Share information and work together

Yesterday I attended a presentation about survey design. One of the people attending said that a Noel-Levitz study found that if you report back to students about what changes have been made because of the survey results, student satisfaction will increase. It's the kind of thing that is too often forgotten. I believe that faculty, staff, and students are one community and should work together toward the goal of creating the best educational environment for students. Working to improve the university is not something the administrators should do in secret, it is something they should do in teamwork with other members of the community.

When experience in the field contradicts the conclusions of science

The third idea I want to write about from When Children Don't Learn: Understanding the Biology and Psychology of Sex Differences comes from what McGuinness writes about educational psychologists vs. teachers. She says that teachers made certain observations about children's learning, but educational psychologists did not believe them because they could not explain the claims scientifically. Regarding discoveries made by teachers and the few scientists who took those discoveries seriously, she writes "Often their work did not appeal to the general educational community because what they claimed was counterintuitive, as, for example, their unanimous insistence that reading is more related to hearing than seeing. Similarly, all these talented teachers discovered that effective remediation techniques require the integration of multiple sensory and motor tasks. It is only in the past two years that research on the brain has revealed the neural basis for this insight" (p. 56).

This parallels a gripe I have long held about the medical profession not believing in ailments suffered by patients until they can explain the physical cause. Too many doctors seem to think that if they can't explain it, it doesn't exist.

Whether it's education or medicine, these examples point to the fact that at times there is a gap between scientific understanding and experience. I'm not saying that experience is always right. Sometimes conclusions arrived at through experience are erroneous. I think that when there is a gap between experience and scientific understanding, we should not conclude that the experience is wrong, nor should we conclude that scientific understanding is wrong. The existence of a gap is simply a pointer to the need for further inquiry. Until the question is resolved, I think both sides need to keep an open mind.

Trying to understand the world

As I did in my previous post, I'm commenting on something which I read in When Children Don't Learn: Understanding the Biology and Psychology of Learning Disabilities, but which is peripheral to the main idea of the book. When McGuinness introduces the major theories about learning disabilities, she writes, "All theories are only approximations to the truth. The truth is always elusive and changeable, but some theories are more true than others" (p. 34).

I think this is an important point which is often overlooked. I think that reality is so vast and infinite that we can't expect to explain it all. I think sometimes people who know a lot about something fall into to the trap of thinking they know everything. I think it is easy to think that the corner of the world that we can see is all there is, to think that when we know everything about our corner, then we know everything. I think the brightest people are those who have a large enough view to be able to glimpse some of the vastness, and who therefore know that they don't know everything.

However, the impossibility of explaining everything does not mean that we should stop trying. The last part of the quote from McGuinness is, "some theories are more true than others." The more we pursue understanding through scientific inquiry, the closer we can get to understanding reality.

Too many rules

I have been reading When Children Don't Learn: Understanding the Biology and Psychology of Learning Disabilities by Diane McGuinness. Rather than trying to condense all my comments into one post, I'm going to write about different ideas in different posts. I have not yet finished the book, and for now I'm only going to comment on ideas that are peripheral to the main point of the book.

The first thing I want to comment on is something McGuinness writes in the preface: "children blossom with individual care and languish or rebel the moment they become less important than the system. If the system is too inflexible, too inhuman, then ultimately even the winners are losers. They have learned to play the wrong game" (p. vii). She writes this comment regarding a contrast between two schools. In one school, children blossom when their creativity is supported, while in the other school, students are valued only for their ability to earn top grades. The danger she points out is that when grades are emphasized, students come to value grades more than they value learning.

I think this is a danger in any system that tries to control behavior with rewards and punishments. I heard a story of a student at another college who visited my alma mater, Haverford College. Haverford has an honor code which, in addition to covering academic integrity, asks students to be considerate and respectful with all members of the Haverford community. The student visiting Haverford said that at her college, there are many rules, and students try to figure out how to get around the rules, while at Haverford, students are expected to be good, so students try to figure out how to be good.

Haverford's honor code is effective because it expects honorable behavior and holds people accountable when they don't live up to that expectation. School administrators are similarly effective when they expect their teachers and staff to serve students, and hold them accountable when they fail to do so. However, some administrations are unable to trust that their teachers and staff will work in the best interests of students. These administrators take the approach of regulating what teachers and staff do at a very detailed level. When they take this approach, they make following the rules the ultimate goal, rather making serving students the goal. Most people who work in the field of education do so because they want to serve students. Working in an environment where complying with regulations is top priority dampens the enthusiasm of many who initially were motivated to serve students.

Thus whether we are talking about student learning, students' non-academic conduct while at school, or the conduct of teachers and others who work with students, I think we need to consider whether all our rules and restrictions really support the things we want to support. Our ultimate academic goal for our students is not top grades but learning. The traits we want to encourage in our students are not dutiful obedience, but creativity, critical inquiry and analysis, confidence, integrity, and compassion. We want our teachers and other staff to care about student learning and development. While rules are always necessary, we need to remember the reasons for those rules, and make sure the rules are just the means to an end, and don't become an end in themselves.

Tests of educational achievement

Two stories, both told to me by the same person. The first happened to a family member. The second is from a book by Don Mitchell. Both are about a school system's testing of what a child had learned at home. In both cases, the child was perhaps around 5 or 6 years old.

1. The examiner marked the child down for not knowing something about Pinocchio. The examiner did not ask, and so never found out, that the child could identify on a map all the states in the country.
2. The examiner showed the child a picture and asked the child to say what it was. The child studied it for a long time, and then said, "It could be a unicorn, but I don't see a horn." The examiner wrote, "Is not able to identify a horse." Then the child said, "It looks like a bit like a horse, but the ears are wrong," and the examiner crossed off what she had written.

In both these cases, the child was smarter than the test was prepared to measure. In these examples, the measure of educational achievement was a one-on-one interview, but these stories make me wonder about standardized tests. These days, the makers of standardized tests attempt to be more sophisticated and measure things like critical thinking and writing, rather than memorization. But can a standardized test ever measure anything other than how well people do on standardized tests? The tests do give us a general idea of what people know, and are useful when we want some imperfect information on a large number of people. But we should not think that they tell the whole story of what an individual knows.

How Children Learn by John Holt

I have been reading How Children Learn by John Holt (second edition).

Some of the points he makes:

• Children are naturally curious. They are eager to understand the world and do the things that adults do. Unfortunately, schools do not always teach things that children find useful, or teach in a way that promotes optimal understanding.
• Children need to develop their own understanding of the world, not just to hear explanations from adults. For example, it's not enough to explain the concept of written words. Children need to be around books and develop their own perceptions and understandings of the concept of written words before they will be ready to learn to read specific words.
• Explaining things to children that they aren't ready to hear or don't want to hear frustrates children rather than contributes to their learning.
• The journey toward increased understanding is not a straight line.Children try doing things in different ways. Even after they have done something right once, they will do it wrong sometimes. However, in time, without being corrected, they will come to consistently do things right. He quotes Professor David Hawkins as saying, "All of us must cross the line between ignorance and insight many times before we truly understand." (pp. 222-223)

Here are a few of the specific things he talks about:

Holt describes how sometimes in a room full of people, he will start playing the cello. After playing a piece, he will invite everyone in the room to try his cello. Usually the children will all try it, but the adults will not, except maybe if they already know how to play the cello. When children try the cello, they mimic Holt's actions, but only after some time do they start to pay attention to how the actions correspond with the sounds, and experiment with changing the actions to change the sounds. In contrast, if adults do play it, they try to figure it out before they even start engaging in actions. Holt says that adults can do this because it is easier for them to make sense of data, to see the relationship between the movement and the sound. He says that for children, the world is full of confusing stimuli, so it is harder for them to make sense of things. Therefore, children gather lots of data, by engaging in actions such as playing the cello. According to Holt, a child "is much less likely than adults to make hard and fast conclusions on the basis of too little data, or having made such conclusions, to refuse to consider any new data that does not support them. And these are the vital skills of thought which, in our hurry to get him thinking the way we do, we may very well stunt or destroy in the process of 'educating' him" (p. 75).

I have seen teachers make the mistake of ceasing to gather data because they think they have the answer already. They think that they understand a student's question and get engrossed in pontificating their answer without taking in the data that what they are talking about does not actually answer the question that the student has.

Holt says children need time to "mess around" with things in order to develop their own conceptual frameworks. He quotes Seymour Papert, a professor at MIT. Papert was fascinated by gears as a child and played with them a lot. When faced with math concepts in school, he understood them by thinking about what they meant as applied to gears. Thus Papert's "messing around" with gears helped him with learning math in school. Unfortunately, math is sometime taught as an abstraction, which makes it more difficult for students to understand.

Holt says that in schools, the students are the ones who need the most practice talking, but the teachers are the ones who do the most talking. When teachers do hold discussions, they often try to elicit certain answers. I remember teachers who did this. Whether it is a teacher or anyone else, if a person does not seem to want to understand what I think, I prefer not to bother to talk to them. The same goes for kids. They will practice speech when people listen to them. As Holt summarizes it, "we get better at using words, whether hearing, speaking, reading, or writing, under one condition and only one -- when we use those words to say something we want to say, to people we want to say it to, for purposes that are our own." (p. 124)

He describes a child doing a puzzle. The child tries to put a piece in the wrong place and it won't go. The child becomes upset. Holt suggests setting the piece aside for now. The child puts some other pieces into place and then easily finds the spot for the piece that had caused trouble before. What teachers need to learn from this is that there are times when a lesson can't be learned, and rather than force it, they should set it aside. The child will learn it better later, when he is ready to learn it.

Holt says that children go through cycles of courage and fear. When getting used to being in a swimming pool, sometimes they want an adult to hold them tightly, while other times they want to jump right in. If we give them reassurance when they seek it, they will rapidly learn to do many brave things. On the other hand, if we push them to do things they are afraid to do, they will become timid and will not learn as fast.

Holt has experienced much opposition to his ideas. Holt addresses the arguments against his views throughout the book. One of the main themes of those who disagree with him is that if children are allowed to direct their own learning, they won't learn the things they need to learn. To counter this, Holt gives some examples of how children get interested in something and pursuing that interest leads them to learn many things. In one example, a child read an article on scuba diving which sparked his interest, and that led to further reading about diving for historic objects, which led to interest in and study of archeology and ancient history. In another example, taken from My Country School Diary by Julia Weber, students wondered about why wool clothing shrunk. That led them to look at fabrics under a microscope, to spin and weave cloth, and to calculate how many hours of work it would take to make cloth. They calculated the area of different shapes of cloth. They visited a factory where cloth was made, and studied the history of labor conditions and the impact of factories on the community.

Holt also discusses his methods. He believes that while experimental methods have their place, they are not the only way to discover truth, and relying on experiments alone will result in a limited understanding of the world. He points out that during experiments, children feel tense and try to behave as the experimenter wants them to. He believes that he learns more about children by observing them in their everyday lives.

I went through the education of a social scientist, and was taught about how scientific experiments are the only way to understand things, how otherwise we will be affected by our own pre-conceived ideas and by the un-representativeness of our sample. I accepted that way of thinking when it was taught to me, but over time, I've come to see things more the way Holt does. I do see how bias can be present in personal observation, and I do think that there are times when the experimental method is most effective. However, sometimes scientists don't realize that bias is also present in the experimental method. Also, I've found that experimenters want to classify human thoughts into neat little categories, but if you listen to a thought for all that it is, it usually contains more than the little pre-determined box indicates.