I
am, among other things, a guitar teacher.
I’ve taught privately for ten years and I decided, this year, I would go
get my credential and start making the big bucks (sarcasm?) in public
education. Class room teaching brings its
own set of challenges. With the onset of
common core among our schools, staff development time is at a premium. With this new prescribed teaching methodology
there comes new ideas for class management and structure. The problem is the questions being asked are
how to teach and not what to teach. The
how is still very important, but the what is the fundamental; as with any
structure, if the foundation is faulty the pillars holding the roof will,
eventually, falter.
Common
Core has a lot of buzz phrases (as with all educational models) that really
excited me. I work primarily at a junior
high school - I also teach at a high school, all my meetings however take place
with the junior high staff – and when I began to hear things like: argument
instead of persuasion; academic discourse; Socratic seminar, I was
excited. The core teachers were/are
scared about the change in style however I felt their excitement at the
prospect of teaching children to use that most valued of tools of reason and
logic: evidence!
This
is where it gets fuzzy. The difference in argumentative and persuasive writing,
as I’m told by the language arts teachers, is argument is derived from evidence
whereas persuasion from opinion. You
see, in order for students to use evidence in the formation of an argument, they
must be able to identify what evidence is.
Additionally, the students must be able to differentiate evidence from
opinion. Yet here’s the problem; in
teaching “academic discourse” the school system has begun to train students
using key phrases to communicate, all of which are opinion driven and not
evidence driven:
·
While some people believe… I think…
·
The way I see it…
·
In my opinion…
“Make sure you cite the text to support your response.” A text book is a secondary source. A text is
always the synthesis of data into a conclusion from a 3rd party and
therefore invalid if trying to teach children to synthesis. The work has already been done for them! A valid source contains three things: a hypothesis,
a method for testing said hypothesis, and the resulting data from exhaustive
testing.
We’ve
already a faulty foundation to our initial goal: to teach argument instead of
persuasion because the very method of conveyance is secondary. Factual or not,
we have side stepped the impetus of the exercise which is to teach students to prove an argument. That is impossible using someone else’s synthesis
of data. We are, in fact, teaching
students a logical fallacy: that truth comes from authority.
In
order to create academic discourse, by definition there must be differing
opinions. Using our flawed method today,
students are taught to agree or disagree with someone else’s synthesis of data
rather than amongst themselves, which is where the richest learning occurs. Students are unable to develop truly original
conclusions because they are not given the proper tools (data) to do so.
Finally,
the purpose of the Socratic method is to arrive at a single conclusion or truth
among a group. A group which has, as
individuals; examined the data, judged its legitimacy and drawn a conclusion. The method of arriving at individual
conclusions is challenged amongst the group until only one conclusion remains.
A
great example of how a class may approach these three steps would be teaching
the mathematical constant π. Pie – π – is calculated as the circumference
of a circle divided by its diameter. Regardless of its size, π is always the
same. Here’s a fantastic video and a fun
experiment to measure and find π:
And another great example of how to
measure the approximate circumference of a circle:
When done as a class, each student
will come up with a slightly different number.
The teacher could average all the numbers, or simply ask the students to
round to the nearest hundredth decimal place.
When the students realize that, amongst all off them 3.14 is the most prevalent
(or ideally only) answer the students will ask the question themselves. Now ask them to find the circumference of a
circle, using the diameter and this new number they have discovered. After repeated correct examples, ask the
question, “Would this work for all circles?” Let the class come to their own conclusion
based on the evidence they themselves have uncovered. Once they arrive at their conclusion you let
them in on the secret: they have discovered for themselves the universal
constant π.
As
I’m almost certain you didn’t come here looking for a math lesson, and God
knows I’m not qualified to give one, let me get back to the topic at hand: the
education of our children. The above lesson does many things; it teaches
problem solving, communication, repetition of a concept, it brings legitimate
academic discourse with the opportunity to employ the Socratic method. This is one of thousands of examples that could
be given, it’s just the one I’m immediately familiar with.
Now,
why don’t we teach this way? As I
mentioned previously staff development time is at a premium in my school
district – there’s a lot of it. We all,
teachers and administrators, bear through it because we truly do want to serve
our students to the best of our ability.
Today our staff attended two separate educational seminars. A seminar on Mindset by Carol Dweck surprised and inspired me to write this
today. It wasn’t the book itself - I
haven’t read it. The topic of
conversation gave me pause to reflect heavily on what I have done as an
educator, both privately and in a class room; what effect we as a community of
educators are doing and creating in society; how students adapt to our teaching
methodology as teachers and parents.
The
conflict begins in our visions. Visions
of humanity, of society, of ourselves.
It is the constrained verses the unconstrained vision of man. I exist
with the constrained view of man which is to say, man is fixed: man can grow
and learn and adapt but man is not perfectible.
I have witnessed the strengths and weaknesses of my individuality. The unconstrained vision sees man as
perfectible. That there is one path
that, should we find it, be the perfect road to lead man to absolute equality
in skill and reward. The unconstrained vision views equality as a value of
skill. If skill is equal, opportunity
can be chosen. The constrained vision
views equality as a value of opportunity.
That if opportunity is equal, skills can be chosen.
I’ll
come back to this before I wonder too far off topic.
Myself
and my generation learned from a very young age that if we weren’t immediately good
at something we should avoid it. Why is
that? Because of the perceived need to
create self-esteem among the youth our parents and teachers, for the most part,
told us how great we were. Then the
moment came when we weren’t immediately good at something. What did we do then? The praise wasn’t there
so we went back to doing things we were praised for. It’s simple behavior conditioning, but we
learned that self-esteem and self-worth are external – that people can give and
take these away from us. Nothing could
be further from the truth.
I
didn’t have a legitimate sense of self-worth until I was 27 years old.
Mindset calls what I had, and what many
of our students have, a fixed mindset.
Defined as having fixed ability or intelligence. If the individual cannot do it perfectly they
would rather not do it. Can you see how
the previous example could lead us down this road? The inverse is called a growth mindset:
believing that your intelligence grows as well as your skill and ability. A growth mindset student takes criticism as
an opportunity to learn whereas a fixed mindset student would take it as
insulting.
Here’s
a contradictory statement: failure is the leading cause of success.
What?
It’s
true! What is the thing all success stories have in common? They were willing
to fail. Michael Jordan says it best:
Students with a fixed mindset are
unwilling to fail. If it’s not perfect
it’s not worth doing. I find myself in
this mindset all the time, I’m a perfectionist and I’ve got to get over
that. If I could go back in time and
give my younger self one piece of advice it would be this: take every
opportunity; value the failures more
that the successes.
How
can I provide this opportunity for my students? In the manner in which I have
already discussed. Using what common
core espouses can create these opportunities for students to fail, rise up, and
succeed.
How
can we help students keep a growth mindset all the time? By helping them
internalize their self-worth – not continuing to externalize it. As a music teacher, writer and general
creative thinker the best way to do this is through the teaching of aesthetics. Aesthetics is the acknowledgement of beauty:
visually, aurally or spatially. More importantly,
it is the value of affect. It is an
opinion that students derive from within and communicate to their peers. As teachers we foster that through
recognition and not through praise. Through
aesthetics students can learn what, why and how they value things and people,
and how they value themselves aesthetically (not through appearance but through
achievement).
The
national community of educators has an unconstrained vision of man. That if we
can give each student equal skills they will be equal, but we see the failing
of that vision every day in the trenches of the classroom. Not every student learns at the same
pace. Some students are completely
uninterested in topics, yet we would hold them to these standards because we
believe we are making them equal. Yet,
if a student is gifted in music and poor in geometry do we foster his
gifts? No we punish him for his
failings. Were the tables turned, would
you punish the student, in love with mathematics, for a failing grade in
music? Were that the case, how many Albert
Einstine’s have we made into mechanics for not fostering their passions? How
many Bill Gates have been put in middle management? I believe Steve Vai says it best when talking
about success in the music industry. “I
cultivate my strengths and avoid my weaknesses.”
It
is the constrained vision of man that allows us to value what is innate. We are equal in our opportunity to
achieve. Each of us was given life and a
will to live it as we choose, and while skills can lead to opportunity ultimately
it is the value of ourselves that pushes us to acquire a higher set of skills. With a growth mindset students are capable whatever
they can imagine. My challenge to all
educators is to learn to give the student room to imagine. Our jobs are made much easier if we simply
allow them to dream.
