings, PhD, writes in this revolutionary new text that our educational system remains stuck in the past. Jennings argues that the system should skip Band-Aid reforms and go for a full reboot!"
Chapter 5. How Students Learn
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Key Points
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Basic Principles
It could happen in any classroom: a gifted teacher presents a meticulously planned lesson to what appears to be a group of zombies who have hijacked and replaced her usually responsive students. On another day in the same classroom with the same teacher, a serendipitous remark produces sparks and competing raised hands. In another classroom, one child struggles to learn to read while another learned before she first crossed the school’s threshold. A high-school student finds long division baffling and a mystery, despite many years of math instruction. Yet the same student excels in geographic locations.
I once asked a very effective teacher how he got his students so engaged. He said it was easy. “All I do is start a fight.” He meant making some provocative remarks that stirred arguments among students.
Although learning is the central task of education, many educators would be hard-pressed to explain how learning occurs. Worse are the students who say, in effect, “I dare you to teach me.” We have reluctant learners who sit in classrooms waiting for the curtain to rise.
Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them become what they are capable of being.
(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Learning is at the heart of schooling. A school’s program for learning supersedes the importance of district management, grade-level organization, and facilities. Learning can occur under backward management from non-licensed people, even in a tent or under a shade tree, though I don’t advocate primitive conditions as a replacement for schoolhouses. Most unfortunately, for too many students, the school system itself is an impediment to learning. We need to apply a paradigm shift from teaching to learning, from textbooks to abundant community resources and the world as a classroom, from dumb to smart learners, from classified as disabled to having strengths, from problem to resource, and from school reform to school transformation.
How does learning occur? How do we advance it? What impedes its progress? Those questions are the focus of this chapter.[1] I repeat the following quote for its truth and power and as a reminder to educators about children and youth. Parents know it through experience with their children:
People today do not even know what children are actually like. They only know what children are like in schools.[2]
I don’t remember much from my time as a fourth grader in a one-room school except that the parents organized an after-dark sleigh ride. At the end, they served hot chocolate with marshmallows. In my fourth-grade innocence, I was stunned by a beautiful lady singing “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” The whole event impressed me, as I still remember it seventy years later. In the sixth grade, I recall debating which was better, winter or summer. Those times stand out in my memory, but not much else from elementary school does. I mostly remember friends and events I organized. Most were fun; some were daring or challenging; and others were illegal, like stealing a watermelon from a farmer’s patch.
Children are different from one another and have a recall of their lives that illustrates the significance of their activities, mostly unrelated to school. Children out of school are viewed differently from the way they perform in school. Their imaginations, natural curiosity, and energy soar so differently from the humdrum life at a school desk. Teachers don’t know children because they only experience them in school. How can adults recall so little of school yet recite a nursery rhyme (“Mary Had a Little Lamb”) that they learned forty years ago? This after decades! How?
There are no misfit children. There are misfit courses of study, misfit textbooks, and misfit teachers. But in the very nature of the case, there can be no misfit children…One might as well say that a man does not fit his clothes as to say that a child does not fit the school…It is one of the tragedies of human institutions that they tend to become formal and mechanical, that they tend to gather about them people who have a vested interest in their perpetuity.[3]
One of the most authoritative sources of learning principles comes from the American Psychological Association. It lists the implications for school organization and assessment. After several revisions, this short, sixteen-page volume contains a convincing position on learning. It is on the web in its entirety. These principles, while a short list, were written with conventional schools in mind. [4] The principles apply to people of all ages.
It is almost impossible to exaggerate the amount we learn in infancy and early childhood. Almost all children enter school with vocabularies of five thousand to ten thousand words without ever completing a workbook exercise or opening a dictionary. Sitting infants for conventional instruction would be a disaster.
Young children know much more than words. They grasp the differences among such concepts as mother, sister, grandmother, cousin, girl, and woman. They know the difference between a chair, a sofa, and a stool, though they were never taught those differences. According to the authors of The Scientist in the Crib, small children are like explorers in their drive to understand the world around them and like sponges in soaking up understanding.[5] If you ask a child what makes the sun come up, the child will answer, proposing a hypothesis, if you will.
The child, a budding psychologist, has learned, for example, whether Mom or Dad would be better to approach for permission. In that context, the same child is a lawyer, arguing the rightness of the request. The child is a mathematician who loves counting and numbers and who knows what one-half a cookie is. (You can divide the cookie but your brother gets to choose his part first.) The child is an artist who tackles drawing or dancing without reservation. How do schools squelch these enthusiastic drives and motivations?
In contrast to the problems many children have with math, the growing infant likes numbers. Children like counting and large numbers, learn to count by fives and tens, want to know their ages and heights and those of others and to compare themselves, want to count how many other children will play a game, know the size and importance of an allowance, can tell time, and understand simple fractions. We fail to work from these interests. We establish a program to introduce formal math without regard to readiness.
We have radically altered our evolved species’ behavior by artificially segregating children in same-age peer groups instead of mixed-age communities, by compelling them to be indoors and sedentary for most of the day, by asking them to learn from artificial text-based materials instead of contextualized real experiences, and by dictating arbitrary timetables for learning rather than following the unfolding of a child’s developmental readiness. Common sense should tell us that all this will have complex and unpredictable results. And it does. While some children seem able to function in the school’s artificial environment, most cannot. Around the world every day, millions and millions of normally bright, healthy children are labeled as failures in ways that damage them for life.[6] My mentioning of different ways for schooling doesn’t mean everything is wrong with current instruction or that newer ways will be entirely better. New ways just have to be better, not perfect. Critics, take notice!
Per educator and author Yong Zhao:
There is general agreement among cognitive scientists, and educators that all children:
It could happen in any classroom: a gifted teacher presents a meticulously planned lesson to what appears to be a group of zombies who have hijacked and replaced her usually responsive students. On another day in the same classroom with the same teacher, a serendipitous remark produces sparks and competing raised hands. In another classroom, one child struggles to learn to read while another learned before she first crossed the school’s threshold. A high-school student finds long division baffling and a mystery, despite many years of math instruction. Yet the same student excels in geographic locations.
I once asked a very effective teacher how he got his students so engaged. He said it was easy. “All I do is start a fight.” He meant making some provocative remarks that stirred arguments among students.
Although learning is the central task of education, many educators would be hard-pressed to explain how learning occurs. Worse are the students who say, in effect, “I dare you to teach me.” We have reluctant learners who sit in classrooms waiting for the curtain to rise.
Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them become what they are capable of being.
(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Learning is at the heart of schooling. A school’s program for learning supersedes the importance of district management, grade-level organization, and facilities. Learning can occur under backward management from non-licensed people, even in a tent or under a shade tree, though I don’t advocate primitive conditions as a replacement for schoolhouses. Most unfortunately, for too many students, the school system itself is an impediment to learning. We need to apply a paradigm shift from teaching to learning, from textbooks to abundant community resources and the world as a classroom, from dumb to smart learners, from classified as disabled to having strengths, from problem to resource, and from school reform to school transformation.
How does learning occur? How do we advance it? What impedes its progress? Those questions are the focus of this chapter.[1] I repeat the following quote for its truth and power and as a reminder to educators about children and youth. Parents know it through experience with their children:
People today do not even know what children are actually like. They only know what children are like in schools.[2]
I don’t remember much from my time as a fourth grader in a one-room school except that the parents organized an after-dark sleigh ride. At the end, they served hot chocolate with marshmallows. In my fourth-grade innocence, I was stunned by a beautiful lady singing “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” The whole event impressed me, as I still remember it seventy years later. In the sixth grade, I recall debating which was better, winter or summer. Those times stand out in my memory, but not much else from elementary school does. I mostly remember friends and events I organized. Most were fun; some were daring or challenging; and others were illegal, like stealing a watermelon from a farmer’s patch.
Children are different from one another and have a recall of their lives that illustrates the significance of their activities, mostly unrelated to school. Children out of school are viewed differently from the way they perform in school. Their imaginations, natural curiosity, and energy soar so differently from the humdrum life at a school desk. Teachers don’t know children because they only experience them in school. How can adults recall so little of school yet recite a nursery rhyme (“Mary Had a Little Lamb”) that they learned forty years ago? This after decades! How?
There are no misfit children. There are misfit courses of study, misfit textbooks, and misfit teachers. But in the very nature of the case, there can be no misfit children…One might as well say that a man does not fit his clothes as to say that a child does not fit the school…It is one of the tragedies of human institutions that they tend to become formal and mechanical, that they tend to gather about them people who have a vested interest in their perpetuity.[3]
One of the most authoritative sources of learning principles comes from the American Psychological Association. It lists the implications for school organization and assessment. After several revisions, this short, sixteen-page volume contains a convincing position on learning. It is on the web in its entirety. These principles, while a short list, were written with conventional schools in mind. [4] The principles apply to people of all ages.
It is almost impossible to exaggerate the amount we learn in infancy and early childhood. Almost all children enter school with vocabularies of five thousand to ten thousand words without ever completing a workbook exercise or opening a dictionary. Sitting infants for conventional instruction would be a disaster.
Young children know much more than words. They grasp the differences among such concepts as mother, sister, grandmother, cousin, girl, and woman. They know the difference between a chair, a sofa, and a stool, though they were never taught those differences. According to the authors of The Scientist in the Crib, small children are like explorers in their drive to understand the world around them and like sponges in soaking up understanding.[5] If you ask a child what makes the sun come up, the child will answer, proposing a hypothesis, if you will.
The child, a budding psychologist, has learned, for example, whether Mom or Dad would be better to approach for permission. In that context, the same child is a lawyer, arguing the rightness of the request. The child is a mathematician who loves counting and numbers and who knows what one-half a cookie is. (You can divide the cookie but your brother gets to choose his part first.) The child is an artist who tackles drawing or dancing without reservation. How do schools squelch these enthusiastic drives and motivations?
In contrast to the problems many children have with math, the growing infant likes numbers. Children like counting and large numbers, learn to count by fives and tens, want to know their ages and heights and those of others and to compare themselves, want to count how many other children will play a game, know the size and importance of an allowance, can tell time, and understand simple fractions. We fail to work from these interests. We establish a program to introduce formal math without regard to readiness.
We have radically altered our evolved species’ behavior by artificially segregating children in same-age peer groups instead of mixed-age communities, by compelling them to be indoors and sedentary for most of the day, by asking them to learn from artificial text-based materials instead of contextualized real experiences, and by dictating arbitrary timetables for learning rather than following the unfolding of a child’s developmental readiness. Common sense should tell us that all this will have complex and unpredictable results. And it does. While some children seem able to function in the school’s artificial environment, most cannot. Around the world every day, millions and millions of normally bright, healthy children are labeled as failures in ways that damage them for life.[6] My mentioning of different ways for schooling doesn’t mean everything is wrong with current instruction or that newer ways will be entirely better. New ways just have to be better, not perfect. Critics, take notice!
Per educator and author Yong Zhao:
There is general agreement among cognitive scientists, and educators that all children:
- Are born with curiosity and the ability to learn.
- Are not born with the same capacities for learning the same things.
- Come to school with different levels of cognitive, emotional, physical, and social development due to a combination of nature and nurture.
- Come to school with different needs, interests, and abilities.
- Are active learners with unique needs.
- Should bear the responsibility for learning.
- Learn best when intrinsically motivated.
- Are motivated when respected, encouraged, and exposed to opportunities that capture their interest and build on their previous experience, and are recognized for their accomplishment.[7]
Chapter 5. How Students Learn
Key Points
· Students differ extensively.
· Students learn in dissimilar ways.
· The brain governs learning.
· The brain loves learning.
· Many schools and classrooms are brain antagonistic.
Basic Principles
It could happen in any classroom: a gifted teacher presents a meticulously planned lesson to what appears to be a group of zombies who have hijacked and replaced her usually responsive students. On another day in the same classroom with the same teacher, a serendipitous remark produces sparks and competing raised hands. In another classroom, one child struggles to learn to read while another learned before she first crossed the school’s threshold. A high-school student finds long division baffling and a mystery, despite many years of math instruction. Yet the same student excels in geographic locations.
I once asked a very effective teacher how he got his students so engaged. He said it was easy. “All I do is start a fight.” He meant making some provocative remarks that stirred arguments among students.
Although learning is the central task of education, many educators would be hard-pressed to explain how learning occurs. Worse are the students who say, in effect, “I dare you to teach me.” We have reluctant learners who sit in classrooms waiting for the curtain to rise.
Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them become what they are capable of being.
(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Learning is at the heart of schooling. A school’s program for learning supersedes the importance of district management, grade-level organization, and facilities. Learning can occur under backward management from nonlicensed people, even in a tent or under a shade tree, though I don’t advocate primitive conditions as a replacement for schoolhouses. Most unfortunately, for too many students, the school system itself is an impediment to learning. We need to apply a paradigm shift from teaching to learning, from textbooks to abundant community resources and the world as a classroom, from dumb to smart learners, from classified as disabled to having strengths, from problem to resource, and from school reform to school transformation.
How does learning occur? How do we advance it? What impedes its progress? Those questions are the focus of this chapter.[1] I repeat the following quote for its truth and power and as a reminder to educators about children and youth. Parents know it through experience with their children:
People today do not even know what children are actually like. They only know what children are like in schools.[2]
I don’t remember much from my time as a fourth grader in a one-room school except that the parents organized an after-dark sleigh ride. At the end, they served hot chocolate with marshmallows. In my fourth-grade innocence, I was stunned by a beautiful lady singing “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” The whole event impressed me, as I still remember it seventy years later. In the sixth grade, I recall debating which was better, winter or summer. Those times stand out in my memory, but not much else from elementary school does. I mostly remember friends and events I organized. Most were fun; some were daring or challenging; and others were illegal, like stealing a watermelon from a farmer’s patch.
Children are different from one another and have a recall of their lives that illustrates the significance of their activities, mostly unrelated to school. Children out of school are viewed differently from the way they perform in school. Their imaginations, natural curiosity, and energy soar so differently from the humdrum life at a school desk. Teachers don’t know children because they only experience them in school. How can adults recall so little of school yet recite a nursery rhyme (“Mary Had a Little Lamb”) that they learned forty years ago? This after decades! How?
There are no misfit children. There are misfit courses of study, misfit textbooks, and misfit teachers. But in the very nature of the case, there can be no misfit children…One might as well say that a man does not fit his clothes as to say that a child does not fit the school…It is one of the tragedies of human institutions that they tend to become formal and mechanical, that they tend to gather about them people who have a vested interest in their perpetuity.[3]
One of the most authoritative sources of learning principles comes from the American Psychological Association. It lists the implications for school organization and assessment. After several revisions, this short, sixteen-page volume contains a convincing position on learning. It is on the web in its entirety. These principles, while a short list, were written with conventional schools in mind. [4] The principles apply to people of all ages.
It is almost impossible to exaggerate the amount we learn in infancy and early childhood. Almost all children enter school with vocabularies of five thousand to ten thousand words without ever completing a workbook exercise or opening a dictionary. Sitting infants for conventional instruction would be a disaster.
Young children know much more than words. They grasp the differences among such concepts as mother, sister, grandmother, cousin, girl, and woman. They know the difference between a chair, a sofa, and a stool, though they were never taught those differences. According to the authors of The Scientist in the Crib, small children are like explorers in their drive to understand the world around them and like sponges in soaking up understanding.[5] If you ask a child what makes the sun come up, the child will answer, proposing a hypothesis, if you will.
The child, a budding psychologist, has learned, for example, whether Mom or Dad would be better to approach for permission. In that context, the same child is a lawyer, arguing the rightness of the request. The child is a mathematician who loves counting and numbers and who knows what one-half a cookie is. (You can divide the cookie but your brother gets to choose his part first.) The child is an artist who tackles drawing or dancing without reservation. How do schools squelch these enthusiastic drives and motivations?
In contrast to the problems many children have with math, the growing infant likes numbers. Children like counting and large numbers, learn to count by fives and tens, want to know their ages and heights and those of others and to compare themselves, want to count how many other children will play a game, know the size and importance of an allowance, can tell time, and understand simple fractions. We fail to work from these interests. We establish a program to introduce formal math without regard to readiness.
We have radically altered our evolved species’ behavior by artificially segregating children in same-age peer groups instead of mixed-age communities, by compelling them to be indoors and sedentary for most of the day, by asking them to learn from artificial text-based materials instead of contextualized real experiences, and by dictating arbitrary timetables for learning rather than following the unfolding of a child’s developmental readiness. Common sense should tell us that all this will have complex and unpredictable results. And it does. While some children seem able to function in the school’s artificial environment, most cannot. Around the world every day, millions and millions of normally bright, healthy children are labeled as failures in ways that damage them for life.[6] My mentioning of different ways for schooling doesn’t mean everything is wrong with current instruction or that newer ways will be entirely better. New ways just have to be better, not perfect. Critics, take notice!
Per educator and author Yong Zhao:
There is general agreement among cognitive scientists, and educators that all children:
· Are born with curiosity and the ability to learn.
· Are not born with the same capacities for learning the same things.
· Come to school with different levels of cognitive, emotional, physical, and social development due to a combination of nature and nurture.
· Come to school with different needs, interests, and abilities.
· Are active learners with unique needs.
· Should bear the responsibility for learning.
· Learn best when intrinsically motivated.
· Are motivated when respected, encouraged, and exposed to opportunities that capture their interest and build on their previous experience, and are recognized for their accomplishment.[7]
Brain-Based Learning
I have found that authors who write about the brain describe the learning process with commonsense language. Let’s start at the beginning. Assuming a supportive home, children absorb huge amounts of information between birth and kindergarten in an informal environment, without standardized tests, worksheets, homework, lessons, and the other armamentarium of schooling. The brain is made for learning; in fact, it is driven to learn. In his book The World until Yesterday, anthropologist Jared Diamond describes the hunter-gatherer cultures in which children run free and explore, even in dangerous environments. They note people’s amazement about children’s curiosity, self-confidence, and autonomy:
One can say that hunter-gatherer rearing practices that seem so foreign to us aren’t disastrous and don’t produce societies of helplessness or following traits. Instead, they produce individuals capable of coping with big challenges while still enjoying their lives.[8]
I don’t propose that we return to the hunter-gatherer way of learning, but I included the description as a contrast to our overdirected, erudite systems for children. By understanding how infants and young children learn without formal teachers or planned lessons, we can better understand the brain’s power and its role in the management of learning. The principles of brainpower apply at all ages.
Schooling is much like learning to ride a bicycle by reading about it, diagramming it on the blackboard, dissecting the bicycle, but never actually riding it. (Hazen Henderson)
At a teacher conference in Toronto, two fifteen-year olds turned on the teachers and said, “Do you teachers realize how boring you are?” Stunned by such a direct criticism, the teachers listened intently as one of the girls went on:
You treat education like a TV dinner. You tell us to go to the freezer, pull out a box, read the instructions carefully, take off the wrapping, puncture the cellophane, then set the microwave for the right time. If we’ve followed the instructions carefully, we’ll get full marks. But that’s so boring. What would be more interesting would be to make up our own recipe, mixing different ingredients we had chosen. Then if it didn’t work, we would change the recipe slightly and keep trying until we had a recipe that tasted good. That kind of learning would be fun and make us think. Now, we are being taught to fit into, rather than shape, our world.[9]
For children to learn, many things are almost irrelevant, such as family size or income, though these have an impact. If the environment is sufficiently stimulating, and children are loved and healthy, they transcend distracting circumstances and learn to communicate with the language(s) spoken in the home without learning plans, drills, or rote-memory exercises. John Holt, in books totaling millions of copies, told in plain language of his experiences with why children learn, fail, and learn all the time. His books are best sellers.[10]
Children are prime teachers. They learn from one another. (Mauro Cardenas)
The three-year-old may say, “Mommy, Jill hitted me.” Remarkably, the brain has extracted the past tense of verb hit.[11] That works for most words except irregular verbs.
Mom doesn’t launch into a lecture on verb tense but probably only says, “You mean hit.” With this simple feedback, the brain, in time, makes a correction for its pattern of an irregular verb. The learning power of infants and young children astonishes their parents, who think, “Where did that come from?” What more could be accomplished if learning in school were as efficient, effortless, and enjoyable as it is in infancy?
One must add that the environment for learning in homes, as well as in schools, varies hugely with numerous factors: health care, nutrition, and loving support. A host of other factors in the environment have an impact on learning: richness of experiences; stimulation; warmth; encouragement; lack of labeling; being valued, accepted, and prized; being treated with dignity; the presence of possibilities; and the courage to be, among others. Opportunities to explore and play and provisions for new experiences play vital roles.[12]
A good home setting is every child’s first school, relaxed yet intense and concentrated. This learning environment and the learning that takes place do not conform to carefully developed plans prepared by parents. Children’s learning occurs through a process that could be called brain-compatible learning. An understanding of this process yields information to change the effectiveness of teaching at all ages and produces the breakthroughs to help all students become more successful.
We have read about the awful situation of a child who is locked in the basement or attic, resulting in severe delay of language and social skills. We must avoid schools or classrooms that are “brain antagonistic”: that is, not compatible with the brain’s means of learning. Leslie Hart, an early author on the brain’s learning, once said, “While I don’t have a precise researched number, my estimate of how many classrooms are brain-compatible is about 30 percent.”[13] He referred to classrooms as barren in appearance, devoid of new experiences, not fun, and with few opportunities to stretch and learn by doing.
Great teachers instinctively know about brain-compatibility (though not necessarily the terminology) and structure their learning environments differently from Schoolmaster Gradgrind:
In this life, we want nothing but facts, sir; nothing but Facts! The speaker and the schoolmaster…swept with their eyes over the inclined plane of little vessels then, and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim. “Very well,” said this gentleman, briskly smiling, and folding his arms. “That’s a horse. Now, let me ask you girls and boys, would you paper a room with representations of horses?”
After a pause, one half of the children cried in chorus, “Yes, sir!” Upon which the other half, seeing in the gentleman’s face that “yes” was wrong, cried out in chorus, “No, sir!”—as the custom is, in these examinations. “I’ll explain it to you, then,” said the gentleman, after another and a dismal pause, “Why you wouldn’t paper a room with representations of horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in reality in fact? Do you?” “Yes, sir!” from one half. “No, sir!” from the other. “Of course not,” said the gentleman, with an indignant look at the wrong half. “Why, then, you are not to see anywhere what you don’t see in fact; you are not to have anywhere, what you don’t have in fact. Now what I want is Facts.”
Teach the boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them…In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir, nothing but Facts!” (Schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times by Charles Dickens)
Let’s take a careful look at how the brain learns. We most easily observe the process of brain-based learning when children learn to walk, talk, feed themselves, identify and manipulate objects, and respond to the world around them. As more objects, sounds, and information stimulate the child’s brain, it collects these into patterns and files each bit of additional data to make new connections and correct errors in existing ones.
The more data the brain receives, the more connections it makes. Those connections in the brain represent learning and increase in quantity and complexity, growing to one hundred billion connected neurons and perhaps ten times as many links in a system more complex than the world’s entire wired-telephone network. As the child ages, the brain prunes away irrelevant and unused connections.
Question: Will my child learn all she needs if she’s not “exposed” to everything?
Response: Through books, newspapers, magazines, television, movies, radio, the Internet, observation, and conversation with the people in the student’s life (other students, staff, family, friends, neighbors, etc.)—in other words, through living—your child will be exposed to everything relevant to his or her life. In our day and age, overexposure is more of a challenge than lack of exposure. (The Living School, Boulder, Colorado)
During this time, the child’s brain learns other things as well: responsibility, kinship, compassion, and respect for others. Children learn to recognize emotions: anger, fairness, love, resentment, devotion, yearning, sadness, happiness, jealousy, envy, fear, and hate, as well as ways to respond. They learn the excitement of anticipation, its fulfillment, and disappointments. They learn how to manage a spoon, interact with others, ride a bike, and thousands of other skills—in effect, programs in the brain that enable repeated actions. None of these tasks are easy or automatically learned the first time. Recall how much the infant, free of tedium, practiced most of these. It requires many experiences to make fine discriminations between similar objects.
We acquire a vast database without a syllabus or planned lessons. Could the lack of standard teaching tools be the precise reason we learn so much in such a short time? What a dreadful thought when considering the planning of school lessons! In reverse, consider the intensity and stress that an adult endures in rehabilitation when relearning to walk in the aftermath of a stroke that damaged the part of the brain that once had the “program” for walking.
Learning develops best in rich, stimulating, and safe environments.[14] This astonishing feature of people’s brains to develop patterns that represent understanding and programs representing skills has not received adequate attention from educators. John Dewey said we learn from experience, and reflecting upon this, I would add a corollary: the more experiences, the more learning.
In addition to the brain’s development of patterns and programs, the brain receives feedback or corrections that hone and perfect understandings and recorded skills. For the preschool child, brain processes work automatically. Well-meaning attempts to speed up learning—say, teaching a child to read at age three—do more harm than good. The current earlier and earlier emphasis on teaching children to sound out letters, to read, and to print flies in the face of research and practice: the famous High Scope study in Ypsilanti, Michigan;[15] the Carolina Abecedarian Project in Chapel Hill, North Carolina;[16] the Minnesota project;[17] and an article by Moyer urge progressive preschool and childhood programs to delay reading instruction until students are ready. [18] These research-based and long-standing projects, most with follow-up into adulthood,[19] show the impact of progressive approaches for mental and social growth.
Tremendous resistance seems to arise from educators at all levels to the simple notion that a child is born motivated to learn and that he or she does not have to be pushed or manipulated in some fashion. Learning in humans can be blocked, impeded, discouraged, fostered, facilitated, and encouraged as we hardly need a specialist to tell us. But the one thing we don’t have to do is motivate the brain to learn. (Leslie A. Hart)
The working vocabulary of several thousand words a child acquires before entering school is not gained from looking up words in a dictionary or from doing a worksheet. Instead, the richer the home environment, the more words the child learns. What is a rich home environment? It operates with much talking; complex vocabulary; varied experiences; interaction with peers, as in the African proverb “each one, teach one”;[20] sensory stimulation; unconditional love;[21] and attention to and encouragement of the child’s interests. Parents augment the learning environment with books, music, trips, magazines, toys, activities, visitors, and opportunities to explore, create, and play.
The environment can also present barriers to learning: fearful conditions, lack of respect and privacy, and a dearth of stimulating experiences. Access to health services and nutrition reduce barriers to learning: for example, providing a child with glasses. The difference in vocabulary among young children stems from the total number of words, the complexity of language, and the types of language used in the home during the preschool years.[22] For children whose language exposure is relatively sparse, the handicap is one that schools won’t overcome with standardized practices.
I spent a portion of my professional life studying the topic of brain-compatible learning, including publishing a newsletter for seventeen years and doing workshops. I was astonished, during the early years, to see puzzlement that the brain was the seat of learning and that the importance of understanding the brain yielded benefits for schooling. That has changed; with many authors writing on the topic, conferences, and workshops. Brain concepts have slowly gained acceptance.
When I ask elementary teachers how many new words they could teach their students in a week, they typically answer between five and twenty. I qualify the question so that teach is defined as permanent learning, never to be forgotten. Teachers pause over that stipulation and lower their estimates because they know that much they teach is forgotten. When I then tell them that children’s brains are learning eleven new words a day, every day, including weekends and vacations, they are incredulous. Most students will have a working vocabulary of seventy-five thousand words by age eighteen.[23] Do the math. It’s far greater than teacher estimates.
Language acquisition occurs without schooling. Ideally, the learning occurs under brain-friendly circumstances or in settings that are compatible with the way the brain acquires new information. Learning grows with a rich (not meant financially here), full life under stimulating conditions, or as John Dewey pointed out with his phrase, we learn by doing. Dewey added that the experience takes place in the brain of the learner. This means that no two people will hold the same content.
Many experiences are needed to distinguish differences between and similarities among unknown objects and concepts. Similarly, a child undertakes episodes of trial and error to understand new phenomena. Why does a child open and close a cupboard door so many times? The rationale is that repetition allows the child to gain a deeper insight into exactly how the door works. Why do children want to hear the same story repeatedly? Their brains need repetition to thoroughly process and organize interesting information. Is that so different for adults, with our enormous bank of experiences and knowledge? The first time I heard the word paradigm in Joel Barker’s film on change,[24] I was puzzled but interested. With repeated exposures in different contexts, the word became familiar and a favorite for a time.
When we appreciate the astonishing amount of learning that happens during infancy, we begin to understand the brain’s capacity for learning and can extrapolate how to apply it to learning during a lifetime. We also find the clues that tell us why learning is so slow and inefficient in conventional school settings. We understand better the difference among children and, therefore, the importance of personalizing schooling. Todd Rose of the Harvard Graduate School of Education called for an end of averages and stated that there is no such thing as an average kid.[25]
Leslie Hart makes the seemingly contradictory point that rather than simplifying content, we learn most deeply from complexity, such as in life situations, particularly in areas of interest. Under those conditions, our powerful brains work to extract meaning and understanding. Repeated exposure to the same complex experience perfects understanding as does coaching augmented by suggestions from invited adults. Learning can be very rapid, such as a year’s worth of some subject in six weeks.
An example of a complex learning experience might be an internship. The student confronts a variety of people, procedures, events, and activities that initially seems overwhelming but, with repeated exposures, becomes untangled in the mind to develop understanding. Exploiting this remarkable feature of the brain gives us insights for designing learning opportunities.
One of the most dramatic examples of complex learning was when the Jennings Community School[26] sent two groups of students on five-week trips during one school year: one to Costa Rica and the other to Ghana, West Africa. There were several weeks of preparation plus time for reflection on return. In those countries, among other experiences, the high-school students did service learning projects such as environmental improvements in a national park, building a solar collector for a remote village, and installing a computer lab from units collected and repaired before the trip. Parents thought their children had grown tremendously in maturity, judgment, and knowledge. One parent said that the students attained three years of maturity that year, and others agreed.[27] This illustrates the brain’s power to learn from complexity. I do not argue for eliminating direct-focused teaching on a narrow point for learning. Not all learning is from complexity; if students confuse too, to, and two, a short lesson, followed by refreshers later as needed, will help. Learning the multiplication tables will be a rote-learning experience, though it will be more successful if it is augmented with meaningful resources.
We can teach many of the basics by relying on context. That is, if student writing shows punctuation errors, a direct lesson may be warranted and will have a greater impact when linked to the errors students make in their writing. Meanwhile, the basics can be defined beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic to include a larger constellation of values: truth, acceptance, justice, appreciation, and trust.[28]
For those who doubt statements about the ineffectiveness of logical, sequential teaching, think of your learning of new material as an adult. If you learned about computers or smartphones as an adult, recall the logical explanations and definitions of terms and how baffled you were despite the helpful instruction. Only a considerable amount of experience and input solved your learning problem, despite your intelligence. Did you struggle with such concepts as triage when you first heard it as an adult, even with helpful and coherent explanations? After several exposures in different contexts, words and events become a part of your vocabulary.
When personal computers came on the scene in the early 1980s, I was determined to obtain one and learn to use it. I encountered foreign terminology. I didn’t know a byte from a bit or understand talk of internal memory. These were explained to me several times, but I was baffled and slow to learn. It wasn’t until repeated exposure through explanations, reading articles, using a computer, and surviving much confusion that I began to feel a degree of comfort, but barely that—this from an adult who likes technology, math, and science.
This illustrates how learning occurs for us as we encounter new situations and new material—even as adults. Under similar circumstances, another adult learns quickly, once again illustrating individual differences. We should remember the brain was made for learning and can’t easily be manipulated into what it doesn’t want to do. Learning endures longer when we’ve generated the answers ourselves.
Before the computer age, I recall teaching ninth graders about finding information in the library and using, at that time, the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature (RGPL) and the card catalog. They were inept, though I knew that other teachers had taught this skill in earlier grades. When taught in isolation as an exercise, the learning barely survived that year’s follow-up tests. I had students identify topics of personal interest first and then directed them to the RGPL and card catalog. Now that they wanted the information, learning how to find it had a new importance. Then learning about the RGPL endured beyond tests.[29]
Given the right amount and type of input and experience, the human brain has great power to make sense of the world by extracting meaning from the surrounding chaos, as Leslie Hart explained.[30] We may need to rethink what confusion is. Does complexity have merit? According to Hart, we need lots of raw material or input for the brain to extract patterns or meaning. We have all experienced confusion in our progress with a new learning task, when suddenly bits of sense begin to appear. With this emergence, meaning materializes, often leading to a thrill of accomplishment. The secret lies in the following combination:
1. An abundance of input (information) to the brain along with opportunities to test skills through trial and error. Personal “theories” result from the input, and we then observe whether the theory worked.
2. Life experiences develop “programs” in the brain for further use, such as developing relationships or using critical thinking in addition to more physical ones like using a spoon. The more we see, hear, touch, smell, and manipulate, the more patterns (understandings) and programs (skills) we create. The experiences need to be novel, stimulating, puzzling, and engaging—not necessarily all, but at least some of these.
3. Supportive environments and the absence of fear that many students experience in school and elsewhere. For example, grading creates anxiety.
Any form of grading that shames the child who is less able or less mature in any aspect of this work than another member of the class is unfair and discouraging, and takes away a sense of security. (Carleton Washburne)
A dramatic event illustrating these factors occurred when Ghana, West Africa, was in the direct path of a solar eclipse while Jennings Community School was on a trip there. The teacher explained what an eclipse was. The students weren’t impressed until they were given dark glasses and watched as the sun began to disappear, and it got dark. They were astonished and wanted to know why it happened and when it would happen again so that they could be ready and inform their parents and others to watch. The actual solar eclipse with its explanation will be remembered for a lifetime.
Education is a result of experience. The wider and more complex the experience, the deeper and more intense the learning. The thrill of experience widens in direct relationship to the frequency of contact, its complexity, and the increase in variety.[31]
To learn, the brain requires a profusion of opportunities to “play” with materials and encounter events. The saying “Play is a child’s work” rings true. Play is a critical component of learning at any age. Play can consist of role-playing, simulation, conversation, the arts, and just mulling ideas. Ideally, kindergarten features free play, a valuable approach to learning.[32] Current movements to reduce play in kindergarten for more academic instruction, while seemingly logical, damage the growing brain and impede the very learning that is desired.
Teaching basic material in school—reading, writing, arithmetic—is simple if we give up the idea that we teach subjects at a certain grade level at a certain time. Students want to learn to read, write, compute, and learn about science and history as a way of understanding and coping with the world. Coping efficiently is one of the brain’s major motivations. Most of the academic material can be taught easily if we are wise about the implications of brain-based learning. When we aren’t, we force the brain before it is ready or experiences a clear need.
An array of stimulating experiences by schools can stretch thinking, skills, and mental excitement. Teachers want to give their students stimulating experiences but are hampered by large classes, test-score emphasis, weak training programs, lack of support from the district, weak school leadership for innovation, and most of all, organizing students in age-based groups and ignoring their instincts.
Schools disregard different types of intelligences (mathematical, linguistic, artistic, intrapersonal, etc.)[33] and different learning styles. Rita and Kenneth Dunn describe some twenty-plus personal preferences for maximum learning.[34] They include environmental factors such as light, temperature, and sound, and continue with emotional, sociological, physical, and psychological preferences.
For example, some people prefer music in the background while studying; others prefer silence. Some prefer working with another person, while others prefer working alone. Some like sitting in a firm chair; others sit on a soft sofa or sprawl on the floor. Such factors limit learning in one-size-fits-all programs. That means that conventional schools as presently constituted are ill-suited to manage such variations. Few schools recognize these differences, and fewer apply them.
As if different intelligences and learning styles were not enough of a challenge to conventional education, a student’s perception of being disliked can completely derail learning. The book I Won’t Learn from You describes students who simply turn off because they sense, rightly or wrongly, that their teachers or the school in its entirety dislikes them.[35] The reason for the perception might be racism or sexism, as well as such factors as disabilities, clothing, poverty, slow-learning patterns, and disregard for their interests.[36] People, especially children, must perceive emotional acceptance from others for maximum learning, as in the saying, “Students don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
Every student must be treated with positive, unconditional regard to avoid activating the brain’s fight-or-flight mechanism. Each student must be prized and honored. While this may be common sense, research has verified that “when teachers know their students and find ways to engage them behaviorally, emotionally, and cognitively, achievement increases.”[37] Research validates that a positive school climate, where students feel safe, experience constructive relationships, are engaged, and find adequate resources, positive youth development and student learning occur most effectively.[38] I’ve cited many references in this chapter because of their importance and unfortunate obscurity.
Motivation
During part of my career, I was the principal of St. Paul Open School, a kindergarten-through-grade-twelve experimental school with no required courses. One day, a parent came to see me about withdrawing her fourth-grade daughter, explaining that while she loved the school, no one could convince her daughter to study arithmetic, and she would need that for her future. Though I regretted the girl’s leaving, I wished her well.
When I ran into the mother some months later, I asked about her daughter’s progress in the conventional school she had transferred to. The mother said that she was puzzled because her daughter caught up with the other students in a matter of weeks, despite having little or no math for several years at my school.
I’ve had numerous similar experiences. One was a student who decided as a fifteen-year-old that algebra was going to be important for his future college work. He tackled an algebra textbook and completed a year of algebra in a month—with minimal teacher guidance. Daniel Greenberg, cofounder of Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts, an experimental school with no required subjects or classes, tells the story of a dozen nine- to twelve-year-old boys and girls who approached him about learning arithmetic, which they had not studied before.
After obtaining assurances from the learners that they would attend his twice-weekly, thirty-minute math class without fail, he proceeded to teach addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, and decimals. The students attained these competencies in twenty hours.[39] Such is the power of personal motivation on the brain, starting from infancy.
Those types of experiences caused me to wonder about the pace of learning in traditional subjects. I think it is torturously slow because most students don’t see the relevance to their lives; hence, personal motivation and drive are missing. As psychologists and researchers have said for years, intrinsic motivation leads to powerful sustained learning compared to extrinsic motivation based on predetermined subjects from the teacher, report cards, or other factors outside the learner.[40]
Dan Pink references this research, stating, “If you truly want to engage kids, you have to pull back on control and create the conditions tapping into inner motivations.”[41]
Another clue to faster learning comes from the work of Paulo Freire with illiterate adults in remote villages in Brazil. He and his colleagues taught adults to read—or should I say, they learned to read—in thirty hours. They used words of great meaning to their lives, such as water, sanitation, children, disease, and elders. Quickly, the adults discerned patterns and applied them to other words.[42] The people behind new models of schooling understand the need for change and cite reforms underway in Brazil,[43] Sweden,[44] Finland,[45] South Korea,[46] Kenya,[47] and US locations.[48]
The crux is how to accomplish transformation. Fixing a conventional system that resists change because of a deeply embedded paradigm requires establishing parallel competing schools, both within public districts and outside the system, and offering parents a choice in both instances.
Some children face overwhelming conditions, often from dysfunctional homes that affect their well-being and school performance. Despite harsh conditions (referred to as adverse childhood experiences or ACE), some children display self-determination and self-efficacy. Researchers study this aspect of children and youth to shed light on how some youth persevere, even in devastatingly severe circumstances.[49]
While participating on a New York City reading study, I visited Public School 192 in East Harlem, an elementary school serving children from low-income families. As part of an auxiliary reading program, a child was asked about favorite events or interesting items. The child might say, “Hippopotamus” after a visit to a zoo. The teacher wrote that word on an index card. More words were added based on the child’s experiences, each on a separate card: cat, mother, Diane (sister), spaghetti, et cetera. The words were chosen by the child, and new ones were added until there was a thick packet. Every day, the teacher or a volunteer held up the cards one by one. In a few days, the children recognized their words. I was astonished as young children proudly showed and recited their loose-leaf rings of words. It was obvious that they loved words.
Like the adults in the previous example, children absorbed patterns from their favorite words and, in time, extended the patterns to other words. This was one of twenty activities using the natural curiosity of children and their drive to gain skills. The reading consultant at the school, Rita Champion, in answer to my question about how reading was taught, said, “Wrong question. We don’t teach reading as an isolated and separate subject. Rather, the children live reading and writing all day.”
I spoke with Julia Reed Palmer, director of the then−American Reading Council. She told me that the school system was so wedded to conventional books and procedures that the program at Public School 192 ended with the back-to-the-basics movement despite its success.
The reading program at Public School 192 built on concepts from such individuals as Sylvia Ashton-Warner, a New Zealand reading teacher working with Māori children,[50] and Frank Smith of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Smith, a well-regarded researcher in reading and learning, said, “We learn how effortlessly children learn to talk and that learning to read can be just as pleasurable provided adults facilitate rather than obstruct.”[51]
A brief list of how initial reading can unfold in a natural way comes from SelfDesign:
· Child notices written words on signs, billboards, magazines.
· Child asks parents, “What does this say?”
· Parent models reading, pretending to read to stuffed animals and younger siblings.
· Child chimes in on familiar parts of stories.
· Child understands that sounds go with letters.
· Child likes to play with sounds and enjoys creating silly words.
· Child can predict the ends of sentences in books that are being read to him or her.
· Child knows when something read doesn’t make sense.
· Child can look from left to right on pages.
· Child recognizes his or her name and names of family members.[52]
Campbell Loughmiller described an example of learning to read by extremely troubled youth. Boys aged eight to sixteen had to set up temporary camps in the woods while working out problems of arranging shelters, food, survival, collaborating, and interacting with difficult personalities, all in residencies averaging eighteen months.
Loughmiller, the founder, wrote that the boys were far behind in academics, and staff pondered hiring a reading teacher. Meanwhile, a boy might discover a snake and would be helped to write an article for the camp newsletter. The boy would read it over and over and proudly send it to his parents. After that, the boy developed improved reading skills under natural circumstances of interest and motivation. No reading teacher was hired.
The process didn’t work perfectly, but it probably worked better than usual schooling.[53] Remember, the mostly failing boys had already been in schools with processes for learning to read, special-education programs, and other interventions.
I realize that children and adults learn differently and that reading programs are a subject of debate. I don’t believe that so many children would have reading problems if we paid attention to maturation and natural interest. Or that so many children would be diagnosed, labeled, and drugged. Certainly, conventional approaches leave much to be desired for results and positive self-regarding attitudes.[54]
Powerful learnings also occur from community experiences. Field trips to farms, aviaries, and behind the scenes in grocery stores; community-service projects; internships; jobs; volunteering; and visiting government agencies in all their complexity fascinate children. (Some teachers report that children are unruly and consider the field trip a way to get out of school lessons. Rather than abandon field trips, consider the lessons.) Teachers report that planned field trips introduce children to new words and concepts and accelerate learning, but school budgets only support a few trips.
Trips and other experiences must fit the child’s maturity, though what children and youth can understand is often underestimated. Remember, infants, constantly faced with challenges far above their maturity levels, figure out patterns of language and concepts.
Experiential encounters, if tailored to interests or potential interests of children, show the brain in action, learning from complexity. The brain’s high-alert status uses maximum input to build understanding. Though information to the brain is initially flawed, with more exposure, concepts become increasingly accurate—a feature of the brain’s powers of self-correction.
Lyn Lesch argues for more learning outside the classroom because of its limited resources and narrow scope. He says the age-grade pattern of schooling (same-age children in the same grade) ignores huge differences among students. Outside experiences awaken the brain’s powers from the dry-as-a-bone daily sameness where children are mostly sitting—sitting at a time when the body aches for movement. Lesch cites children and adults learning faster and more deeply from community-based activities.[55]
When an elder dies, a library closes. (African proverb)
Children have many interests and questions, but schools ignore them for a set curriculum. The school says, in effect, “We’re not interested in your little questions; we’ve got more important things to do.” This has an unfortunate impact, probably at the unconscious level. Many have suspected that schooling reduces curiosity, creativity, and self-efficacy.[56]
Howard Adelman and Linda Taylor, long-time advocates for greater learning results, urge attention to mental-health factors, integrating social and educational services, and using modern principles of learning. I recommend familiarity with their focused, free, and useful materials from the University of California at Los Angeles School Mental Health Project and Center for Mental Health in Schools, in addition to their readable, practical, pertinent, referenced books.[57]
Readiness for Learning
Early-elementary teachers observe which students catch on quickly and which have a difficult time with academic learning. As one would expect, teachers find huge differences among students. We should not be surprised at this any more than we are at differences in physical size, musical talent, artistic ability, or athletic skills. Parents note difference among their children—this despite similar genetics and much-the-same family experiences. We have known for some time about the range of human variability and functioning in the body’s organs from one person to another.[58] Is there any reason to believe that mental functioning, interests, and motivations would be any less varied?
Many teachers above the third-grade level report that students show decreasing interest in schoolwork and try to avoid assignments with questions like “Will this be on the test?” “How long does it have to be?” “Do I have to?” “Why do we have to learn this?”
About half of six-year-olds are ready to read. Therefore, the other half are not. Why force learning when students aren’t ready? Much of the curriculum and many of the expected outcomes have this same rigid expectation. In other settings, reading is not introduced until age seven or eight. Those students quickly catch up and, after that, forge ahead of those taught with the standard timetable.[59] Similar findings apply for arithmetic.[60]
Schools want to cover as much content as possible. (Why not uncover?) Schools waste time because of the unyielding timetables in the curriculum, the same for every student. Examples of wasted effort include algebra in the eighth grade and British literature in the tenth grade, both taught in isolation and as though every student was ready in interest and maturity. Most students have not discovered a need for the algebra or cannot relate their life experiences to British literature and don’t see the relevance—nor would most adults, despite the rationale of teachers.
The carefully prepared lessons zoom by with little sticking in the brain. Worse, the student comes to dislike and resent the subjects and, still worse, schooling. Gifted teachers may find ways to engage students in obscure topics, but the curve of forgetting can’t be ignored. Obscure topics can be taught by innovative teachers (but ask if the material should be taught and its relevance.)
None of these readiness issues can be pasted on teachers and administrators. They strive with all their might to make the established system—the only one they know—work. They know it doesn’t produce expected results. They have been ingenious at devising improvements to keep their spirits up. But they are in a bad system, and some want to do things differently for more learning.[61] Typically, requests for change suffer the indignity of being ignored and denied without explanation.
Meanwhile, given the absolute and widespread views about the importance of schooling, reluctant or failing children have two paths: either they view themselves as dumb and unable to learn, or they view school as senseless and uninteresting and drop out mentally or physically. The first instance strikes me as inhumane, the second as profoundly unnecessary and unfortunate.
Teachers report that many students daydream or are off task much of the time. That’s generally because the student wishes he or she was elsewhere. The issue of piano lessons and other areas of well-meaning adult-initiated activities encounter a child’s sense of control. Critics respond that everything doesn’t have to be or can’t be meaningful to youth who don’t even know what they don’t know. They cite examples of reluctant students made to learn something that turned up later in life to yield an opportunity or interest they would not have had without the disliked lessons.
It’s a view that has a poor track record and violates human variability and learning principles. If interests or career opportunities occur later in life, skills and knowledge can develop then despite comments to the contrary. We don’t need to demand and bore an entire student population through thousands of hours of information they forget beyond the test.
Critics then say to track students by ability groups. What they mean by this borders on academic elitism. Typically, in their view, only academic learning qualifies as a worthy goal. They want rigor! On the other hand, teachers want stimulating lessons to engage students. Mostly, it doesn’t work. I’ve observed teachers of gifted and talented students use experiential learning to challenge their learners. Many of their imaginative activities would stimulate all students.
I accept that some very gifted students may require special programs or classes. However, a student gifted in mathematics may not be gifted in writing. Calvin Taylor found a large variation among talents in academic giftedness, creativity, planning, communication, and other factors. In other words, a student scoring high in one factor frequently scored low in another. The corollary was that a student with a low score in one area was frequently high in another characteristic.[62]
This view of human characteristics finds reinforcement in Project Zero[63] at Harvard University, involving Howard Gardner’s concept of multiple intelligences. The same child who tested high in one of the eight or nine intelligence areas likely tested low in another of the areas of verbal, logical/mathematical, bodily kinesthetic, musical, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic intelligence.[64] Only the first two correlate with good report-card grades. The others, important as they are, don’t show up on standardized tests used to judge student, teacher, and school performance. Conventional testing is a misguided, foolish, and harmful practice because it ignores human uniqueness and characteristics essential for life success. Testing ties the hands of teachers who would use the time more meaningfully. I don’t argue for more tests but rather for recognition of talents and the downgrading of traditional grading of students, teachers, and schools.
I do support characteristics such as these advanced by Shari Tishman at Project Zero:
· being broad and adventurous
· wondering, problem finding, and investigating
· building explanations and understandings
· making plans and being strategic
· being intellectually careful
· seeking and evaluating reasons
· being metacognitive[65]
Governing Principles for Learning
Almost universally, traditional schools, classrooms, and teachers place students in passive roles and, therefore, restrict choices and decisions.[66] Choosing and making decisions appeals to learners and are essential for health and critical thinking. The common rebuttal to attending to student interests and questions runs along these lines: “What do the students know? How can they make decisions about subjects they don’t even know about? Would you ask a patient to guide a surgeon in an operation? Students expect me to tell them how and what to learn. They expect me to be their teacher.”
Such remarks miss the point and exaggerate student weaknesses. That view belongs to an older paradigm, an outmoded characterization of the teaching-learning process. It certainly doesn’t fit the concept of the teacher as a facilitator of learning or a guide on the side. It more closely resembles the position of sage on the stage or professor model. It disparages the learner and makes the situation worse because students quickly become aware of their powerless status and learning falters. When teachers condescend, students tune out. No one tolerates a passive model of physician-patient relationships in modern health care, and it has no place in a learning environment for essential, active engagement.
Motivation, readiness, meaningfulness, emotion, and application help assure that learning occurs quickly. I don’t say that all learning is easy; some learning is very challenging, but students will persist if motivated. Students will crack the code[67] and acquire initial reading skills when they are ready. They don’t want to sit all day at their most energetic and physically active stage of life any more than we would like to sit all day in a passive mode, though adults can manage it better given the practice they had in schools. Counter to human growth, sitting all day results in flabby muscles. I describe children and youth as fast race cars, revving up their engines at the start line, but the flag never falls. They want to do things, create, play, interact, mess around, and try on different roles. They don’t want to sit and sit and sit and do someone else’s bidding most of the time. Children sit in classrooms and, aside from doing worksheets, are limited to observing their teacher and classmates. After a week or two of observation, there isn’t anything much new to observe. They sit, and their brains go on idle.
Sitting in rows with the same routine day after day provides meager fodder for children’s brains. Behavior management of students has been perfected because, surprisingly, there are few uprisings by the “hapless inmates” in school. [68]
Hostility, aggression, tension, and reduced productivity result from authoritarian control compared to more democratic environments, as shown in a famous study from the 1930s by psychologist Kurt Lewin.[69] The age of this study doesn’t discredit it. It illustrates how long we’ve known concepts about enlightened leadership without implementation.
The crux of the problem is the collision between children’s need to be active, being controlled, and marching to others’ directions without hope of influencing the outcome. When student voices fade to nothing in schools, their brains slow for learning. When creativity, imagination, and initiative are squelched in the classroom, they shrink from disuse.
In most classrooms, students aren’t even sure what is most important to learn in the plethora of subject-matter content that is thrown at them hour after hour. So why bother with more than a half-hearted try or just enough to get by or, for some ambitious and high-achieving students, working for grades and status?
Currently, the dominant model of schooling is a facsimile we reject as oppressive for both students and teachers. The emphasis of the present system, on production of narrow predetermined ends…and on objectives predetermined by curriculum experts…Our orientation deemphasizes the concern with the disciplines and their syntax; we are concerned with facilitating the students reexperiencing their environment in a playful, self-expressive way as an initial aspect of the writing process. This approach is called either “fooling around” by its critics or “exploring ideas” by its supporters.[70]
What are the implications for schools? Am I advocating the total abandonment of the present curriculum? I am not because there is much interesting and useful material in school subjects but also much that isn’t. Some schools have abandoned teaching the conventional curriculum’ These schools follow interdisciplinary approaches, project- and place-based learning, the Sudbury model (described elsewhere),[71] and parents using an unschooling model.[72] Such programs have far fewer children labeled as learning-disabled, and graduates appear to be leading happy, productive lives.
Contrast what we have discussed regarding active learning with what we find in a conventional school with its classes and grades and its uncompromisingly, sequentially ordered, slow-paced group procedures. Unfortunately, in these settings, the brain is starved for the input it needs to make sense and opportunities to test its understandings and skills in the crucible of real experience.
In the typical classroom, where is the profusion of input the brain needs minute by minute? The learner needs to talk, to practice, to act on ideas, to experiment—to muck about, as the English say it. Deep, enduring learning emerges when the brain actively engages new material or reruns previous learnings when needed. Although we can get children to parrot what we have taught, learning will be superficial and transient unless the learner personally engages the content.
Leslie Hart, the pioneer in brain-based learning mentioned earlier, once paused during a workshop and remarked about a sign in the library. The sign read, “If you are talking, you are not learning.” Hart was alarmed by the sign’s message and declared it patently false. “Humans need to talk to learn,” he rebutted. “They must talk to relate their ideas, to work out bugs, to test their learning, and to obtain important feedback. Even the silent personal talk in one’s brain clarifies and solidifies ideas.” Although rules such as those in a library may be necessary, the pin-drop quiet classroom may signal fleeting learning.
The traditional classroom model of instruction—planned lessons, explanations, practice, and testing—mostly violates the brain’s powerful and efficient processes. No one means to do this. It’s just that we haven’t understood and appreciated how to work with the extraordinary capabilities of the brain. It seems so logical that to help people learn, we teach them. Of course, structured teaching works efficiently in circumstances such as airline-pilot training and learning new medical procedures and sometimes even with rote learning (for instance, memorizing the times table). The difference hinges between highly structured learning’s success in one setting and the views expressed in this book on voluntary, chosen learning.
A steady diet of structured material that is not chosen by the student provides little opportunity for learning to jell. Too many people see the brain as a container to be filled. It’s more like a sieve. Only a few things stick: those of high novelty and those that find a connection to embedded memory. The brain as the organ for learning seems an obvious idea, but it has only been realized as such in the last few decades. We should see the brain as an extraordinary learning organ. It’s as much designed for learning as the stomach is for extracting nutrients. Neither needs to be programmed or told its basic function.
Many teachers seek to improve traditional instruction by giving students practice time, relating lessons to life, and using a strategy called differentiated instruction[73] to reach faster and slower students. The latter requires a great deal of preparation and skill from the teacher and gains meager results. There are several problems—chiefly, providing different types of instruction individually or for groups of students becomes an almost impossible task, particularly at secondary-school levels.
The span of differences is just too great as is the load of students per day. David Tyack and Larry Cuban said it well: “No amount of tinkering with the conventional model of schooling will succeed in achieving the potentials of students.”[74] The profession tries to tune its teaching, replete with such jargon as scaffolding, rubrics, looping, blended learning, and an alphabet soup of initials.[75] I try to avoid these terms in my talking and writing, and if I use them with the public, I want to be called out for their use without a definition or a simpler term.
A veteran teacher who became an instructional coach shared a story about how she shadowed two students in her school and saw the school from their points of view and saw the tasks they did. She had three key takeaways: (1) students sit all day, and sitting is exhausting; (2) high school students sit passively and listen during approximately 90 percent of their classes; (3) students feel a little bit like nuisances all day long.
Here’s how she summarized her experience:
I waited fourteen years to do something that I should have done my first year of teaching, shadow a student for a day. It was so eye-opening that I wish I could go back to every class of students I ever had right now and change a minimum of ten things, the layout, the lesson plan, the checks for understanding. Most of it![76]
Her story became a viral sensation online and inspired hundreds of comments and requests for more information about her experiences.
Twelve years of ordered, sequential school “programming” have detoured us from the natural learning processes of the brain. We have been lulled into thinking that with workshops for teachers, the basic schooling process can be fixed. This idea is based on an illusion that a school-subject-centered universe will create order in the brain. It does eventually work that way with experts in a subject or field of study. The organized-school-subject’s mind-set skews school missions into silos of information to be mastered by students. This guarantees little of much value in life.
Psychotherapist and education consultant Ruth Bettelheim describes the situation well:
The traditional classroom needs an overhaul based on the findings of cognitive neuroscience. Rather than lecturing to passive observers, teachers should act as facilitators, introducing individual students to new concepts based on their interests and developmental state. Children should be free to move around and to choose when, for how long, and with whom they will work at each task. Instead of being told facts, children should learn by acting on instructional materials, experimenting, and observing until answers are found.[77]
The quote describes traditional classrooms and their denial of student participation in curriculum and instruction. Think of the quote’s power when applied to transformed schools when classrooms become but one facet of learning. Because conventional schooling conditions students to a passive, receiving role, we damage their natural learning “programs.” After school conditioning, we need to learn how to learn all over again, as actively and aggressively as we did before we started school and as we often do outside school walls. We must relearn the original knowhow of our brains and unlearn inefficient learning habits. To summarize, modern principles of learning and conventional schooling practice are incongruent.[78]
When I was principal of the St. Paul Open School, I had a magic hobby, and I started a magician’s club with about ten students. What happened was amazing. I urged students to practice tricks to perfection. We did shows for day-care centers, elder centers, and nursery schools. The students maintained secrecy as magicians do. They wrote bylaws for the club, ordered tricks from a wholesaler, started a store, built a cabinet for their magic materials, set up a small library of magic books, and produced a magic magazine.
When the students learned that professional magicians held annual conferences open to anyone, six students and I traveled to Philadelphia for the International Brotherhood of Magicians conference. It was an eye-opening experience for both the students and me. I had the students plan the trip, choose nutritious food, and figure out how they would endure the long drive with games. One game was to name a magician for each letter of the alphabet. I was astonished that they did it for every letter except Q. They had dug in and learned far more than I imparted. We argued ethical issues on topics of magic.
While a magician’s club might seem trivial, I found that students learned to research, solve problems, work together, calculate; learned some principles of psychology; did reading and writing; exercised creativity; and entertained others. I did not overly direct them but responded to their questions and needs. It was a powerful learning experience for the students and for me. Their enthusiasm and energy were contagious.
I suggest that every school and teaching practice needs to pass these tests: 1) Does this practice contribute to the school’s mission of preparing students for active life in a democracy, productive careers, lifelong learning, and talent development? 2) Is the practice congruent with the learning needs of students? and 3) Are the practices brain compatible?
Most school practices fail on these grounds, not because teachers don’t work hard or are not dedicated to their students. Instead, they fail because the entire educational enterprise is so out of sync with the principles of learning that it would be pointless to explore new paths in a pre-set curriculum. Teachers and administrators feel powerless and lack authority to change staff configuration, budget allocations, and other key areas of schooling.
Alfie Kohn, one my favorites on research on learning and a prolific author of books and articles, summarizes contradictions about schooling with ten “obvious truths”:
· Much of the material students are required to memorize is soon forgotten.
· Just knowing a lot of facts doesn’t mean you’re smart.
· Students are more likely to learn what they find interesting.
· Students are less interested in whatever they’re forced to do and more enthusiastic when they have something to say.
· Just because doing X raises standardized test scores doesn’t mean X should be done.
· Students are more likely to succeed in a place where they feel known and cared about.
· We want children to develop in many ways, not just academically.
· Just because a lesson (or book or class or test) is harder doesn’t mean it’s better.
· Kids aren’t just short adults.
· Substance matters more than labels.[79]
As we shall see, schools can be organized to achieve breakthroughs in ways that are congruent with how people learn and consistent with the mission of education.[80] As educator-researchers on brain-based learning, Renata and Geoffrey Caine wrote:
This approach to teaching based on natural learning requires many shifts in our collective beliefs about learning, teaching, and “schooling. It will require a fundamental shift in how everyone sees his or her role and responsibilities…But ultimately, what we propose makes more sense and appears more useful for those who will be living in a connected, information, and collaboration-driven world.[81]
Summary
· Student motivation and interest drive learning.
· Schools largely ignore students’ questions and interests.
· The brain is made for learning.
· Schools are largely brain antagonistic by design though not intentionally.
· Skilled teachers have been using brain-based learning processes without knowing the terminology.
[1] National Resource Council. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
[2] Black, C. (2016). A thousand rivers: What the modern world has forgotten about children and learning. Retrieved from http://carolblack.org/a-thousand-rivers.
[3] Buckingham, B. R. (1938). Disciplinary values in individualized instruction. The Education Record.
[4] American Psychology Association. (1997). Learner-centered psychological principles: Guidelines for school redesign and reform. Washington, DC: Learner-Centered Principles Work Group of the American Psychological Association’s Board of Educational Affairs. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/ed/governance/bea/learner-centered.pdf.
[5] Gopnik, A., Meltzoff, A. N., & Kuhl, P. K. (2000). The scientist in the crib: What early learning tells us about the mind. New York: William Morrow.
[6] Black, C. (2016). A thousand rivers: What the modern world has forgotten about children and learning. Retrieved from http://carolblack.org/a-thousand-rivers. This is an extraordinary essay about learning.
[7] Zhao, Y. (2012). World class learners: Educating creative and entrepreneurial students. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
[8] Diamond, J. (2012). The world until yesterday: What we can learn from traditional societies? New York: Viking Press.
[9] Abbott, J. (ed.). (2014). Battling for the soul of education. St. Fortitude Valley, Australia: Independent Schools of Queensland.
[10] Holt, J. (1989). Learning all the time: How small children begin to read, write, count, and investigate the world without being taught. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley; Holt, J. (1982). How children fail. Cambridge, MA: Merloyd Lawrence; Holt, J. (1983). How children learn. Cambridge, MA: Merloyd Lawrence.
[11] Eminent scholar Jean Berko Gleason, author of the Wug test, found that even young children possess implicit knowledge of linguistic morphology. This is considered one of the foremost research findings about language development.
[12] Love, J. (2012). What toddlers know they don’t know about plurals: Fifty years later, the Wug test is still teaching us how children learn new word forms. The American Scholar. The Wug test measures creativity.
[13] Hart, L. (2002). Human brain and human learning. Kent, WA: Books for Educators.
[14] Harrison, S. (2002). The happy child: Changing the heart of education. Boulder, CO: Sentient Publications. A delightful little book that asks crucial questions about the true nature of children and learning. Harrison gives some of the most humane answers I’ve encountered. Also charming and persuasive: Christakis, E. (2017). The importance of being little: What young children really need from grownups. London: Penguin.
[15] Holzman, M. (January 19, 2005). Preschool’s effects at 40: The news from Ypsilanti. Education Week. Retrieved from https://highscope.org.
[16] http://abc.fpg.unc.edu/.
[17] Sroufe, L. A., Egeland, B., Carlson, E. A., & Collins, W. A. (2005). The development of the person: The Minnesota study of risk and adaptation from birth to adulthood. New York: The Guilford Press.
[18] Moyer, M. W. (March/April 2017). Getting preschool right. Scientific American Mind.
[19] The longest continuing follow-up study is Terman’s study of gifted children from childhood to old age. (The remaining subjects are in their nineties.) Leslie, M. (July/August 2000). The vexing legacy of Lewis Terman. Stanford Alumni.
[20] “Each one teach one” captures the impact of children learning from one another. The phrase originated in slavery times, when teaching slaves how to read was forbidden. Also, delightfully depicted in TED talks, Sugata Mitra tells of his “hole in the wall” observation and of numerous other self-teaching episodes with children around the world. See also his School in the Cloud TED talk: https://www.theschoolinthecloud.org/about/.
[21] Scribner, H. (April 27, 2015). Five benefits of showing your child unconditional love. Deseret News National. This literature base supports healthier children, better parent-child relations, and learning from love without condition for children.
[22] Risley, T. A., & Hart, B. (1995) Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.
[23] Smith, F. (2011). Understanding reading: A psycholinguistic analysis of reading and learning to read, sixth ed. London: Routledge.
[24] Barker, J. (1985). Discovering the future: The business of paradigms. Burnsville, MN: Charthouse. CD. Also Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[25] Rose, T. (2016). The end of average: How we succeed in a world that values sameness. San Francisco: Harper One. Todd Rose is director of the Center for Individual Opportunity, Harvard University. He can be seen on numerous videos on YouTube.
[26] Jeffery Holte and Ellie Tofte of Jennings Community School, a charter school in St. Paul, Minnesota, designed and led the expeditions. As of the writing of this book, I am chair of the school board for this school.
[27] Interestingly, some of the students on the trip to Ghana were astonished that, despite primitive schools, children were standing around the edges of the schoolyard, wanting to come into school, but their parents couldn’t afford the five-dollar tuition. Why such motivation to learn under primitive conditions yet reluctance to attend school by US students?
[28] Brobinsky, B. (1977). Defining the basics of American education. Bloomington, IN: The Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation.
[29] Of course, the results of their searches were meager in contrast to looking up information on the Internet. Hence, we more often used human resources like interviews in person or by telephone.
[30] Hart, L. A. (2002). Human brain and human learning. Black Diamond, WA: Books for Educators. See also Jones, T. P. Educating for the human brain. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
[31] De Carlo, G. (1969). Why and how to build school buildings. Harvard Educational Review.
[32] For a delightful and convincing discussion of the power of play, see the Tinkergarten site: https://www.tinkergarten.com/.
[33] Gardner, H. E. (2011). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic Books.
[34] Dunn, R., & Dunn, K. (1986). Teaching students through their individual learning styles: A practical approach. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Reston. http://www.ilsa-learning-styles.com/.
[35] Kohl, H. (1994). I won’t learn from you and other thoughts on creative maladjustment. New York: New Press. Also Harbour, P. M. (2012). Community educators: A resource for educating and developing our youth. Dayton, OH: Kettering Foundation Press.
[36] Hirsh, S. (1955). The fears men live by. New York: Harper and Brothers. An excellent book on how prejudice develops. Based on the studies by Theodor Adorno, author of The Authoritarian Personality, Hirsh writes a readable, compelling, and provocative book about what science has learned of prejudice and what can be done about it. It also explains the frightful long-term impact of rigid authoritarian parenting.
[37] Wallace, T. L. & Chhuon, V. (2014). Proximal processes in urban classrooms: Engagement and disaffection in urban youth of color American Educational Research Journal, 51 (5).
[38] Thapa, A., Cohen, J., Guffey, S., & Higgins-D’Alessandro, A. (2013). A review of school climate research. Review of Educational Research.
[39] Greenberg, D. (1995). Free at last: The Sudbury Valley School. Sudbury, MA: Sudbury Valley Press.
[40] See for example Deci, E., & Flaste, R. (1996). Why we do what we do: Understanding self-motivation. New York: Penguin Press; Pink, D. (2009). Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. New York: Riverhead Books.
[41] Azzam, A. (September 2014). Motivated to learn: A conversation with Daniel Pink. Educational Leadership.
[42] Brown, C. (1975). Literacy in 30 hours: Paulo Freire’s process in North East Brazil. Danbury, CT: Writers and Readers, Ltd.
[43]Led by Lumiar Institute: http://www.international3c.org/node/55.
[44]Progressive group of schools: www.kunskapsskolan.com.
[45] Google “Finland progressive education” for several pieces on their leadership.
[46] Google “Korea Smart schools” for several pieces on departures from traditional schools.
[47] Kenya: https://www.kicd.ac.ke/images/downloads/CURRICULUMFRAMEWORK.pdf.
[48] Innovation Unit. (2013). Redesigning education: Shaping learning systems around the globe. Seattle, WA: Booktrope and Global Education Leaders Program.
[49] See, for example, Bandura. A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: Freeman and Company; Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2002). Handbook of self-determination research. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press; Thiessen, D., & Cook-Sather, A. (eds.). (2007). International handbook of student experience in elementary and secondary school. Dordrecht, NED: Springer; Centers for Disease Control. (2016). Adverse childhood experiences. Washington, DC: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/violence-prevention/acestudy/index.html.
[50] Ashton-Warner, S. (1986). Teacher. New York: Simon & Schuster.
[51] Smith, F. (2011). Understanding reading: A psycholinguistic analysis of reading and learning to read, 6th rev. ed. New York: Routledge. Other books by the same author offer insights about reading.
[52] See SelfDesign daily message: http://www.selfdesign.com.
[53] Loughmiller, C. (1965). Wilderness Road. Austin: University of Texas.
[54] Bluestein, J. (2001). Creating emotionally safe schools: A guide for educators and parents. Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications. A comprehensive guide thoroughly documenting mental-health issues. Includes useful surveys and questionnaires.
[55] Lesch, L. (2014). Creative learning for the information age: How classrooms can better prepare students. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Also Lesch, L. (2009). Learning not schooling: Reimaging the purpose of education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
[56] Zmuda, A., Kuklis, R., & Klein, E. Transforming schools: Creating a culture of continuous improvement. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
[57] Adelman, H. S., & Taylor, L. (2008). Rebuilding for learning: Addressing barriers to learning and teaching and re-engaging students. New York: Scholastic. Retrieved from http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/.
[58] Williams, R. (1967). You are extraordinary. New York: Random House.
[59] See, for example, Palmer, S. (2016). Upstart: The case for raising the school starting age and providing what the under-sevens really need. Hillside, UK: Rudolf Steiner Press; Sahlberg, P. (2014). Finnish lessons 2.0: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland? revised ed. New York: Teachers College Press; Rohwer, W. (September 1971). Prime time for education: Early childhood or adolescence? Harvard Educational Review. Eminent scholars in the field of reading deplore the grade placement and overemphasis on reading with concomitant embarrassment and shame for the child. See Children of the Code project: www.childrenofthecode.org.
[60] Torsten, H. (1967). International study of achievement in mathematics, vol. 2. Uppsala, SWE: Almquist & Wilsells.
[61] A good example for this point comes from the work of Thomas Armstrong in his various books. For example, Armstrong, T. (2005). The best school: How human development research should inform educational practice. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
[62] Taylor, C. W. (ed.). (1972). Climate for creativity reports. Oxford, UK: Pergamon Press. Also Taylor, C. W. (March/April 1978). Multiple talent teaching. Today’s Education.
[63] http://www.pz.harvard.edu/.
[64] Gardner, H. E. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic Books.
[65] Metacognition: an awareness of one’s thinking, sometimes referred to as thinking about thinking.
[66] Hart, L. A. (1969). The classroom disaster. New York: Teachers College Press.
[67] Crack the code: understand the meaning of letters and words on a page. Retrieved from http://www.learningstewards.org.
[68] Metzger, M. A. (2016). A prison called school: Creating effective schools for all learners. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Also Rose, M. (2014). Why school? Reclaiming education for all of us. New York: The New Press; Fuentes, A. (2011). Lockdown High: When the schoolhouse becomes a jailhouse. London: Verso.
[69] Lewin, K., Lippitt, R., & White, R. K. (1939). Patterns of aggressive behavior in experimentally created social climates. The Journal of Social Psychology (10)276. It appeared again in another famous experiment with boys in a camp setting: Sherif, M., Harvey, O. J., Hood, W. R., Sherif, C. W., & White, J. (1988). The robbers’ cave experiment: Intergroup conflict and cooperation. Middletown, OH: Wesleyan University Press. (Originally published as Intergroup Conflict and Group Relations.); McLeod, S. A. (2008). Robbers’ cave. Retrieved from www.simplypsychology.org/robbers-cave.html.
[70] Macdonald, J. B., Wolfson, B. J., & Zeret E. (1973). Re-schooling society: A conceptual model. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. This booklet conveys the spirit of the 1960s and ’70s when most institutions were questioned for their validity. It’s astonishing to me that these extraordinarily humane-centered ideas disappeared in the back-to-basics movement of the 1980s and to this day, except for research scholars reciting principles of learning. Many have forgotten earlier movements and concepts like John Dewey’s writing and the work of Maria Montessori in the late nineteenth century.
[71] Greenberg, D. (1995). Free at last: The Sudbury Valley School. Sudbury, MA: Sudbury Valley Press.
[72] Griffith, M. (1998). The unschooling handbook: How to use the whole world as your child’s classroom. New York: Three Rivers Press.
[73] Tailoring instruction to differences among students.
[74] Tyack, D., & Cuban, L. (1997). Tinkering toward utopia: A century of public school reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
[75] Of course, every profession has its technical language as shortcuts to long explanations, but the problem with education is the use of these terms with parents and the public. Education professors promote these vague and often polysyllabic terms, and new ones appear often for the latest development (fad). My favorite is RTI, which stands for response to intervention. It could be simply said as a tutor for slow learners rather than the official definition, which runs thirty-seven words on the RTI network. An amusing exercise in creating impressive educational phrases is randomly combining jargon verbs, adjectives, and nouns: http://www.sciencegeek.net/lingo.html.
[76]Quotes from an anonymous teacher in the following blog post: Wiggins, G. (October 10, 2014). . https://genius.com/Grant-wiggins-a-veteran-teacher-turned-coach-shadows-2-students-for-2-days-a-sobering-lesson-learned-annotated
[77] Bettelheim, R. (November 15, 2010). “Time for school to stop damaging children.” Huffpost.
[78] See, for example, Lounsbury, J., & Marini J. (1964). The junior high school we saw: One day in the eighth grade. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. A report for the ASCD Commission on Secondary Curriculum. The study showed a large disconnect between what happens in classrooms and modern learning principles. Lounsbury repeated the study several times over twenty years with similar results. Lounsbury, J. H., Marani, J. D., & Compton, M. F. (1980). The middle school in profile: A day in the seventh grade. Fairborn, OH: National Middle School Association; Lounsbury, J. H., & Johnston, J. H. (1988). Life in the three 6th grades. Reston, VA: National Association of Secondary School Principals; Lounsbury, J. H., & Clark, D. C. (1990). Inside grade eight: From apathy to excitement. Reston, VA: National Association of Secondary School Principals. There have been other similarly detailed observations of schooling showing the disconnect between what happens in schools and what is known about learning, such as Goodlad, J. (2004). A Place Called School: Twentieth Anniversary Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill; Jackson, P. (1990). Life in classrooms. New York: Teachers College Press.
[79] Kohn, A. (April 2011). “Well, duh!”—Ten obvious truths that we shouldn’t be ignoring. American School Board Journal. An abridged form of these is in the introduction to Feel-bad education: And other contrarian essays on children and schooling. An amazing amount of thoughtful, research-based material, including this list, is also found on Kohn’s blog: http://www.alfiekohn.org/blog.
[80] Spangler, D., et al. (2016). Seizing the moment: Realizing the promise of student-centered learning. Hartford, CT: Our Piece of the Pie. Based on four principles: learning is personalized; learning is competency based; learning happens anytime, anywhere; and students take ownership. An outstanding booklet!
[81] Caine, R., & Caine, G. (Autumn, 2011). How new research on learning is rewriting how schools work and teachers teach. Learning Landscapes.
otivation
During part of my career, I was the principal of St. Paul Open School, a kindergarten-through-grade-twelve experimental school with no required courses. One day, a parent came to see me about withdrawing her fourth-grade daughter, explaining that while she loved the school, no one could convince her daughter to study arithmetic, and she would need that for her future. Though I regretted the girl’s leaving, I wished her well.
When I ran into the mother some months later, I asked about her daughter’s progress in the conventional school she had transferred to. The mother said that she was puzzled because her daughter caught up with the other students in a matter of weeks, despite having little or no math for several years at my school.
I’ve had numerous similar experiences. One was a student who decided as a fifteen-year-old that algebra was going to be important for his future college work. He tackled an algebra textbook and completed a year of algebra in a month—with minimal teacher guidance. Daniel Greenberg, cofounder of Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts, an experimental school with no required subjects or classes, tells the story of a dozen nine- to twelve-year-old boys and girls who approached him about learning arithmetic, which they had not studied before.
After obtaining assurances from the learners that they would attend his twice-weekly, thirty-minute math class without fail, he proceeded to teach addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, and decimals. The students attained these competencies in twenty hours.[39] Such is the power of personal motivation on the brain, starting from infancy.
Those types of experiences caused me to wonder about the pace of learning in traditional subjects. I think it is torturously slow because most students don’t see the relevance to their lives; hence, personal motivation and drive are missing. As psychologists and researchers have said for years, intrinsic motivation leads to powerful sustained learning compared to extrinsic motivation based on predetermined subjects from the teacher, report cards, or other factors outside the learner.[40]
Dan Pink references this research, stating, “If you truly want to engage kids, you have to pull back on control and create the conditions tapping into inner motivations.”[41]
Another clue to faster learning comes from the work of Paulo Freire with illiterate adults in remote villages in Brazil. He and his colleagues taught adults to read—or should I say, they learned to read—in thirty hours. They used words of great meaning to their lives, such as water, sanitation, children, disease, and elders. Quickly, the adults discerned patterns and applied them to other words.[42] The people behind new models of schooling understand the need for change and cite reforms underway in Brazil,[43] Sweden,[44] Finland,[45] South Korea,[46] Kenya,[47] and US locations.[48]
The crux is how to accomplish transformation. Fixing a conventional system that resists change because of a deeply embedded paradigm requires establishing parallel competing schools, both within public districts and outside the system, and offering parents a choice in both instances.
Some children face overwhelming conditions, often from dysfunctional homes that affect their well-being and school performance. Despite harsh conditions (referred to as adverse childhood experiences or ACE), some children display self-determination and self-efficacy. Researchers study this aspect of children and youth to shed light on how some youth persevere, even in devastatingly severe circumstances.[49]
While participating on a New York City reading study, I visited Public School 192 in East Harlem, an elementary school serving children from low-income families. As part of an auxiliary reading program, a child was asked about favorite events or interesting items. The child might say, “Hippopotamus” after a visit to a zoo. The teacher wrote that word on an index card. More words were added based on the child’s experiences, each on a separate card: cat, mother, Diane (sister), spaghetti, et cetera. The words were chosen by the child, and new ones were added until there was a thick packet. Every day, the teacher or a volunteer held up the cards one by one. In a few days, the children recognized their words. I was astonished as young children proudly showed and recited their loose-leaf rings of words. It was obvious that they loved words.
Like the adults in the previous example, children absorbed patterns from their favorite words and, in time, extended the patterns to other words. This was one of twenty activities using the natural curiosity of children and their drive to gain skills. The reading consultant at the school, Rita Champion, in answer to my question about how reading was taught, said, “Wrong question. We don’t teach reading as an isolated and separate subject. Rather, the children live reading and writing all day.”
I spoke with Julia Reed Palmer, director of the then−American Reading Council. She told me that the school system was so wedded to conventional books and procedures that the program at Public School 192 ended with the back-to-the-basics movement despite its success.
The reading program at Public School 192 built on concepts from such individuals as Sylvia Ashton-Warner, a New Zealand reading teacher working with Māori children,[50] and Frank Smith of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Smith, a well-regarded researcher in reading and learning, said, “We learn how effortlessly children learn to talk and that learning to read can be just as pleasurable provided adults facilitate rather than obstruct.”[51]
A brief list of how initial reading can unfold in a natural way comes from Self Design:
Campbell Loughmiller described an example of learning to read by extremely troubled youth. Boys aged eight to sixteen had to set up temporary camps in the woods while working out problems of arranging shelters, food, survival, collaborating, and interacting with difficult personalities, all in residencies averaging eighteen months.
Loughmiller, the founder, wrote that the boys were far behind in academics, and staff pondered hiring a reading teacher. Meanwhile, a boy might discover a snake and would be helped to write an article for the camp newsletter. The boy would read it over and over and proudly send it to his parents. After that, the boy developed improved reading skills under natural circumstances of interest and motivation. No reading teacher was hired.
The process didn’t work perfectly, but it probably worked better than usual schooling.[53] Remember, the mostly failing boys had already been in schools with processes for learning to read, special-education programs, and other interventions.
I realize that children and adults learn differently and that reading programs are a subject of debate. I don’t believe that so many children would have reading problems if we paid attention to maturation and natural interest. Or that so many children would be diagnosed, labeled, and drugged. Certainly, conventional approaches leave much to be desired for results and positive self-regarding attitudes.[54]
Powerful learnings also occur from community experiences. Field trips to farms, aviaries, and behind the scenes in grocery stores; community-service projects; internships; jobs; volunteering; and visiting government agencies in all their complexity fascinate children. (Some teachers report that children are unruly and consider the field trip a way to get out of school lessons. Rather than abandon field trips, consider the lessons.) Teachers report that planned field trips introduce children to new words and concepts and accelerate learning, but school budgets only support a few trips.
Trips and other experiences must fit the child’s maturity, though what children and youth can understand is often underestimated. Remember, infants, constantly faced with challenges far above their maturity levels, figure out patterns of language and concepts.
Experiential encounters, if tailored to interests or potential interests of children, show the brain in action, learning from complexity. The brain’s high-alert status uses maximum input to build understanding. Though information to the brain is initially flawed, with more exposure, concepts become increasingly accurate—a feature of the brain’s powers of self-correction.
Lyn Lesch argues for more learning outside the classroom because of its limited resources and narrow scope. He says the age-grade pattern of schooling (same-age children in the same grade) ignores huge differences among students. Outside experiences awaken the brain’s powers from the dry-as-a-bone daily sameness where children are mostly sitting—sitting at a time when the body aches for movement. Lesch cites children and adults learning faster and more deeply from community-based activities.[55]
When an elder dies, a library closes. (African proverb)
Children have many interests and questions, but schools ignore them for a set curriculum. The school says, in effect, “We’re not interested in your little questions; we’ve got more important things to do.” This has an unfortunate impact, probably at the unconscious level. Many have suspected that schooling reduces curiosity, creativity, and self-efficacy.[56]
Howard Adelman and Linda Taylor, long-time advocates for greater learning results, urge attention to mental-health factors, integrating social and educational services, and using modern principles of learning. I recommend familiarity with their focused, free, and useful materials from the University of California at Los Angeles School Mental Health Project and Center for Mental Health in Schools, in addition to their readable, practical, pertinent, referenced books.[57]
During part of my career, I was the principal of St. Paul Open School, a kindergarten-through-grade-twelve experimental school with no required courses. One day, a parent came to see me about withdrawing her fourth-grade daughter, explaining that while she loved the school, no one could convince her daughter to study arithmetic, and she would need that for her future. Though I regretted the girl’s leaving, I wished her well.
When I ran into the mother some months later, I asked about her daughter’s progress in the conventional school she had transferred to. The mother said that she was puzzled because her daughter caught up with the other students in a matter of weeks, despite having little or no math for several years at my school.
I’ve had numerous similar experiences. One was a student who decided as a fifteen-year-old that algebra was going to be important for his future college work. He tackled an algebra textbook and completed a year of algebra in a month—with minimal teacher guidance. Daniel Greenberg, cofounder of Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts, an experimental school with no required subjects or classes, tells the story of a dozen nine- to twelve-year-old boys and girls who approached him about learning arithmetic, which they had not studied before.
After obtaining assurances from the learners that they would attend his twice-weekly, thirty-minute math class without fail, he proceeded to teach addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, and decimals. The students attained these competencies in twenty hours.[39] Such is the power of personal motivation on the brain, starting from infancy.
Those types of experiences caused me to wonder about the pace of learning in traditional subjects. I think it is torturously slow because most students don’t see the relevance to their lives; hence, personal motivation and drive are missing. As psychologists and researchers have said for years, intrinsic motivation leads to powerful sustained learning compared to extrinsic motivation based on predetermined subjects from the teacher, report cards, or other factors outside the learner.[40]
Dan Pink references this research, stating, “If you truly want to engage kids, you have to pull back on control and create the conditions tapping into inner motivations.”[41]
Another clue to faster learning comes from the work of Paulo Freire with illiterate adults in remote villages in Brazil. He and his colleagues taught adults to read—or should I say, they learned to read—in thirty hours. They used words of great meaning to their lives, such as water, sanitation, children, disease, and elders. Quickly, the adults discerned patterns and applied them to other words.[42] The people behind new models of schooling understand the need for change and cite reforms underway in Brazil,[43] Sweden,[44] Finland,[45] South Korea,[46] Kenya,[47] and US locations.[48]
The crux is how to accomplish transformation. Fixing a conventional system that resists change because of a deeply embedded paradigm requires establishing parallel competing schools, both within public districts and outside the system, and offering parents a choice in both instances.
Some children face overwhelming conditions, often from dysfunctional homes that affect their well-being and school performance. Despite harsh conditions (referred to as adverse childhood experiences or ACE), some children display self-determination and self-efficacy. Researchers study this aspect of children and youth to shed light on how some youth persevere, even in devastatingly severe circumstances.[49]
While participating on a New York City reading study, I visited Public School 192 in East Harlem, an elementary school serving children from low-income families. As part of an auxiliary reading program, a child was asked about favorite events or interesting items. The child might say, “Hippopotamus” after a visit to a zoo. The teacher wrote that word on an index card. More words were added based on the child’s experiences, each on a separate card: cat, mother, Diane (sister), spaghetti, et cetera. The words were chosen by the child, and new ones were added until there was a thick packet. Every day, the teacher or a volunteer held up the cards one by one. In a few days, the children recognized their words. I was astonished as young children proudly showed and recited their loose-leaf rings of words. It was obvious that they loved words.
Like the adults in the previous example, children absorbed patterns from their favorite words and, in time, extended the patterns to other words. This was one of twenty activities using the natural curiosity of children and their drive to gain skills. The reading consultant at the school, Rita Champion, in answer to my question about how reading was taught, said, “Wrong question. We don’t teach reading as an isolated and separate subject. Rather, the children live reading and writing all day.”
I spoke with Julia Reed Palmer, director of the then−American Reading Council. She told me that the school system was so wedded to conventional books and procedures that the program at Public School 192 ended with the back-to-the-basics movement despite its success.
The reading program at Public School 192 built on concepts from such individuals as Sylvia Ashton-Warner, a New Zealand reading teacher working with Māori children,[50] and Frank Smith of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Smith, a well-regarded researcher in reading and learning, said, “We learn how effortlessly children learn to talk and that learning to read can be just as pleasurable provided adults facilitate rather than obstruct.”[51]
A brief list of how initial reading can unfold in a natural way comes from Self Design:
- Child notices written words on signs, billboards, magazines.
- Child asks parents, “What does this say?”
- Parent models reading, pretending to read to stuffed animals and younger siblings.
- Child chimes in on familiar parts of stories.
- Child understands that sounds go with letters.
- Child likes to play with sounds and enjoys creating silly words.
- Child can predict the ends of sentences in books that are being read to him or her.
- Child knows when something read doesn’t make sense.
- Child can look from left to right on pages.
- Child recognizes his or her name and names of family members.[52]
Campbell Loughmiller described an example of learning to read by extremely troubled youth. Boys aged eight to sixteen had to set up temporary camps in the woods while working out problems of arranging shelters, food, survival, collaborating, and interacting with difficult personalities, all in residencies averaging eighteen months.
Loughmiller, the founder, wrote that the boys were far behind in academics, and staff pondered hiring a reading teacher. Meanwhile, a boy might discover a snake and would be helped to write an article for the camp newsletter. The boy would read it over and over and proudly send it to his parents. After that, the boy developed improved reading skills under natural circumstances of interest and motivation. No reading teacher was hired.
The process didn’t work perfectly, but it probably worked better than usual schooling.[53] Remember, the mostly failing boys had already been in schools with processes for learning to read, special-education programs, and other interventions.
I realize that children and adults learn differently and that reading programs are a subject of debate. I don’t believe that so many children would have reading problems if we paid attention to maturation and natural interest. Or that so many children would be diagnosed, labeled, and drugged. Certainly, conventional approaches leave much to be desired for results and positive self-regarding attitudes.[54]
Powerful learnings also occur from community experiences. Field trips to farms, aviaries, and behind the scenes in grocery stores; community-service projects; internships; jobs; volunteering; and visiting government agencies in all their complexity fascinate children. (Some teachers report that children are unruly and consider the field trip a way to get out of school lessons. Rather than abandon field trips, consider the lessons.) Teachers report that planned field trips introduce children to new words and concepts and accelerate learning, but school budgets only support a few trips.
Trips and other experiences must fit the child’s maturity, though what children and youth can understand is often underestimated. Remember, infants, constantly faced with challenges far above their maturity levels, figure out patterns of language and concepts.
Experiential encounters, if tailored to interests or potential interests of children, show the brain in action, learning from complexity. The brain’s high-alert status uses maximum input to build understanding. Though information to the brain is initially flawed, with more exposure, concepts become increasingly accurate—a feature of the brain’s powers of self-correction.
Lyn Lesch argues for more learning outside the classroom because of its limited resources and narrow scope. He says the age-grade pattern of schooling (same-age children in the same grade) ignores huge differences among students. Outside experiences awaken the brain’s powers from the dry-as-a-bone daily sameness where children are mostly sitting—sitting at a time when the body aches for movement. Lesch cites children and adults learning faster and more deeply from community-based activities.[55]
When an elder dies, a library closes. (African proverb)
Children have many interests and questions, but schools ignore them for a set curriculum. The school says, in effect, “We’re not interested in your little questions; we’ve got more important things to do.” This has an unfortunate impact, probably at the unconscious level. Many have suspected that schooling reduces curiosity, creativity, and self-efficacy.[56]
Howard Adelman and Linda Taylor, long-time advocates for greater learning results, urge attention to mental-health factors, integrating social and educational services, and using modern principles of learning. I recommend familiarity with their focused, free, and useful materials from the University of California at Los Angeles School Mental Health Project and Center for Mental Health in Schools, in addition to their readable, practical, pertinent, referenced books.[57]
Readiness for Learning
Early-elementary teachers observe which students catch on quickly and which have a difficult time with academic learning. As one would expect, teachers find huge differences among students. We should not be surprised at this any more than we are at differences in physical size, musical talent, artistic ability, or athletic skills. Parents note difference among their children—this despite similar genetics and much-the-same family experiences. We have known for some time about the range of human variability and functioning in the body’s organs from one person to another.[58] Is there any reason to believe that mental functioning, interests, and motivations would be any less varied?
Many teachers above the third-grade level report that students show decreasing interest in schoolwork and try to avoid assignments with questions like “Will this be on the test?” “How long does it have to be?” “Do I have to?” “Why do we have to learn this?”
About half of six-year-olds are ready to read. Therefore, the other half are not. Why force learning when students aren’t ready? Much of the curriculum and many of the expected outcomes have this same rigid expectation. In other settings, reading is not introduced until age seven or eight. Those students quickly catch up and, after that, forge ahead of those taught with the standard timetable.[59] Similar findings apply for arithmetic.[60]
Schools want to cover as much content as possible. (Why not uncover?) Schools waste time because of the unyielding timetables in the curriculum, the same for every student. Examples of wasted effort include algebra in the eighth grade and British literature in the tenth grade, both taught in isolation and as though every student was ready in interest and maturity. Most students have not discovered a need for the algebra or cannot relate their life experiences to British literature and don’t see the relevance—nor would most adults, despite the rationale of teachers.
The carefully prepared lessons zoom by with little sticking in the brain. Worse, the student comes to dislike and resent the subjects and, still worse, schooling. Gifted teachers may find ways to engage students in obscure topics, but the curve of forgetting can’t be ignored. Obscure topics can be taught by innovative teachers (but ask if the material should be taught and its relevance.)
None of these readiness issues can be pasted on teachers and administrators. They strive with all their might to make the established system—the only one they know—work. They know it doesn’t produce expected results. They have been ingenious at devising improvements to keep their spirits up. But they are in a bad system, and some want to do things differently for more learning.[61] Typically, requests for change suffer the indignity of being ignored and denied without explanation.
Meanwhile, given the absolute and widespread views about the importance of schooling, reluctant or failing children have two paths: either they view themselves as dumb and unable to learn, or they view school as senseless and uninteresting and drop out mentally or physically. The first instance strikes me as inhumane, the second as profoundly unnecessary and unfortunate.
Teachers report that many students daydream or are off task much of the time. That’s generally because the student wishes he or she was elsewhere. The issue of piano lessons and other areas of well-meaning adult-initiated activities encounter a child’s sense of control. Critics respond that everything doesn’t have to be or can’t be meaningful to youth who don’t even know what they don’t know. They cite examples of reluctant students made to learn something that turned up later in life to yield an opportunity or interest they would not have had without the disliked lessons.
It’s a view that has a poor track record and violates human variability and learning principles. If interests or career opportunities occur later in life, skills and knowledge can develop then despite comments to the contrary. We don’t need to demand and bore an entire student population through thousands of hours of information they forget beyond the test.
Critics then say to track students by ability groups. What they mean by this borders on academic elitism. Typically, in their view, only academic learning qualifies as a worthy goal. They want rigor! On the other hand, teachers want stimulating lessons to engage students. Mostly, it doesn’t work. I’ve observed teachers of gifted and talented students use experiential learning to challenge their learners. Many of their imaginative activities would stimulate all students.
I accept that some very gifted students may require special programs or classes. However, a student gifted in mathematics may not be gifted in writing. Calvin Taylor found a large variation among talents in academic giftedness, creativity, planning, communication, and other factors. In other words, a student scoring high in one factor frequently scored low in another. The corollary was that a student with a low score in one area was frequently high in another characteristic.[62]
This view of human characteristics finds reinforcement in Project Zero[63] at Harvard University, involving Howard Gardner’s concept of multiple intelligences. The same child who tested high in one of the eight or nine intelligence areas likely tested low in another of the areas of verbal, logical/mathematical, bodily kinesthetic, musical, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic intelligence.[64] Only the first two correlate with good report-card grades. The others, important as they are, don’t show up on standardized tests used to judge student, teacher, and school performance. Conventional testing is a misguided, foolish, and harmful practice because it ignores human uniqueness and characteristics essential for life success. Testing ties the hands of teachers who would use the time more meaningfully. I don’t argue for more tests but rather for recognition of talents and the downgrading of traditional grading of students, teachers, and schools.
I do support characteristics such as these advanced by Shari Tishman at Project Zero:
Early-elementary teachers observe which students catch on quickly and which have a difficult time with academic learning. As one would expect, teachers find huge differences among students. We should not be surprised at this any more than we are at differences in physical size, musical talent, artistic ability, or athletic skills. Parents note difference among their children—this despite similar genetics and much-the-same family experiences. We have known for some time about the range of human variability and functioning in the body’s organs from one person to another.[58] Is there any reason to believe that mental functioning, interests, and motivations would be any less varied?
Many teachers above the third-grade level report that students show decreasing interest in schoolwork and try to avoid assignments with questions like “Will this be on the test?” “How long does it have to be?” “Do I have to?” “Why do we have to learn this?”
About half of six-year-olds are ready to read. Therefore, the other half are not. Why force learning when students aren’t ready? Much of the curriculum and many of the expected outcomes have this same rigid expectation. In other settings, reading is not introduced until age seven or eight. Those students quickly catch up and, after that, forge ahead of those taught with the standard timetable.[59] Similar findings apply for arithmetic.[60]
Schools want to cover as much content as possible. (Why not uncover?) Schools waste time because of the unyielding timetables in the curriculum, the same for every student. Examples of wasted effort include algebra in the eighth grade and British literature in the tenth grade, both taught in isolation and as though every student was ready in interest and maturity. Most students have not discovered a need for the algebra or cannot relate their life experiences to British literature and don’t see the relevance—nor would most adults, despite the rationale of teachers.
The carefully prepared lessons zoom by with little sticking in the brain. Worse, the student comes to dislike and resent the subjects and, still worse, schooling. Gifted teachers may find ways to engage students in obscure topics, but the curve of forgetting can’t be ignored. Obscure topics can be taught by innovative teachers (but ask if the material should be taught and its relevance.)
None of these readiness issues can be pasted on teachers and administrators. They strive with all their might to make the established system—the only one they know—work. They know it doesn’t produce expected results. They have been ingenious at devising improvements to keep their spirits up. But they are in a bad system, and some want to do things differently for more learning.[61] Typically, requests for change suffer the indignity of being ignored and denied without explanation.
Meanwhile, given the absolute and widespread views about the importance of schooling, reluctant or failing children have two paths: either they view themselves as dumb and unable to learn, or they view school as senseless and uninteresting and drop out mentally or physically. The first instance strikes me as inhumane, the second as profoundly unnecessary and unfortunate.
Teachers report that many students daydream or are off task much of the time. That’s generally because the student wishes he or she was elsewhere. The issue of piano lessons and other areas of well-meaning adult-initiated activities encounter a child’s sense of control. Critics respond that everything doesn’t have to be or can’t be meaningful to youth who don’t even know what they don’t know. They cite examples of reluctant students made to learn something that turned up later in life to yield an opportunity or interest they would not have had without the disliked lessons.
It’s a view that has a poor track record and violates human variability and learning principles. If interests or career opportunities occur later in life, skills and knowledge can develop then despite comments to the contrary. We don’t need to demand and bore an entire student population through thousands of hours of information they forget beyond the test.
Critics then say to track students by ability groups. What they mean by this borders on academic elitism. Typically, in their view, only academic learning qualifies as a worthy goal. They want rigor! On the other hand, teachers want stimulating lessons to engage students. Mostly, it doesn’t work. I’ve observed teachers of gifted and talented students use experiential learning to challenge their learners. Many of their imaginative activities would stimulate all students.
I accept that some very gifted students may require special programs or classes. However, a student gifted in mathematics may not be gifted in writing. Calvin Taylor found a large variation among talents in academic giftedness, creativity, planning, communication, and other factors. In other words, a student scoring high in one factor frequently scored low in another. The corollary was that a student with a low score in one area was frequently high in another characteristic.[62]
This view of human characteristics finds reinforcement in Project Zero[63] at Harvard University, involving Howard Gardner’s concept of multiple intelligences. The same child who tested high in one of the eight or nine intelligence areas likely tested low in another of the areas of verbal, logical/mathematical, bodily kinesthetic, musical, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic intelligence.[64] Only the first two correlate with good report-card grades. The others, important as they are, don’t show up on standardized tests used to judge student, teacher, and school performance. Conventional testing is a misguided, foolish, and harmful practice because it ignores human uniqueness and characteristics essential for life success. Testing ties the hands of teachers who would use the time more meaningfully. I don’t argue for more tests but rather for recognition of talents and the downgrading of traditional grading of students, teachers, and schools.
I do support characteristics such as these advanced by Shari Tishman at Project Zero:
- being broad and adventurous
- wondering, problem finding, and investigating
- building explanations and understandings
- making plans and being strategic
- being intellectually careful
- seeking and evaluating reasons
- being metacognitive[65]
Governing Principles for Learning
Almost universally, traditional schools, classrooms, and teachers place students in passive roles and, therefore, restrict choices and decisions.[66] Choosing and making decisions appeals to learners and are essential for health and critical thinking. The common rebuttal to attending to student interests and questions runs along these lines: “What do the students know? How can they make decisions about subjects they don’t even know about? Would you ask a patient to guide a surgeon in an operation? Students expect me to tell them how and what to learn. They expect me to be their teacher.”
Such remarks miss the point and exaggerate student weaknesses. That view belongs to an older paradigm, an outmoded characterization of the teaching-learning process. It certainly doesn’t fit the concept of the teacher as a facilitator of learning or a guide on the side. It more closely resembles the position of sage on the stage or professor model. It disparages the learner and makes the situation worse because students quickly become aware of their powerless status and learning falters. When teachers condescend, students tune out. No one tolerates a passive model of physician-patient relationships in modern health care, and it has no place in a learning environment for essential, active engagement.
Motivation, readiness, meaningfulness, emotion, and application help assure that learning occurs quickly. I don’t say that all learning is easy; some learning is very challenging, but students will persist if motivated. Students will crack the code[67] and acquire initial reading skills when they are ready. They don’t want to sit all day at their most energetic and physically active stage of life any more than we would like to sit all day in a passive mode, though adults can manage it better given the practice they had in schools. Counter to human growth, sitting all day results in flabby muscles. I describe children and youth as fast race cars, revving up their engines at the start line, but the flag never falls. They want to do things, create, play, interact, mess around, and try on different roles. They don’t want to sit and sit and sit and do someone else’s bidding most of the time. Children sit in classrooms and, aside from doing worksheets, are limited to observing their teacher and classmates. After a week or two of observation, there isn’t anything much new to observe. They sit, and their brains go on idle.
Sitting in rows with the same routine day after day provides meager fodder for children’s brains. Behavior management of students has been perfected because, surprisingly, there are few uprisings by the “hapless inmates” in school. [68]
Hostility, aggression, tension, and reduced productivity result from authoritarian control compared to more democratic environments, as shown in a famous study from the 1930s by psychologist Kurt Lewin.[69] The age of this study doesn’t discredit it. It illustrates how long we’ve known concepts about enlightened leadership without implementation.
The crux of the problem is the collision between children’s need to be active, being controlled, and marching to others’ directions without hope of influencing the outcome. When student voices fade to nothing in schools, their brains slow for learning. When creativity, imagination, and initiative are squelched in the classroom, they shrink from disuse.
In most classrooms, students aren’t even sure what is most important to learn in the plethora of subject-matter content that is thrown at them hour after hour. So why bother with more than a half-hearted try or just enough to get by or, for some ambitious and high-achieving students, working for grades and status?
Currently, the dominant model of schooling is a facsimile we reject as oppressive for both students and teachers. The emphasis of the present system, on production of narrow predetermined ends…and on objectives predetermined by curriculum experts…Our orientation deemphasizes the concern with the disciplines and their syntax; we are concerned with facilitating the students reexperiencing their environment in a playful, self-expressive way as an initial aspect of the writing process. This approach is called either “fooling around” by its critics or “exploring ideas” by its supporters.[70]
What are the implications for schools? Am I advocating the total abandonment of the present curriculum? I am not because there is much interesting and useful material in school subjects but also much that isn’t. Some schools have abandoned teaching the conventional curriculum’ These schools follow interdisciplinary approaches, project- and place-based learning, the Sudbury model (described elsewhere),[71] and parents using an unschooling model.[72] Such programs have far fewer children labeled as learning-disabled, and graduates appear to be leading happy, productive lives.
Contrast what we have discussed regarding active learning with what we find in a conventional school with its classes and grades and its uncompromisingly, sequentially ordered, slow-paced group procedures. Unfortunately, in these settings, the brain is starved for the input it needs to make sense and opportunities to test its understandings and skills in the crucible of real experience.
In the typical classroom, where is the profusion of input the brain needs minute by minute? The learner needs to talk, to practice, to act on ideas, to experiment—to muck about, as the English say it. Deep, enduring learning emerges when the brain actively engages new material or reruns previous learnings when needed. Although we can get children to parrot what we have taught, learning will be superficial and transient unless the learner personally engages the content.
Leslie Hart, the pioneer in brain-based learning mentioned earlier, once paused during a workshop and remarked about a sign in the library. The sign read, “If you are talking, you are not learning.” Hart was alarmed by the sign’s message and declared it patently false. “Humans need to talk to learn,” he rebutted. “They must talk to relate their ideas, to work out bugs, to test their learning, and to obtain important feedback. Even the silent personal talk in one’s brain clarifies and solidifies ideas.” Although rules such as those in a library may be necessary, the pin-drop quiet classroom may signal fleeting learning.
The traditional classroom model of instruction—planned lessons, explanations, practice, and testing—mostly violates the brain’s powerful and efficient processes. No one means to do this. It’s just that we haven’t understood and appreciated how to work with the extraordinary capabilities of the brain. It seems so logical that to help people learn, we teach them. Of course, structured teaching works efficiently in circumstances such as airline-pilot training and learning new medical procedures and sometimes even with rote learning (for instance, memorizing the times table). The difference hinges between highly structured learning’s success in one setting and the views expressed in this book on voluntary, chosen learning.
A steady diet of structured material that is not chosen by the student provides little opportunity for learning to jell. Too many people see the brain as a container to be filled. It’s more like a sieve. Only a few things stick: those of high novelty and those that find a connection to embedded memory. The brain as the organ for learning seems an obvious idea, but it has only been realized as such in the last few decades. We should see the brain as an extraordinary learning organ. It’s as much designed for learning as the stomach is for extracting nutrients. Neither needs to be programmed or told its basic function.
Many teachers seek to improve traditional instruction by giving students practice time, relating lessons to life, and using a strategy called differentiated instruction[73] to reach faster and slower students. The latter requires a great deal of preparation and skill from the teacher and gains meager results. There are several problems—chiefly, providing different types of instruction individually or for groups of students becomes an almost impossible task, particularly at secondary-school levels.
The span of differences is just too great as is the load of students per day. David Tyack and Larry Cuban said it well: “No amount of tinkering with the conventional model of schooling will succeed in achieving the potentials of students.”[74] The profession tries to tune its teaching, replete with such jargon as scaffolding, rubrics, looping, blended learning, and an alphabet soup of initials.[75] I try to avoid these terms in my talking and writing, and if I use them with the public, I want to be called out for their use without a definition or a simpler term.
A veteran teacher who became an instructional coach shared a story about how she shadowed two students in her school and saw the school from their points of view and saw the tasks they did. She had three key takeaways: (1) students sit all day, and sitting is exhausting; (2) high school students sit passively and listen during approximately 90 percent of their classes; (3) students feel a little bit like nuisances all day long.
Here’s how she summarized her experience:
I waited fourteen years to do something that I should have done my first year of teaching, shadow a student for a day. It was so eye-opening that I wish I could go back to every class of students I ever had right now and change a minimum of ten things, the layout, the lesson plan, the checks for understanding. Most of it![76]
Her story became a viral sensation online and inspired hundreds of comments and requests for more information about her experiences.
Twelve years of ordered, sequential school “programming” have detoured us from the natural learning processes of the brain. We have been lulled into thinking that with workshops for teachers, the basic schooling process can be fixed. This idea is based on an illusion that a school-subject-centered universe will create order in the brain. It does eventually work that way with experts in a subject or field of study. The organized-school-subject’s mind-set skews school missions into silos of information to be mastered by students. This guarantees little of much value in life.
Psychotherapist and education consultant Ruth Bettelheim describes the situation well:
The traditional classroom needs an overhaul based on the findings of cognitive neuroscience. Rather than lecturing to passive observers, teachers should act as facilitators, introducing individual students to new concepts based on their interests and developmental state. Children should be free to move around and to choose when, for how long, and with whom they will work at each task. Instead of being told facts, children should learn by acting on instructional materials, experimenting, and observing until answers are found.[77]
The quote describes traditional classrooms and their denial of student participation in curriculum and instruction. Think of the quote’s power when applied to transformed schools when classrooms become but one facet of learning. Because conventional schooling conditions students to a passive, receiving role, we damage their natural learning “programs.” After school conditioning, we need to learn how to learn all over again, as actively and aggressively as we did before we started school and as we often do outside school walls. We must relearn the original knowhow of our brains and unlearn inefficient learning habits. To summarize, modern principles of learning and conventional schooling practice are incongruent.[78]
When I was principal of the St. Paul Open School, I had a magic hobby, and I started a magician’s club with about ten students. What happened was amazing. I urged students to practice tricks to perfection. We did shows for day-care centers, elder centers, and nursery schools. The students maintained secrecy as magicians do. They wrote bylaws for the club, ordered tricks from a wholesaler, started a store, built a cabinet for their magic materials, set up a small library of magic books, and produced a magic magazine.
When the students learned that professional magicians held annual conferences open to anyone, six students and I traveled to Philadelphia for the International Brotherhood of Magicians conference. It was an eye-opening experience for both the students and me. I had the students plan the trip, choose nutritious food, and figure out how they would endure the long drive with games. One game was to name a magician for each letter of the alphabet. I was astonished that they did it for every letter except Q. They had dug in and learned far more than I imparted. We argued ethical issues on topics of magic.
While a magician’s club might seem trivial, I found that students learned to research, solve problems, work together, calculate; learned some principles of psychology; did reading and writing; exercised creativity; and entertained others. I did not overly direct them but responded to their questions and needs. It was a powerful learning experience for the students and for me. Their enthusiasm and energy were contagious.
I suggest that every school and teaching practice needs to pass these tests: 1) Does this practice contribute to the school’s mission of preparing students for active life in a democracy, productive careers, lifelong learning, and talent development? 2) Is the practice congruent with the learning needs of students? and 3) Are the practices brain compatible?
Most school practices fail on these grounds, not because teachers don’t work hard or are not dedicated to their students. Instead, they fail because the entire educational enterprise is so out of sync with the principles of learning that it would be pointless to explore new paths in a pre-set curriculum. Teachers and administrators feel powerless and lack authority to change staff configuration, budget allocations, and other key areas of schooling.
Alfie Kohn, one my favorites on research on learning and a prolific author of books and articles, summarizes contradictions about schooling with ten “obvious truths”:
As we shall see, schools can be organized to achieve breakthroughs in ways that are congruent with how people learn and consistent with the mission of education.[80] As educator-researchers on brain-based learning, Renata and Geoffrey Caine wrote:
This approach to teaching based on natural learning requires many shifts in our collective beliefs about learning, teaching, and “schooling. It will require a fundamental shift in how everyone sees his or her role and responsibilities…But ultimately, what we propose makes more sense and appears more useful for those who will be living in a connected, information, and collaboration-driven world.[81]
Summary
Almost universally, traditional schools, classrooms, and teachers place students in passive roles and, therefore, restrict choices and decisions.[66] Choosing and making decisions appeals to learners and are essential for health and critical thinking. The common rebuttal to attending to student interests and questions runs along these lines: “What do the students know? How can they make decisions about subjects they don’t even know about? Would you ask a patient to guide a surgeon in an operation? Students expect me to tell them how and what to learn. They expect me to be their teacher.”
Such remarks miss the point and exaggerate student weaknesses. That view belongs to an older paradigm, an outmoded characterization of the teaching-learning process. It certainly doesn’t fit the concept of the teacher as a facilitator of learning or a guide on the side. It more closely resembles the position of sage on the stage or professor model. It disparages the learner and makes the situation worse because students quickly become aware of their powerless status and learning falters. When teachers condescend, students tune out. No one tolerates a passive model of physician-patient relationships in modern health care, and it has no place in a learning environment for essential, active engagement.
Motivation, readiness, meaningfulness, emotion, and application help assure that learning occurs quickly. I don’t say that all learning is easy; some learning is very challenging, but students will persist if motivated. Students will crack the code[67] and acquire initial reading skills when they are ready. They don’t want to sit all day at their most energetic and physically active stage of life any more than we would like to sit all day in a passive mode, though adults can manage it better given the practice they had in schools. Counter to human growth, sitting all day results in flabby muscles. I describe children and youth as fast race cars, revving up their engines at the start line, but the flag never falls. They want to do things, create, play, interact, mess around, and try on different roles. They don’t want to sit and sit and sit and do someone else’s bidding most of the time. Children sit in classrooms and, aside from doing worksheets, are limited to observing their teacher and classmates. After a week or two of observation, there isn’t anything much new to observe. They sit, and their brains go on idle.
Sitting in rows with the same routine day after day provides meager fodder for children’s brains. Behavior management of students has been perfected because, surprisingly, there are few uprisings by the “hapless inmates” in school. [68]
Hostility, aggression, tension, and reduced productivity result from authoritarian control compared to more democratic environments, as shown in a famous study from the 1930s by psychologist Kurt Lewin.[69] The age of this study doesn’t discredit it. It illustrates how long we’ve known concepts about enlightened leadership without implementation.
The crux of the problem is the collision between children’s need to be active, being controlled, and marching to others’ directions without hope of influencing the outcome. When student voices fade to nothing in schools, their brains slow for learning. When creativity, imagination, and initiative are squelched in the classroom, they shrink from disuse.
In most classrooms, students aren’t even sure what is most important to learn in the plethora of subject-matter content that is thrown at them hour after hour. So why bother with more than a half-hearted try or just enough to get by or, for some ambitious and high-achieving students, working for grades and status?
Currently, the dominant model of schooling is a facsimile we reject as oppressive for both students and teachers. The emphasis of the present system, on production of narrow predetermined ends…and on objectives predetermined by curriculum experts…Our orientation deemphasizes the concern with the disciplines and their syntax; we are concerned with facilitating the students reexperiencing their environment in a playful, self-expressive way as an initial aspect of the writing process. This approach is called either “fooling around” by its critics or “exploring ideas” by its supporters.[70]
What are the implications for schools? Am I advocating the total abandonment of the present curriculum? I am not because there is much interesting and useful material in school subjects but also much that isn’t. Some schools have abandoned teaching the conventional curriculum’ These schools follow interdisciplinary approaches, project- and place-based learning, the Sudbury model (described elsewhere),[71] and parents using an unschooling model.[72] Such programs have far fewer children labeled as learning-disabled, and graduates appear to be leading happy, productive lives.
Contrast what we have discussed regarding active learning with what we find in a conventional school with its classes and grades and its uncompromisingly, sequentially ordered, slow-paced group procedures. Unfortunately, in these settings, the brain is starved for the input it needs to make sense and opportunities to test its understandings and skills in the crucible of real experience.
In the typical classroom, where is the profusion of input the brain needs minute by minute? The learner needs to talk, to practice, to act on ideas, to experiment—to muck about, as the English say it. Deep, enduring learning emerges when the brain actively engages new material or reruns previous learnings when needed. Although we can get children to parrot what we have taught, learning will be superficial and transient unless the learner personally engages the content.
Leslie Hart, the pioneer in brain-based learning mentioned earlier, once paused during a workshop and remarked about a sign in the library. The sign read, “If you are talking, you are not learning.” Hart was alarmed by the sign’s message and declared it patently false. “Humans need to talk to learn,” he rebutted. “They must talk to relate their ideas, to work out bugs, to test their learning, and to obtain important feedback. Even the silent personal talk in one’s brain clarifies and solidifies ideas.” Although rules such as those in a library may be necessary, the pin-drop quiet classroom may signal fleeting learning.
The traditional classroom model of instruction—planned lessons, explanations, practice, and testing—mostly violates the brain’s powerful and efficient processes. No one means to do this. It’s just that we haven’t understood and appreciated how to work with the extraordinary capabilities of the brain. It seems so logical that to help people learn, we teach them. Of course, structured teaching works efficiently in circumstances such as airline-pilot training and learning new medical procedures and sometimes even with rote learning (for instance, memorizing the times table). The difference hinges between highly structured learning’s success in one setting and the views expressed in this book on voluntary, chosen learning.
A steady diet of structured material that is not chosen by the student provides little opportunity for learning to jell. Too many people see the brain as a container to be filled. It’s more like a sieve. Only a few things stick: those of high novelty and those that find a connection to embedded memory. The brain as the organ for learning seems an obvious idea, but it has only been realized as such in the last few decades. We should see the brain as an extraordinary learning organ. It’s as much designed for learning as the stomach is for extracting nutrients. Neither needs to be programmed or told its basic function.
Many teachers seek to improve traditional instruction by giving students practice time, relating lessons to life, and using a strategy called differentiated instruction[73] to reach faster and slower students. The latter requires a great deal of preparation and skill from the teacher and gains meager results. There are several problems—chiefly, providing different types of instruction individually or for groups of students becomes an almost impossible task, particularly at secondary-school levels.
The span of differences is just too great as is the load of students per day. David Tyack and Larry Cuban said it well: “No amount of tinkering with the conventional model of schooling will succeed in achieving the potentials of students.”[74] The profession tries to tune its teaching, replete with such jargon as scaffolding, rubrics, looping, blended learning, and an alphabet soup of initials.[75] I try to avoid these terms in my talking and writing, and if I use them with the public, I want to be called out for their use without a definition or a simpler term.
A veteran teacher who became an instructional coach shared a story about how she shadowed two students in her school and saw the school from their points of view and saw the tasks they did. She had three key takeaways: (1) students sit all day, and sitting is exhausting; (2) high school students sit passively and listen during approximately 90 percent of their classes; (3) students feel a little bit like nuisances all day long.
Here’s how she summarized her experience:
I waited fourteen years to do something that I should have done my first year of teaching, shadow a student for a day. It was so eye-opening that I wish I could go back to every class of students I ever had right now and change a minimum of ten things, the layout, the lesson plan, the checks for understanding. Most of it![76]
Her story became a viral sensation online and inspired hundreds of comments and requests for more information about her experiences.
Twelve years of ordered, sequential school “programming” have detoured us from the natural learning processes of the brain. We have been lulled into thinking that with workshops for teachers, the basic schooling process can be fixed. This idea is based on an illusion that a school-subject-centered universe will create order in the brain. It does eventually work that way with experts in a subject or field of study. The organized-school-subject’s mind-set skews school missions into silos of information to be mastered by students. This guarantees little of much value in life.
Psychotherapist and education consultant Ruth Bettelheim describes the situation well:
The traditional classroom needs an overhaul based on the findings of cognitive neuroscience. Rather than lecturing to passive observers, teachers should act as facilitators, introducing individual students to new concepts based on their interests and developmental state. Children should be free to move around and to choose when, for how long, and with whom they will work at each task. Instead of being told facts, children should learn by acting on instructional materials, experimenting, and observing until answers are found.[77]
The quote describes traditional classrooms and their denial of student participation in curriculum and instruction. Think of the quote’s power when applied to transformed schools when classrooms become but one facet of learning. Because conventional schooling conditions students to a passive, receiving role, we damage their natural learning “programs.” After school conditioning, we need to learn how to learn all over again, as actively and aggressively as we did before we started school and as we often do outside school walls. We must relearn the original knowhow of our brains and unlearn inefficient learning habits. To summarize, modern principles of learning and conventional schooling practice are incongruent.[78]
When I was principal of the St. Paul Open School, I had a magic hobby, and I started a magician’s club with about ten students. What happened was amazing. I urged students to practice tricks to perfection. We did shows for day-care centers, elder centers, and nursery schools. The students maintained secrecy as magicians do. They wrote bylaws for the club, ordered tricks from a wholesaler, started a store, built a cabinet for their magic materials, set up a small library of magic books, and produced a magic magazine.
When the students learned that professional magicians held annual conferences open to anyone, six students and I traveled to Philadelphia for the International Brotherhood of Magicians conference. It was an eye-opening experience for both the students and me. I had the students plan the trip, choose nutritious food, and figure out how they would endure the long drive with games. One game was to name a magician for each letter of the alphabet. I was astonished that they did it for every letter except Q. They had dug in and learned far more than I imparted. We argued ethical issues on topics of magic.
While a magician’s club might seem trivial, I found that students learned to research, solve problems, work together, calculate; learned some principles of psychology; did reading and writing; exercised creativity; and entertained others. I did not overly direct them but responded to their questions and needs. It was a powerful learning experience for the students and for me. Their enthusiasm and energy were contagious.
I suggest that every school and teaching practice needs to pass these tests: 1) Does this practice contribute to the school’s mission of preparing students for active life in a democracy, productive careers, lifelong learning, and talent development? 2) Is the practice congruent with the learning needs of students? and 3) Are the practices brain compatible?
Most school practices fail on these grounds, not because teachers don’t work hard or are not dedicated to their students. Instead, they fail because the entire educational enterprise is so out of sync with the principles of learning that it would be pointless to explore new paths in a pre-set curriculum. Teachers and administrators feel powerless and lack authority to change staff configuration, budget allocations, and other key areas of schooling.
Alfie Kohn, one my favorites on research on learning and a prolific author of books and articles, summarizes contradictions about schooling with ten “obvious truths”:
- Much of the material students are required to memorize is soon forgotten.
- Just knowing a lot of facts doesn’t mean you’re smart.
- Students are more likely to learn what they find interesting.
- Students are less interested in whatever they’re forced to do and more enthusiastic when they have something to say.
- Just because doing X raises standardized test scores doesn’t mean X should be done.
- Students are more likely to succeed in a place where they feel known and cared about.
- We want children to develop in many ways, not just academically.
- Just because a lesson (or book or class or test) is harder doesn’t mean it’s better.
- Kids aren’t just short adults.
- Substance matters more than labels.[79]
As we shall see, schools can be organized to achieve breakthroughs in ways that are congruent with how people learn and consistent with the mission of education.[80] As educator-researchers on brain-based learning, Renata and Geoffrey Caine wrote:
This approach to teaching based on natural learning requires many shifts in our collective beliefs about learning, teaching, and “schooling. It will require a fundamental shift in how everyone sees his or her role and responsibilities…But ultimately, what we propose makes more sense and appears more useful for those who will be living in a connected, information, and collaboration-driven world.[81]
Summary
- Student motivation and interest drive learning.
- Schools largely ignore students’ questions and interests.
- The brain is made for learning.
- Schools are largely brain antagonistic by design though not intentionally.
- Skilled teachers have been using brain-based learning processes without knowing the terminology.
[1] National Resource Council. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.
[2] Black, C. (2016). A thousand rivers: What the modern world has forgotten about children and learning. Retrieved from http://carolblack.org/a-thousand-rivers.
[3] Buckingham, B. R. (1938). Disciplinary values in individualized instruction. The Education Record.
[4] American Psychology Association. (1997). Learner-centered psychological principles: Guidelines for school redesign and reform. Washington, DC: Learner-Centered Principles Work Group of the American Psychological Association’s Board of Educational Affairs. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/ed/governance/bea/learner-centered.pdf.
[5] Gopnik, A., Meltzoff, A. N., & Kuhl, P. K. (2000). The scientist in the crib: What early learning tells us about the mind. New York: William Morrow.
[6] Black, C. (2016). A thousand rivers: What the modern world has forgotten about children and learning. Retrieved from http://carolblack.org/a-thousand-rivers. This is an extraordinary essay about learning.
[7] Zhao, Y. (2012). World class learners: Educating creative and entrepreneurial students. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
[8] Diamond, J. (2012). The world until yesterday: What we can learn from traditional societies? New York: Viking Press.
[9] Abbott, J. (ed.). (2014). Battling for the soul of education. St. Fortitude Valley, Australia: Independent Schools of Queensland.
[10] Holt, J. (1989). Learning all the time: How small children begin to read, write, count, and investigate the world without being taught. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley; Holt, J. (1982). How children fail. Cambridge, MA: Merloyd Lawrence; Holt, J. (1983). How children learn. Cambridge, MA: Merloyd Lawrence.
[11] Eminent scholar Jean Berko Gleason, author of the Wug test, found that even young children possess implicit knowledge of linguistic morphology. This is considered one of the foremost research findings about language development.
[12] Love, J. (2012). What toddlers know they don’t know about plurals: Fifty years later, the Wug test is still teaching us how children learn new word forms. The American Scholar. The Wug test measures creativity.
[13] Hart, L. (2002). Human brain and human learning. Kent, WA: Books for Educators.
[14] Harrison, S. (2002). The happy child: Changing the heart of education. Boulder, CO: Sentient Publications. A delightful little book that asks crucial questions about the true nature of children and learning. Harrison gives some of the most humane answers I’ve encountered. Also charming and persuasive: Christakis, E. (2017). The importance of being little: What young children really need from grownups. London: Penguin.
[15] Holzman, M. (January 19, 2005). Preschool’s effects at 40: The news from Ypsilanti. Education Week. Retrieved from https://highscope.org.
[16] http://abc.fpg.unc.edu/.
[17] Sroufe, L. A., Egeland, B., Carlson, E. A., & Collins, W. A. (2005). The development of the person: The Minnesota study of risk and adaptation from birth to adulthood. New York: The Guilford Press.
[18] Moyer, M. W. (March/April 2017). Getting preschool right. Scientific American Mind.
[19] The longest continuing follow-up study is Terman’s study of gifted children from childhood to old age. (The remaining subjects are in their nineties.) Leslie, M. (July/August 2000). The vexing legacy of Lewis Terman. Stanford Alumni.
[20] “Each one teach one” captures the impact of children learning from one another. The phrase originated in slavery times, when teaching slaves how to read was forbidden. Also, delightfully depicted in TED talks, Sugata Mitra tells of his “hole in the wall” observation and of numerous other self-teaching episodes with children around the world. See also his School in the Cloud TED talk: https://www.theschoolinthecloud.org/about/.
[21] Scribner, H. (April 27, 2015). Five benefits of showing your child unconditional love. Deseret News National. This literature base supports healthier children, better parent-child relations, and learning from love without condition for children.
[22] Risley, T. A., & Hart, B. (1995) Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.
[23] Smith, F. (2011). Understanding reading: A psycholinguistic analysis of reading and learning to read, sixth ed. London: Routledge.
[24] Barker, J. (1985). Discovering the future: The business of paradigms. Burnsville, MN: Charthouse. CD. Also Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[25] Rose, T. (2016). The end of average: How we succeed in a world that values sameness. San Francisco: Harper One. Todd Rose is director of the Center for Individual Opportunity, Harvard University. He can be seen on numerous videos on YouTube.
[26] Jeffery Holte and Ellie Tofte of Jennings Community School, a charter school in St. Paul, Minnesota, designed and led the expeditions. As of the writing of this book, I am chair of the school board for this school.
[27] Interestingly, some of the students on the trip to Ghana were astonished that, despite primitive schools, children were standing around the edges of the schoolyard, wanting to come into school, but their parents couldn’t afford the five-dollar tuition. Why such motivation to learn under primitive conditions yet reluctance to attend school by US students?
[28] Brobinsky, B. (1977). Defining the basics of American education. Bloomington, IN: The Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation.
[29] Of course, the results of their searches were meager in contrast to looking up information on the Internet. Hence, we more often used human resources like interviews in person or by telephone.
[30] Hart, L. A. (2002). Human brain and human learning. Black Diamond, WA: Books for Educators. See also Jones, T. P. Educating for the human brain. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
[31] De Carlo, G. (1969). Why and how to build school buildings. Harvard Educational Review.
[32] For a delightful and convincing discussion of the power of play, see the Tinkergarten site: https://www.tinkergarten.com/.
[33] Gardner, H. E. (2011). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic Books.
[34] Dunn, R., & Dunn, K. (1986). Teaching students through their individual learning styles: A practical approach. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Reston. http://www.ilsa-learning-styles.com/.
[35] Kohl, H. (1994). I won’t learn from you and other thoughts on creative maladjustment. New York: New Press. Also Harbour, P. M. (2012). Community educators: A resource for educating and developing our youth. Dayton, OH: Kettering Foundation Press.
[36] Hirsh, S. (1955). The fears men live by. New York: Harper and Brothers. An excellent book on how prejudice develops. Based on the studies by Theodor Adorno, author of The Authoritarian Personality, Hirsh writes a readable, compelling, and provocative book about what science has learned of prejudice and what can be done about it. It also explains the frightful long-term impact of rigid authoritarian parenting.
[37] Wallace, T. L. & Chhuon, V. (2014). Proximal processes in urban classrooms: Engagement and disaffection in urban youth of color American Educational Research Journal, 51 (5).
[38] Thapa, A., Cohen, J., Guffey, S., & Higgins-D’Alessandro, A. (2013). A review of school climate research. Review of Educational Research.
[39] Greenberg, D. (1995). Free at last: The Sudbury Valley School. Sudbury, MA: Sudbury Valley Press.
[40] See for example Deci, E., & Flaste, R. (1996). Why we do what we do: Understanding self-motivation. New York: Penguin Press; Pink, D. (2009). Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. New York: Riverhead Books.
[41] Azzam, A. (September 2014). Motivated to learn: A conversation with Daniel Pink. Educational Leadership.
[42] Brown, C. (1975). Literacy in 30 hours: Paulo Freire’s process in North East Brazil. Danbury, CT: Writers and Readers, Ltd.
[43] Led by Lumiar Institute: http://www.international3c.org/node/55.
[44] Progressive group of schools: www.kunskapsskolan.com.
[45] Google “Finland progressive education” for several pieces on their leadership.
[46] Google “Korea Smart schools” for several pieces on departures from traditional schools.
[47] Kenya: https://www.kicd.ac.ke/images/downloads/CURRICULUMFRAMEWORK.pdf.
[48] Innovation Unit. (2013). Redesigning education: Shaping learning systems around the globe. Seattle, WA: Booktrope and Global Education Leaders Program.
[49] See, for example, Bandura. A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: Freeman and Company; Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2002). Handbook of self-determination research. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press; Thiessen, D., & Cook-Sather, A. (eds.). (2007). International handbook of student experience in elementary and secondary school. Dordrecht, NED: Springer; Centers for Disease Control. (2016). Adverse childhood experiences. Washington, DC: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/violence-prevention/acestudy/index.html.
[50] Ashton-Warner, S. (1986). Teacher. New York: Simon & Schuster.
[51] Smith, F. (2011). Understanding reading: A psycholinguistic analysis of reading and learning to read, 6th rev. ed. New York: Routledge. Other books by the same author offer insights about reading.
[52] See SelfDesign daily message: http://www.selfdesign.com.
[53] Loughmiller, C. (1965). Wilderness Road. Austin: University of Texas.
[54] Bluestein, J. (2001). Creating emotionally safe schools: A guide for educators and parents. Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications. A comprehensive guide thoroughly documenting mental-health issues. Includes useful surveys and questionnaires.
[55] Lesch, L. (2014). Creative learning for the information age: How classrooms can better prepare students. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Also Lesch, L. (2009). Learning not schooling: Reimaging the purpose of education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
[56] Zmuda, A., Kuklis, R., & Klein, E. Transforming schools: Creating a culture of continuous improvement. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
[7 Adelman, H. S., & Taylor, L. (2008). Rebuilding for learning: Addressing barriers to learning and teaching and re-engaging students. New York: Scholastic. Retrieved from http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/.
[58] Williams, R. (1967). You are extraordinary. New York: Random House.
[59] See, for example, Palmer, S. (2016). Upstart: The case for raising the school starting age and providing what the under-sevens really need. Hillside, UK: Rudolf Steiner Press; Sahlberg, P. (2014). Finnish lessons 2.0: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland? revised ed. New York: Teachers College Press; Rohwer, W. (September 1971). Prime time for education: Early childhood or adolescence? Harvard Educational Review. Eminent scholars in the field of reading deplore the grade placement and overemphasis on reading with concomitant embarrassment and shame for the child. See Children of the Code project: www.childrenofthecode.org.
[60] Torsten, H. (1967). International study of achievement in mathematics, vol. 2. Uppsala, SWE: Almquist & Wilsells.
[61] A good example for this point comes from the work of Thomas Armstrong in his various books. For example, Armstrong, T. (2005). The best school: How human development research should inform educational practice. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
[62] Taylor, C. W. (ed.). (1972). Climate for creativity reports. Oxford, UK: Pergamon Press. Also Taylor, C. W. (March/April 1978). Multiple talent teaching. Today’s Education. [63] http://www.pz.harvard.edu/.
[64] Gardner, H. E. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic Books.
[65] Metacognition: an awareness of one’s thinking, sometimes referred to as thinking about thinking.
[66] Hart, L. A. (1969). The classroom disaster. New York: Teachers College Press.
[67] Crack the code: understand the meaning of letters and words on a page. Retrieved from http://www.learningstewards.org.
[68] Metzger, M. A. (2016). A prison called school: Creating effective schools for all learners. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Also Rose, M. (2014). Why school? Reclaiming education for all of us. New York: The New Press; Fuentes, A. (2011). Lockdown High: When the schoolhouse becomes a jailhouse. London: Verso.
[69] Lewin, K., Lippitt, R., & White, R. K. (1939). Patterns of aggressive behavior in experimentally created social climates. The Journal of Social Psychology (10)276. It appeared again in another famous experiment with boys in a camp setting: Sherif, M., Harvey, O. J., Hood, W. R., Sherif, C. W., & White, J. (1988). The robbers’ cave experiment: Intergroup conflict and cooperation. Middletown, OH: Wesleyan University Press. (Originally published as Intergroup Conflict and Group Relations.); McLeod, S. A. (2008). Robbers’ cave. Retrieved from www.simplypsychology.org/robbers-cave.html.
[70] Macdonald, J. B., Wolfson, B. J., & Zeret E. (1973). Re-schooling society: A conceptual model. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. This booklet conveys the spirit of the 1960s and ’70s when most institutions were questioned for their validity. It’s astonishing to me that these extraordinarily humane-centered ideas disappeared in the back-to-basics movement of the 1980s and to this day, except for research scholars reciting principles of learning. Many have forgotten earlier movements and concepts like John Dewey’s writing and the work of Maria Montessori in the late nineteenth century.
[71] Greenberg, D. (1995). Free at last: The Sudbury Valley School. Sudbury, MA: Sudbury Valley Press.
[72] Griffith, M. (1998). The unschooling handbook: How to use the whole world as your child’s classroom. New York: Three Rivers Press.
[73] Tailoring instruction to differences among students.
[74] Tyack, D., & Cuban, L. (1997). Tinkering toward utopia: A century of public school reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
[75] Of course, every profession has its technical language as shortcuts to long explanations, but the problem with education is the use of these terms with parents and the public. Education professors promote these vague and often polysyllabic terms, and new ones appear often for the latest development (fad). My favorite is RTI, which stands for response to intervention. It could be simply said as a tutor for slow learners rather than the official definition, which runs thirty-seven words on the RTI network. An amusing exercise in creating impressive educational phrases is randomly combining jargon verbs, adjectives, and nouns: http://www.sciencegeek.net/lingo.html.
[76] Quotes from an anonymous teacher in the following blog post: Wiggins, G. (October 10, 2014). . https://genius.com/Grant-wiggins-a-veteran-teacher-turned-coach-shadows-2-students-for-2-days-a-sobering-lesson-learned-annotated.
[77] Bettelheim, R. (November 15, 2010). “Time for school to stop damaging children.” Huffpost.
[78] See, for example, Lounsbury, J., & Marini J. (1964). The junior high school we saw: One day in the eighth grade. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. A report for the ASCD Commission on Secondary Curriculum. The study showed a large disconnect between what happens in classrooms and modern learning principles. Lounsbury repeated the study several times over twenty years with similar results. Lounsbury, J. H., Marani, J. D., & Compton, M. F. (1980). The middle school in profile: A day in the seventh grade. Fairborn, OH: National Middle School Association; Lounsbury, J. H., & Johnston, J. H. (1988). Life in the three 6th grades. Reston, VA: National Association of Secondary School Principals; Lounsbury, J. H., & Clark, D. C. (1990). Inside grade eight: From apathy to excitement. Reston, VA: National Association of Secondary School Principals. There have been other similarly detailed observations of schooling showing the disconnect between what happens in schools and what is known about learning, such as Goodlad, J. (2004). A Place Called School: Twentieth Anniversary Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill; Jackson, P. (1990). Life in classrooms. New York: Teachers College Press.
[79] Kohn, A. (April 2011). “Well, duh!”—Ten obvious truths that we shouldn’t be ignoring. American School Board Journal. An abridged form of these is in the introduction to Feel-bad education: And other contrarian essays on children and schooling. An amazing amount of thoughtful, research-based material, including this list, is also found on Kohn’s blog: http://www.alfiekohn.org/blog.
[80] Spangler, D., et al. (2016). Seizing the moment: Realizing the promise of student-centered learning. Hartford, CT: Our Piece of the Pie. Based on four principles: learning is personalized; learning is competency based; learning happens anytime, anywhere; and students take ownership. An outstanding booklet!
[81] Caine, R., & Caine, G. (Autumn, 2011). How new research on learning is rewriting how schools work and teachers teach. Learning Landscapes.
[2] Black, C. (2016). A thousand rivers: What the modern world has forgotten about children and learning. Retrieved from http://carolblack.org/a-thousand-rivers.
[3] Buckingham, B. R. (1938). Disciplinary values in individualized instruction. The Education Record.
[4] American Psychology Association. (1997). Learner-centered psychological principles: Guidelines for school redesign and reform. Washington, DC: Learner-Centered Principles Work Group of the American Psychological Association’s Board of Educational Affairs. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/ed/governance/bea/learner-centered.pdf.
[5] Gopnik, A., Meltzoff, A. N., & Kuhl, P. K. (2000). The scientist in the crib: What early learning tells us about the mind. New York: William Morrow.
[6] Black, C. (2016). A thousand rivers: What the modern world has forgotten about children and learning. Retrieved from http://carolblack.org/a-thousand-rivers. This is an extraordinary essay about learning.
[7] Zhao, Y. (2012). World class learners: Educating creative and entrepreneurial students. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
[8] Diamond, J. (2012). The world until yesterday: What we can learn from traditional societies? New York: Viking Press.
[9] Abbott, J. (ed.). (2014). Battling for the soul of education. St. Fortitude Valley, Australia: Independent Schools of Queensland.
[10] Holt, J. (1989). Learning all the time: How small children begin to read, write, count, and investigate the world without being taught. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley; Holt, J. (1982). How children fail. Cambridge, MA: Merloyd Lawrence; Holt, J. (1983). How children learn. Cambridge, MA: Merloyd Lawrence.
[11] Eminent scholar Jean Berko Gleason, author of the Wug test, found that even young children possess implicit knowledge of linguistic morphology. This is considered one of the foremost research findings about language development.
[12] Love, J. (2012). What toddlers know they don’t know about plurals: Fifty years later, the Wug test is still teaching us how children learn new word forms. The American Scholar. The Wug test measures creativity.
[13] Hart, L. (2002). Human brain and human learning. Kent, WA: Books for Educators.
[14] Harrison, S. (2002). The happy child: Changing the heart of education. Boulder, CO: Sentient Publications. A delightful little book that asks crucial questions about the true nature of children and learning. Harrison gives some of the most humane answers I’ve encountered. Also charming and persuasive: Christakis, E. (2017). The importance of being little: What young children really need from grownups. London: Penguin.
[15] Holzman, M. (January 19, 2005). Preschool’s effects at 40: The news from Ypsilanti. Education Week. Retrieved from https://highscope.org.
[16] http://abc.fpg.unc.edu/.
[17] Sroufe, L. A., Egeland, B., Carlson, E. A., & Collins, W. A. (2005). The development of the person: The Minnesota study of risk and adaptation from birth to adulthood. New York: The Guilford Press.
[18] Moyer, M. W. (March/April 2017). Getting preschool right. Scientific American Mind.
[19] The longest continuing follow-up study is Terman’s study of gifted children from childhood to old age. (The remaining subjects are in their nineties.) Leslie, M. (July/August 2000). The vexing legacy of Lewis Terman. Stanford Alumni.
[20] “Each one teach one” captures the impact of children learning from one another. The phrase originated in slavery times, when teaching slaves how to read was forbidden. Also, delightfully depicted in TED talks, Sugata Mitra tells of his “hole in the wall” observation and of numerous other self-teaching episodes with children around the world. See also his School in the Cloud TED talk: https://www.theschoolinthecloud.org/about/.
[21] Scribner, H. (April 27, 2015). Five benefits of showing your child unconditional love. Deseret News National. This literature base supports healthier children, better parent-child relations, and learning from love without condition for children.
[22] Risley, T. A., & Hart, B. (1995) Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.
[23] Smith, F. (2011). Understanding reading: A psycholinguistic analysis of reading and learning to read, sixth ed. London: Routledge.
[24] Barker, J. (1985). Discovering the future: The business of paradigms. Burnsville, MN: Charthouse. CD. Also Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[25] Rose, T. (2016). The end of average: How we succeed in a world that values sameness. San Francisco: Harper One. Todd Rose is director of the Center for Individual Opportunity, Harvard University. He can be seen on numerous videos on YouTube.
[26] Jeffery Holte and Ellie Tofte of Jennings Community School, a charter school in St. Paul, Minnesota, designed and led the expeditions. As of the writing of this book, I am chair of the school board for this school.
[27] Interestingly, some of the students on the trip to Ghana were astonished that, despite primitive schools, children were standing around the edges of the schoolyard, wanting to come into school, but their parents couldn’t afford the five-dollar tuition. Why such motivation to learn under primitive conditions yet reluctance to attend school by US students?
[28] Brobinsky, B. (1977). Defining the basics of American education. Bloomington, IN: The Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation.
[29] Of course, the results of their searches were meager in contrast to looking up information on the Internet. Hence, we more often used human resources like interviews in person or by telephone.
[30] Hart, L. A. (2002). Human brain and human learning. Black Diamond, WA: Books for Educators. See also Jones, T. P. Educating for the human brain. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
[31] De Carlo, G. (1969). Why and how to build school buildings. Harvard Educational Review.
[32] For a delightful and convincing discussion of the power of play, see the Tinkergarten site: https://www.tinkergarten.com/.
[33] Gardner, H. E. (2011). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic Books.
[34] Dunn, R., & Dunn, K. (1986). Teaching students through their individual learning styles: A practical approach. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Reston. http://www.ilsa-learning-styles.com/.
[35] Kohl, H. (1994). I won’t learn from you and other thoughts on creative maladjustment. New York: New Press. Also Harbour, P. M. (2012). Community educators: A resource for educating and developing our youth. Dayton, OH: Kettering Foundation Press.
[36] Hirsh, S. (1955). The fears men live by. New York: Harper and Brothers. An excellent book on how prejudice develops. Based on the studies by Theodor Adorno, author of The Authoritarian Personality, Hirsh writes a readable, compelling, and provocative book about what science has learned of prejudice and what can be done about it. It also explains the frightful long-term impact of rigid authoritarian parenting.
[37] Wallace, T. L. & Chhuon, V. (2014). Proximal processes in urban classrooms: Engagement and disaffection in urban youth of color American Educational Research Journal, 51 (5).
[38] Thapa, A., Cohen, J., Guffey, S., & Higgins-D’Alessandro, A. (2013). A review of school climate research. Review of Educational Research.
[39] Greenberg, D. (1995). Free at last: The Sudbury Valley School. Sudbury, MA: Sudbury Valley Press.
[40] See for example Deci, E., & Flaste, R. (1996). Why we do what we do: Understanding self-motivation. New York: Penguin Press; Pink, D. (2009). Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. New York: Riverhead Books.
[41] Azzam, A. (September 2014). Motivated to learn: A conversation with Daniel Pink. Educational Leadership.
[42] Brown, C. (1975). Literacy in 30 hours: Paulo Freire’s process in North East Brazil. Danbury, CT: Writers and Readers, Ltd.
[43] Led by Lumiar Institute: http://www.international3c.org/node/55.
[44] Progressive group of schools: www.kunskapsskolan.com.
[45] Google “Finland progressive education” for several pieces on their leadership.
[46] Google “Korea Smart schools” for several pieces on departures from traditional schools.
[47] Kenya: https://www.kicd.ac.ke/images/downloads/CURRICULUMFRAMEWORK.pdf.
[48] Innovation Unit. (2013). Redesigning education: Shaping learning systems around the globe. Seattle, WA: Booktrope and Global Education Leaders Program.
[49] See, for example, Bandura. A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: Freeman and Company; Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2002). Handbook of self-determination research. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press; Thiessen, D., & Cook-Sather, A. (eds.). (2007). International handbook of student experience in elementary and secondary school. Dordrecht, NED: Springer; Centers for Disease Control. (2016). Adverse childhood experiences. Washington, DC: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/violence-prevention/acestudy/index.html.
[50] Ashton-Warner, S. (1986). Teacher. New York: Simon & Schuster.
[51] Smith, F. (2011). Understanding reading: A psycholinguistic analysis of reading and learning to read, 6th rev. ed. New York: Routledge. Other books by the same author offer insights about reading.
[52] See SelfDesign daily message: http://www.selfdesign.com.
[53] Loughmiller, C. (1965). Wilderness Road. Austin: University of Texas.
[54] Bluestein, J. (2001). Creating emotionally safe schools: A guide for educators and parents. Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications. A comprehensive guide thoroughly documenting mental-health issues. Includes useful surveys and questionnaires.
[55] Lesch, L. (2014). Creative learning for the information age: How classrooms can better prepare students. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Also Lesch, L. (2009). Learning not schooling: Reimaging the purpose of education. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
[56] Zmuda, A., Kuklis, R., & Klein, E. Transforming schools: Creating a culture of continuous improvement. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
[7 Adelman, H. S., & Taylor, L. (2008). Rebuilding for learning: Addressing barriers to learning and teaching and re-engaging students. New York: Scholastic. Retrieved from http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/.
[58] Williams, R. (1967). You are extraordinary. New York: Random House.
[59] See, for example, Palmer, S. (2016). Upstart: The case for raising the school starting age and providing what the under-sevens really need. Hillside, UK: Rudolf Steiner Press; Sahlberg, P. (2014). Finnish lessons 2.0: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland? revised ed. New York: Teachers College Press; Rohwer, W. (September 1971). Prime time for education: Early childhood or adolescence? Harvard Educational Review. Eminent scholars in the field of reading deplore the grade placement and overemphasis on reading with concomitant embarrassment and shame for the child. See Children of the Code project: www.childrenofthecode.org.
[60] Torsten, H. (1967). International study of achievement in mathematics, vol. 2. Uppsala, SWE: Almquist & Wilsells.
[61] A good example for this point comes from the work of Thomas Armstrong in his various books. For example, Armstrong, T. (2005). The best school: How human development research should inform educational practice. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
[62] Taylor, C. W. (ed.). (1972). Climate for creativity reports. Oxford, UK: Pergamon Press. Also Taylor, C. W. (March/April 1978). Multiple talent teaching. Today’s Education. [63] http://www.pz.harvard.edu/.
[64] Gardner, H. E. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic Books.
[65] Metacognition: an awareness of one’s thinking, sometimes referred to as thinking about thinking.
[66] Hart, L. A. (1969). The classroom disaster. New York: Teachers College Press.
[67] Crack the code: understand the meaning of letters and words on a page. Retrieved from http://www.learningstewards.org.
[68] Metzger, M. A. (2016). A prison called school: Creating effective schools for all learners. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Also Rose, M. (2014). Why school? Reclaiming education for all of us. New York: The New Press; Fuentes, A. (2011). Lockdown High: When the schoolhouse becomes a jailhouse. London: Verso.
[69] Lewin, K., Lippitt, R., & White, R. K. (1939). Patterns of aggressive behavior in experimentally created social climates. The Journal of Social Psychology (10)276. It appeared again in another famous experiment with boys in a camp setting: Sherif, M., Harvey, O. J., Hood, W. R., Sherif, C. W., & White, J. (1988). The robbers’ cave experiment: Intergroup conflict and cooperation. Middletown, OH: Wesleyan University Press. (Originally published as Intergroup Conflict and Group Relations.); McLeod, S. A. (2008). Robbers’ cave. Retrieved from www.simplypsychology.org/robbers-cave.html.
[70] Macdonald, J. B., Wolfson, B. J., & Zeret E. (1973). Re-schooling society: A conceptual model. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. This booklet conveys the spirit of the 1960s and ’70s when most institutions were questioned for their validity. It’s astonishing to me that these extraordinarily humane-centered ideas disappeared in the back-to-basics movement of the 1980s and to this day, except for research scholars reciting principles of learning. Many have forgotten earlier movements and concepts like John Dewey’s writing and the work of Maria Montessori in the late nineteenth century.
[71] Greenberg, D. (1995). Free at last: The Sudbury Valley School. Sudbury, MA: Sudbury Valley Press.
[72] Griffith, M. (1998). The unschooling handbook: How to use the whole world as your child’s classroom. New York: Three Rivers Press.
[73] Tailoring instruction to differences among students.
[74] Tyack, D., & Cuban, L. (1997). Tinkering toward utopia: A century of public school reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
[75] Of course, every profession has its technical language as shortcuts to long explanations, but the problem with education is the use of these terms with parents and the public. Education professors promote these vague and often polysyllabic terms, and new ones appear often for the latest development (fad). My favorite is RTI, which stands for response to intervention. It could be simply said as a tutor for slow learners rather than the official definition, which runs thirty-seven words on the RTI network. An amusing exercise in creating impressive educational phrases is randomly combining jargon verbs, adjectives, and nouns: http://www.sciencegeek.net/lingo.html.
[76] Quotes from an anonymous teacher in the following blog post: Wiggins, G. (October 10, 2014). . https://genius.com/Grant-wiggins-a-veteran-teacher-turned-coach-shadows-2-students-for-2-days-a-sobering-lesson-learned-annotated.
[77] Bettelheim, R. (November 15, 2010). “Time for school to stop damaging children.” Huffpost.
[78] See, for example, Lounsbury, J., & Marini J. (1964). The junior high school we saw: One day in the eighth grade. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. A report for the ASCD Commission on Secondary Curriculum. The study showed a large disconnect between what happens in classrooms and modern learning principles. Lounsbury repeated the study several times over twenty years with similar results. Lounsbury, J. H., Marani, J. D., & Compton, M. F. (1980). The middle school in profile: A day in the seventh grade. Fairborn, OH: National Middle School Association; Lounsbury, J. H., & Johnston, J. H. (1988). Life in the three 6th grades. Reston, VA: National Association of Secondary School Principals; Lounsbury, J. H., & Clark, D. C. (1990). Inside grade eight: From apathy to excitement. Reston, VA: National Association of Secondary School Principals. There have been other similarly detailed observations of schooling showing the disconnect between what happens in schools and what is known about learning, such as Goodlad, J. (2004). A Place Called School: Twentieth Anniversary Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill; Jackson, P. (1990). Life in classrooms. New York: Teachers College Press.
[79] Kohn, A. (April 2011). “Well, duh!”—Ten obvious truths that we shouldn’t be ignoring. American School Board Journal. An abridged form of these is in the introduction to Feel-bad education: And other contrarian essays on children and schooling. An amazing amount of thoughtful, research-based material, including this list, is also found on Kohn’s blog: http://www.alfiekohn.org/blog.
[80] Spangler, D., et al. (2016). Seizing the moment: Realizing the promise of student-centered learning. Hartford, CT: Our Piece of the Pie. Based on four principles: learning is personalized; learning is competency based; learning happens anytime, anywhere; and students take ownership. An outstanding booklet!
[81] Caine, R., & Caine, G. (Autumn, 2011). How new research on learning is rewriting how schools work and teachers teach. Learning Landscapes.
