This view from our porch has been just too inviting to resist. On most summer evenings, Jane and I have been able to spend our time watching a mother deer and her twin fawns drift into our yard just before dusk and graze peacefully on the tall grass under our border trees. Even our dog, Iona, has been pretty mellow in terms of communing with nature — and, in particular, with the two fawns. The danger of Iona chasing the deer seems to have faded over time, and, as long as the fawns do not try to run past her disguised as yellow tennis balls, I am pretty sure that this respectful truce will continue.

I wish that I could say that my break from blog writing was really just a common sense respite from activity. That I was just a little like Iona resting with her chin on her paws in harmony with her world. I am pretty sure that that was what it was for perhaps the first two or three weeks of the hiatus. However, when I attempted to take up my blog writing again in August, I found that I just lacked enthusiasm for the task. Upon reflection, I realized that my issue really centered on the fact that I saw the blog more as a “task” than as a pleasant excursion into thought. What had begun as a fun activity for me had somehow morphed into a burden that I did not want or need.

In an attempt to motivate myself, I re-read the posts that I have made since I started the blog. What I found was that there was very little that I would change or revise. I truly believe in what I have written. At the same time, I did recognize a need to revise the way I was thinking. That is what my summer weeks of reflection were telling me.

I still feel a desire to write about things that matter to me, but I know that I must do that with two particular thoughts in mind. First, I intend to publish on my own schedule in the context of what is convenient for me. I will work the writing around other activities that are also important to me (like taking long walks with Iona or playing with my grandchildren). I have worked all my life to be free of deadlines, and it just makes no sense to engage in activities that create them. Second, whether I am publishing poems or essays or comments about educational issues, I intend to make a positive contribution. I am going to write for something and not against something. This is particularly true when it comes to my posts about education. I am tired of the negativity that surrounds educational issues, and I simply refuse to have that negativity rob me of my motivation to write. I have certain values and beliefs about learning that have guided my life and my career. That is what I am going to write about. That is my passion.

And so I begin — again.

“I know that most of what we teach is best learned in reflection after an experience than it is in front end lectures.  I know that more gets accomplished over the course of a full year when we build debrief time into the learning process. I know that we will have more success if we work from real learning experiences as they are lived and then ‘back’ into the grand language of our curricular documents. I know that this is doable.”

My intention in this post is not just to state abstractly that this can be done but to illustrate how it might be done in practical terms. In order to do this, I will begin the post in a very concrete and personal way. Then, I am going to make a connection to the Critical Thinking and Problem Solving outcome as it is presented in the P21 Framework (  http://www.p21.org/storage/documents/P21_Framework_Definitions.pdf ). I use this outcome as an an example, but what is said is also true for the remaining skill outcomes as well.

I realize that, while the United States is focusing on 21st Century Skills in our reform efforts, other countries may have different mandates specific to them. Nevertheless, I think that this post is relevant enough to have some connection to teachers anywhere.  The learning issues involved transcend national boundaries.

~  A Real Life Context for Learning ~

Last August, Hurricane Irene devastated our section of New York State and flooded several towns in our school district. The destruction was enormous. The passage below was written by Riley Young, a 10 year old boy in our school. The picture at the end of the story is the house that the boy describes. Please forget about teaching skills for the moment, and just read what this boy has to say.

When that flood ended, we had a number of students in our school who had experiences just like Riley’s. Many of our children were displaced and had virtually nothing left except for the clothes they were wearing when the flood hit. Some were living in tents and travel trailers, while others were living with relatives and neighbors. We lost roads and bridges and communication infrastructure. Somehow school and academic work was just not as important as the fundamental survival issues that we needed to address.

It really was the case that we could not open our school in a business as usual way. We had to address the human needs of our students, and our teachers were put into a situation that teachers everywhere understand all too well: when crises hit, it is often the teachers in a school who help children survive the unpleasant or tragic present in order to take their next steps forward into an uncertain future. It is a job that the overwhelming majority of teachers do straight from their hearts. They put aside schedules and lesson plans and tests, and they just do for children. Most of the time teachers are guided by the same intuitions that made a teaching career appeal to them in the first place.

In the months following that flood, we did not run out to spend thousands of dollars that we did not have on a “flood survival” or “flood recovery” curriculum. We did not look to publishers to give us neat little curricular packages that could help us guide our students through a difficult time. We did it ourselves, and we did it because we cared and because we could.

We immersed our children in important projects. Some were academic challenges, but others were more community based and very much geared to an “out of school” focus. We did, however, make an effort to connect those experiences to the knowledge and skills we needed to teach within the context of our school curriculum. We embedded those projects in beliefs and values that were central to our overall school culture. We helped our children to collaborate so that we could solve problems that were bigger than any of us could solve as individuals. We taught them to think critically, write creatively and to believe that, even if a problem could not be immediately solved, it could be whittled down into smaller successes that mattered.

One such project turned into one of our end of the year assessments, but it did not come by way of a test. It came by way of a celebration for the publication of a book called The Eyes of the Storm.  Our art teacher, Mrs. Sue Kliza, collected the art that the children created as well as the stories and poems that they had written after the flood, and turned all of that into a book. Riley’s story above was just one of those stories.

I have been an advocate of project based learning for many years, but my observations of our post-flood experiences convince me that the best way to approach the teaching of skills that transfer to life long learning is by embedding those skills in real contexts that students can understand and invest in. They do not need to be terribly creative or cute projects. They can be designed as individual or group activities, and they can be directly tied to the content that we have to teach. The important bit is that students are presented with a real challenge that they have the opportunity to solve and have teachers willing to guide them through their learning process. The expectation must be that skills will evolve over time, and central to the design is the expectation that students will be able to reflect honestly on their learning after the event.

That is what the remainder of this post will be about.

~ 

It can be a daunting task to look at the documents that seek to flesh out educational reforms. What we often see is an endless linear sequence of things we have to do, and, since we cannot seem to “nest” those activities so that we can accomplish multiple objectives or outcomes simultaneously, we tend to become a bit edgy. We worry about both the breadth and depth of our curriculum, and we see our time as being too short to do it all. We examine the present “here” of where our students are, and we are worried about getting them to the “there” of where they need to be by the end of the year.

In my view, the place to begin our planning is with the contexts for learning that we establish as part of our designs. Learning contexts are essential to what we want to accomplish. When we try to teach children how to swim, we put them in water. We do not lay them on sand and tell them to flap their arms and legs about until they get it. When we want to teach them to eat, we give them food. We do not spend endless hours reading nutritional labels to them. I think it is time to stop rubbing salt on children’s lips and saying, “Some day, I will take you to the ocean!”

If we want to teach children to think (creatively or critically), we ought to begin with what they are thinking about or we ought to provide them with something that is worth thinking about. If we want to teach them to work with others or to be able to collaborate, then we need to put them in situations where they get a chance to do that. If we want children to solve problems, then we need to give them honest problems for which we will accept the solution arrived at by the children. We need to have them stop flapping around on the sand and put them in the water.

At this point, I am going to narrow the focus and just look at the components of the Critical Thinking and Problem Solving outcome in the 21st Century Skills initiative as it is presented in the P21 Framework (  http://www.p21.org/storage/documents/P21_Framework_Definitions.pdf ). Here is an excerpt from that document:

I suppose that one salient feature of critical thinking and problem solving is that, in real life, it is very hard to isolate the little “bullet point” refinements in the processes we use. The bullet points do not happen in sequence no matter how neat and logical they might appear in a curricular document. Sometimes they might all occur, and yet, in other situations, they might cluster themselves in a different way. Sometimes, there might even be something not on that list that has to be included as an integral part of the process because it was a function of life as lived.

When it comes to designing a curriculum to teach critical thinking and problem solving, teachers need to make some choices. One early choice is how specifically they need (or want) to plan. They might select a specific outcome to target (like the one excerpted above), and they might even attempt to parse that outcome down into its component parts. For example, with the Critical Thinking and Problem Solving outcome, they might want to design a lesson around how students might “analyze and evaluate major alternative points of view” or how they might “solve different kinds of problems in both conventional and innovative ways”. This would be a neat piece of design work if it could be done effectively. Certainly, that is what seems to be done on some of the slick commercial products that schools purchase. We have a tidy little package of isolated worksheets or sequentially designed computer scripts, and we are told to walk the students through it. These activities are loosely connected to larger units we teach and we can devote instructional time to them, but the artificiality of parsing the process in this way seems to me to be a bit like rubbing salt on child lips and saying, “Some day I will take you to the ocean!”

Before we simply accept this very precise and specific kind of component design as the teacher’s lot, let’s do two things: first, let’s consider this approach from an intellectual perspective; and, second, let’s consider it from a practical perspective.

Intellectually, the effectiveness of a problem solving experience centers on their being a real problem in the first place. It ought to be a messy problem without a clear solution. If what we are doing is presenting a challenge to students and there is only one correct choice to make, then it is not really a problem at all and no ownership is really being transferred to the students. We are simply trying to manipulate them into accepting a pre-determined choice that we have already made for them. We are working with “puzzle solving” and what we are really teaching is “puzzle assembly”.  If it is a real problem and the students have ownership of it, then a range of potential solutions opens up and choices are made. In that situation, problem solving can occur but, by definition, the process is mostly out of the teacher’s control and in the control of the problem solvers themselves — namely, the students. They might demonstrate some of the bullet points in the Critical Thinking and Problem Solving outcome list, but perhaps not all of them. Have they succeeded or failed? How do we assess that?  Would an authentic problem solving process allow for that? Is it responsible for a teacher to structure such a lesson? Is doing this good teaching or bad teaching? Can a learning intention evolve as learning occurs, or do they all have to be rubbed into children’s lips at the start of the lesson?

Then, too, there are practical considerations. How does Critical Thinking and Problem Solving work in the real world? The reason I began with Riley Young’s story is because I think it illustrates the point that I knew I wanted to make by the end of this post. Just consider Riley’s story as you read it. There is much in Riley’s real life experience that connects to this Critical Thinking and Problem Solving outcome. We can trace the “various types of reasoning” behind the family’s actions as the flooding worsened. We can see how details supported the decisions made, how alternatives were explored as the situation became more dire, how the “best analysis” got revised, how “non-familiar problems” were solved in innovative ways, how “points of view” varied with time and circumstances, and how inter-dependent the problem solving process became. Look at the 21st Century excerpt again now from the perspective of Riley Young. What do you think that ten year old can tell us about this outcome? What has he already told us in his story?

If you look at this document in the context of Riley’s essay and in the context of Riley’s needs, it is pretty clear that he needed an opportunity to say what was on his mind. He needed his teacher to be a compassionate listener. He need her to give him the opportunity to write his story and to read it to his classmates. In reality, those activities were part of his debriefing process and his reflection upon those experiences. Such events can become a context for the teaching of 21st Century Skills. It is possible to work backwards from that experience and that story into a pretty effective “lesson” on Critical Thinking and Problem Solving as a 21st Century Skill, and I suspect that such a lesson would at least be the equivalent of anything we might have purchased from a publisher.

~

It seems to me that, as we develop curricular designs for the teaching of 21st Century Skills, we might consider spending less time planning to micro-manage every aspect of skill acquisition and more time on the actual development of skills in real contexts. Maybe we need a little bit less of “teacher as teller” and a little more of “teacher as listener” and “teacher as guide”.

We also ought to worry less about “covering our content” and spend more time developing contexts in which we can recast our curriculum as problems for students to solve.

Finally, although it may be counterintuitive, perhaps students would have better performances on the end of year summative assessments that we worry about if we spent more time during the year on formative assessment.

~

Summer vacations may just be starting, but they promise to be very short-lived for most teachers. Despite the warmth of a summer sun, there is already a bit of a chill in the winds that swirl around our schools. This is a summer of “curriculum alignment” for most teachers.  Maybe, before these summer planning days melt into autumn realities, it might be a good time to consider an important design question: “Is the work we are about to do really going to result in improved learning or better lives for our students or for us?”

I fear that, as we begin our curricular design work, we are likely to start with a focus that is too narrow to meet our ultimate goals. Most of us are locked into a process that will have us look at our curriculum as it is framed by the four corners of a content-specific framework or syllabus or program guide. We will fret about teaching geometry or Spanish or earth science or British literature. We will worry about aligning the essential units of our courses with the overall content standards that are prescribed for us. We will generate “specific documents” to flesh out “broader documents”, and, for sure, we will end the summer with more paper on our desks and on our shelves.

Of course, we need to do this very specific kind of planning. I am not arguing against that, but I really do wonder if the proper place to begin our designing is with the curriculum itself or if we need to be looking at overall school culture first. In their book, Building an Intentional School Culture: Excellence in Academics and Character, Elbot and Fulton make the point that, “as educators, we tend to focus on improving our school’s curriculum, teacher training, and school leadership. Though we have made significant gains in these areas, we must look at the untapped potential of building an intentional school culture, for it is the school culture that serves as the medium for growing our students and teachers.” ( http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/17253_Pages_from_Elbot_Final_Pdf.pdf )

My own teaching experience tells me that school culture is the proper place to begin reform. That is what this post is about. It will not be a post for the squeamish. I am going to describe a real experience I had, and, since this post is read in my home community as well as by some of my former students, I am going to stick as closely as I can to the events as they occurred. I look at my own school (as well as at other schools I have been involved with in both the United States and the United Kingdom), and I have to be honest: the biggest problems I see have less to do with curriculum deficiencies than they have to do with school culture. What I am saying in this post is not a cautionary tale. It is an experience as lived.

I have already written a post about my introduction to constructivist teaching, and I am not going to repeat that here. I will say that I managed to modify my teaching style about midway through my career, and, while it was not an easy task, it was a very rewarding one for me. The experience that I describe here did not happen to a new teacher. It happened to me, a veteran teacher who somehow stumbled into a summer course on experiential learning in the early 1990′s. I know that, when I finished the course that summer, I went back to school really excited about teaching in that way. I was not at all sure that I could do it, but I wanted to.

In the weeks before school that autumn term, I did not align my whole curriculum. I just worked on getting ready for the year, and I only wrote one constructivist lesson plan. I have included that lesson at the end of this post. It was going to be my “make it or break it” lesson. If it worked, I was going to do more with constructivist teaching, and, if it did not work, I was going to put the course in the “interesting but undoable” column of my life and then get back into traditional teaching. I am, at heart, a kind of a perfectionist “either-or” guy, and mediating extremes has not always been a particularly strong suit of mine (but I honestly do try). It would be helpful at this point if you read the lesson at the end of this post now and then return to the next paragraph.

~

Now, this particular lesson was not all that remarkable. One of the extension activities in the textbook I was using at the time suggested having students design a t-shirt to show the fight with Grendel so I was not being particularly creative with that. I did not like that activity as it was suggested in the text because I wanted to tie it more directly to the objectives that I needed to teach (namely, the characteristics of epic poetry) and I just extended the t-shirt design to include that. I also wanted the students to actually get into the spirit of the task so I played around with the language to get them to see the activity as a bit of fun as well. The language I used to introduce the task might not be for everyone, but I knew the students and I knew that this would appeal to them. I had very specific product standards for the t-shirt because I wanted to be able to say at the end of the lesson that we had actually used that lesson to explore the content of what it was that I was teaching. Finally, since NY state was introducing “new standards” back then for their Language Arts Framework, I wanted the activity to be tied directly to those standards:

In the end, I felt comfortable with the task as planned and went ahead with it.

Despite some apprehensions, I felt that there was a good chance for success. When I distributed the task to the students, I had them read it, and it seemed to be well-received. When I was sure that they understood, I divided them into groups and told them to begin. The class fell apart almost immediately. They got up to move their desks, but they simply banged the desks around and created as much chaos as they could. When they finally got into groups, it took a while for them to even look at each other as they worked. They did use some specialist terms associated with the study of literature, but it is oddly dissatisfying to hear students say, “That is not an example of personification, you f***ing a*****e”. After a disastrous 20 minutes, I beat a rapid retreat from constructivism and simply put them back into rows and taught the remainder of the class in my traditional style.  It was safe and orderly, but I felt defeated and knew that we were a real long way from the stated standards in my curriculum framework.

Yet, as defeated as I was on that particular afternoon, I was strangely committed to that lesson. I guess if you spend weeks developing only one lesson plan, you would at least like to get to use it. After some coaching and encouragement from my wife, I returned to class the next day and spent an entire class just teaching the students to move their desks into various room arrangements so that at least that much could be accomplished without incident or bodily harm. It hurt to use a complete period for it, but, if they could at least move the furniture in my room around, the options for more active learning would increase. It was not quite the “basics” that I was expecting to return to, but sometimes we have to begin at the beginning. Life is not always fair, but it is almost always real.

Then, I did something that I was not particularly proud of at the time. In fact, I felt a real sense of shame about it then (and still feel a bit of shame now as I type this). It was not something I wanted other teachers to see, and I would certainly not want to have been evaluated on it. What I did was to copy over the same task for the students, but I left out the process bits dealing with ELA Standard 3. Instead, I wrote some simple “success criteria” on the chalk board for how I wanted the process to go:

* Play/ work safe, fair and hard

* Move desks carefully

* Look at each other when you talk

* Do not say f***

I made sure that the students understood exactly what I wanted from them. The bit that was cultural was the play/work safe, fair and hard. I believed that we needed a community contract in place that would establish a social norm for our interactions. I wanted them to consider safety (both emotional and physical safety). I wanted them to be fair to themselves, to each other and to me. By this, I meant that there were certain rules that had to be followed and that they were as accountable for observing those rules as I was. I wanted them to work hard. Although the task was a little different from my standard assignment, it did not mean that they were any less accountable for doing it. I wanted them to commit to quality performance in whatever we did — whether it was an essay or a t-shirt design. Quality was its own reward. Those rules eventually became the defining “beliefs” for our classroom culture. No matter what we were doing (an individual reading, a pair share, a large group discussion, a test, an essay, a project or whatever), the same community contract applied: Play/work safe, fair and hard. If we could not commit to that much of a learning culture, the rest of what we wanted to do was not of any consequence. I believed that then, and I believe that now.

The students did eventually complete that assignment. They even enjoyed themselves. Once they were done, we had an extended debrief of the entire experience. We spent some serious time in reflection. They spoke about why they enjoyed it and how they needed to do more than to just be “dulled out by English”. They did not want a course where they “just read poetry and wrote about it.” I spoke about what was important to me with the assignment and why it mattered to me. In reality, I believe that they were as ashamed of their first constructivist performance as I was of mine. That debrief was the beginning of who we were as a learning community. It was the start of a much more intentional learning culture that sustained us throughout the year.

I will admit that my “standards” on those first assignments were not really ones that I would encourage others to have. It took time for our culture to evolve so that the state standards could be properly addressed, but, with each debrief, we drew closer to those standards. Students did learn to respect differences of opinions as well as how to give and receive constructive criticism. The reason we were successful, however, had less to do with the curriculum as it was stated in the NYS ELA Framework, and a lot more to do with the culture of the class. Culture trumps curriculum every time in my mind.

I look now at today’s teachers struggling to align curriculum with Common Core standards. I see the same kinds of broad statements that existed some twenty years ago in an earlier effort at reform. I think back to those students who engaged in my first “constructivist” lesson, and I think that, while the rhetoric might have changed, it is still all about “culture”. I am sure that somewhere there exists a classroom where, during the first week of school, a teacher might be able to stand in front of a class and say: “Here is what I want you to do, and I just want to remind you to engage with each other constructively.” However, in too many places, we cannot begin there. In too many places, we have to begin with “Do not say f***”, and then we work backwards into the lofty language of a curricular document. That is just the reality for too many teachers for us to ignore it. We have to teach students how to engage with each other constructively, how to solve problems, how to think critically, how to manage time, and so on. It does not happen because we write flowery phrases on the assignments that we hand out to them. We teach it in concrete ways and in real settings. We need to begin with where they are and work from “here” to “there”. In real classrooms, sometimes the road to using “specialist vocabulary” in a literary discussion begins with “Do not say f***.”

I know some things today, however, that I did not know back on that day I first did the Beowful T-Shirt challenge. I know that there has to be an intentional culture nurtured in a classroom for real learning to occur. I know that we must account for that culture in all of our curricular designs. I know that design is not just a front end, top down process. I know that most of what we teach is best learned in reflection after an experience than it is in front end lectures.  I know that more gets accomplished over the course of a full year when we build debrief time into the learning process. I know that we will have more success if we work from real learning experiences as they are lived and then “back” into the grand language of our curricular documents. I know that this is doable.

I think we would do well this summer to extend our design work just enough to provide for the building of an intentional learning culture into our plans. Given our circumstances, I think that the best we can hope for at the moment is that we can transform the culture in individual classrooms. But that is just a patchwork solution to get us past the first steps in reform. Real reform can only occur when we have the wisdom and the tools and the will to address whole school culture.

~

I fear that, as we begin our curricular design work, we are likely to start with a focus that is too narrow to meet our ultimate goals. Most of us are locked into a process that will have us look at our curriculum as it is framed by the four corners of a content-specific framework or syllabus or program guide. We will fret about teaching geometry or Spanish or earth science or British literature. We will worry about aligning the essential units of our courses with the overall content standards that are prescribed for us. We will generate “specific documents” to flesh out “broader documents”, and, for sure, we will end the summer with more paper on our desks and on our shelves.

Of course, we need to do this very specific kind of planning. I am not arguing against that, but I really do wonder if the proper place to begin our designing is with the curriculum itself or if we need to be looking at overall school culture first. In their book, Building an Intentional School Culture: Excellence in Academics and Character, Elbot and Fulton make the point that, “as educators, we tend to focus on improving our school’s curriculum, teacher training, and school leadership. Though we have made significant gains in these areas, we must look at the untapped potential of building an intentional school culture, for it is the school culture that serves as the medium for growing our students and teachers.” ( http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/17253_Pages_from_Elbot_Final_Pdf.pdf )

My own teaching experience tells me that school culture is the proper place to begin reform. That is what this post is about. It will not be a post for the squeamish. I am going to describe a real experience I had, and, since this post is read in my home community as well as by some of my former students, I am going to stick as closely as I can to the events as they occurred. I look at my own school (as well as at other schools I have been involved with in both the United States and the United Kingdom), and I have to be honest: the biggest problems I see have less to do with curriculum deficiencies than they have to do with school culture. What I am saying in this post is not a cautionary tale. It is an experience as lived.

I have already written a post about my introduction to constructivist teaching, and I am not going to repeat that here. I will say that I managed to modify my teaching style about midway through my career, and, while it was not an easy task, it was a very rewarding one for me. The experience that I describe here did not happen to a new teacher. It happened to me, a veteran teacher who somehow stumbled into a summer course on experiential learning in the early 1990′s. I know that, when I finished the course that summer, I went back to school really excited about teaching in that way. I was not at all sure that I could do it, but I wanted to.

In the weeks before school that autumn term, I did not align my whole curriculum. I just worked on getting ready for the year, and I only wrote one constructivist lesson plan. I have included that lesson at the end of this post. It was going to be my “make it or break it” lesson. If it worked, I was going to do more with constructivist teaching, and, if it did not work, I was going to put the course in the “interesting but undoable” column of my life and then get back into traditional teaching. I am, at heart, a kind of a perfectionist “either-or” guy, and mediating extremes has not always been a particularly strong suit of mine (but I honestly do try). It would be helpful at this point if you read the lesson at the end of this post now and then return to the next paragraph.

~

Now, this particular lesson was not all that remarkable. One of the extension activities in the textbook I was using at the time suggested having students design a t-shirt to show the fight with Grendel so I was not being particularly creative with that. I did not like that activity as it was suggested in the text because I wanted to tie it more directly to the objectives that I needed to teach (namely, the characteristics of epic poetry) and I just extended the t-shirt design to include that. I also wanted the students to actually get into the spirit of the task so I played around with the language to get them to see the activity as a bit of fun as well. The language I used to introduce the task might not be for everyone, but I knew the students and I knew that this would appeal to them. I had very specific product standards for the t-shirt because I wanted to be able to say at the end of the lesson that we had actually used that lesson to explore the content of what it was that I was teaching. Finally, since NY state was introducing “new standards” back then for their Language Arts Framework, I wanted the activity to be tied directly to those standards:

In the end, I felt comfortable with the task as planned and went ahead with it.

Despite some apprehensions, I felt that there was a good chance for success. When I distributed the task to the students, I had them read it, and it seemed to be well-received. When I was sure that they understood, I divided them into groups and told them to begin. The class fell apart almost immediately. They got up to move their desks, but they simply banged the desks around and created as much chaos as they could. When they finally got into groups, it took a while for them to even look at each other as they worked. They did use some specialist terms associated with the study of literature, but it is oddly dissatisfying to hear students say, “That is not an example of personification, you fucking asshole”. After a disastrous 20 minutes, I beat a rapid retreat from constructivism and simply put them back into rows and taught the remainder of the class in my traditional style.  It was safe and orderly, but I felt defeated and knew that we were a real long way from the stated standards in my curriculum framework.

Yet, as defeated as I was on that particular afternoon, I was strangely committed to that lesson. I guess if you spend weeks developing only one lesson plan, you would at least like to get to use it. After some coaching and encouragement from my wife, I returned to class the next day and spent an entire class just teaching the students to move their desks into various room arrangements so that at least that much could be accomplished without incident or bodily harm. It hurt to use a complete period for it, but, if they could at least move the furniture in my room around, the options for more active learning would increase. It was not quite the “basics” that I was expecting to return to, but sometimes we have to begin at the beginning. Life is not always fair, but it is almost always real.

Then, I did something that I was not particularly proud of at the time. In fact, I felt a real sense of shame about it then (and still feel a bit of shame now as I type this). It was not something I wanted other teachers to see, and I would certainly not want to have been evaluated on it. What I did was to copy over the same task for the students, but I left out the process bits dealing with ELA Standard 3. Instead, I wrote some simple “success criteria” on the chalk board for how I wanted the process to go:

* Play/ work safe, fair and hard

* Move desks carefully

* Look at each other when you talk

* Do not say fuck

I made sure that the students understood exactly what I wanted from them. The bit that was cultural was the play/work safe, fair and hard. I believed that we needed a community contract in place that would establish a social norm for our interactions. I wanted them to consider safety (both emotional and physical safety). I wanted them to be fair to themselves, to each other and to me. By this, I meant that there were certain rules that had to be followed and that they were as accountable for observing those rules as I was. I wanted them to work hard. Although the task was a little different from my standard assignment, it did not mean that they were any less accountable for doing it. I wanted them to commit to quality performance in whatever we did — whether it was an essay or a t-shirt design. Quality was its own reward. Those rules eventually became the defining “beliefs” for our classroom culture. No matter what we were doing (an individual reading, a pair share, a large group discussion, a test, an essay, a project or whatever), the same community contract applied: Play/work safe, fair and hard. If we could not commit to that much of a learning culture, the rest of what we wanted to do was not of any consequence. I believed that then, and I believe that now.

The students did eventually complete that assignment. They even enjoyed themselves. Once they were done, we had an extended debrief of the entire experience. We spent some serious time in reflection. They spoke about why they enjoyed it and how they needed to do more than to just be “dulled out by English”. They did not want a course where they “just read poetry and wrote about it.” I spoke about what was important to me with the assignment and why it mattered to me. In reality, I believe that they were as ashamed of their first constructivist performance as I was of mine. That debrief was the beginning of who we were as a learning community. It was the start of a much more intentional learning culture that sustained us throughout the year.

I will admit that my “standards” on those first assignments were not really ones that I would encourage others to have. It took time for our culture to evolve so that the state standards could be properly addressed, but, with each debrief, we drew closer to those standards. Students did learn to respect differences of opinions as well as how to give and receive constructive criticism. The reason we were successful, however, had less to do with the curriculum as it was stated in the NYS ELA Framework, and a lot more to do with the culture of the class. Culture trumps curriculum every time in my mind.

I look now at today’s teachers struggling to align curriculum with Common Core standards. I see the same kinds of broad statements that existed some twenty years ago in an earlier effort at reform. I think back to those students who engaged in my first “constructivist” lesson, and I think that, while the rhetoric might have changed, it is still all about “culture”. I am sure that somewhere there exists a classroom where, during the first week of school, a teacher might be able to stand in front of a class and say: “Here is what I want you to do, and I just want to remind you to engage with each other constructively.” However, in too many places, we cannot begin there. In too many places, we have to begin with “Do not say fuck”, and then we work backwards into the lofty language of a curricular document. That is just the reality for too many teachers for us to ignore it. We have to teach students how to engage with each other constructively, how to solve problems, how to think critically, how to manage time, and so on. It does not happen because we write flowery phrases on the assignments that we hand out to them. We teach it in concrete ways and in real settings. We need to begin with where they are and work from “here” to “there”. In real classrooms, sometimes the road to using “specialist vocabulary” in a literary discussion begins with “Do not say fuck.”

I know some things today, however, that I did not know back on that day I first did the Beowful T-Shirt challenge. I know that there has to be an intentional culture nurtured in a classroom for real learning to occur. I know that we must account for that culture in all of our curricular designs. I know that design is not just a front end, top down process. I know that most of what we teach is best learned in reflection after an experience than it is in front end lectures.  I know that more gets accomplished over the course of a full year when we build debrief time into the learning process. I know that we will have more success if we work from real learning experiences as they are lived and then “back” into the grand language of our curricular documents. I know that this is doable.

I think we would do well this summer to extend our design work just enough to provide for the building of an intentional learning culture into our plans. Given our circumstances, I think that the best we can hope for at the moment is that we can transform the culture in individual classrooms. But that is just a patchwork solution to get us past the first steps in reform. Real reform can only occur when we have the wisdom and the tools and the will to address whole school culture.

~

Reflections tend to be concerned with the clarity and quality of learning. Reflections involve the learners in the process and are more organic. They seek to influence learning over time and to nurture the far transfer of knowledge, skills and attitudes. Reviews, on the other hand, tend to be more teacher-driven, more wishfully concise and more hurried. In general, reviews are most likely to be a collage of instructional sound bites delivered in fast-forward with the hopeful intent of embedding information more deeply in learner memories (generally under the pressure of some impending summative assessment).

I think that a part of the problem is that, when we view teaching as a science, we try to logically divide and sequence our course content into tidy lessons that we can teach in a top down linear way.  In our planning, we try to align a “content bit” with an “outcome or standard bit”, and we look for ways to “flow chart” the process into learning. Teaching can work that way, and, when it does, we kind of wish that that was the day on which we could have had our teacher observations. In educational circles, we are quite enamored with the process of stating a teacher learning intention at the beginning of a lesson, teaching the content to the children, locking the children into our design, and then confirming that our teaching matched our intent for x% of our students. It has kind of a pristine logic to it all. Personally, I liked it very much when that kind of planning panned out for me.

The difficulty is that classes do not often follow a flow chart in real world practice. Somehow, real children in real settings have a way of rubbing our well-intentioned noses in an all too pungent smell of reality. I do not need to use other people’s children to illustrate this. I can use my own son. When our Tom was 5 years old, he brought home a phonics worksheet on initial consonant sounds that he did in school that day. It was a picture of a picket fence with a gate right in the middle of the fence. The gate featured prominently in the picture. He was supposed to circle the letter that corresponded to the initial consonant in the picture.  Since I was significantly older than my son (and also taught secondary English), it was pretty easy for me to understand that he should have circled “g‘ for “gate”.  Pointing underneath the big red X on his paper, I said, “Tom, that is a “gate” … “g – g – g” as in “gate”. Tom looked right back up at me and said, in his own defense, “You see “g – g – gate”, but I see “f – f -fence”. That pretty much ended the home review of his school work for that day. It was all “o – o – over”. Time to play with toy trucks in the yard.

What I personally learned that day was that I had spent too much time in my first years of teaching doing the same thing Tom’s teacher did. I had my “intent” and my “design”. It was a safe world with little ambiguity provided that the students perceived my plans in the way I wanted them perceived, worked in the way I wanted them to work and responded as I intended them to respond. I actually agreed with Tom’s teacher when I first looked at his “corrected” paper on that afternoon. In point of fact, he did make a “mistake”. To me, the gate was pretty well pronounced on that page. It was just not that way for Tom. Yet, I also found myself wishing on that afternoon that his teacher had done what I myself had too often failed to do in so many of my classes prior to that day: I wished she had talked to Tom about why he marked the answer he did. I wished that she had taken the time to discover what his operating strategy was for selecting the initial consonant sounds in the pictures he saw. I wished that, instead of rushing to correct the paper so that she could send it home by the end of the day as evidence of Tom’s learning (or not), she held onto that paper and used it as a next step for Tom to take. My world got a whole lot grayer that day as the blacks and whites of certitude were cast more in chiaroscuro.

There are times when I think that, because we do not often structure our classrooms for meaningful reflective learning discussions, we overlook important performance variables that defeat both learning and the significant measurement of learning. We rush into classifying student performances as “errors” without ever spending the time to assess whether they might be miscues rather than errors. I am using these two terms in a rather specific way here. To me, a miscue occurs when a student understands what it is that (s)he should do but fails to do it for whatever reason. An error occurs when a student does not understand what it is that (s)he should do and fails to do it as a result of ignorance. Miscues are amenable to one type of intervention (many of which are experiential), and errors are more likely to be problems that need to be addressed by formal instruction.

I am going to use an illustration here from English grammar, so please bear with me. I need an example to illustrate an important point that I believe can be transferred to other content disciplines and grade levels. I am hoping to make this worth your time to consider, and I will try to keep the grammatical terms to a minimum.

I would like you to consider how children might acquire the ability to write complex sentences in their productive writings. When children first begin writing sentences, their writing is a bit constrained and labored. A child might write in simple sentences: “My mother is a nurse. She wrote my note.” Grammatically, we would like the sentences to be complete. We would like to have a period between the two sentences. Competent performance in lower elementary school might be measured by such achievement.

At a later stage of development, it is natural for children to seek a greater economy of style. Just as a toddler might practice walking faster as they gain confidence in their mobility, students begin to see the opportunity to increase speed by combining sentences. They might, for example, speak the sentence, “My mother, who is a nurse, wrote my note.” Technically, what the child has learned to do is to embed a non-essential clause into a main clause. Note that, if you were to read that sentence aloud, there is a tendency to raise and lower intonation around non-essential phrases and clauses. That is why there are commas in that sentence.

Now, as children acquire the capacity to make these combinations in oral discourse, it would be surprising if they did not also seek to transfer that capacity to their writing. This opens up the possibility of discussions of the “intent” associated with productive writing. Is it possible that linguistic intent could be defeated by limitations involved with the act of writing? For many children, the sentence in their heads (the “My mother, who is a nurse, wrote that note.”) gets stopped in mid-stream and the child writes, “My mother, who is a nurse. She wrote that note.”  The intonation contour and the flow of the thought gets interrupted by performance constraints (perhaps by the physical act of writing, perhaps by perceptual salience, perhaps by short term memory). At this point, we have a problem. The same child who could write those thoughts as simple sentences, now has a sentence fragment and a certain problem with awkwardness. So, is this linguistic progress or is it regression? Is this a miscue or an error? Personally, I would argue that it is a miscue and that, in this case, it is a good miscue because it is an indication of linguistic development that will eventually be very beneficial to the development of writing fluency for the child. It may seem counterintuitive, but miscues are often a sign of progress.

Assuming that the child’s writing develops normally, the child might very well correct the punctuation problem as they become more accustomed to such embeddings. They may even be able to use this pattern for a few years before they begin to test the upper limits of expression. They might reach a point where they might feel, “Well, if I can embed one thought, might I be able to embed two?” When it reaches that stage, they may in fact conceive of a sentence that looks like this: “My mother, who is a nurse and who took my temperature, wrote that note.” However, since this sentence is a bit more complex because more information is embedded, there is a chance that there will be a sentence punctuation issue propping up that is similar to one that the writer had earlier in their linguistic history. They might write this sentence as, “My mother, who is a nurse and who took my temperature. She wrote that note.”

Now, I think that this developmental sequence is pretty accurate for many writers. Viewed from a grammatical perspective, we are looking at an error. Viewed from a child’s perspective, we might be looking at a miscue. So what is a teacher to do? Grammatically, the student is not following the rules for the punctuation of non-essential phrases and clauses and the child is not writing in complete sentences. The safe bet is to re-teach the grammatical principles involved. But are safe bets always the wisest ones? Does the misdiagnosis of a problem result in misinstruction? Does valuable time get wasted when we fail to account for miscues in learning?

The temptation to review the grammar involved in a case like this can be quite strong. Fast-forwarding over a series of grammatical terms and rules, however, is not likely to work. This is probably because, as they write, students do not think to themselves, “I think I will insert a non-essential clause here and punctuate that with commas”, any more than adult readers of this post might say, “My, I think that this letter home to parents might sound just a tad better if I used a gerund as the subject of this sentence.” There is the world of grammar, and there is the real world in which we live.

There is even a selfish reason why teachers might want to consider this miscue versus error issue, and that has to do with teacher evaluations. In New York State, we are now assessing teachers based on their student test scores. I am very much against doing this, and I have a number of reasons for feeling that way. However, the one that connects to this post has to do with the developmental progress of children as they learn. If we were to look at a child’s ability to write in sentences as a key performance criterion, we might actually see progression and regression year to year for psycholinguistic reasons and not for pedagogical reasons. A child at the end of one year might have few sentence fragments because they are writing in simple sentences alone. The following year they might score lower on a formal assessment of their productive sentences because they are transitioning into a more fluid and appropriate linguistic style of writing. There might very well be regression that the teacher in the following year would be held accountable for. Then, the child might plateau out for a few years (to the benefit of those teachers at those grade levels) and, in upper primary, the child might go through another phase where they are embedding more information and old surface structure errors become apparent again. Reducing linguistic performance to a number score does not address the developmental issues that govern learning.

I am not at all sure how all of this will play out in the politics of reform, but I do know something that we had better start paying attention to if we want to improve our educational systems. We need to stop confusing reflection and review. We need to get serious about reflective learning, and we need to provide more time for that. We need to get over our obsession with error counts and begin looking at underlying processes and operating strategies that govern real learning. We need to listen to the learner’s voice. We need to be more open to the possibility of miscues as a determinant of student performance because that is what will lead to an economy of learning. We need to discuss important performance variables with our students, to adjust our lesson designs accordingly and to use formative assessment in meaningful ways within our classes. We need to respect both the child and the learning.

When I think back to some of those more private conversations, I don’t believe that the majority of them centered on problems that teachers had teaching their course content. Some did, but, for the most part, the teachers I knew were not terribly troubled by the knowledge part of their curriculum. Student skills were more of an issue, but most teachers do have a sense that skills can be acquired and that there is a process that can be followed to lead to that. It was student attitudes, I think, that was the big driver for Friday afternoon decompression talks and Sunday night fitful sleeps. Only those who have done their best and still felt the shiver of a student’s “whatever” can understand the deflating impact that student attitudes can have in a classroom.

I always find it interesting that, regardless of country, curricular guides approach what gets studied in pretty much the same rank order of presentation and importance: Knowledge → Skills → Attitudes  (with attitudes sometimes being ignored entirely in official curricular documents). Yet, when it comes to actual teaching experience and to “life as lived” within a real classroom, a classroom teacher is more likely to rank them in reverse order: Attitudes → Skills → Knowledge. If we cannot first change attitudes, the skills and the knowledge bits are all the more difficult (if not impossible) to teach. However, if attitudes and skills are in place, the teaching of knowledge is more of a pleasure than a challenge.

I believe that the only way we will ever get it right in classrooms is if we pay more attention to reflective learning. If we want to address attitudes, if we are truly going to engage students in a meaningful way about how their attitudes impact on their learning, then we need to reflect on the specific contexts within which those attitudes are demonstrated. We need to hold a mirror up to the process. The same is true for developmental skills. Skills get developed in productive contexts. We cannot lecture students into having them (any more than we can lecture them into changing attitudes). Even our course content is developmental and context dependent as if flows throughout a school year. We cannot pretend that all good things happen as a result of front-end delivery. Quality learning does not very often happen in that way. It is more often the case that we learn after the fact from the experience as it has been lived. This experience is what feeds genuine reflective learning.

Ultimately, a course is not about the teacher and what gets taught. It is about the students and what gets learned. I think we can all remember times when we needed our parents, our teachers, and our mentors to “fade” so that we could have the opportunity to “do it ourselves”. We needed independence and we needed their trust. If we think back on the life experiences from which we learned the most, it is most likely that our parents, teachers and mentors did not do for us. They let us be. However, they remained present to us and were “watchers” of the process. Their guidance,  insights and wisdom were often communicated in reflection. The best teachers have that capacity. They know instinctively that the game belongs to those who must play it. As teachers, we cannot give the gift of knowledge, but we can shape a reflective process that leads to understanding. That is our gift.

My next posts are going to be about how reflective learning informs curricular design. My intention is to show how this might be done in very practical and concrete ways.  This post is but an introduction. If you are interested, check back for the follow up posts. In the meantime, I am posting a poem below to set the stage. I wrote the poem last year for my good friends, Andrew Pearce and Lynne Williams during the first year in their consultancy, Single Steps Learning ( http://www.singlestepslearning.co.uk ).  I am “borrowing” my poem back from them for this post (I hope with their permission.) Lynne and Andrew are people who live their beliefs ~ exemplars for the fade needed for student learning. When I saw the magic in their insets, I needed to write this poem because I so saw what they were doing as the way forward for others. Hope you enjoy it.

~

If I were a squirrel in an acorn-rich environment, I know that I would be tempted to get fat on easy acorn pickings. Yet, I don’t like to think of myself as being just a glutton squirrel who might live all winter on what was so readily obtained. I would not want to just keep eating old acorns, but I also would not want to race over to the latest acorn that has dropped from the tree and simply plop it into my cheek. I prefer to think that I’d be more of a “gourmet squirrel”, the kind of cultured squirrel who would work at finding really great acorns and then sip merlot as he ate them. That’s the kind of fat squirrel I’d want to be.

As humans, we do live in an information-rich environment. As a teacher, I know that there is no dearth of experts willing to write about what we teachers should be doing and how we should do it. There are so many educational articles available in blogs, newspapers, magazines, journals, books, and so on that I could literally stuff my cheeks full in no time at all. But to what end? I try to be a little more discriminating in what I read. If I find something of real value, I eat it right away and then try to remember it on a cold winter’s night when my need is great and I can pat my big furry belly with my paws and say, “My, that was some acorn! I will never forget it.”

I have just such an acorn in mind now as I write this post. It is the article, “The Many Faces of Constructivism” by David Perkins that was published in Educational Leadership in 1999 ( http://www.scribd.com/karen_uriya/d/32920521-Perkins-The-Many-Faces-of-Constructivism ). To be truthful, I have never come across much written about this article after I read it. Life got really busy for me after that, and even gourmet squirrels need to move on when a new spring arrives. But, as soon as my paws scratched my belly this morning, I knew what it was that I wanted to write about.

I am not going to use this post as a “book report” on what Perkins said. The link is above, and you ought to read the original for yourself. It provides food for thought, and it might be a useful way to frame some issues we are grappling with today. I think that this article still has some relevance even after all these years. I particularly like the way Perkins envisions different types of knowledge. There is a lot in this Perkins article that I used, but I also modified things to fit my understanding and my needs. I urge you to do the same. You are your own expert.

I believe that we should be having a curricular alignment debate right now, but I think it should be less on the political question of what we need to do in order to align with curriculum guides being dictated to us and more on how to align methodologies and essential knowledge to promote deep learning in our classrooms. I am a pretty eclectic guy. Common sense and necessity were always important to me. When circumstances demanded it, I used a lecture approach in my classes if it seemed to be the best option. I also had specific times when I deliberately wove in more constructivist lessons. Sometimes I went weeks with students working just on individual assignments, and sometimes we worked weeks in group work assignments. Sometimes I used a top down design, and sometimes I used more of a backwards design approach.

I suppose that I should admit as well that I have never been truly comfortable in a discussion with other teachers when someone says, “Yes, that is probably something I should be doing, but I have too much content to get through.” I don’t think we should plan our classes just on the basis of legislative fiat or time constraints or the test at the end of our courses. I think we owe more to our students. Until I read this Perkins article, I do not believe I ever thought much about different types of knowledge. I just assumed that content was content, and let’s just get on with it. That was enough complexity for me. However, the way Perkins defined knowledge and understanding intrigued me, and I set myself to the task of trying to develop some operating strategies that would be beneficial to me in my planning. That is what this post is about.

I am proposing that we ask ourselves a very specific question: Given our fields of study and the knowledge, skills and dispositions we want our students to have when they complete our courses, what conscious operating strategies should we apply as design protocols in order to align our instructional methodologies with what is essential in our course content?

~ What I Mean by Operating Strategy ~

Writing a post (in this case, an essay really) on operating strategies for curricular design sounds pretty dull (and probably is dull), but I will try to do it in an interesting way.  As a warning, I will tell you that this post is longer than the average blog post. I entertained the thought of dividing this into several posts, but ultimately I decided that it would be best to do in one essay. Once you crack open a good acorn, it needs to be eaten fresh.

I will begin with my definition of an operating strategy because such definitions might vary from one individual to another.  I think that an operating strategy is an hypothesis we make about life that governs our thoughts and behaviors when we interact with our world as we perceive it to be. Some operating strategies might be idiosyncratic (i.e., specific to one individual), while other operating strategies might be more general and are shared by a group of people. Learning is impacted upon by the operating strategies held by both students and teachers.

I have a quick example of an individual operating strategy that came from working with a student writer some years ago. At the time, I was preparing my students for a writing test that was required for a basic New York State high school diploma. I required all my students to submit both a rough draft and a final draft to me so that I could assess the types of revisions they were making in their productive writing. One particular assignment came directly from a New York State Regents Competency Test. Students were required to write a business letter in which they returned a defective clock radio to the manufacturer. I was really puzzled by a girl who wrote this sentence in the final draft of her letter: “My family is upset by the upheaval breakage of the clock.” Her rough draft of that sentence was “My family is upset because the clock radio doesn’t work”. When I met with her about her letter, I joked that the final draft made it sound “as if your family broke it in some kind of family brawl” and that her rough draft was much clearer. She just laughed, and, when I asked why she wrote that final draft sentence, she said: “Oh, that sentence did not sound right to me. The rough draft was what I wanted to say, but I figured if it sounds right to me, it is probably wrong, but, if it doesn’t sound right to me, it is probably what you want.” That was the girl’s operating strategy. Teaching her to improve her writing was not a matter of teaching writing mechanics; it was working to correct an operating strategy.

Sometimes operating strategies may exist for an entire class, and, sadly when they go awry, they can be the result of the instruction we provide. For example, I was once teaching a class how to write a formal paper to analyze a work of literature. Students needed to be able to write an extended paper that included the critical vocabulary associated with literary analysis.  My unit began well enough. I did get students to write about the content of a literary work, and they were coming along just fine. However, I also needed to get them to extend their analysis by using literary terms (e.g., metaphor, simile, personification, irony, etc.) in their essays. I used a constructivist approach to teach these terms and everything went very, very well. Then, I gave them an end of unit writing assignment to pull it all in together. When I read their papers, they all wrote about literary terms exactly as we had used them in class, but they forgot that the terms really get used to develop a main point or theme that the author was trying to make. I received an entire set of papers with sentences that simply followed one after another like lemmings over a cliff. 25 essays that said,  “Line 4 is a metaphor, and here is why it is a metaphor. Line 7 contains an example of simile and here is why I say that. Line 11 uses a symbol.” Their papers were one step forward and two steps back for us. Since we had spent so much time on literary terms, they simply assumed that that was what I now wanted. Last in, first out. They had the literary elements, but they forgot the whole point of writing the essay. An operating strategy.

I found that set of papers painful because I really felt that somehow I had managed to lead the class astray. I could not just drop the papers because it was a problem that needed to be addressed. Our state exam demanded that they write a literary analysis essay. So, I had the students put all their chairs in a circle and held their papers on my lap. Then, I began with a story: “Let’s pretend that you got up this morning, and you found out that your toaster did not work. You know you need a new toaster. So here is the plan you came up with. You decide to get married because you just know that, if you get married, someone will give you a new toaster.” Well, the students laughed, and they  mused about how dumb that would be. Then, I said, “Well, I will take the blame for this, but it is kind of what you did in this set of papers and it is kind of what I taught you to do. You do not get married so you can get a toaster, and you do not write an essay just to show off literary terms. It has to be connected to the main point. We all have some more work left to do — you and me.” Operating strategies again. From that point forward, the “toaster” debrief was extremely helpful in focusing on why we were doing what we were doing. It was a group attempt at adjusting a group operating strategy so that we could draw closer to the intentionality of learning.

I suppose that, in addition to talking about operating strategies, I am also going to suggest that we work harder to promote reflective learning in our classrooms. We often think of classes as having an individual or pair or small group or large group focus (we design for that), but we forget that the same range of options exists for our guiding of students in reflective thinking after the fact. We do not seem to design for reflective learning as often as we design for the events that lead into reflection. Reflective learning activities often save us time because a little more concentration on the discovery of the “operating strategies” behind a performance can save us hours and hours of re-teaching. The misdiagnosis of a problem results in misinstruction, and that is where we lose our time.  

We might have to change our questions, however. Too many times we ask, “Why did you not do what I taught you to do in class?” and the answer to that question is not likely to be the same as the answer to “Can you tell me why you made the decision to do this rather than that?”  Some questions are more likely to get at operating strategies than others. Sometimes, it’s all about toasters.

 ~ Inert Knowledge ~

The first category of knowledge that Perkins identifies in his article is inert knowledge. He defines inert knowledge as sitting “…. in the mind’s attic, unpicked only when specifically challenged by a quiz or a direct prompt, but otherwise gathering dust”.  I have to say that I believe that some level of factual knowledge is necessary for thinking. I see nothing wrong with teaching facts, and I am not anti-fact.  It seems fair to say that, perhaps in some cases, too much time is spent with the teacher in the transmission mode and with students serving the role of passive receptors for “important facts” that cascade down to them. We all know that. And, most of us are guilty of it no matter how much we might deny or demur. I suspect that we try not to do that. Certainly, I spent enough years teaching the difference between Italian and Elizabethan sonnets to avoid being too critical of others, and I have never had a former student come up to me to thank me for teaching them that difference or to tell me that it made a significant contribution to the quality of their adult lives. Such is life.

The problem with inert knowledges seems to be one that is less associated with the type of knowledge and more associated with the design behind the teaching style. I would argue further that the canonization of some facts over others seems to be more of a cultural preference than a cultural imperative. The danger that we face now is that, if society puts teachers and students under attack, the consequence is not likely to be a surge of activities centering on higher order thinking skills. On the contrary, I think there is more likely to be a de facto retreat into “safe facts” and low level mastery of easily testable information. I also suspect that, when all is said and done and we finally do take a look at the “student gains” that this particular era of reform yields, we will find that the gains came at the lower end of Bloom’s taxonomy.

It seems to me that all content areas have some level of inert knowledge that must be transmitted to students. Yes, I am saying that inert knowledge can be a good thing. I am going to use an example here, but I admit that it might not be a perfect analogy. I just cannot think of something better.  When I think of inert knowledge, I see an operating strategy that has similarities to how computer viruses can bypass security to infect a system. Rather than send the virus all at once and risk detection, seemingly innocuous pieces of a virus code can be sent over time and embedded in a system. Then, when it is time to activate the virus, an activating agent can be sent that “wakes up” the dormant code and we have a full-fledged virus that had previously eluded detection. I am definitely not arguing that inert knowledge is the equivalent of a computer virus. What I am arguing is that perhaps, instead of lamenting that inert knowledge is at fault, we should spend more time trying to figure out why and what and how and when we can introduce an activating agent to wake up dormant knowledge bits resting in the “systems” of our students. We most certainly can do a better job of designing the “activating agents” for inert knowledge. And I do not think that simply testing the knowledge is a sufficient activating agent.

I think that students who are fed endless days of inert knowledge develop an operating strategy whereby they assume that no “school” knowledge has usefulness in their lives. It is not the knowledge itself that is doing that to them. It is the uninspired transmission of the inert knowledge over time.  Students don’t even think to transfer knowledge, skills and dispositions to new learning. It just does not occur to them. It just seems unfair to criticize teachers for the transmission of inert knowledge (especially if it is something demanded of them by the curriculum guides under which they must operate). Even Perkins, who is a constructivist, admits that when “knowledge is not particularly troublesome for learners, … teaching by telling may serve just fine.”

The question teachers need to be asked is not, “Why are you teaching inert knowledge?” but “How to you plan to activate that knowledge so that students can learn beyond that knowledge?” It is that question that gets at the heart of curricular design.

~ Ritual Knowledge ~

The second type of knowledge that Perkins identifies is ritual knowledge, which, he says, “has a routine and rather meaningless character. It feels like part of a social or an individual ritual: how we answer when asked such-and-such, the routine that we execute to get a particular result.” I like the fact that Perkins identifies the category of ritual knowledge, but I disagree with considering it in only a pejorative way.

I actually think that there are benefits as well as problems with ritual knowledge. Sure, there is the danger that people will grow up and hum the Roy G Biv song on the way to work some day. I don’t suppose that hurts, and it probably got them to pass a test somewhere earlier in their academic careers as they were acquiring the credentials to get that job. And, I also know that, if we persist in turning complex knowledge into sing-song routines, we can diminish the intellectual content of what gets learned. As a secondary teacher who taught more advanced secondary courses, I have had my share of parent conferences over the years that went like this: “I just cannot understand it. He always did so well in English and he enjoyed his classes. This year — with you, he seems to be struggling. He is so unhappy, and, to be truthful, we are not too pleased either.” Well, if you are a teacher with a Regents exam in New York State or a teacher with a Higher exam in Scotland or an A Level exam in England, you know how uncomfortable it is to twist in your seat at such conferences and say, “But I expect him to think and not just parrot back facts to me.” (By the way, I use this example only because it was the age level and course I taught. The same problem presents itself to teachers at all grade levels. It is wrong to believe that higher order thinking only kicks in at 13 or 16 years of age. Young children are also involved in higher order thinking. It is not just upper level secondary teachers standing out there with the Scarlet Letter on their chests, so let’s drop that canard when it comes time to play the “blame game”). In this sense, I very much agree with Perkins when he considers ritual knowledge to be a problem in schools.

At the same time, the problem with ritual knowledge may be a bit like the problem with inert knowledge. Maybe it is not type of knowledge but the operating strategies involved with the knowledge that are important. Maybe we could mitigate that problem with a little more intentionality in our curricular designing.

First of all, rituals are not necessarily bad. There is enough fragmentation and isolation in life that students (and teachers) can easily feel a bit stressed out by overload. Rituals can provide us with comfort and a belief that somehow life has a flow to it that will carry us. Any of us who have survived traumatic events (e.g., the death of a loved one) knows the consequences of trauma and how disorienting that can be. When they have happened to me, I  generally fall back on the rituals of my life and ride out the storm. I can see students in schools taking comfort in rituals (even ritual knowledge) because it gives them a certain amount of seeming control over their lives. And it works most of the time early in their careers and some of the time late in their careers. I do not believe that the positive benefits of ritual knowledge have changed much since earlier people sat in their mead halls listening to their poets recite Beowulf with a rhythmic chant (there is a measure of relief in hearing that our ancestors survived tough times and that somehow we will survive as well).

The problem with ritual knowledge might be that students develop an operating strategy that tells them that ritual knowledge alone is sufficient for success in school as well as in their lives thereafter. When they are taught ritual knowledge initially, the chances are that they do have some success with it. It gets them from Point A to Point B, and they feel good about that. Ritual knowledge works well in times when only short term transfer of knowledge is required. But they may not realize that there is a Point N or a Point Q or a Point Z that requires them to go beyond ritual knowledge. Far transfer of knowledge requires more than ritual.  Students may not understand that there is both theme and variation in their learning. Ritual knowledge emphasizes the “what is there” in our curriculum, the continuity of the apparent. For children who have not seen it before or understood it before, just seeing the common theme (the ritual knowledge) gives them a sense of control. Of course, it is not enough to end their educations with that, but it is a reasonable start for many children.

As an operating strategy, we may need to adjust how we use “ritual knowledge” to its best advantage in our curricular designs. Maybe we need to go beyond ritual by designing a bit more for variation. To become expert in any field requires us to note and understand what is there but to also see what is not there (and to learn from that). We need to perceive what discrepancies or anomalies are present that might be an indication that “ritual knowledge” is not sufficient in dealing with a specific situation. It is easy to teach the ritual, but it is much harder to teach the children to discern the departure points, the jumping off points, that launch an intellectual trajectory that takes them beyond ritual knowledge. These trajectories are almost like the lines and shapes in a Kandinsky painting that take us beyond the frame of the painting and have us project somewhere beyond the painting.

I know that this line of thinking might be a bit abstract so I am going to connect it to a particular curricular issue. I am not going to use percentages here because I am doing this off the top of my head, but it is true enough. Most of the English language is pretty predictable in terms of grammar. As native speakers of a language, there are probabilities that children can rely on in their productive uses of the language. However, almost as soon as formal grammar study gets introduced in schools, we turn our attention from the predictability of the language that children can, as native speakers, depend upon, and we focus on the exceptions to rules rather than on the rules themselves. We may have textbook chapters that try to keep that balance alive, but the practice questions at the end of the chapters (and too many of the standardized tests we give) focus on exceptions that militate against children feeling comfortable with their predictable competencies. We tweak their operating strategies until they see grammar as a trick and not as a competency. We create children who begin describing broken clocks in terms of “upheaval breakage”. The purpose of grammar study is to perhaps improve speaking and writing skills, but we ought to be testing them by having them actually speak and write. To give them standardized tests that in too many cases distort probability and focus on exceptions so that we can fine tune our ability to discriminate among students is not really educating them in my view. It is a manipulation of students and a capitulation to statistics. It is a little bit like having children stare into mirrors looking at their bodies and saying to them, “Now the important point is that you not be concerned with the size of your nose in relationship to those ears of yours.” We must find ways to teach students to see variations without destroying a sense of probability and predictability. We do need to design for the leap beyond ritual knowledge without denying the value of ritual knowledge.

I would also like to take the focus of this discussion beyond what Perkins was dealing with and to consider — just briefly — the impact of ritual skills and ritual dispositions. We are not just teaching content. We are teaching children, and we are doing that in the context of a culture and a community. Some rituals are important because they are also “operating procedures” that benefit curricular design. When I made my first foray into a constructivist mode of teaching, I worked really hard on a particular Beowulf lesson that I wanted my students to experience. I wanted that lesson to go well, but it failed quickly. When I told the students to arrange their desks in groups of fours so that they could work on the challenge, they were not able to do that. They banged their desks together, raised havoc with each other and I quickly retreated. Somehow the measure of control that I had over them when I lectured was not the same as the control I had over them as they moved into small group.  At first, I just thought that, since it was a somewhat troublesome class to begin with, there was little that I could do. I sat in my classroom feeling defeated that afternoon, a bit like Forrest Gump holding a box of chocolates on his lap. Eventually, I did have to leave the shame of my classroom that day and go home. When I discussed this failure with my wife, who taught second grade, she said, “Of course, it did not work. You need to teach them how to move their desks in your room.”  I defended myself by saying, “But they are 18 years old. Why would I have to teach them how to move their desks?” Yet, the next day I went back in and did just that. I spent a class teaching them to arrange their desks quickly, quietly and safely. I had them arrange their desks for a formal lecture, for work in pairs, for small groups, and for a large group debrief. I ran that class almost like a fire drill. I endured the noise, the confusion, the fooling around, the loss of instructional time, the guilt that came with the loss of instructional time and so on. I tried to maintain a sense of humor about it. At the end of 40 minutes, the students had the “rituals” down and I was able to transition among curricular designs for the rest of the year. I could lecture for 15 minutes and then break into any number of connected activities and have my room back in shape for my next class without too many problems. Taking care of a practical problem in a ritualistic way was beneficial to me and to my ability to teach my academic content. Such things are possible. Those 40 minutes of immediate time saved countless minutes of future time for the remaining days of that course.

I sometimes think that our problems with varying curricular designs and approaches are not a failure of our intellects or our imaginations. They are more the result of our failure to teach community responsibilities to children and to provide them with the “tools” needed to be successful in adapting to more flexible curricular opportunities. In order to make this statement here, I do not need to accuse readers of anything. I can base it simply on my own experience. I do not believe that we ought to avoid ritual knowledge, skills or dispositions. It is not the rituals that are bad. It is the fact that we do not do enough to use those rituals as the departure points for trajectories that “go beyond” when “going beyond” is necessary for deeper learning.

~ Conceptually Difficult Knowledge ~

For me, one of the most difficult problems in curricular design (especially in matching the teaching method to the essential knowledge of a course) was a when issue: “When should I use a lecture approach? When should I take the time to do more active learning? When should I have students work individually? When should I have them work in pairs? When should they work in small groups? When should they work in large group?” I really did not want to choose my method based on student discipline and behavior (which most certainly do impact upon such decisions), nor did I want to make the decision based on something as transitory or as arbitrary as the time available (and time is admittedly a limited resource).

Part of my difficulty was that I had kind of a “marching band strategy” that dominated my design processes. I think maybe I saw myself more as band director whose job it was to get the students marching in synchronized harmony. I saw my curricular designs as cues for student performance. I wanted to cue them “correctly” so that they would all work as individuals. Provide a different “correct” cue and they would all reassemble as pairs. New “correct” cue and, voila, small group. New “correct” cue and, bingo, they all wind up in neat little rows so the classroom was arranged for my next class coming in. On a personal level, I saw them as individuals but, once the class started, they were really members of a marching band. I think this was closely aligned to a “fairness to all” principle that I thought justified my methodology. I simply believed (uncritically perhaps) that, if all students were working on a common assignment, they needed to have “instructional sameness” so that I could justify my “fairness”. Such is life inside the sausage machine of too many classrooms (particularly at the secondary level where we might define ourselves more as “teachers of content” rather than as “teachers of children”).

What I can tell you is that, when Perkins described conceptually difficult knowledge, he got my attention.  Conceptually difficult knowledge, he asserted, was knowledge that confounds the ritual responses that students have toward what is learned because that knowledge seems counter-intuitive to their prior learning. Ritual knowledge might well be embedded in a group context, but understanding conceptually difficult knowledge might demand more flexible designs. This was a real insight for me (much to my professional shame). Conceptually difficult knowledge can vary from one individual to another individual. What is counter-intuitive for one is not necessarily counter-intuitive for another. Nor, for that matter, do all people work their way through counter-intuitive information in the same way. Some might need to do that with a period of individual reflection. Others might need to do that in private discussion with one other person. Some might demand teacher time, and some might want to explore with another student. Yet, others might want a wider range of thoughts to select from and might be more amenable to small group processing. Sometimes, we set up these learning moments by starting in large group and breaking down into other settings, and sometimes we start in the smaller settings and do our large group teaching during a post-experience debrief when we can fine tune the learning in reflection.

Thinking back to my own experiences in school confirmed this for me. Math has always been a difficult subject for me. If I were doing a math assignment, I often preferred to work alone at it for a while to try to see what it was I knew and could do (at least then I could subvocalize my cursing without greater jeopardy). After I had some processing time as an individual, I might need some individual teacher assistance or I might be able to move into a pair or into a small group. However, my primary need at the start was to be given time to read and assess and approximate where I was in the context of what was being asked of me. When it came to an English assignment, however, I was much more comfortable and confident. Often I could bypass alone time, and I was just anxious to work in pairs or in small groups. My approach to learning was very different.

Considering conceptually difficult knowledge in this way opened my eyes to the need to learn how to design a lesson that could be an individual assignment for one student but a pair assignment for others or a small group for still others in a classroom or perhaps an opportunity for whole group instruction.  I could really appreciate the intentionality of the design. It was not really a fairness issue; it was a learning preference and a learning need. I was not a band director. I was a facilitator of learning. I was a teacher and a guide and a fellow learner.  It was not a matter of my choosing the technique; it was having the design capability to match the technique to the student. It was personalized learning.  For me, the realization that conceptually difficult knowledge might vary was a wake up call for a re-think.

Today, I see that these design issues as being central to our consideration of universal designs in the context of Common Core.  Americans are not alone in this. The same issues are being raised in England, Scotland and Wales. Although these are places with which I am familiar, I would not be surprised if other countries are not also grappling with them. It is no longer an alien concept to me. Rather than extend this discussion further in what is already a “too long” post, I will come back to this on future posts more specifically focused on a specific curricular context. I will say, however, that this issue is not really just a problem with curricular design. It is a cultural issue. For us to do this, we need to change the culture of our schools so that learners are respected more as people and considered less as numbers to be crunched in some forced march to progress.

~  Foreign Knowledge ~

A fourth type of knowledge that Perkins describes is foreign knowledge, or knowledge that “comes from a perspective that conflicts with our own”. For example, it could be a conflict that results from different faiths, different ethnic backgrounds, different nationalities and so on. One particular concept that Perkins uses as an example is “presentism in historical understanding” where a student might “tend to view past events through present knowledge”.

I know that, as I originally read this article, my mind drifted back over my years of teaching literature. Discussions of word choices in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or the use of “awful” as an adjective to describe God in the Puritan sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God”, or Swift’s biting satire in “A Modest Proposal”. If we switched disciplines, we could discuss the ethics of Jefferson as an owner of slaves and  yet as the author of some important documents in American history. Or, we might discuss cultural differences that govern “edible” foods from one culture to another, or the way in which a particular culture mights use animals differently, or how various societies treat children or the elderly. We do not lack for examples.

I did find Perkins’ identification of foreign knowledge to be a useful distinction because it reminds us that learning is a social activity. For some learners, there may well be a kind of “perceptual blindness” that impedes learning and that some inquiries simply lend themselves better to group activities than to individual ones. That is useful in curricular design.

If I had written this post several months ago, I might have ended with the strategy above as my main suggestion. However, something happened in early May that really has me rethinking the operational strategies for foreign knowledge designs, but it has less to do with the alignment of methodologies and course content and much more to do with courage.

I can give a really clear example that I mentioned in a post a few weeks ago. In early May, New York State was giving its English test to 8th graders. One of the reading passages on that test was “about a pineapple challenging a hare to a foot race through the forest … . The fable described several animals assuming that the pineapple must have a trick up its sleeve that would enable the immobile fruit to win the race, and when they discovered that it didn’t, they ate it. Test-takers were asked: Why did they eat the pineapple?”  ( http://ideas.time.com/2012/05/04/what-everyone-missed-on-the-pineapple-question/?iid=pf-author-mostpop2#ixzz1wNWnWlrh )

To its credit, the New York State Education Department decided to exclude that reading passage in determining student test scores because the passage made so little sense. However, a key question remains: Why on earth would that passage be on the exam when there are so many other potential reading passages that could have been used? Andrew J. Rotherham, writing in Time Magazine, made a very cogent observation. He said “state officials are often choosing not the best but rather the least problematic option to do their state assessments. And that includes state officials shying away from reading passages by Mark Twain or about the Vietnam war or anything else that contains even a hint of controversy. “The Hare and the Pineapple” is an absurd and almost trippy story, and it is emblematic of the sort of sanitized material that makes it onto tests and into too many classrooms because … interest groups have collectively created a culture in education that makes rich and provocative content out of bounds and leaves fun but nonsensical passages like “The Hare and the Pineapple” to fill the void” ( http://ideas.time.com/2012/05/04/what-everyone-missed-on-the-pineapple-question/?iid=pf-author-mostpop2#ixzz1wNWnWlrh )

We say that we want 21st century skills, but all too often we want to develop those skills by ducking real 21st century issues. When it comes to designing for foreign knowledge, we may have to accept the courage to confront issues as a key part of our operating strategy for curricular designing. The failure to have courage is not simply a disservice to students. It is a disservice to thinking itself.

~

I realize that this is not a particularly entertaining post. It was a serious treatment of a serious issue that concerns me. There are times when we simply have to endure and smile and just push ahead. And sometimes we have to read and reflect and have the courage to confront issues so that we can provide better opportunities for our students to learn. This post is simply a nudge in the direction that I think we need to be going.

~

The problem with heavy-handed reform efforts (especially those firmly embedded in political contexts) is that they tend to shut down creative approaches to change at exactly the time when innovation is most important. Reforms fail not because reform was not — or is — not needed. Reforms fail because the either-or mentality of extremists at both ends of the spectrum in the debate tend to demand credal purity more than pragmatic solutions. The past tends to become so idealized or so vilified that the way forward is missed and we just squander opportunities. I think that is happening in education today, and I believe it’s time to lighten up.  Yes, we need to improve, but we are not marching in a funeral procession here. Can we not at least retain enough optimism to consider the full range of options available to us? Are there not certain attitudes and skills and understandings that we can bring to the debate that can give us a chance both to smile and to teach a new generation of children? Do we gain that much by making our schools increasingly duller and more frightening places to be?  Can we not at least respect our students enough to take some time to listen to them and to learn along with them?

I know for a fact that change is possible. Old dogs can learn new tricks, and I am proof of that. And, for those of you who are frightened by change, there is a comforting corollary to that statement: old tricks still work on new dogs. My students can attest to that. We lived it. Life is not an endless stream of mutually exclusive alternatives. The adventure comes by living the life between these statements.

When I was about mid-way through my teaching career, I took a summer course called Critical Skills. It was a program offered by Antioch University New England Graduate School in Keene, NH ( http://www.antiochne.edu/ ). The motto of the program was “Teachers Teaching Teachers”. It was a unique program at that time (and, in my view, it still is). It was a one week intensive course facilitated by classroom teachers for other classroom teachers. It focused on how to take the normal school curriculum and turn it into “problems for students to solve”. It was an experiential program grounded in constructivism. My entire career up to that point involved my using a pretty traditional “lecture” type instruction in my classes. I was a secondary English teacher (an old style red pen and tweed sport coat English teacher). The Critical Skills course was really my first formal exposure to a constructivist methodology (something that I had avoided, almost as I might avoid the nurse’s office after a reported outbreak of head lice in the school. Yes, I knew such things existed but why expose myself to that?).

What I learned in that course was how I might better explore a full range of instructional designs in my classes. I left the course understanding that lessons could be more than just top down, teacher-dominated designs geared to individuals arranged in rows like feed lot cows. But I also learned that students are not just the opposite of that either: They are not free range chickens running all over the lawns of the school pecking at constructivist kernels of corn sprinkled at random in their academic barn yard. For whatever reason, I was ready to listen to alternative approaches to curricular design that summer. I learned the importance of flexible planning, how to assert intentional control over a process without subverting the process and the need to once again become a learner among learners.

Somehow, as I survey the educational reform efforts today, I see these efforts as coming dangerously close to bringing us back to a feed lot mentality that I simply find objectionable. I want to argue against that, and I want to be a voice for creative moderation. This may go against the grain, but I think it is worth the effort. In this post, I am just going to list a few of the guiding principles I learned that helped me change at the midpoint in my career. (In the next post, I am going to present some operating principles that tie the big ideas or essential knowledge of a curriculum to specific instructional methodologies.)

~

To begin with, the hardest part of change (at least for me) was walking away from prior success and gambling on something new. I felt that I was pretty successful as a stand up lecturer. There was a high stakes exit exam, a high powered summative assessment, at the end of my course: the New York State Comprehensive Regents Examination in English. My students tended to do well on that exam, and I had to fight the desire to play the game conservatively. However, it did reach a point where I understood that my style of teaching was meeting my needs more than it was meeting the needs of my students. After I took that Critical Skills course, I went back into the classroom and I explained to my students what I wanted to try. When I got all done with my explanation, one student raised his hand (yes, it was that long ago), and said, “Mr. Fox, that is not you!” and I said, “I know it is not me, but it is the me I would like to become.” So my first tip is to admit the risk, to be open about it and to seek help from the best professional development experts we have out there today — our students. I am a perfectionist by nature, and this step was maybe the toughest part of the entire change process. Making  a public declaration of the intent to change is quite a risk. 

Main Point: If we want to teach students to be learners, we must be learners ourselves. The best classes are those in which the teacher is a model for learning.

~

I really struggled trying to find the “right balance” between top down designed classes and backwards designed constructivist classes. Timing was troublesome, but I did get better at it as time went on. My students understood my pain and really helped me. I had a particular girl who had a unique way of teaching me to how to integrate formal planning and incidental learning. She would come into the classroom on Monday mornings, walk over to my desk, throw open my plan book and say — dramatically and loudly — “Let’s see where he scheduled spontaneous fun this week!” The first time she did that I was just so stunned that I could not do anything but laugh, but eventually it became a ritual as well as an important regulator for me in designing my classes. Ah, yes, a culture must be intentionally developed for productive spontaneity to occur. It was ok for some things to happen that were not planned. My, what a novel approach to life!

An important concept really helped me to come to grips with this — the Puzzle vs. Problem Continuum. If we envision curriculum planning as a continuum and, at one end, we had puzzles and, at the other end, we had problems, there is a whole range of design options that would open up for us. It would be possible (and perhaps advisable at times) to design lower complexity challenges that are more puzzled-based (i.e., one possible solution that the lesson is designed around and that give the teacher more control and that limit the risk for students since protocols for puzzle solution can be carefully scaffolded for success). At the other end, we could have problems (really messy problems) with no clear solutions where students needed to assert a great deal of independence and assume much more responsibility for their learning. These problems consume more time, but they are a better way to teach long term understandings and to address knowledge transfer issues (precisely the kinds of learning that are important for higher order thinking skills and lifelong learning).

Main Point: Lesson designs exist on a continuum of potential choices. It is not an either-or situation. Incidental or spontaneous learning is a productive outcome of a healthy learning culture. Incidental learning does not diminish or threaten more planned and structured learning; it complements it. It is joyful learning and not a cause for recrimination.

~

Effective lesson designs may demand teachers to cede some power to students and to enter into a collaboration with their students. I personally was trained to believe that a teacher needed to be in control of every facet of the classroom — design, instruction, classroom management, and so on. Although this is mostly an illusory “not tied to the real world” view of teaching, it is the one I operated under for many years. I needed to find a balance that would work for me. I started writing “challenges” for my students, and, since I am a pretty conscientious guy on most days, I would put everything I had into those curricular challenges. I was too controlling, but it was what I needed to get started. Eventually, I would present the challenges to students and we would “chunk” the challenges. I use “chunking” here in a psycholinguistic context, and it means that we  would discuss what it was I wanted them to do and how I wanted them to do it. At the start, it was really a matter of “Do they understand what it is that I want?” The students would chafe a bit at my desire to control, but they played along. Often, they simply gave me enough rope to “hang myself” and they would say after the event: “Why did you not just listen to us to begin with?” Fortunately for me, I do have a sense of humor as well as some professional integrity, and I could admit my limitations. Eventually, this evolved into a classroom ritual. The kids allowed me to spend my weekends writing “the perfect challenge” and then I would copy that challenge off for them to read as we began a class. Then, and I still love this student to this day for the impact she had on my career, it became a ritual for a particular girl in the class to wait until everyone had read my “perfect challenge” and she would say, “Mr. Fox, this is SO not going to happen!” Then, I would smile and ask, “Why not?”. And the kids eventually would rewrite the challenge for themselves and I would negotiate with them. It was liberating and it was fun. I always maintained the integrity of the curriculum, but I ceded the how to them and, as I grew more comfortable with the process, I ceded more and more of the instructional design responsibilities. As long as we could meet the goals and outcomes we needed to meet, I was a pretty flexible guy. To be fair, I was not a real good process person anyway. I was (and still am) one of those people who focuses on the end product and does not really have a real good idea of how to get there.

Main point: The teacher is not the sole designer of the curriculum. Teachers have learning intentions, but students have learning intentions as well. Effective classrooms are characterized more by a serious negotiation among learners. Sharing learning intentions is a bilateral process based on a respect for all learners (the teacher as well as the students).

~

I always feared doing a lot of small group work in the classroom for two reasons: first, it would require moving furniture around (and I am pretty much of a plodder who loves sameness); and, second, I always thought that group work simply introduced students to the “near occasion of sin” and that bad behavior would have to be the short term consequence of innovation. It never occurred to me that the biggest problem would be my own behavior. When I started to give my students more control (more responsibility, really), and I moved more in the direction of problems and away from controlled puzzles (solved individually or in pairs), I found that I often drifted over to student discussions. I was kind of a hovering presence in the room, sort of like an old lingering aunt waiting to be kissed goodbye at the end of a Christmas night as she was about to leave for the place where all old aunts live. This kept happening until one day, a student looked up at  me and said, “Mr. Fox, just because you’re bored doesn’t mean that you can come over here and vamp off us!” I always think of this as my “Slow Down Moses Moment”. That girl was absolutely right in what she said, and her courage in saying that made me a better teacher. It was more than just a blunt plea to let them take control of their own learning; it was an opportunity for me to invent a new role for myself in the classroom.

The unintended consequence of this “don’t vamp off us” comment was that, by pulling back from the process and learning how to watch it, I eventually learned how to listen and observe and note the kinds of things that were important to formative assessment. At the end of the process — after the game was played —  I learned how to lead students through a reflective thinking process. We could actually discuss what happened as they worked, what they might want to celebrate having done and what they might want to change in order to improve their efforts on the next assignment. Wow, it was real teaching to people who wanted to listen. The power of the teacher may be more in the teaching done “after the fact” than “before the fact”. If it had not been for a girl with enough courage to tell me not to “vamp off them”, I might never have learned that or had the joys of teaching that way.

Main Point: In curricular planning, we need to be mindful that there is a time for teachers to assert control and to do direct teaching, but there is as well a time to relinquish control and to simply observe students as they learn for themselves. It may be less of an issue of what we do during the instructional process than it is when we do it. Timing is vital to learning, and astute observation is important to formative assessment.

~

I am not going to pretend that these anecdotes are any more than what they are. They are memories of experiences that I had with my students that helped me grow professionally and that perhaps assisted in the learning of my students at a particular point in their academic lives. There are others that I could have added that might have been more or less pertinent to the readers of this post. However, I did want to illustrate something that I just think we need to bear in mind as we think about curricular design. What we design may be the products of our intellects, but what we are doing is not really designing products at all. We are designing processes for children to engage in so that they can be the ones who produce. For all our talk about the knowledge, skills and dispositions we think are important for children to have in the 21st Century, it seems to me that we do not really spend enough time thinking about how our aspirations for children are grounded in the dispositions of our teachers. That is what this post was really all about. We need to relax, we need to smile, we need to have courage, and we need to change. And that is a good thing because we are learners and we must model that for our students.