Reversing the Curriculum

How might a six-year-old describe the way a dropped ball bounces?

How might a five-year-old describe the way water pours?

And what about a kid telling a story?

When kids come to school at five (if kids should come to school at five in the first place) they have certain fascinations - hearing and telling stories, understanding signs, the physics which make their world work, hot and cold, animal behaviour. And great teachers do embrace much of this, but our school curriculum never does.

Instead of running with this natural learning curve, instead of meeting our students where they are, we focus all of our attention through the age of eight on a certain set of formalized learning systems which disinterest most kids, and are essentially impossible for many. We spend all of our time on complex symbolic codes (the alphabet, the numeral system) and on the operation of those code systems (phonics, spelling, arithmetic).

And, within three years, we have taken kids thrilled to start school and turned them into kids who'd rather be anywhere else.

Last night on Twitter I had a conversation with college professor Michael Walters - @rugcernie. At one point he was troubled when I said that we had to, "meet students where they are." "by making the practice "meeting them where they are," you may lower standards. Balance must be struck," he said.

When he said that I thought of the classic scene from Francois Truffaut's film Les Quatre Cent Coups (400 Blows). A teacher takes the boys out on a physical training run through Paris. Two by two, three by three, they vanish from behind him, running off into shops and alleys. By the time the scene ends the teacher is no longer being followed by 40 students, but by one.  "You can't bring anyone anywhere if you start where they are not," I suggested.

Imagine a tour leader waiting on a corner ten blocks away from where the group going on the tour has gathered. This is what most education looks like. We're frustrated because students are not following along, but the students can not follow because we are beginning where they are not.

And thus, the one-third who succeed are those who either somehow luck out into being at our starting point or who, essentially, don't need us in the first place, and the other two-thirds muddle along in failure, year after year after year.

Green percentage are students proficient in reading at grade four, according to US National Assessment of Educational Progress through 2009

And it never gets any better. The students aren't following at the start, and so they can never catch up.

Green percentage are students proficient in reading at grade eight according to US National Assessment of Educational Progress through 2009

This creates not just overall failure, but creates disability as well. Because we do not want to admit that our system is flawed, we label our children as flawed. We don't look at the charts above and see a system which is ignoring children, rather, we describe those falling in the orange zones as "retarded," whatever polite words we choose. Thus, it is the kid's fault, and we can go on and on as before.

But what if school began differently?

I'm not promoting Montessori specifically, but they surely understand the idea

So do many hands-on museums (here, the New York Hall of Science)

What if school began with where kids actually are? With the bounce of a ball, the spin of a playground ride, the stories of their mornings, their obsessions with cars, planes, boats, or dolls? What if we allowed kids to create their own paths from their own starting points? What if letters, numbers, reading, counting, multiplying were only introduced as it appeared as a problem-solving solution for the student's interest?

Then that learning wouldn't be the worthless chores they now appear to most kids, but rather, as a route to where the student wants to go: Wouldn't you like to read this story about Nascar, Arsenal, the Titanic, knights, off-road-vehicles? Let's start with text-to-speech, so you can listen and watch...

And if the student wants to go there, the learning is motivated. And motivated learning is effective learning.

In 1865 the New York State Board of Regents cranked out the first standardized test of general education. About one-third of students did well. Today, 145 years later, our school curriculum system is the same, and so are our results.

So, do we keep insisting that our students change? That our teachers change? Or do we change our system?

- Ira Socol

The Reading List

What if everyone in a literature class didn't read the same book? What would happen if, say, during Great Gatsby month, a third of the class read that, a third read Dos Passo's 1919, and a third read Sinclair Lewis's Dodsworth?

What might the class discover? What kinds of discussions would develop?

It's not that I have anything against The Great Gatsby. In fact, I think it might be the best written American novel ever. And there is surely no clearer refutation of the myth of 'The American Dream' ever put on paper.

And this isn't just about fixing terrible teaching. Sure, I read in shocked horror as supposedly "top" high school students misread the novel so badly that a whole New York Times article could be devoted to their complete missing of Fitzgerald's point, '"My green light?” said Jinzhao, who has been studying “Gatsby” in her sophomore English class at the Boston Latin School. “My green light is Harvard.”' (say goodbye to Harvard, Jinzhao). Bad teaching is bad teaching no matter what you read.

But it is about suggesting an alternative to our basic pedagogy. It is about creating student choice. It is about empowering peer teaching. And it is about exposing students to far more literature.

Two of the basic components of Universal Design are student choice, and the empowering a wide range of expertise among students, so that a classroom becomes a community of learners rather than one leader and a roomful of passive receptors.

We can start doing this by allowing alternate learning tools - this students reads the book on paper, that student listens to the audiobook, this other student uses text-to-speech. We can continue by allowing one student to sit in a chair, another to sit on the floor, and a third to stand. And we can even allow one to express their knowledge through writing, another through creating a painting, a third to create a video. And all those things are good, but I do not think we are quite there yet.

Getting there requires distributed knowledge and community cognition. And distributed knowledge and community cognition means we offer truly different paths to the knowledge we hope to share.

So when we teach Gatsby, what are we teaching? We should be teaching language, yes, and the structuring of thought and image. We should also be teaching the role of literature, how fiction shapes what we know. And we should be teaching a social history - what did Fitzgerald capture in Gatsby? What did he challenge? Why did he challenge those things? or my favorite... Would an American high school English teacher have assigned Gatsby to his/her class in 1928? Why or why not?

If we mix a room of students reading the other two books, how might these lessons change? The three writers are all inventive - all rule breakers - but they all break the rules in radically different ways. They are all angry, but they are angry in different ways. They all doubt the basic myths of America, but they attack them in different ways.

Imagine the conversation as students compare the end of Gatsby to the "Body of an American" end of 1919? Where does the Gatsby character come from? Surely not just Princetonian frustration.

Given all these options, I would imagine that students might compare, debate, challenge, doubt, and, in every way be less prone to seeking the "right for school" answer. They might even want to read one of the books they hadn't read - maybe outside of school.

This isn't just an idea for lit classes. Spreading out the research, spreading out the work, letting peers teach peers, seems a way to expand both the knowledge base in the classroom, but also the number of experts in the room, and I think that's always a good idea. The best classes I have been in are those where students carried in significant, relevant outside knowledge, and the "not completely common curriculum" approach might just help you get to that in every class.

Just a thought as you start your summer, and start dreaming about what your classroom will look like next year.

- Ira Socol