What if there's no prior knowledge to activate

            Activating students’ prior knowledge is one of those edu-speak phrases so often repeated that it has in many ways lost all meaning and functions only as a square on satirical faculty meeting bingo cards.

The intention is good.  New information can be more readily understood and remembered if it can be assimilated with material that already resides in long-term memory.  For example, if I needed directions to somewhere in downtown Durham, NC, I would ask where it was in relation to Fullsteam Brewery.  I have a very clear mental image of that area and can easily build onto it, despite my nearly tragic lack of directional sense.  I once missed the entire state of Virginia.  True story.

Unfortunately, the places with which I am that familiar are very few, and my map reading skills are purely theoretical.  When I first moved to Athens, GA, from Chicago, I needed to buy a shower curtain, so I called the local Target store and asked for directions.  

The clerk asked, “Do you know where the mall is?” 

I said, “No.” 

She tried again, “Do you know…” 

I said, “Let me save you some time.  I’ve lived here about sixteen minutes.  I don’t know where anything is.”  We eventually worked it out. 

The prior knowledge activation technique that I hear used most often is to ask students, “What do you know about ______?”  And the problem is that many of our students don’t know anything about the topic.  Asking them, “What do you know about Ancient Egypt?” is analogous to asking me where the mall is. 

Actually, it’s worse.  I absolutely knew that I had no idea where the mall was.  Our kids often think they know things when in fact they don’t or the things they know are complete fiction.

            According to Dr. David Sousa, author of How theBrain Learns among other titles, we tend to remember best the first and last things presented to us in a learning session.  That means students need to receive only correct information initially.  The use of the above technique or the much-beloved KWL chart may explain why students give those same wrong answers on the end-of-unit test, despite weeks of instruction.

            It may be more useful to plan your lessons with an eye toward creating a schema, as opposed to activating prior knowledge.  Consider, for example, Ancient Egypt.  Rather than asking students what they know, present them with an image like this one.  Better yet—give them an assortment of images. 

Now ask them simply to observe: “What do you see?” This can be done individually, in small groups, or as a whole class.  Make certain to limit students’ contributions at this point to what is objectively present in the image.  No interpretations or value judgments just yet.

When students have exhausted their observations, ask them, “Based on what you see, what do you think is going on?” 

Finally, ask students to consider what questions persist for them.  “What are you still wondering about?”

This activity, called See-Think-Wonder, is taken from the superb book Making Thinking Visible,  I like that it allows students to craft an accurate mental framework on which to attach the material they will be studying.  Later in the unit, the teacher can refer back to the images rather than spending a great deal of time explaining a concept.  Because the students were allowed to ponder the images for a considerable amount of time, they are apt to be remembered and serve as useful shorthand. 

Perhaps more importantly, it presents academic material as a puzzle to be solved.  Cognitive psychologist Dan Willingham, author of Why Don’t Students Like School?, explains that people like puzzles and will keep at them provided they believe they have a reasonable chance of success. If you have ever persisted at a difficult crossword or Sudoku, you know this is true. 

Quid Pro Quo

Yesterday, I unloaded on the academy.  Today, it's the practioners' turn to feel a little sting.

In that earlier post, I noted that part of the reason for the disastrous results of some so-called research-based best practices is reductionism.  I'm going to lay most of the blame for that at the feet of K-12 administrators. 

Make no mistake.  I think classroom teachers are guilty of reductionism, too, but, for the most part, they have very little power over what interventions get adopted by their schools.  If you have that power and are also a reductionist, I'm talking to you.

[Imagine I just put two fingers to my eyes, then turned them toward you, then back at me.]

What do I mean by reductionism?  It is the process by which a complex idea is divested of all its complexity either because the person dealing with the idea doesn't fully understand it or doesn't want to do the work all that nuance would require.  Let me give you an example.

A few months ago, I engaged a group of teachers in an activity designed to illuminate the societal changes catalyzed by World War I.  Among the artifacts they examined was Wilfred Owen's "Dolce et Decorum Est."  Ordinarily, I would simply provide a link to the text, but understanding the theme of the poem is essential to understanding what reductionism is.

Dulce Et Decorum Est Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: Latin, "It is sweet and proper to die for one's country."

Owen was a Lieutenant in the British army and, in fact, was killed in action shortly after this poem was written.  The poem describes a mustard gas attack, not the sort of subject matter usually found in British lit prior to this time.  The imagery is horrifying.  No one could read this and think Owen sees war as glamorous or heroic.

You would think.

I checked in with one teacher who pointed to the footnote in which the Latin was translated and claimed the poem was a call to arms, a glamorizing of warfare.  Think "Charge of the Light Brigade."

I pointed this teacher to the last two lines of the poem and asked, "What does the narrator say about this Latin phrase?"

"Oh, I didn't see that he called it a lie."

I think I demonstrated tremendous restraint in not asking, "And the rest of the words?  Did you miss them, too?"

This would be a particularly heinous example of reductionism.  You probably have students who do this--grab on to a fragment of a sentence and contort it into an interpretation of an entire essay. 

Unfortunately, you probably have colleagues, principals, curriculum directors, and superintendents who do the same. 

Reductionism can be avoided, but it won't be easy. 

First of all, the people who inhabit those offices need to be smart.  I once asked a guy in my Introduction to Statistics class at the University of Georgia, "What correlation are you trying to demonstrate?" 

"Aw, hell, I'm just gonna count some shit."

He was referring to his DISSERTATION!!! 

Somewhere in Georgia, people are forced to call this man "Doctor."

Second, assuming we get smart people in these essential positions, they have to read and interpret the research themselves.  We can't count on the salespeople that Pearson or Houghton-Mifflin or Renaissance Learning send into their offices to provide unbiased information. 

Would you ask your meth dealer, "What's this going to do to my teeth?"

We cannot rely on educational journalists to provide complete information.  Watch an episode of Good Morning, America! and see how a single medical study gets bastardized in mere seconds.

The bestowing of the title "Doctor" should also imply the ability to read, understand, and critique research.  If you can't do that, you don't deserve that job.  If you can do it, but opt not to, you still don't deserve that job.

Let's start demanding more of our administrators and ourselves. 

If your state legislature ordered you to eat something out of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, I hope you would refuse.  We read labels at the grocery store.  I don't think it's unreasonable to read the labels of what we're being asked to consume in the classroom and say, "No, thank you.  No more rat droppings for me."

XOX,
The Know-it-All

The Audacity of Skepticism

I  become very agitated when anyone introduces me as an "expert."  I'm educated, and I have a point of view.  Because I can string words together fairly lucidly and, perhaps because my voice is deep and stentorian (those of you who don't know me will just have to take my word for that), I may seem more convinced of my own expertise than I actually am. 

I say all this by way of establishing a patina of humility: "Shucks, don't think nothin' about this li'l ol' PhD.  My dawg, Daisy, is smarter'n some people what folks call 'doctor.'" 

She really is, actually.  When in the presence of some PhDs and EdDs, I wonder, "Who puts your pants on for you in the morning?" 

Or, the case of the more obnoxious of their ilk, "How is it no one has killed you yet?"

It was in a meeting with the latter that I found myself last week.  There are many things about this meeting about which I could complain, but I'm going to limit myself to the arrogance of some members of the academy and the myth of research-based best practices.

For those of you who don't recognize this word in context, the "academy" is the world of the scholar: higher education, colleges and universities, those whose primary responsibility is to create knowledge, not consume it.  What most people outside of the academy don't realize is that these entities' first responsibility is not the education of college students; it is the production and publication of research.  Members of the academy must publish. 

Now understand that these are not publications that the practitioners of education read.  English Journal, Teaching Children Mathematics, Science Teacher--these are all phenomenal resources.  Practical, readable, creative.  They are not "academic" journals. 

The late David Foster Wallace opined, "The truth is that most US academic prose is appalling—-pompous, abstruse, claustral, inflated, euphuistic, pleonastic, solecistic, sesquipidelian, Heliogabaline, occluded, obscure, jargon-ridden, empty: resplendently dead."  I had to look up most of those words, too.  Wallace was having a bit of fun by using lots of big words, most of which mean "using many big words unnecessarily."

The research that Wallace eulogized and that my sister, a Senior Policy Analyst at the National Education Association referred to as "unusable, unreadable sawdust" is the stuff that constitutes your so-called research-based best practices. 

Unfortunately, here's the process by which that sawdust makes its way into your classroom.  The author or authors publish the findings of a study that may or may not have

• been submitted prematurely because the author(s) required more publications to gain traction with the tenure committee;
• contained a non-representative sampling of students;
• been conducted over a very short period of time;
• made use of resources or experts provided by the university and not readily available in the average classroom;
• provided alternative explanations for the results the researchers found.

The researchers then present their findings either in print or at a conference.  If they are ethical, they limit themselves to a statement such as, "The findings SUGGEST that there is a RELATIONSHIP between our intervention and [insert selected improvement in student achievement.]  If they are not ethical, they say, "Our findings PROVE that X causes Y." 

CAUTIONARY NOTE: Any researcher in the social sciences who claims causation without hesitation is full of $#!+.  Put that on a bumper sticker.

Moving on.

Even ethical research, though, falls into the hands of . . . people.  And like a sinister game of telephone or when you make repeated photocopies of other photocopies, the original message gets blurry and distorted.  What started out as a suggestion that perhaps some children might benefit from an alternative to phonics because they have trouble identifying the individual sounds in words is subjected to round after round of reductionism, eventually finding its way into your classroom as, "Don't use phonics; use whole language instruction."

Like the swallows returning to San Juan Capistrano, you can pretty much count on some paradigm shift every year or so.  In the mid-sixties, we had The New Math, which humorist and math professor Tom Lehrer explained thusly: "It's more important to understand what you're doing rather than to get the right answer."  Check out his song "The New Math," on the album That Was the Week that Was. Sadly, Lehrer no longer performs, claiming irony died the day Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. 

But I digress

In the eighties, we were told to stop teaching grammar because it only made sense to people who already understood it and took time away from more valuable instruction. 

At some point, we were told to teach history NOT chronologically but thematically. 

We've been told not to correct children's spelling, that "invented spelling" is an important stage in the development of literacy and of phonics instruction. 

Oh, yeah, we went back to phonics instruction some time ago. 

My point is that, at one time, all of these "reforms" were the result of research-based best practices.  Any many of them were, essentially, neither.

Wayne Booth, Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Chicago, created a fictional utopia in which researchers had to pay to be published and could only publish a limited number of works.  In this manner, only work that was of the highest quality and needed to be read by others would ever see the light of day.  Obviously, Booth was speaking tongue in cheek, but one can see a certain beauty in the concept. 

We K-12 educators cannot control what happens in the academy.  We can only control how we respond to it.  We need to get over our inferiority complex.  Yes, "scholars" can be arrogant and condescending.  They use academic jargon and complicated statistical modeling.  Unfortunately, we assume, "Hmm, I don't understand this, so it must be brilliant."

It's not.  Any idiot can make something complicated seem complicated.  True brilliance is making the complicated understandable.  Someone smarter than me once said that when people use a lot of words, they either don't know what they're talking about or don't want you to know what they're talking about.

K-12 educators and policy-makers have to become smarter consumers.  Be audacious.  We can't be so intimidated by scholars that we are afraid to make them explain their research in ENGLISH.  If they can't or won't, we can't be afraid to reject it.  Be skeptical!  I've seen educational research conducted.  Some of it excellent.  Much of it is crap. 





And we, as a nation, have to stop eating it.

XOX,
The Know-it-All