Author: Alan Jones

In response to a New York Times article titled: “The Social Justice Purge at Idaho Colleges: Republicans lawmakers try to cancel diversity programs“

As a former high school history teacher, I taught history–that’s it. I refrained from labeling or categorizing the history I was teaching. I also refrained from using textbooks, which, too often sanitized parts of the American story that were horrific. I did stick to primary documents, that were challenging to read, but, were guaranteed to generate some heated discussions–and that is really what teaching history is all about—letting my juniors wrestle intellectually with the who, what, why, and how of our country’s history.

The political hot button question to emerge out of a year of a pandemic shutdown is when will students be able to return to in-person schooling? The source of this urgent call for returning children and adolescents to neighborhood classrooms is twofold: first, parents want to return to work; secondly, there is growing research indicating that remote learning is having damaging effects on the social, emotional, and intellectual development of children and adolescents.

Parents calling for a return to in-person schooling assume that learning is optimized when children and adolescents are placed in a single classroom with a teacher. John Goodlad’s study of instructional programs of 13 high schools remains, after 30 years, the best description of what is being defined as in-person learning.  

The teacher explaining or lecturing to the total class or a single students, occasionally asking questions requiring factual answers: the teacher, when not lecturing, observing or monitoring students working individually at their desks; students listening or appearing to listen to the teacher and occasionally responding to the teacher’s questions; students working individual at their desks on reading or writing assignments; and all with little emotion, from interpersonal warmth to expressions of hostility. (Goodlad, 1984, p. 230)

While it is true, that Goodlad’s description of the regularities of classroom instruction includes a teacher in a classroom—the person—it leaves out the following key elements of what I term, personalized learning environments:

PERSONALIZED LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS…

• Create problem-centric units of instruction that focus on meaning-making with relevant examples of how the principles and concepts taught can be applied in the real world.
• Are interactive with students engaging in what Dewey termed the four basic human impulses: the impulse to communicate, to construct, to inquirer, and to express in finer form.
• Allow students to self-pace their understandings of subject matter content—the ability to hit the stop, rewind, or mute button.
• Provide students with immediate feedback on what they understand and what they need to review.
• Provide students with frequent opportunities to interact with peers.
• Reduce one period presentations—sixty minutes—to ten-minute modular presentations of a concept, theory, or practice.
• Provide students with practice exercises designed for mastery of subject matter material.
• Detect patterns of student responses that identify misconceptions and generate immediate correctives.
• Connect students with experts throughout the world on problems they are working to solve.

No in-person teacher standing in front of a classroom of thirty students, works within an organizational structure or works with a teaching model designed to create a PERSONALIZED LEARNING ENVIRONMENT. Over three decades ago, Benjamin Bloom wrote about the 2 Sigma Problem in schooling: the search for methods of group instruction as effective as one-to-one tutoring. What we know about personalized one-to-one tutoring is a process in which 90% of the tutored students reach high levels of learning. What we know about conventional in-person classroom teaching is a process in which fewer than 20% of the students in a classroom reach high levels of learning.

Although there has been much criticism leveled at the virtual learning environments that schools hastily put together during the pandemic year, the kinds of personalized learning environments created by well crafted virtual learning units of instruction clearly are the answer to Bloom’s 2 Sigma problem.

After a year of homeschooling, with the exposure to personalized learning environments, schools are at an inflection point—do they continue to house a one-size fits all in-person classroom instruction or do they explore and experiment with a different model of teaching and learning that creates a configuration of schooling that honors the diverse interest, talents, abilities, and learning styles of our sons and daughters.

1.      MAIN OFFICES ARE NOT OPEN TO NEW IDEAS

The regularities of schooling formulated at the turn of the century remain firmly in control of the organizational and pedagogical structures of contemporary schooling. What do the regularities of schooling look like? Goodlad’s (1984) study of instructional programs of 13 high schools remains, after 30 years, the best account of these regularities in action. The regularities described in Goodlad’s study of high school classrooms is a highly scripted performance that includes:

   the teacher explaining or lecture to the total class or a single students, occasionally asking questions requiring factual answers: the teacher, when not lecturing, observing or monitoring students working individually at their desks; students listening or appearing to listen to the teacher and occasionally responding to the teacher’s questions; students working individual at their desks on reading or writing assignments; and all with little emotion, from interpersonal warmth to expressions of hostility. (Goodlad, 1984, p. 230)

 Any idea, program, technique that would fundamentally alter the regularities are met with the regular responses of bureaucracies: “no money,” “no room,” “no staff,” “no time.”

2.      MAIN OFFICES ARE RISK AVERSE

Embedded in the process of innovating is the willingness to experiment. Any form of experimentation involves risk—the understanding that your great idea may result in great failure. No parent wants to hear that their son or daughter’s educational progress was impeded by a failed teaching methodology or organizational arrangement. The problem with this fear of failure is most of what we do in schools—how we organize subjects; how we teach; how we assess—are methodologies and organizational structures that the research for decades has declared to be educationally ineffective. Most of what school communities would define as experimental are practices that the research has proven to be educationally effective. The willingness on the part of administrators to experiment with “what the research says” is still a bridge too far for main offices who value the certainties of institutional schooling over the uncertainties of progressive learning environments.

3.      MAIN OFFICES DO NOT HIRE DIVERSE TALENT

The source of all innovative environments is a talent pool populated with personnel with diverse cultural, educational, and work backgrounds. Main offices look for candidates that meet uniform credentialing requirements and are comfortable working within programs and organizational structures that prize compliance and standardization. Teachers with a proclivity for out of the box thinking do not remain long in organizational structures and routines that leave little time or venues to think about, discuss, or experiment with disparate models of schooling or teaching.

4.      MAIN OFFICES ARE NOT DESIGNED FOR INNOVATION

School buildings were designed for surveillance and categorization of children and adolescents. Hallways, classrooms, offices, departments are organizational configurations that simplify adult supervision and assign them to the right age group, or subject, or department. Spending your entire day in an office or a classroom, largely isolated from your colleagues, fails create the kinds of collaborative environments that generate innovate ideas and practices.

5.      MAIN OFFICES HOUSE DOERS NOT THINKERS

Main offices house men and women who have mastered the managerial tools—budgeting, scheduling, distributing, monitoring— for completing administrative and supervisory tasks. None of these tools question or elaborate on the beliefs, ideas, theories, values, or outcomes governing an assigned managerial task. Without a thorough understanding of the theories, concepts, or practices constituting the managerial task, administrators are unable to adjust, to improve upon, or create new understandings of the programs, the mandates, the teaching models they have been assigned to implement.

Recent results from international testing programs (PISA) indicate that scores for American students have remained stagnant in comparison to other comparable nations where scores have risen. Media outlets have been quick to blame progressive pedagogies—common core—for the decline in American performance in core disciplines.

Don’t blame common core. If anything, common core mirrored the kind of instructional goals now being followed in countries that score well on PISA. I admit to having some issues with common core, but the substance of the reform called for teachers to invite students to participate in processes of inquiry, problem solving and sensemaking. Students, according to common core, must have opportunities to participate in authentic, conceptual problem solving and argumentation. So then, what went wrong.

First, and foremost, our teachers are not at the same educational and training levels of comparable industrialized nations—they lack deep background in their subject matter, which, is the foundation of common core and the curricula in nations doing well on PISA. This is not to blame teachers for low test scores. It is to admit the uncomfortable truth that the curriculum and expectations in American schools of education do not align with the kinds of pedagogy—e.g. common core) designed to do well on conceptually based content and procedures tested by PISA.

Secondly, nations doing well on PISA spend more time in school ( e.g. 240 days in Japan).

Thirdly, even when in school American students waste enormous amounts of time on non-academic activities—homecoming, prom, pep assemblies

Finally, our culture is deeply anti-intellectual and anti-school. American parents look at schooling as means to earn a credential, a piece of paper–the concept that the act of learning is a honored value–one that must be pursued at all cost–well, what our culture values is Friday Night Under the Lights, supporting our winning head football coach, who, also teaches one period of Algebra.

For the last century–yes century–we have designed and operated our schools as factories. Watching student on my block wait for buses at 6: 30 in morning and then seeing the activity buses arriving at 5 or 6 pm—just another day at the factory.There is now mountains of research on adolescent sleeping habits concluding that schools should start later and end earlier—Finland’s 9 – 2 school hours conforms to these findings. We continue in this country to support school systems that are pursuing institutional goals—accreditation, accountability mandates, budgetary goals (e.g. bus companies bottom-line)—but none of the educational goals and values listed in school mission statements. The routines of American schooling—the grammar of schooling—is wholly designed to conform to the schedules and the goals of the adult working world and nothing to do with the working of a child’s mind.