Racing to Catch Up With the Past

When I was in col­lege earn­ing my edu­ca­tion degree, most of the research on learn­ing came out of behav­ioral psy­chol­ogy: Pavlov, Thorndike, and Skin­ner. We learned how to mold our stu­dents’ skills and behav­iors through drill and prac­tice, rewards, and pun­ish­ments. Instruc­tional tech­niques were built around how to train stu­dents to become flu­ent in the read­ing and com­pu­ta­tion skills they would need to be suc­cess­ful in life.

Then, about ten years later, when I was doing advanced grad­u­ate work and earn­ing my cer­tifi­cate in cur­ricu­lum design, we learned that learn­ing wasn’t quite as cut and dried as that. Cur­ricu­lum shouldn’t be com­part­men­tal­ized, it should be inte­grated. Instruc­tion shouldn’t be skill-​​driven, it should incor­po­rate higher level think­ing. Assess­ments shouldn’t be designed around dis­crete facts, they should be authen­tic. At the time we read an inter­view with Lau­ren Resnick, a major researcher into learn­ing and how it works. (The arti­cle is avail­able free to ASCD members.)

I recently came across the arti­cle again, and although it is now twenty years old, Resnick’s com­ments are thought-​​provoking, not the least because much of what she said then still has not become wide­spread in the field.

If you read the pro­fes­sional lit­er­a­ture and lis­ten to what is said in train­ing sem­i­nars and work­shops, you might think this belief that there is more to learn­ing than dis­crete facts has per­vaded our school sys­tems. Resnick talked about how math­e­mat­ics, for exam­ple, is not a col­lec­tion of skills, but is an “orga­nized sys­tem of thought” (p. 14). But the cur­ricu­lum has yet to catch up with the past. Even twenty years later, text­books still look essen­tially the same as they did then. They still are struc­tured around the accu­mu­la­tion of facts and dis­crete skills, though they often fill them with lots of the lat­est terminology.

Teach­ing prac­tices really haven’t caught up either, because our schools aren’t struc­tured to facil­i­tate it.

And yet what do we see in many class­rooms? Teacher at the front, telling stu­dents what to do, how to do it, and what to remem­ber. I’m guilty of it myself, and I think on reflec­tion it is a func­tion of time. Plan­ning and imple­ment­ing the most effec­tive forms of learn­ing expe­ri­ences take far more time than most teach­ers can spare. So we fall back on what is effi­cient, even if it is not as effective.

It’s not enough to stay com­fort­able with what we know how to do. If I keep teach­ing the way I’ve always taught, I can’t bring my prac­tice up to date with 1980’s research, let alone what is hap­pen­ing in 2009. I don’t think we can even afford to say, “the sys­tem isn’t set up for it, so why bother?” Find ways inside the struc­ture to start mak­ing changes toward a more student-​​centered, think­ing– and problem-​​solving-​​oriented approach.

How are you mak­ing this hap­pen in your class­room? What are the strug­gles you’re fac­ing? How can we work together to over­come the challenges?

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Ref­er­ence

Brandt, R. (Decem­ber 1988/​January 1989). On learn­ing research: A con­ver­sa­tion with Lau­ren Resnick. Edu­ca­tional Lead­er­ship, 46 (4), 12–16.