why we learn

Classroom instruction is complex but do we treat it as such? Is “sensing” a priority of teacher education? How would an instructor who waits for “patterns to emerge” be viewed by their supervisor? As laid back? Aloof? And does outcome-based education (unintentionally) result in educators treating complex situations as complicated, or worse yet, simple in nature? These questions find their origins in the work of David Snowden and Mary Boone, as they apply the principles of Snowden’s Cynefin Framework to leadership in the 2007 Harvard Business Review article A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making.

Rather than summarize Snowden & Boone’s application textually, I’ve generated a graphical representation. Clicking on this smaller image will produce the full-sized document.

Initially, my interest in this article was peaked by a blog posting of David Clark in his series of writings aimed at describing how the tenets of Agile software development can be applied as a system of instructional design. The HBR article had the added advantage of using this framework as a lens from which to view leadership, a topic of focus for me now as I begin supervising staff at my school. However, its application to the classroom teacher is intriguing.

Aren’t teachers really classroom leaders, or leaders within a complex educational / instructional setting? David Williamson Shaffer, in his 2004 TCR article Pedagogical Praxis: The Professions as Models for Postindustrial Education states the following.

We know a great deal about some of the epistemological and pedagogical underpinnings of compelling learning environments. However, orchestrating these elements into a coherent whole remains a challenge (p. 1417).

Shaffer suggests that professions have unique epistemologies, or “ways of knowing”, and thus have the potential to be used as models for instruction. Daniel Willingham, in his new book Why Don’t Students Like School?, alludes to the complexity of the educational setting as well as he explains the disconnect between controlled experimental studies and the classroom.

But mental processes are not isolated in the classroom. They all operate simultaneously, and they often interact in difficult-to-predict ways (Kindle edition, Location 126).

Marzano et al., in their work Classroom Instruction that Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement discuss nine categories of instructional strategies.

• Identifying Similarities and Differences
• Summarizing and Note Taking
• Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition
• Homework and Practice
• Nonlinguistic Representations
• Cooperative Learning
• Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback
• Generating and Testing Hypotheses
• Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers

Throughout this work, the presented strategies are also (necessarily) related to content and instructional situation. Doesn’t this make instructional choices more complex? If we agree with Willingham, who differs from Marzana et al. in this regard, there’s another layer of complexity that must be superimposed onto the extant relationships between content and strategy, topic specific ability. He contends that we must present problems to learners that fall within a specific range, not too tough (which causes despair), or too easy (no satisfaction, nor release of dopamine), but just right. (Goldilocks analogies are welcome.)

Thus, we will seek out opportunities to think, but we are selective in doing so; we choose problems that pose some challenge but that seem likely to be solvable, because these are the problems that lead to feelings of pleasure and satisfaction (Kindle edition, Location 400).

At this point, I’ve identified several variables that must be considered by a teacher as they teach.

• What needs to be taught
• What has been taught
• What is to be taught in the future
• Individual abilities of students with regards to content
• Individual abilities / preferences of students related to instructional strategies
• Situation / relation between content and potential strategies (what “fits” best)

But there is another, most important factor, life outside of the classroom. What happens beyond the classroom walls, in other classes, and more significantly outside of school, affects each learner. The combination of these variables supports the idea that classrooms should be classified as “complex” with the Cynefin Framework. If we review the traits of “Complex” systems, it is clear that often times there is “no right answer” in terms of instructional choices, that classrooms are “systems in constant flux”, and that the “ability to understand” (from the teacher’s perspective) comes after class has been dismissed.

The ability to work within this complex system (the classroom) is typically part of the teacher observation process. For example, Domain 3e in Charlotte Danielson’s Framework for Teaching is entitled Demonstrating Flexibility and Responsiveness, and includes the elements Lesson adjustment, Response to students, and Persistence. However, outcomes are the focus of this work, not the manner in which those outcomes are reached. Admittedly, factors such as rapport and teacher-student interactions are also part of these assessments, and these might be considered constituents of “probing”. However, the emergence / identification of patterns is not addressed in any meaningful way.

Is there a need, then, to construct a formalized framework / structure for “probing” and “sensing (for emergent patterns)” specific to the classroom? Is this something teachers need to know how to do? Would familiarity with the tenets of the Cynefin framework lead to more effective instruction through appropriate responses to the different categories of complexity manifest within that setting?

Comments and/or critiques are welcomed.

Benjamin S. Bloom has two works from which to draw when interpreting the results of a new study by Carnegie Mellon. The key finding, related to the efficiency of this design, is summarized in the following quotation.

By combining the open-learning software with two weekly 50-minute class sessions in an intro-level statistics course, they found that they could get students to learn the same amount of material in half the time.

Essentially, the inclusion of this intelligent tutoring system allows the professor to discuss more nuanced and/or complex aspects of the content, and do so in one less class period. Bloom might infer that the observed improvements were due to an increase in the amount of time spent analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating, i.e., at the higher levels of “his” taxonomy, while in class. Alternatively, he could point to his work on tutoring, and its corresponding “2 Sigma Problem”, which suggests that one can expect to observe a difference of +2 standard deviations when students work with a teacher in a one-to-one setting.

I’m inclined to agree with both of these hypothetical conclusions. I’m also reminded of Ewan McIntosh’s recent response to Will Richardson’s post commenting on an image of a lecture hall filled with (mostly Apple) computers. McIntosh’s critique, in he differentiates between curriculum and pedagogy, noting that teachers can control pedagogy but not curriculum, culminates with the following assertion.

The reason the picture presents a dubious message is that neither curriculum nor pedagogy have changed an iota in this learning space: it’s about the same layout – with as many apples on laps – as a Victorian classroom would have appeared.

I wonder how instructional design fits, as Carnegie Mellon’s design offloads the mundane, didactic portions of instruction to technological entities, thus freeing up space and time for the instructor/professor to do the sorts of things that are much harder for computers, even “intelligent” systems, to replicate. This is a good start, but can we go further?

The program’s efforts to maximize the contributions of technology are impressive. They’ve applied adaptive algorithms similar to those that are used in the GRE, which monitor and subsequently respond to students understanding. This is one of the first times this technology has been used outside of the assessment arena. (The article refers to its use as “novel”.) What needs to be considered, however, is a design that manufactures or generates time for face-to-face. That is to say that although the tutoring aspect of Bloom’s research is (partially) present in the form of the intelligent tutoring system, the potential of human tutoring is greater.

This is not the first time that I’ve considered using technology to offload the sort of lower level tasks of instruction. My presentation, entitled “A Shift in Focus: Designing for Face-to-Face” can be found here. Comments/critiques are welcome.

The New York Times has an interesting article – http://j.mp/8aYXO6 – summarizing the extant research on the mathematical abilities of preschoolers. The findings indicate that children’s abilities are greater, and develop earlier, than had been previously thought.

The money quote:

“A crude number instinct us hard-wired into the brain”

Also of note, researchers surmise that math education “sharpens the firing of these quantity neurons”, which has a corollary in the cellular development in the visual cortex.

I know that my boys, ages six and four, have been doing some remedial math for a while now, as I have sometimes given them basic addition problems to pass the time while we drive. Fingers are utilized, but they can be pretty successful in finding the answer to problems such as 3+2.

Posted via email from Andrew J. Cerniglia

There’s a significant amount of buzz around the idea of integrating social networks and the principals thereof into “school 2.0″. What seems to be missing is an acknowledgement that the teacher is still the person that sets the tone, chooses the material (or, at a minimum, provides some sort of guidelines in terms of what can and cannot be investigated), assesses work. They are the master, if you will, in the age old pairing of master and apprentice. If they cannot assume this role, than all else is for nought.

It is the nature of the teacher is what matters. It is not solely pedagogy nor mannerism, materials nor embracement of technology. The totality of the individual, their “essence” if you will, that is the determining factor in what is learned and the amount of growth that is observed. Haven’t we all seen the teacher that knows their instructional methods, works late laying out lessons, yet struggles to maintain order and therefore fails to make any meaningful progress throughout the year? These things are forgotten in the rush to embrace a technology than promises to bring us together yet, by it’s very nature, devalues face-to-face human interaction by making itself it’s equal.

Why is it that you can find scholarly work supporting direct instruction, differentiated instruction, problem based learning, and inquiry based learning (the list goes on…)? If one method of instruction was inherently superior to the others, would this be the case? Is it shoddy experimental design, or is there something else at work here? We have endured years of arguments, erudite individuals on all sides documenting why their chosen method works better than the others, pointing to academic work as evidence for their technique’s supposed eminence. And what have we learned? Have we learned? We have not. Pedagogy has been discarded and replaced with the promise of the medium.

I have an idea. Why don’t we give teacher’s less? If I’m presented with a plethora of (web-based) tools, I’ll naturally try to use each one in some way. Each year new tools are created, and each year I try to implement lessons using these new tools. Have we read the literature related to expertise? Ten years, on average (I’m not going to reference anything here, but I’m close in terms of the number of years), is how long it takes to become and expert in a “field”. So, we have a cyclical pattern of new tools being available, and teachers subsequent attempts to integrate those tools into their curricula/repertoire. How does this cultivate the qualities of a “master”?

What would happen if, instead, we give everyone one tool. And, we say that they aren’t allowed to use anything but that tool.

What would we see then?

Ingenuity?
Creativity?

Maybe. But we’ll never know. The technological advance of the web is too rapid. It’s momentum too great. And teachers are left trying to assimilate each now advance in real time, while mastering only the art of survival.

Recently I came upon a Twitter post from Darren Draper, the context of which was the writing of Ivan Illich, a radical academic prominent in the early 1970’s. I’ve since ordered one of his books from Amazon. It arrives Tuesday.

The general idea behind what Illich wrote, as I understand it from reading the initial blog posting from Christopher Sessums and two papers^{1, 2} I found using EBSCO is that schools are problematic in that they reinforce economic disparity while being inherently problematic in the way in which curricula is standardized and teachers act as both mentor and evaluator. I must admit that I find what little I know about his philosophy appealing. There is a general principle in martial arts that I think provides a useful analogy for how I interpret what Illich is saying. That is the ability to use an opponent’s energy against them; to redirect, if you will, that energy back towards the individual from whom it originated. I’ve never understood why more of this philosophy isn’t used more in public schooling. It seems that educators spend the majority of their time learning and then employing strategies meant to overcome the implicit resistance of students to learning the majority of the material that they are required, via legislation, to be able to regurgitate on standardized assessments.

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