by Alfie Kohn | MFA, Montessori Education, Montessori Family Life, Montessori Parenting, Montessori Teachers
Is this working? [taps microphone] I do believe it is!
OK, if everyone can please find a seat, we’d like to get started. Thanks so much for coming out tonight! We’ve reserved plenty of time for discussion obviously I’m not going to talk at you all evening, just as our teachers don’t spend most of class time talking at your kids ? but as the principal I did want to try to give you a sense of what _________ School stands for, and what your student, and you, can expect this year.
Our top priority here and I mean a real, honest-to-goodness commitment, not just a slogan on the website or in a mission statement is to learn about and support each student’s interests. What questions do they have about the world? How can we help them build on and find answers to those questions? When we meet as a staff, it’s usually to think together about how best to do that, how to create a school that’s not just academic but intellectual.
We don’t want to write a detailed curriculum or devise a bunch of rules in advance and then spend the year demanding that kids conform to them. Our main concern is that what students are learning, and how they’re helped to learn it, make sense for the particular kids in a given room. That’s why our teachers spend a lot more time asking than telling and even more time listening to what the kids wonder about. The plan for learning is created with your kids, not just for them.
Take Ms. _______ and Mr. ________, who are both standing in the back of the room, over there near the fire alarm. (Say hello!) They teach the same grade and the same subjects, but do they have the same curriculum, the same topics in the same order with the same reading list and assignments? Well, of course not! They teach different kids! And I happen to know that much of what each of them is teaching this year is different from what they were teaching last year. For the same reason.
A good way to tell how successful we are is how excited the students are about figuring stuff out and playing with ideas. Nurturing their desire to learn is more important to us than cramming them full of definitions and dates and details that they’re likely to forget anyway. Plus, in my experience, when that excitement is there, academic excellence tends to follow assuming they’ve been given the support and resources they need.
So if your children ever seem reluctant to come to school, if you get a sense that they see what they’re doing here as a chore, please let us know! Hating school isn’t a fact of life; it’s a problem to be solved. We’re not going to talk about how to motivate them or just expect them to improve their attitude; it’s our responsibility to improve what happens in school. And if it turns out that the curiosity of our students is being smothered by practices that we’ve come to take for granted, well, we’re not going to say, Too bad. That’s life. We’re going to rethink those practices.
You want a couple of examples? Well, I think I can safely say and feel free, teachers, to contradict me here that all of us on the staff used to assume that things like grades, tests, homework, and textbooks were just part of the educational package. So we focused on the details of how we did them what seem to us now like piddly little questions. We would solemnly ask: Should grades be posted online and what’s the best way to do that? Or: Exactly how many minutes of homework should be assigned? Should students be permitted to retake tests? Should textbooks be available digitally? (Boy, that’s innovation for you, huh? The same collection of predigested facts from a giant publishing conglomerate but, hey, now it’s on an iPad!)
Anyway, we gradually realized that because we were so busy asking how to implement x, y, and z, we had let ourselves off the hook by failing to ask whether x, y, or z should be done at all. For instance, a lot of studies have shown that when you give kids grades, they tend to lose interest in what they’re learning ? and also become less thoughtful in the way they learn it. So if we can offer kids (and also you parents) much more meaningful feedback about how they’re doing in school through written observations and, better yet, in-person conversations then why would we risk smothering their excitement about learning by slapping a letter or number on them? We were doing real damage by training kids to think that the point of going to school is to get A’s. The solution wasn’t to implement standards-based grading, or to change A to greatly exceeds expectations, or ramp up the use of rubrics (which basically take all that’s wrong with grades and intensify it). No. The solution was to get rid of grading entirely and replace it with something better. So that’s just what we’ve done. And the results have been nothing short of amazing.
The same thing is true with other old-fashioned practices. Homework creates frustration, anxiety, boredom, exhaustion and it’s no fun for the kids either! (Ba-dum-bum). So we really paid attention when we discovered teachers some in our school, some in other schools who had completely stopped assigning homework and found real improvement in the way kids felt about school, about learning, about themselves, and about their teachers all without detracting from the quality of their learning. True, kids end up doing less drill and practice when they’re free to do what they enjoy after school, but our teachers have gone way beyond the old drill-and-practice approach anyway!
We’ve seen similar benefits after educating ourselves about how to evaluate kids’ understanding of ideas without using tests. And about how textbooks can be left on the shelves, to be consulted occasionally like reference sources, rather than dictating course content. What? A school without tests or textbooks? Yes. It’s not only possible; it opens new possibilities for learning to the point that we wondered why we hadn’t ditched these relics years ago.
Well, let’s be honest. Some of us wondered that. Others of us are still a little, um, uneasy about completely getting rid of these traditional practices. Some of us understandably need help teaching with primary sources instead of textbooks. Or getting better at knowing how well students are doing (or how we’re doing) without giving kids tests and quizzes. Or doing what needs to be done during class instead of saddling kids with more schoolwork after the school day is over.
So we’re still struggling with some of this. But we’re pretty sure at least we’re asking the right questions now. And I’m happy to report that this shift is taking place in all the schools in our district elementary, middle, and high schools, since everything I’m talking about tonight is relevant to all grade levels. In fact, at the risk of making your head explode, I could mention that the same is true of a bunch of other features of Old Style education that we’re also starting to look at skeptically now: segregating kids by age, or teaching different subjects separately, or even making kids raise their hands so that the teacher alone decides who gets to talk when. If there are solid reasons to keep doing these things, fine. If not, well, ”that’s the way things have always been done” is a pretty lame justification for not making a change, isn’t it?
Maybe you won’t be surprised to hear that those of us who are committed to doing right by kids tend not to take kindly to dictates handed down by people who have never met your kids. If distant authorities announce a new set of standards you know, All nth graders will now have to be taught such-and-such? and we just followed their orders blindly, well, we wouldn’t be acting like professional educators, would we? Our classrooms are student-centered and much of the learning is student-designed. It’s organized around their questions, around projects and problems that intrigue them. (By ‘them’, I mean not only individual kids but whole classrooms; the learners think these things through together.) So if, after the fact, we can figure out a way to draw a connection between their learning and the latest top-down standards, well, peachy. That reassures people higher up the food chain and makes my job a little more secure. But for heaven’s sake, we’re not going start with those one-size-fits-all standards and let them determine what we teach!
And if that’s true, we’re sure as heck going to resist being judged by standardized tests. It’s bad enough when the word ‘data is overused as if learning, and learners, can be reduced to numbers. It’s even worse when those numbers turn out to be test scores. Please, folks, don’t ever assume that just because it’s a number that means it’s objective. Or meaningful. We often come across students who are incredibly impressive thinkers but just don’t test well. Frankly, we also see some whose thinking isn’t all that amazing but, holy cow, they’re awfully good at taking tests. The test results make the first group look bad and the second group look great. In other words, those numbers are really misleading about kids and also, I have to say, about teachers. What I’ve learned from all my years in education is that the main thing standardized tests do is make mediocre teaching seem impressive. At the same time, they fail to capture the results of amazing teaching.
Because we don’t think your kids’ achievements and potential can be captured by how many bubbles they fill in correctly, you’ll never catch us bragging about the school’s test results or training students to be better test takers. Hold us accountable for helping your child to be a deep thinker who loves learning. Expect creativity. Expect curiosity. But don’t expect us to raise their scores. I don’t doubt that we could produce impressive results on unimpressive tests. But to do that, we’d probably have to scale back music and the arts, get rid of those wonderful democratic class meetings that build community and empower students, eliminate hands-on projects outside the school that we’re famous for, and give kids less time to read for pleasure. Among many other things. We’d become, excuse the expression, a crappy school that looks good to real estate agents and politicians and newspaper editorial writers. So please, please, please don’t judge us by test results. Judge us by what matters. We’ll return the favor by teaching what matters to your kids. (And if you have questions about more meaningful indicators of success and failure, just send me an e-mail or stop by my office, and I’ll gladly talk your ear off.)
Speaking of talking your ear off, what time is it? [Looks at watch.] Yikes. I want to get to your questions and reactions, and then of course we’re going to break up in small groups, as we always do on Back to School night, to talk about education. (We’ve noticed that when we raise big issues with parents, they take us up on our invitation to discuss them. Whereas if we just list rules and procedures, then that’s all they ask about.) Anyway, bear with me as I quickly touch on a couple more issues.
We talk a lot about the importance of creating a caring community of learners. Actually, I guess lots of schools use phrases like that, but one way we prove we really mean it is by making sure we don’t do anything that disrupts a feeling of community like setting kids against each other in a contest for awards or recognition. The day we start publicly singling out one child as better than everyone else is the day we’ve given up on the ideal of community. This doesn’t mean we don’t care about excellence. Just the opposite! Real excellence comes from helping students to see one another as potential collaborators. Sorting them into winners and losers leads each kid to see everyone else as a rival. That undermines achievement (as well as caring and trust) for winners and losers alike. So instead of awards assemblies, you can expect to be invited to student-designed celebrations of what all of us have accomplished together. These ceremonies can be amazingly moving, by the way. If you’re used to those rituals where a few kids are called up to the stage to be applauded for having triumphed over their peers, well, you’re in for a real treat.
Because we take kids, all kids so seriously here at _________, and because we treat them, and their ideas, with respect, we tend to have remarkably few discipline problems. Few, not none. When there is a problem, we don’t talk about it in terms of a kid’s ‘behavior’ that needs to be changed; we ask what’s going on beneath the behavior. Sometimes what’s going on is that something about the school isn’t working for that child. That’s not a signal to fix the child, to lean on him until he does what he’s told. You’re sending us your children, not your pets, so we don’t use rewards and consequences. We don’t bribe or threaten them to make them behave. Hey, we don’t like to be treated that way, so why would we treat our students that way? We don’t use point systems, or dangle prizes in front of them, or use other strategies of control. Those gimmicks don’t really work in the long run, and they’re an awfully disrespectful way to treat people of any age. Besides, we find that when the learning is engaging, when our requests are reasonable, when we view students as people to be consulted rather than as bundles of behaviors to be reinforced, most of the time they live up to our expectations. Or even go beyond them.
As the year unfolds, we’ll send you occasional letters and e-mails and update our website about how all this is playing out, about how your child is doing and, more important, what your child is doing. Some teachers host their own blogs or send out periodic newsletters. But don’t be worried if sometimes they write things like, We had a conflict in class that made some kids unhappy so we called a class meeting to work it out or Hey, I tried a new way to introduce an unfamiliar concept today, and it bombed so I’m not likely to do that again. If we sent you updates that were always upbeat, implying that every kid loved and succeeded at every activity, we’d quickly lose all credibility and you’d discount everything you heard from us. So we’ll be tactful but honest in sharing the challenges we’re facing.
By the same token, I’m not going to close now by offering clichés about how precious your children are to us. Instead, I figure we’ll show you by what we do as the days go by and, just as important, by what we don’t do. I try to steer away from empty, feel-good sentiments like, for example, All children can learn, which is kind of silly. All children can learn what is how you’d probably respond. Obviously everyone can’t learn everything, but the more important question is whether a given thing we’re asking them to learn is really worth learning. That’s what we should be talking about. And that’s what we do talk about not only at staff meetings but with the kids. That’s what defines our approach to education, in fact.
Is this working? I do believe it is!
Inspired by an occasional feature in Mad magazine called “Scenes We’d Like to See.” And counter inspired by some back-to-school talks we’ve actually heard.
Copyright 2015 by Alfie Kohn. Reprinted with the author’s permission. For more, please visit www.alfiekohn.org.
by Alfie Kohn | Brain Development, Family Resources, MFA, Montessori Education, Montessori Family Life, Montessori Parenting, Montessori students, Montessori Teachers
This essay is an abridged version of the introduction to Feel-Bad Education … And Other Contrarian Essays on Children and Schooling (Beacon Press, 2011)
The field of education bubbles over with controversies. It’s not unusual for intelligent people of good will to disagree passionately about what should happen in schools. But there are certain precepts that aren’t debatable, that just about anyone would have to acknowledge are true.
While many such statements are banal, some are worth noticing because in our school practices and policies we tend to ignore the implications that follow from them. It’s both intellectually interesting and practically important to explore such contradictions: If we all agree that a given principle is true, then why in the world do our schools still function as if it weren’t?
Here are 10 examples.
1. Much of the material students are required to memorize is soon forgotten
The truth of this statement will be conceded (either willingly or reluctantly) by just about everyone who has spent time in school — in other words, all of us. A few months, or sometimes even just a few days, after having committed a list of facts, dates, or definitions to memory, we couldn’t recall most of them if our lives depended on it. Everyone knows this, yet a substantial part of schooling – particularly in the most traditional schools – continues to consist of stuffing facts into students’ short-term memories.
The more closely we inspect this model of teaching and testing, the more problematic it reveals itself to be. First, there’s the question of what students are made to learn, which often is more oriented to factual material than to a deep understanding of ideas. (See item 2, below.) Second, there’s the question of how students are taught, with a focus on passive absorption: listening to lectures, reading summaries in textbooks, and rehearsing material immediately before being required to cough it back up. Third, there’s the question of why a student has learned something: Knowledge is less likely to be retained if it has been acquired so that one will perform well on a test, as opposed to learning in the context of pursuing projects and solving problems that are personally meaningful.
Even without these layers of deficiencies with the status quo, and even if we grant that remembering some things can be useful, the fundamental question echoes like a shout down an endless school corridor: Why are kids still being forced to memorize so much stuff that we know they won’t remember?
Corollary 1A: Since this appears to be true for adults, too, why do most professional development events for teachers resemble the least impressive classrooms, with experts disgorging facts about how to educate?
2. Just knowing a lot of facts doesn’t mean you’re smart
Even students who do manage to remember some of the material they were taught are not necessarily able to make sense of those bits of knowledge, to understand connections among them, or to apply them in inventive and persuasive ways to real-life problems.
In fact, the cognitive scientist Lauren Resnick goes even further: It’s not just that knowing (or having been taught) facts doesn’t in itself make you smart. A mostly fact-oriented education may actually interfere with your becoming smart. “Thinking skills tend to be driven out of the curriculum by ever-growing demands for teaching larger and larger bodies of knowledge,” she writes. Yet schools continue to treat students as empty glasses into which information can be poured — and public officials continue to judge schools on the basis of how efficiently and determinedly they pour.
3. Students are more likely to learn what they find interesting
There’s no shortage of evidence for this claim if you really need it. One of many examples: A group of researchers found that children’s level of interest in a passage they were reading was 30 times more useful than its difficulty level for predicting how much of it they would later remember. But this should be obvious, if only because of what we know about ourselves. It’s the tasks that intrigue us, that tap our curiosity and connect to the things we care about, that we tend to keep doing — and get better at doing. So, too, for kids.
Conversely, students are less likely to benefit from doing what they hate. Psychology has come a long way from the days when theorists tried to reduce everything to simple stimulus-response pairings. We know now that people aren’t machines, such that an input (listening to a lecture, reading a textbook, filling out a worksheet) will reliably yield an output (learning). What matters is how people experience what they do, what meaning they ascribe to it, what their attitudes and goals are.
Thus, if students find an academic task stressful or boring, they’re far less likely to understand, or even remember, the content. And if they’re uninterested in a whole category of academic tasks — say, those they’re assigned to do when they get home after having just spent a whole day at school — then they aren’t likely to benefit much from doing them. No wonder research finds little, if any, advantage to assigning homework, particularly in elementary or middle school.
4. Students are less interested in whatever they’re forced to do and more enthusiastic when they have some say
Once again, studies confirm what we already know from experience. The nearly universal negative reaction to compulsion, like the positive response to choice, is a function of our psychological makeup.
Now combine this point with the preceding one: If choice is related to interest, and interest is related to achievement, then it’s not much of a stretch to suggest that the learning environments in which kids get to make decisions about what they’re doing are likely to be the most effective, all else being equal. Yet such learning environments continue to be vastly outnumbered by those where kids spend most of their time just following directions.
5. Just because doing x raises standardized test scores doesn’t mean x should be done
At the very least, we would need evidence that the test in question is a source of useful information about whether our teaching and learning goals are being met. Many educators have argued that the tests being used in our schools are unsatisfactory for several reasons.
First, there are numerous limitations with specific tests. Second, most tests share certain problematic features, such as being timed (which places more of a premium on speed than on thoughtfulness), norm-referenced (which means the tests are designed to tell us who’s beating whom, not how well students have learned or teachers have taught), and consisting largely of multiple-choice questions (which don’t permit students to generate or even explain their answers).
The third reason is the problems inherent to all tests that are standardized and created by people far away from the classroom — as opposed to assessing the actual learning taking place there on an on-going basis.
This is not the place to explain in detail why standardized tests measure what matters least. Here, I want only to make the simpler — and, once again, I think, indisputable — point that anyone who regards high or rising test scores as good news has an obligation to show that the tests themselves are good. If a test result can’t be convincingly shown to be both valid and meaningful, then whatever we did to achieve that result — say, a new curriculum or instructional strategy — may well have no merit whatsoever. It may even prove to be destructive when assessed by better criteria. Indeed, a school or district might be getting worse even as its test scores rise.
So how is it that articles in newspapers and education journals, as well as pronouncements by public officials and think tanks, seem to accept on faith that better scores on any test necessarily constitute good news, and that whatever produced those scores can be described as “effective”? Parents should be encouraged to ask, “How much time was sacrificed from real learning just so our kids could get better at taking the [name of test]?”
6. Students are more likely to succeed in a place where they feel known and cared about
I realize there are people whose impulse is to sneer when talk turns to how kids feel, and who dismiss as “soft” or “faddish” anything other than old-fashioned instruction of academic skills. But even these hard-liners, when pressed, are unable to deny the relationship between feeling and thinking, between a child’s comfort level and his or her capacity to learn.
Here, too, there are loads of supporting data. As one group of researchers put it, “In order to promote students’ academic performance in the classroom, educators should also promote their social and emotional adjustment.” And yet, broadly speaking, we don’t. Teachers and schools are evaluated almost exclusively on academic achievement measures (which, to make matters worse, mostly consist of standardized test scores).
If we took seriously the need for kids to feel known and cared about, our discussions about the distinguishing features of a “good school” would sound very different. Likewise, our view of discipline and classroom management would be turned inside-out, seeing as how the primary goals of most such strategies are obedience and order, often with the result that kids feel less cared about — or even bullied — by adults.
7. We want children to develop in many ways, not just academically.
Even mainstream education groups have embraced the idea of teaching the “whole child.” It’s a safe position, really, because just about every parent or educator will tell you that we should be supporting children’s physical, emotional, social, moral, and artistic growth as well as their intellectual growth. Moreover, it’s obvious to most people that the schools can and should play a key role in promoting many different forms of development.
If we acknowledge that academics is just one facet of a good education, why do so few conversations about improving our schools deal with — and why are so few resources devoted to — non-academic issues? And why do we assign children still more academic tasks after the school day is over, even when those tasks cut into the time children have to pursue interests that will help them develop in other ways?
Corollary 7a: Students “learn best when they are happy,” as educator Nel Noddings reminded us, but that doesn’t mean they’re especially likely to be happy (or psychologically healthy) just because they’re academically successful. And millions aren’t. Imagine how high schools would have to be changed if we were to take this realization seriously.
8. Just because a lesson (or book, or class, or test) is harder doesn’t mean it’s better.
First, if it’s pointless to give students things to do that are too easy, it’s also counterproductive to give them things that they experience as too hard. Second, and more important, this criterion overlooks a variety of considerations other than difficulty level by which educational quality might be evaluated.
We know this, yet we continue to worship at the altar of “rigor.” I’ve seen lessons that aren’t unduly challenging yet are deeply engaging and intellectually valuable. Conversely, I’ve seen courses — and whole schools — that are indisputably rigorous . . . and appallingly bad.
9. Kids aren’t just short adults.
Over the past hundred years, developmental psychologists have labored to describe what makes children distinctive and what they can understand at certain ages. There are limits, after all, to what even a precocious younger child can grasp (e.g., the way metaphors function, the significance of making a promise) or do (e.g., keep still for an extended period).
Likewise, there are certain things children require for optimal development, including opportunities to play and explore, alone and with others. Research fills in — and keeps fine-tuning — the details, but the fundamental implication isn’t hard to grasp: How we educate kids should follow from what defines them as kids.
Somehow, though, developmentally inappropriate education has become the norm, as kindergarten (literally, the “children’s garden”) now tends to resemble a first- or second-grade classroom — in fact, a bad first- or second-grade classroom, where discovery, creativity, and social interaction are replaced by a repetitive regimen focused on narrowly defined academic skills.
More generally, premature exposure to sit-still-and-listen instruction, homework, grades, tests, and competition — practices that are clearly a bad match for younger children and of questionable value at any age — is rationalized by invoking a notion I’ve called BGUTI: Better Get Used To It. The logic here is that we have to prepare you for the bad things that are going to be done to you later . . . by doing them to you now. When articulated explicitly, that principle sounds exactly as ridiculous as it is. Nevertheless, it’s the engine that continues to drive an awful lot of nonsense.
The obvious premise that we should respect what makes children children can be amended to include a related principle that is less obvious to some people: Learning something earlier isn’t necessarily better. Deborah Meier, whose experience as a celebrated educator ranges from kindergarten to high school, put it bluntly: “The earlier [that schools try] to inculcate so-called ‘academic’ skills, the deeper the damage and the more permanent the ‘achievement’ gap.” That is exactly what a passel of ambitious research projects has found: A traditional skills-based approach to teaching young children — particularly those from low-income families — not only offers no lasting benefits but appears to be harmful.
Corollary 9A: Kids aren’t just future adults. They are that, of course, but they aren’t only that, because children’s needs and perspectives are worth attending to in their own right. We violate this precept — and do a disservice to children — whenever we talk about schooling in economic terms, treating students mostly as future employees.
10. Substance matters more than labels
A skunk cabbage by any other name would smell just as putrid. But in education, as in other domains, we’re often seduced by appealing names when we should be demanding to know exactly what lies behind them. Most of us, for example, favor a sense of community, prefer that a job be done by professionals, and want to promote learning. So should we sign on to the work being done in the name of “Professional Learning Communities”? Not if it turns out that PLCs have less to do with helping children to think deeply about questions that matter than with boosting standardized test scores.
The same caution is appropriate when it comes to “Positive Behavior Support,” a jaunty moniker for a program of crude Skinnerian manipulation in which students are essentially bribed to do whatever they’re told. More broadly, even the label “school reform” doesn’t necessarily signify improvement; these days, it’s more likely to mean “something that skillful and caring teachers wouldn’t be inclined to do unless coerced,” as educational psychologist Bruce Marlowe put it.
In fact, the corporate-style version of “school reform” that’s uncritically endorsed these days by politicians, journalists, and billionaires consists of a series of debatable tactics — many of them amounting to bribes and threats to force educators to jack up test scores. Just as worrisome, though, is that these reformers often overlook, or simply violate, a number of propositions that aren’t debatable, including many of those listed here.
This essay is an abridged version of the introduction to Feel-Bad Education … And Other Contrarian Essays on Children and Schooling (Beacon Press, 2011)
Copyright © 2011 by Alfie Kohn. Permission granted to reprint this article. For more information, go to the Contact Us page at http://www.alfiekohn.org
Tomorrow’s Child / April 2012 / p. 11
By now we shouldn’t be surprised that older studies on SLL, along with attempts to apply it to our current situation, uncritically conflate the results of standardized tests with broader concepts like learning, achievement, educational excellence, or academic success. After all, many politicians, journalists, parents, and even educators make the same mistake.
