Lost in Action: Are Time-consuming, Trivializing Activities Displacing the Cultivation of Active Minds?
From Common Knowledge, Volume 13, Number 4, Fall 2000
Gilbert T. Sewall is a director of the American Textbook Council and, most recently, the editor of The Eighties: A Reader. This article first appeared in the Summer 2000 issue of American Educator, the magazine of the American Federation of Teachers. These excerpts are reprinted with permission of the AFT and Mr. Sewall.
Copyright 2000 by the Core Knowledge Foundation. Not to be copied or reproduced without permission from the Core Knowledge Foundation, 801 E. High Street, Charlottesville, Virginia 22902.
Hands-on classroom activities have expanded exponentially because teachers think that's what they are supposed to be doing. Administrators, curriculum specialists, educational gurus, workshop presenters, psychologists, academic journals, and textbook publishers have told teachers that activities are the only way to engage students. "Chalk and talk" and "drill and kill" are the derisive names given to traditional approaches. Teachers, understandably, shudder at the thought of being associated with such dreary pedagogy. Should they resist the conventional wisdom, they may face scorn and intimidation for being instructionally out of date or insensitive to student needs.
Lack of variety and imagination in assignments does lead to dull classrooms.
Whole-class, teacher-led instruction is not always of high quality. But it certainly can be, frequently is, and would be much more often if it weren't caricatured as inevitably boring and ineffective, thus discouraging teachers from perfecting the art, as Japanese teachers work so hard and successfully do.*
Activities-based learning often suspends valid educational premises: that the ability to communicate derives from verbal training; that the ability to absorb, filter, and process information requires facility with words and numbers; that general knowledge leads to project mastery; that getting there requires hard work and even then is not universally conferred. The fear of passive learning may be spectacularly misdirected, but the chalk-and-talk caricature has done its work. Pressed to be events coordinators and social directors, teachers have been robbed of traditional pedagogy's vision of quality: the carefully prepared lesson, rich with analogy, illustration and anecdote; focused and guided; demanding and lively; peppered with good humor; with frequent interchange between student and teacher, student and student; interspersed with small-group work when appropriate; and with a clear sense of direction at the beginning and summary at the end, leaving all participants with a feeling of completion and satisfaction.
Sometimes teachers must inform directly; at other times they guide students to figure things out for themselves. Active, attentive listening — on the part of both teacher and students — is an imperative. Repetition, practice, and memorization have their part, as does learning to take organized notes. At the core, always, is serious content approached seriously. Knowledge builds on knowledge. Thirteen years of carefully sequenced content and jealously guarded classroom time allow students to build an enormous storehouse of knowledge and skills and the ability to use them. And since knowledge and success are the best breeding ground for interest to take root and expand, the more students know, the more they will want to know.
Under the leadership of their teacher, students work to unearth meaning; to evaluate, interpret, compare, extend and apply; to analyze their errors, present their findings, define their solutions; to attend carefully to what others say; to get their thoughts down clearly on paper; to understand. This is not boring and it is not passive. This is real action learning. This is the mind at work. Those who would banish such teaching by dismissing it as dull and ineffective are better advised to put their efforts into helping teachers sharpen these familiar and research-validated approaches.
[John A]. Zahorik's [1996] report, titled "Elementary and Secondary Teachers' Reports of How They Make Learning Interesting," reaches the following conclusion based on an extensive survey of 65 teachers: "Hands-on activities are the primary way of establishing interest, although teachers also reported creating interest through the use of personalized content, student trust, and group talks, and other ways. Teachers reported that they rarely used content facts and concepts as a means to establish interest [italics added]. All of the teachers except two secondary teachers identified "sedentary activities" as "producing disinterest and, often, causing antagonism." Of sedentary activities, Zahorik explained, "the behaviors and tasks that teachers saw as harmful to interest were lecturing, explaining, giving directions, reviewing, taking tests, reading textbooks, doing workbooks, and taking notes."
What has happened here? How did the humanities and sciences get declared a turnoff? This view is inert to the beauty and use of knowledge. The list of subjects that can move and instruct is endless: The magic of Pythagoras and the value of the hypotenuse in navigating in everyday life; the digestive system of mollusks and mammals; how cutting a sentence by half can sometimes double its power; the influence of Palladio on world architecture; the world as seen by Copernicus and Galileo; the building of the canals in China during the Ming dynasty and the transcontinental railroad in 19th-century America; the story of the boy from hard-scrabble Kentucky who became a president who served the Union and freed the slaves, Abraham Lincoln. This content needs no dressing up or excuses. It stands on its own. In the upper grades, social promotion and detracked classrooms contribute to hands-on practices. Teachers are rightly eager that students succeed and that all students are least marginally "engaged" in learning. Faced with the daunting task of teaching to a wide range of achievement, teachers feel they have no choice but to offer an array of activities accessible to even the most unprepared students.
* * *
Activity-based learning is vain. It presupposes that it alone is responsive to the "inner gifts" of children, especially children who are challenged or overmatched by traditional academic learning. A salting of high theory stands behind it, theory that is reinforced in faculty lounges and workshops and that has special appeal to those who face a rising number of children who seem alienated from words and numbers.
Teachers are on the receiving end of much bad information about learning. They endure pressure from gurus and guides. Complicit are schools of education that encourage teachers not to be "hung up on facts" but to concentrate on nurturing self-esteem and individuality. Methods classes uncritically praise project learning and activity-based learning. They subscribe to a set of principles at odds with classical education that go back 75 or 80 years to William Kilpatrick's project method and Harold Rugg's child-centered school.
Project-based learning enthusiasts want children to be — here we return to affective philosophy — active. The learning process, they say, should be "tactile," with busy hands and classrooms in motion. According to powerful currents that influence how teachers frame their lesson plans, educational success should be joyful noise and creative disorder, durable concepts of the 1970s. In motivational educational workshops, a teacher learns not to be a "sage on the stage." She should be a "guide on the side." A deep bias exists against a teacher-centered classroom.
Those preparing to be teachers rarely hear that some projects are neither beneficial nor valuable, that they may in fact corrupt subtle thinking about a subject; or that if projects are to succeed, they must be limited in scope and time; or that projects need to be filled and supplemented with generous amounts of reading and writing. Orderly classrooms and unadorned lessons are minuses, they hear, as is "rote" education too terrible to behold.
The topology of talent and intelligence bends so far as to render academic education peripheral or competitive with other varieties of knowledge. Projects, it is said, are more sensitive to diversity and different intelligences. They honor individual modes of expression. Fine, if you are a cognitive type… but if you are not, no problem. Word and number learning were demoted during the 1990s, joined in school by new kinds of intelligence that all seemed to cry for activities-based learning. The premier exponent of this "multiple intelligences" (MI) scheme — the most powerful force in progressive education today — is Howard Gardner, the tireless promoter of the theory. Sage-on-the-stage is Harvard University's professor of cognition and education, and an adjunct professor of psychology, a staple on news and talk shows, and authors of dozens of books, monographs and videos.
The MI concept — originated by in the early 1980s, and embraced by education organizations, schools, and experts — has achieved doctrinal status in a short time. According to Gardner's widely accepted schema, word (linguistic) and number (logical-mathematical) smart are two kinds of smart. But so is picture smart (spatial), body smart (bodily-kinesthetic), music smart (musical), people smart (interpersonal), self smart (intrapersonal), and — his newest addition — nature smart (naturalist). The MI appeal is obvious. It caters to the idea of individual modes of learning, itself a concept that research has failed to deliver on but that nevertheless remains a central progressive interest and promise. It is rooted in American fair play. It levels the playing field.
Howard Gardner knows that many very silly things are said in his name. But the writings in Thomas Armstrong's Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom (ASCD, second edition, 2000), published with the imprimatur of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, cannot be among them. The book appears with Gardner's blessing. In a preface, vouches for the accuracy, clarity, broad range, and the teacher-friendliness of the book. He calls it a "reliable and readable account of my work" that "conveys a vivid idea of what MI classes, teaching moves, curricula, and assessments can be like."
Armstrong's guide is a veritable encyclopedia of non-traditional teaching strategies. To tap into interpersonal intelligence, the book extols the construction and use of board games "easily made using manila file folders, magic markers. . .a pair of dice and miniature cards, people or colored cubes. . .to serve as a game pieces. Topics can include a wide range of subjects, from math facts and phonics skills to rain forest data and history questions." In Armstrong's world, animal sounds, plant symbols, class plays, making pictures, and color coding are alternate ways to learn about punctuation.
To engage the naturalist intelligence, another teaching strategy suggests that high school teachers "use a class pet as a kind of 'alter ego' for the classroom in posing instructional questions (e.g., 'How do you think our rabbit Albert would feel about the problem of world hunger?'). Students who relate best to the world through their love of animals might well use Albert's persona in giving voice to their own thinking on the matter."
In featured examples in the book's appendix, for a fifth-grade history lesson on the development of Rhode Island, students — depending on their "smarts" — can choose between traditional approaches such as reading a textbook and creating a timeline, or they can relate the settlement of Rhode Island to their need or desire to break away from authority, or compare the settlement of Rhode Island with the growth of an amoeba. (It's hard to know what this last learning exercise means or means to teach.) But such antic activities will undoubtedly influence some impressionable curriculum specialists, just as they reinforce the false notion that learning should be cheery and blithe. (Learning is often very hard and even tedious work.)
To get a feel for unknowns in basic algebra, Armstrong advises, spatially endowed students in junior high school can draw a version of "x" as a masked outlaw. Students with musical intelligence can chant "x is a mystery" and "accompany their chanting with any available percussion instruments."
To get a feel for Boyle's Law, high school chemistry students can become "molecules" of gas in a "container" (a clearly defined corner of the classroom). They move at a constant rate temperature) and cannot leave the container (constant mass).
The activities are at once catchy, dreary, and desperate. This is not the way to learn about "x" or Boyle's Law. Animal sounds are not the best way for children to learn about punctuation. Teachers should not suffer theory that tells them they are. Don't have high school students ask Albert the classroom rabbit what he thinks about world hunger, as Armstrong's guide would suggest. Have them obtain research material from the Population Reference Bureau.
Sometimes, Zahorik noted in his study of how teachers make learning interesting, an activity may stir up interest but be educationally counterproductive. In Zahorik's chosen example, on a field trip to a nature center, students were asked to role-play various animals such as the "radar-eared grass nibbler" and the "long-legged fish nabber" while the teacher, wearing an official-looking costume, role-played the mayor of a hypothetical community. Using written clues suspended from trees, each "animal" was to find a home where it could survive. "Since natural environments with real plants and animals can provide considerable situational interest, the role-playing activity may not have been needed," Zahorik concluded with academic understatement.
At rock bottom, projects and activities provide mere entertainment. Teachers who fear student antagonism abandon "sedentary activities." They seek to fill dead time in the classroom. Projects and activities keep kids occupied and unmutinous. One of Zahorik's points was that "artificial tasks … detract from interest." But real knowledge needs no artificial task.
- Compare the tricky verbs, Etre and avoir, to their English cousins. Compare the Romanesque and the Gothic.
- Read a description of the French Revolution. Plenty exist, and they are not hard to find. Tell the story of the extraordinary flight from Paris of Louis XVI, a monarch who was ultimately tried, found guilty, and executed in one of the great moving spectacles in all history. How is this revolution linked to the American Revolution and Constitution?
- Get to know the Carpetbaggers, the Know-Nothings, the Copperheads, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, William JenningsBryan, Warren Harding, and Franklin Roosevelt.
Inherently fascinating subjects — how water gets from a reservoir to a kitchen sink, the locomotion of flatworms, the features of the solar system and what the names of each planet symbolize, the discovery of penicillin and the polio vaccine, why sad songs like the blues often use minor chords — are without limit. None of these subjects needs an artificial stimulus to make it come alive. Each brims with thrilling substance that lends itself to a memorable lesson in unadulterated form.
* * *
Balance is everything in education, and just as teachers should sometimes make judgments that land on the side of activity, so they must also often act as experts and leaders. Teachers have to ask themselves: Is writing an eyewitness journal entry on "what it was like to witness the signing of the Declaration of Independence" really the best way for eighth-graders to learn the principles of the Declaration? Do we give up making that mural of the Underground Railroad in order to get a more in-depth understanding of the Civil War through reading the Emancipation Proclamation or memorizing the Gettysburg Address? Which is doable in a shorter amount of time, and which is more valuable?
In order to succeed, projects and activities take more planning, care, and work for teachers than standard lessons. In both successful and unsuccessful projects, teachers work very hard to make learning direct and lively. When successful, the inner satisfaction of developing the activity and fusing it to academic content drives teacher and student alike.
Teachers must define the scope, limit the things to be learned, and make sure students learn these things. If the subject is handled with planning and forethought, students will gain a sense of mastery from a project, not frustration.
In designing activities and projects, teachers must ask: What do I want to accomplish by this? Is an activity the most effective and time-efficient way to achieve results? What evidence will stand to prove the desired end has been achieved? How is this project intended to advance what most or all students should know or be able to do?
Activities and projects work best when they are matched to the individual, stimulate intellectual growth in ways that the student cannot yet know, and build on knowledge that gives the endeavor depth and substance upon completion. Selection, arrangement, focus, presentation, practice, review — the mainstays of curriculum — must all be taken into account.
Education is not a game. The only valid architecture for projects and activities is core knowledge. How to handle words, express yourself fluently, and listen are not education electives. No substitute exists for the foundations of mathematics, history, and science. Individual deliberation, judgment, understanding, and the ability to take advantage of the present depend on an individual's storehouse of these fundamental facts and skills. They are the armature, skeleton, and building blocks on which continuing education depends. Facts and academic mastery are what too many activities artfully dodge. What civilizations have considered the keys to and the superstructure of knowledge, contemporary progressives label lower-order skills. At their most debased, projects and activities are the curriculum of Nietzsche's Last People, who see the wonders of the world, a world formalized in the humanities and sciences — and can only blink.
*See "Polishing the Stone: How Asian Teachers Perfect Their Lessons," by James Stigler and Harold Stevenson (American Educator, Spring 1991).
 |
 |
 |
|
||
 |
|
 |
|
||
Last updated: Thu, May 22 2008
