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‘Obstacles’ Category

  1. Constructivism – Now Into Science Wars

    July 25, 2016 by Tunya

    YES, THE UNDEAD CONSTRUCTIVIST LEARNING VAMPIRE, EVEN WITH STAKE IN HEART, IS ALIVE AND WELL AND CONTINUES ITS HARMFUL WAYS

    Ever hear about the casualty lists that continued, even after a formal truce was signed? Sometimes it took months for the word to get to the front lines of the old wars. Of course, they did not have the technology we have today to get the word out to the front lines — instantly !

    Here is one declaration about Constructivism’s rejection by a leading promoter that’s already 10 years old! How many Constructivist casualties in that time period?

    “I have abandoned the constructivist paradigm as a useful theory for articulating and explaining knowledgeability and changes in observable behaviors. …[this] because it turned out to be plagued with considerable contradictions.” (Roth, W.-M. 2006) Learning science: A singular plural perspective, p. 326)
    A dozen years earlier this same author had been saying: “Constructivist teachers view themselves as gardeners, tour guides, learning councillors or facilitators rather than as dispensers of information or judges of right and wrong answers.”

    The aim of constructivist science teaching was to turn students into constructivists. Again, the same author’s quote is instructive: “Thus, science educators seek to help teachers in changing from worldviews that are commensurable with objectivism to ones that are commensurable with constructivism.”
    On another thread I had posted information regarding material to read about how Constructivism had migrated from Reading Wars to Math Wars to, now, Science Wars.

    Constructivism As It Affects Science Teaching

    I read this article while it was still available FREE in January according to publishing rules, but then it became costly. I had recommended it to many people. It is now again FREE due to the author’s intervention.

    I recommend it highly. Reflections on 25 Years of Journal Editorship https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276458457_Reflections_on_25_Years_of_Journal_Editorship

    Michael R Matthews chronicles his editing of a Journal devoted to teachers who teach SCIENCE in Schools. It is the Sections 10, 11, 12 that deal specifically with how CONSTRUCTIVISM made inroads into the teaching. At one point it became so dominant that a speaker proclaimed: “We are all Constructivists now!”
    __________________________________

    Are we concerned? I am very concerned, on many counts, but fearfully because discussion about methods and philosophies such as constructivism are being suppressed and not provided forums for wider airing. I am concerned because “Shifting of Minds” and changing “worldviews” ARE topics in the inner circles of the education establishments but are not open to the public.

    [ to SQE 20160725 11:35 http://www.societyforqualityeducation.org/index.php/blog/read/time-to-put-a-stake-through-the-heart-of-the-undead-constructivist-learning ]

    Category Absurdities, Obstacles, Uncategorized | Tags: | No Comments

  2. Education Groupthink — Who Needs It ?

    July 24, 2016 by Tunya

    GROUPTHINK In School Reform — Who Needs It?

    Two leading American education analysts — Rick Hess and Robert Pondiscio — have experienced searing experiences around the issues of groupthink.

    Hess, with the American Enterprise Institute, wrote (Jn 15’16) that the Ed Reform community is as loaded today with groupthink as the Teacher Ed Colleges have been for so long. The progressive orthodoxy rules: “Dissenters, whether students or faculty, were dismissed as troublemakers.” Outside the faculties, Ed Reformers critical of the dominant reform movements have no place to “look for refuge”.
    http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/rick_hess_straight_up/2016/06/school_reform_is_the_new_ed_school.html

    Hess, in an earlier article (Jn 1’16) figured that “90% of ‘school reform’ land” is progressive and that their “’by any means necessary’ ethos” is a method that does not square with conservatives. He figures that the general population outside schools is an even 50/50 split between conservatives and progressives.
    http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/rick_hess_straight_up/2016/06/making_sense_of_left-right_school_reform_divide.html

    Pondiscio, of the Thomas Fordham Institute, wrote (May 25’16) about “The Left's drive to push conservatives out of education reform”. The comments section to the article was suspended because they were “getting unnecessarily acrimonious and threatening. ” https://edexcellence.net/articles/the-lefts-drive-to-push-conservatives-out-of-education-reform

    If critics in the education communities are complaining of being squeezed out in education discussions, where does that leave the “consumers” — general public, students, parents, taxpayers? This goes way beyond “producer capture” and “rent-seekers’ dominion”, doesn’t it? That’s one good reason that “uber” ideas are taking hold — education savings accounts, charter schools, online learning, home education, etc. Anything to avoid the nastiness!

    [published in Filling The Pail https://gregashman.wordpress.com/2016/07/24/the-solution-to-educations-groupthink/ ]

    Category Obstacles, Opinions in media, Uncategorized | Tags: | No Comments

  3. Discovery continues its masquerades

    May 11, 2016 by Tunya

    The Mantra Persists — Discovery In It’s Many Masquerades !

    “ . . . children in rows bad, teachers who talk bad, today’s kids will have 17 jobs in 5 industries, content and knowledge bad, schools kill creativity, project-based learning is the future, kids need 21st C competencies and be ‘engaged’ — or so the mantra goes. We have it here in Canada as well, right now!


    This reminds me of the 1980 quote from the Aquarian Conspiracy: “Discoveries about the nature of the mind, unfortunately, have been like the slow-spreading news of armistice. Many die needlessly on the battlefield, long after the war is over.”

    Just how many of our children are the casualties of today’s continuing education wars. A dozen years ago Richard E Mayer said, “The debate about discovery has been replayed many times.” After discovery came experiential learning, then problem-based learning, then inquiry learning, then constructivist instruction. Other terms also populate this thrust — and they should be collected and brought forward for the needed work ahead. 


    Mayer, in his paper “Should There Be a Three-Strikes Rule Against Pure Discovery Learning? The Case for Guided Methods of Instruction” says:
    “An important role for psychologists is to show how educational practice can be guided by evidence and research-based theory rather than ever-shifting philosophical ideology.”

    The division, the disagreement, the actual “war” lies in a quarrel between practical people who want the education job done and political people who see schools as training for changing the world (or something like that, you know, “social justice”, etc.).

    To differ slightly with Mayer, I, as a grandparent, don’t think psychologists alone can tackle this job. Many parents are getting impatient, and so too are a lot of teachers. Thankfully, cognitive psychologists ARE leading the way in delineating effective methods in pedagogy. But the matter has come to the point of knowing that withholding critical information is doing untold harm in this world. No medical breakthrough would ever be left dormant as long as this unrevealed education knowledge has been left to fester.

    I am a gardener and am constantly uprooting invasive weeds. That is the imagery that inspires me to want to help in this task of getting the proper pedagogy out there. I came across an incredible article that increases my fears even more, and that is a 25 year chronicle of the very revered “scientific method” itself being attacked by “constructivists” . Academics out there should be able to get this paper easily and I got it months ago when it was still free — 25 Years of Journal Editorship, Michael R Matthews.

    The comforting part in Matthews article is that he has found at least one constructivist cheerleader who has “abandoned the constructivist paradigm as a useful theory for articulating and explaining knowledgeability and changes in observable behaviors . . . because it turned out to be plagued with considerable contradictions.” Ominously, however, Matthews points out that there is now a journal devoted to cultural studies in science as a mutation of the constructivist direction.

    I am wondering if this embrace by Willingham of the social and cultural is aligned?

    [published in SQE and Filling the Pail, Disrupting The Culture https://gregashman.wordpress.com/2016/05/10/disrupting-the-culture/ ]

    Category Absurdities, Obstacles, Uncategorized | Tags: | No Comments

  4. Crazy-making, brain-scrambling — intentional?

    April 19, 2016 by Tunya

     

    [There was a time when people started challenging the habit (technique) of educators to mystify.  Mystification was identified as an obstacle standing in the way of parents trying to understand what was going on in education.  And, a barrier to their meaningful participation in consultation and decision-making.  There was an inkling of understanding.  Nonetheless, parents still continue to be mystified, and driven "crazy" by ongoing system-led changes to education.  To stretch the concern further, here is my theory — this confusion is a deliberate way not only to keep parents at bay and out of the picture while "transformation" of education proceeds but is also a means, via "discovery" methods and other confusing means, to weaken the foundation of early "primary" and "elementary" education altogether rather than to ensure it's strength? This goes back over a 100 years when John Dewey enunciated, and started the slide down the rabbit-hole, as he proclaimed that foundation-building of skills in primary education was a "fetish", a "perversion" — that is, a fixation and not a necessary building block of learning?     My comment to SQE about a government sanctioned communiqué to parents about reading in Ontario — Bats in their Belfries  http://www.societyforqualityeducation.org/index.php/blog/read/bats-in-their-belfries ]

    Crazy-Making Education Reform

    Yet another education absurdity is brought forward for our attention — avoiding letter-sound rules in the teaching of beginning reading.

    The flyer — The Facts on Education: How Children Learn to Read – http://www.cea-ace.ca/sites/cea-ace.ca/files/cea-2011-foe-learn-read.pdf — is such a mish-mash ! People who know the field rather well find a number of inconsistencies, omissions and ambiguities, which, if followed, would be rather counterproductive to teaching youngsters to read. This flyer was broadcast widely in Ontario public school systems and especially targeted for parent-teacher connections.

    The flyer is obviously a public relations product — designed probably for well-meaning purposes but hardly of a standard a reading teacher or committed parent would find helpful. One such expert has concluded that the authors of the flyer have “bats in their belfries” and “clearly don’t have a clue”.

    What is troubling in the flyer is that we are led to believe that any of a number of “different ways” can be used to teach reading. Today, however, we do know a lot more about successful methods and discredited methods. Research literature clearly shows that a phonics approach can be highly successful in teaching reading, to both boys and girls and to special needs children. This is not the achievement level attained by the other major approach, the whole-language approach, which figures indicate somewhere around 60% functional literacy level.

    What is even more disturbing is what I heard at a Comparative Education conference March 10 this year. There is to be in the next few years a massive world campaign to promote teaching of reading to children in developing countries. The work has been done — needs assessment tools have been field-tested — protocols for community involvement have been mapped out, etc. What remains is for the Ministries of Education of the developing nations to then adopt the methods for implementing the reading programs.

    BUT, the literature involved already foresees a problem — “The reading ‘wars’ are alive and well in many low-income countries, often miring ministries of education and teaching centers in seemingly endless debates between the ‘whole-language’ and ‘phonics-based’ approaches.” (pg 11 of 1st edition , 2009, EGRA toolkit. The 2nd edition, 2016, does not have that sentence. Nonetheless, when I talked to some people they said it was always a policy to be set by a Ministry of Education as to which method(s) were to be chosen.)

    The point I am aiming at is this — upon knowing the difference between highly successful teaching methods and less stellar methods how ethical is it to promote, or even keep talk, talking, about those methods which have poor yields and also, at the same time, spin-off secondary industries in remediation — both at school levels and college levels?

    There is some other agenda at play here. Is it political? Is it related to ensuring safe jobs for the industry? This quandary is certainly maddening and absolutely a cause for considerable frustration for parents.

    I have been involved for over 45 years in this effort to get more parent/consumer satisfaction from our education systems, and truly, the deafness to, and sabotage of, successful methods is painful to bear. It certainly is enough to make one think twice about trying to reform an unresponsive education system, which seems to exploit opportunities more for self interest than for clients. The matter of ethics and conscience are raised. Accountability is definitely missing in the equation between client and producer sides in public education.

    Category Absurdities, Education Reform, Obstacles, Uncategorized | Tags: | No Comments

  5. When will teachers learn?

    April 2, 2016 by Tunya

    Which Other Professional Besides A Teacher Would Say That?

    Only in education would you hear someone say — “Teaching is such that it takes a lifetime to get good at it and then you retire.” John Myers, Professor, on Educhatter blog, Mar 26, 2016

    No doctor, engineer or accountant would say that ! Nor, would they be allowed to remain in their profession for long! To use your clientele and your field continually as subjects of experimentation and a playpen for your own learning is really upsetting and disturbing. Is this a responsible profession or a “disabling” one as Ivan Illich used to say and write about ? Why do we have to appeal to a Daniel Willingham to sort this out — aren’t there professional and ethical standards in education?

    It’s only in education that there is some kind of accepted (or is it somehow intimidated) tolerance that educators can have so many excuses to avoid proven standard practices. “Methods” is a bad word to use in conversations with teachers — “Don’t tell me how to teach. I don’t tell my doctor how to take out my appendix.” — is a frequent (or variant) reply when a parent dares mention “methods”.

    Where we’re at right now is very much where we were 45 years ago when I tried to get parent voice more heard. There actually was a much greater awareness then and a good number of groups supporting the parent voice. Unfortunately and regrettably, not so much now. All I was able to accomplish was to play a role in the launching of the home education movement — https://gaither.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/john-holts-conversion-to-home-education/

    Discredited and questionable practices and developmentally inappropriate expectations of the young are still practiced and parent qualms are still dismissed. And parents are still stuck with few choices or exits or any sympathetic listeners in the defensive system.

    Both Reading and Math are considered foundational skills that the young student should start mastering at an early stage. Where are we at with these two? Math is a continual worry and news articles continue to expose the issues.

    Regarding Reading there is a worry of colossal scale! At an international conference on comparative education held in Vancouver recently (CIES, Mar 6-10,’16) at one of the sessions it was announced that after considerable testing an initiative would soon be launched by UN and other agencies to help developing countries with reading programs. BUT, within the literature there lurks one sentence that dooms the enterprise:

    “The reading “wars” are alive and well in many low-income countries, often miring ministries of education and teaching centers in seemingly endless debates between the “whole-language” and “phonics-based” approaches.” (pg 4 Early Grade Reading Assessment Toolkit)

    What should be done? Those poor families will not be getting the best information or practices to help their children to read as promised.

    [Most of the above is also posted to Educhatter blog ]

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