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Terry Doyle, Ferris State University
As a teacher for 30 years and a person who now spends his
professional life reading and studying the research literature on teaching and
learning, I have reached my limit on listening to the “our schools are failing”
rhetoric coming from the state and federal legislators, local politicians, and
news media. I’ve had enough from business people too; many who think that their
model of producing success just needs to be implemented in schools and all will
be well. But the group I have really heard enough from are parents who believe
schools are responsible for their children’s failures.
Like in any profession I admit that there are teachers
among us that do not live up to their professional obligations and seem more
concerned with their paychecks and summers off than their students learning.
However, they do not exist in numbers large enough to bring about the failing of
a single school much less an entire school system.
The belief that school failure is primarily the fault of
teachers and administrators is based on a misguided belief that teachers and
school administrators can over come the lack of a culture of learning that exist
in millions of American homes today. Schools are seen as failing by so many
because they choose to ignore two of the most basis facts about learning, first,
that it occurs most often outside of school when students reflect, practice,
talk about, read and write about what they have been exposed to in school, and
second, that teachers have little control over whether or not students spend the
time needed to form the new neuronal networks and long term memories that are
learning. Parents and caregivers have control of the out of school time or what
I call the 50% solution.
Two significant changes in the way schools are looked at
could lead to a much fairer and more accurate assessment of the job schools are
doing to educated young people today. The first is to recognize that school is
no different than any other human to human interaction—difficult to mange, hard
to control and not easy to guarantee outcomes. The saying a team is only as good
as its players, or a company is only as good as its employees is true for
schools as well—school is only as good as its teachers and its students.
Give schools students that try to learn, pay attention, and do their homework
and you will get good results. Give schools students that are disruptive, rarely
attend, never study and fail to embrace any semblance of a culture of learning
and you will get what many describe today as schools of failure.
The second change is to define school success in a context
that takes in to account the research on learning and teaching that has emerged
in the past ten years which is more clearly defining what aspects of learning
teachers can control and should be held responsible for and what control and
responsibilities belong to the learners and their care givers.
The need to define this context became crystal clear to me
a few months ago when I was commenting to a group of college professors that the
high school graduation rate of a major urban city schools system was 28% and
that I wasn’t certain whether that rate was good or bad. After the professor’s
gapping mouths closed and their looks of disbelief had subsided, I went on to
say that given that our educational system is premised on human to human
interaction which is always hard to manage successfully and given how few
aspects of learning teachers actually control and the limited time teachers have
students in school and given the environmental factors that can impact the
students who attend the public schools in a large urban area, maybe a 28%
graduation rate is more reasonable than some want to believe. The professors
then asked me to elaborate on what I meant by my observation that teachers don’t
control most of the factors that impact learning. That’s when it hit me!
If teachers don’t realize the limited control and responsibilities they have in
facilitating student learning, how could those who so often criticize schools,
legislators, business people, school boards and parents have these
understandings?
So what follows is a description of what is reasonable to
expect from schools and what controls and responsibilities for learning lie
elsewhere. Recent research in educational fields and in neuroscience has help to
define more clearly the challenges that face our teachers and our schools. These
challenges described below are based on well researched understandings about how
humans learn (at least to the extent we can know that at this time). I am
certain that others could add to the list, but the areas I am addressing are
crucial to the discussion of what is a reasonable context in which to view
school success.
Challenge One—Time
An important place to start in understanding teachers’
limitations is with the time that schools in the USA have to engage students in
structured and guided learning activities. The amount of time students spend in
class in the USA each day is rather wide ranging, but it usually totals between
300 to 400 minutes. The same wide range is true for the number of school days
per year ranging from 171 to 190, depending on the school district. The exact
numbers are not as important as the general understanding that children and
young adults engage in learning at school about 19% of the 168 hours each week
when school is in session and about 13% of their total time over the 52 weeks of
each year. If we allow for students to be asleep an average of nine hours
per–day( more for elementary students less for high school students) or 63 hours
per-week it still means that students’ primary care givers (parents and
guardians) have responsibility for them 50% of the time each year or more than
three time as much as the schools.
One of the most important points about the nature of
learning is that the change in neuronal networks in the brain that give proof
that learning has occurred are gradual and most often, especially as children
grow older, occurs outside of the classroom. Leaning occurs when students’
practice the skills and knowledge they are taught at school by doing homework or
discussing their in-class activities and home work with peers or family members,
reflect on what they have come to understand in school by thinking about it or
reading more about it or seeing how it connects to other things they know, and
then sharing with others what they know or using the information to gain new
understandings or solve problems. It is the care givers as well as the students
who are responsible for how the students spend their time outside of school.
Teachers have little or no control over what the care givers do to direct the
50% of the students’ time they are responsible for when the student is not in
school or asleep. The best teachers can only set an appetizing table for
learning. The learners and their care givers must come to understand that long
term memories and changes in neuronal networks need to be fed by time and
practice to form. This time and practice must take place outside of school as a
reinforcement to what happens within the school room.
Challenge Two—A Student’s Prior
Experience
Researchers like David Ausubel in the late 60’s and Renate
and Geoffrey Caine in the 1990’s confirm that a learners’ prior experiences play
the single biggest role in their learning, however, teachers have only limited
control over these experiences. Included in the a learners’ prior experience are
such factors as all of students’ content/information knowledge, such as their
factual knowledge of a given subject; their emotional experiences, especially
those related to learning and school; their learning strategies/ ways/and
styles; and, their study skills and motivation to learn in school, including the
importance they see learning having in their life, their home environment
experiences, their socialization skills, their self-image and their basic
literacy and computational skills among other things.
The success of any school depends on its teachers’
abilities to learn as much about their students’ prior experiences so they can
build connections to the students’ prior knowledge to produce new learning.
However, teachers cannot come close to knowing what students’ primary care
givers know about these areas. In truth, teachers’ control of their students’
prior experiences are limited and yet it is these experiences that are so vital
to students’ learning success.
Learning is a “whole person experience” In other words,
teachers teach more than the cognitive parts of the brain; they teach a whole
being. Any part of a person’s experiences can limit or impede the learning
process. A teacher’s professional duty is to somehow try and overcome any limits
and impediments to learning and facilitate each student’s academic education.
Teachers, by their professional calling, accept this challenge and see it as
their duty and responsibility. However, when it comes to determining the
definition of “school success” the context from which society judges that
success or failure needs to include that it’s just not an easy goal to
facilitate learning when classroom teachers have only limited control over the
most important aspects of learning: what the learner brings to school in the
form of his or her prior experiences.
Challenge Three—Research
Limitations
Until recently, there has been little scientific
understanding of the relationship between how the brain (the most important
organ in the learning process) works and the teaching and learning process.
Robert Sylwester author of several books on the brain and learning has said “To
be honest the practical basis of our profession (teaching) has been probably
closer to folklore knowledge than to scientific knowledge. We could predict what
would probably occur in a classroom, but we generally didn’t know why it
occurred” Despite the best effort of psychologist, anthropologist, linguist
and philosophers, our understanding of how learning actually occurs in the brain
has been limited by our inability to look inside the human head and physically
“see” the evidence of how the brain works. With the inventions of the MRI and
PET scans, this is beginning to change. However, this lack of hard science has
lead to wide swings in the pendulum of teaching practices for the past fifty
years. The cutting judgment as to the failure of schools must be tempered by the
reality that teachers have been ask to teach with an ever changing blueprint
that, even today, is not based on a confirmed clear picture about how the brain
actually learns. John Ratey, M.D. points out in his 2001 book Users Guide to
the Brain that “our new discoveries are beginning to generate speculative
theories about how the brain itself works. If several of these theories are even
remotely close to the truth, they will change the way we think about ourselves
forever”
Sylwester points out in his 1995 book A Celebration of
Neurons that teachers guided only by the study of behavior over the past
several decades have been able to only partially understand, diagnose and treat
many complex learning behaviors like dyslexia and attention disorders and less
recognized but equally frustrating disabilities like student motivational
problems and memory difficulties. Failure to help students who have difficulties
that teachers cannot fully understand is tragic. Yet one must wonders whether
it is really failure on the part of the teacher.
Challenge Four—Expectations
The expectations that society
places on schools to solve its problems outstrip the resources and skills that
even the finest teachers in the best schools can offer. An example of this
expectation is express in the National Association for the Education of Young
Children’s (NAEYC) Position Statement on School Readiness which notes that “It
is a public responsibility to ensure that all families have access to the
services and support needed to provide the strong relationships and rich
experiences that provide children with a foundation for all future learning. At
a minimum such services include basic health care, including prenatal care and
childhood immunizations; economic security; basic nutrition; adequate housing;
family support services; and high-quality early childhood programs.
I do not disagree that all of the above issues need to be addressed if a
child is to be school ready; yet, the truth is that quite often we as a society
fall far short of meeting these readiness expectations. However, those who call
our schools failures in general seem to ignore that these readiness necessities
did not happen and expect school to successfully teach students to learn and to
learn well. This is an unlikely outcome.
Schools over the past 35 years have been asked to provide an ever increasing
set of services to students. Often these services go well beyond simply teaching
students to become information and computationally literate in addition to the
other important traditional school skills and knowledge. The expectation that
schools will provide emotional and career counseling, health care, nutrition,
deal effectively with disabilities, day care before and after school and “leave
no child behind” have changed the definition of school. Merriam-Webster defines
school “an organization that provides instruction: as a: an institution for the
teaching of children” By contrast, this is hardly what schools are asked to do
today. The expectations have become unrealistic given the time constraints and
limited resources that are paired with the diverse skills demanded of the
professionals. This tension between expectation and reality is compounded by
the limited hard science research. Schools have always been fairly good as
Sylwester observes, “at teaching motivated students of at least average ability
who come from secure homes and can function reasonably well on their own.” But
that is not what teachers are being asked to do.
Challenge Five—Range of Students’ Abilities
The question that I most
often get in my role as an instructor of teachers is “How do I handle the wide
rage of abilities that I find in my classroom?” This happens whether I am
working with elementary teachers or college instructors. I answer by saying
that there are many instructional adaptations and multiple lesson planning
activities that teachers can try that will help. But, the truth is, there is no
really good answer. The uniqueness of each student’s background experience,
readiness level, intellect and motivation level simply don’t allow for meeting
all of students’ individual learning needs, especially when Renate and Geoffrey
Caines’ research tell us “there can be a five-year difference in maturation
between any two “average’ children” Would smaller class size solve this problem
? No according to Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom in their new book No Excuses:
Closing the Racial Gap in Learning in which they report that California spent a
fortune reducing class size in grades K-3 with few benefits.
Challenge Six—Competition from a Media Flooded Culture
How well do schools compete
with the sense-luscious media opportunities children have available to them
today? The answer is not well. The National Institute on Media and the Family
found in their 1999 national survey that the average American child watches 25
hours of television each week, plays computer or video games for 7 hours each
week, and accesses the Internet from home for 4 hours each week (among those who
have Internet access).
What impact does this have on
school success? Family media habits can affect children's school performance.
Families that use electronic media less and read more have children who do
better in school. National studies by Dorr and Rabin, 1995: Huston, 1992; Lin
and Atkin, 1989, have demonstrated predictable correlations between students’
school performance and children’s use of media. For example, one finding is
that children watching at least 10 hours of TV per-week have their school
performance decline as their TV watching increases. Given that the average child
watches 25 hours of TV per-week; this is a very bothersome finding.
Media is very powerful and can be very enlightening and helpful to students.
However, most schools have trouble competing with the visual lusciousness of
today’s media. Add to this, that schools can’t control what or how much students
watch or use media and the result is that media use outside of school often
diminishes rather than enhances teachers’ abilities to aide students’ learning.
Conclusion
So we must all consider how
society can accurately and honestly measure success in schools that face the
challenges outline in this paper. How do we – society, caregivers, teachers,
school districts - leave no child behind? I am not certain I know or anyone
knows how to leave no one behind. I do know that the legislators, business
people, news media, school boards, parents, students and many teachers need to
rethink their expectations for schools and begin to look for solutions in the
areas of students’ lives that are beyond a teacher’s control. The enormous
problems schools face are not solvable as Mortimer Zuckerman, Editor and Chief
of U.S. News & World Report put it in a recent editorial by throwing
more money at schools or reducing class size or getting more certified teachers
or more minority teachers—these have been shown to have little impact on the
quality of education in our schools
Learning is a partnership between students, teachers and caregivers. Like all
other human to human interactions it suffers when one party fails to carry its
weight. Schools are an easy target but they are simply not the complete problem
or the complete answer. We have to look at the other 50% of our children’s days
if we are to have schools of success.
References
Ausubel, David P. (1968). Educational
Psychology, A Cognitive View. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc
Caine, G and Renate Caine. (1997)
Education on the Edge of Possibility. Alexandria, VA: ASCD
Dorr, A. & Rabin, B. E. ( 1995). Parents
children and television. In M. Bornstein ( Ed) Handbook of parenting,
Vol. 4 pp. 323-351).Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum
Gentile, D. A. & Walsh, D. A. (1999).MediaQuotientTM:
National Survey of Family Media Habits, Knowledge, and Attitudes, National
Institute on Media and the Family, Minneapolis, M
Goldberg, E. ( 2001). The Executive Brain
Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind. Oxford: University Press
Huston, A. C., Donnerstein, E., Fairchild,
H., Feshbach, N. D., Katz, P.A., Murray, J. P., Rubinstein, E. A., Wilcox, B.
L., & Zuckerman, D.M. (1992). Big world, small screen: the role of television
in American society. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press
Merriam-Webster Online
Dictionary, Springfield MA
http://www.m-w.com/home.htm
National Association for the
Education of Young Children(NAEYC) Mission Statement pp.1, Washington DC
http://www.naeyc.org/
Ratey, J. (2001). A User’s
Guide to the Brain. New York: Pantheon Books
Swanbrow, D. (Dec, 10, 1997). Study of worldwide
rates of religiosity, church attendance. U of M News and Information Services:
Ann Arbor, MI
Sylwester, R.(1995). A Celebration of Neurons. Alexandria, VA: ASCD
U.S. Divorce Rates, ( 2002)
Monthly Vital Statistics Report, Vol. 51, No. 10: National Center for Health
Statistics
http://www.divorcereform.org/rates.html
Zuckerman, M. ( 2003). A
hard look at what works. Us News and World Report, Nov 24, pp84-85. |
