Running head: PURPOSE OF CURRICULUM
Platform Plank III: Nature of the Learner and the Role of the Teacher: Pedagogical Mode
Theme IV: Learning Principles and Purposes
Jeffrey B. Romanczuk
Sevier County School System
Abstract
This plank attempts to answer what are the nature of the learner and the role of the teacher. The subquestions addressed include why the teacher cannot help but be a role model, how do teachers get students to the higher Bloom and higher Kohlberg levels, what kinds of rewards are there for learning, and how do schools create independent learners.
Teacher as Role Model
When the teacher individualizes instruction, they are operating from the Existentialist educational philosophy, but the teacher’s intent may be only to do whatever works to make available to that child a future that contributes to society rather than takes from the community. That may sound Social Reconstructionist, but the teacher is no more being a disciple of Existentialist Maxine Greene than of Social Reconstructionist George Counts (Sadker & Sadker, 2003). How the student makes known what they need, what works best for them with any given curriculum, is what the teacher is trying to tap into. Sternberg and Lubart (as cited in Ornstein, Behar-Horenstein, & Pajak, 2003), in their argument that creativity can be taught, make the point that creative teaching can help highlight undervalued ideas and turn around existing ways of thinking. However, when the idea is undervalued for good reason, the existing ways of thinking do not need turning. The students do.
In the perennialist educational philosophy, the teacher is the “scholarly role model” (Sadker & Sadker, 2003, p. 364), exposing the students to critical thinking skills so they can decide what is true for themselves. Sizer and Sizer (as cited in Ornstein, Behar-Horenstein, & Pajak, 2003) submit that character education helps even young teens in their struggle to figure out how the world works and move toward finding their place in it. But Kohn’s criticism of character education (as cited in Ornstein, Behar-Horenstein, & Pajak) is that it comes with too much adult telling and not enough adult modeling. This is the teacher’s role and it is done by being genuine and by finding what will motivate the students to learn more independently.
Higher Level Bloom Taxonomy Teaching
The teacher can be the bridge to the higher level Bloom Taxonomy only if she can motivate students to cross. Even elementary students can deconstruct input to find connections (analyze) and combine this information to generalize from it (synthesis) (from March 25, 2003 class notes). It may not be until middle or high school age that the students can integrate information to come to an original conclusion (the rest of synthesis) or support their opinion with a reasoned argument (evaluation). But the teacher’s goal should be to meet them wherever they are and walk the students to the next level. While all of the Ornstein, Behar-Horenstein, and Pajak (2003) readings for this segment (chapters 13 through 18) require teaching higher order Bloom, success at this end of the taxonomy is not limited to the student-centered teachers. Refocusing the curriculum to the top levels of Bloom’s taxonomy requires tapping into the affective domain as much as the higher end cognitive domain.
Higher Stage Kohlberg
Although Sizer and Sizer (as cited in Ornstein, Behar-Horenstein, & Pajak, 2003) are making a case for student-centered teaching in stating that “grappling” is a step better than “engagement” because what the student brings to the struggle starts to matter (p. 144), it is affective-centered instruction more than student-centered that is needed to successfully navigate moral lessons. Krathwohl’s affective taxonomy (as cited in Ornstein & Hunkins, 2004, p. 286) depends even more than Bloom’s does on individual student investment to get to the receiving/responding stage. While most teens (and a few preadolescents) can engage in moral reasoning, what will compel them to do so is the trickier question.
I taught To Kill a Mockingbird—the very example Sizer and Sizer hold up for grappling—to 3rd track 10th graders twenty years ago and still recall with dismay that few of the students got, or cared to get, its moral lesson. That my To Kill a Mockingbird classroom experience does not match Sizer and Sizer’s is the first affective roadblock to moral education. Also from my own experience, I can say that many students do not make the effort to get to Kohlberg’s postconventional level (as cited in Ornstein, Behar-Horenstein, & Pajak, 2003, p. 169, the social contract and universal ethical principle stages). Of course, most kids and many adults never make the effort to get to this level. The ten moral dilemma areas (Kohlberg, p. 170), even the ones that do not seem like abstractions (property, truth, sex), are too abstract for many to trouble with. Only the hardest working students will want to grapple this much. Most will just want to be told (unless they know it is not “on the test;” then they will not want even this much).
In their discussion of phenomenology’s impact on the curriculum (making the point that others’ experiences are open to us only by inference), Ornstein and Hunkins (2004), make the statement: “Affective needs are more important than cognitive needs” (p. 127). This is going too far. While this may be true, it is not the school’s or the teacher’s task to make “school more satisfying to student and more consistent with their interests, so that they gain a sense of power, fulfillment, and importance in the classroom” (Ornstein & Hunkins, p. 127). The student needs to know the curriculum matters or it would not be the curriculum and learn it as well as they can. (Okay, so I slipped from perennial to essential; but there is obviously no danger of me sliding over to the student-centered philosophies.) Although I dislike most business/school analogies, this one works: schools under scrutiny are like businesses losing money. The smart advice is to cut back on the diversification and recommit to the core competencies of the mission statement. Even essentialist Hirsch (1996), realizing that the teaching community was growing alarmed by his call for “cultural literacy,” reintroduced the idea as “core knowledge,” the aim of which is to “introduce solid knowledge in a coherent way into the elementary curriculum” (p. 13). This is where the schools’ emphasis needs to be. While I believe teachers should be role models, we are not doing our students (or their families) any favors by becoming parental/familial role models. Affective education has to begin at home.
Where is the Reward for Learning?
What if no affective education begins at home? Even the absence of education can be an education. If children see that their parents do not care about school (or about them), no amount of counter messages from teachers are going to make them believe otherwise. Maybe by adolescence a student might come to realize that more effort to schoolwork leads to college and a better life situation. But at the same time, they would also realize that their parents are not going to contribute to send them to college. It would take more intrinsic motivation than most teens have to keep at the books under this scenario.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Intrinsic motivation for younger students (even the ones whose parents do put them first) is almost nonexistent. Chris Henderson admitted as much with his story about falling back on the “candy jar” reward system he thought he would not need (Curriculum class notes, April 1, 2004). I am as resigned to (and chagrinned by) this as Chris appeared to be. What I do not agree with is when teachers never attempt to move the students beyond concrete rewards. One of the few things I dislike about special education is that intrinsic motivation is downplayed while external reward is codified. At its best, it’s behavior management; at its worst the kids become not so much educated humans as trained seals. I would like to believe Kohlberg would support my belief in the heart, soul, and intrinsic motivation of even the apparently most severely disabled students.
Creating Independent Learners
I also believe that special education students have a contribution to make to society (beyond making the nondisabled appreciate what they have). If we cannot get kids beyond the immediate satisfaction of the candy jar, will we ever get them to the delayed reward inherent in fulfilling ones obligation to society? Those who just take without giving back can rationalize it away, but Sizer and Sizer submit that character education helps even young teens in the struggle to find the way the world works, moving toward finding their place in it.
My point is that any and all of us can and should try to give more than we get. A broader point is that K to 12 education needs to present a curriculum that teaches students to think. If they think it through and decide to look out for themselves above all because nobody else will, then their parents and teachers either were not doing their jobs or were poor role models. I do not buy Kohn’s argument (as cited in Ornstein, Behar-Horenstein, & Pajak, 2003) that inner city turmoil and the imbalance of wealth somehow justifies bad values (p. 182). Richard Rhodes and his brother were raised by a lunatic step mother who fed them a bean diet and locked them in their bedroom after dinner each night. Both went to Yale and Richard later earned a Pulitzer Prize for The Making of the Atomic Bomb. There are not many examples like this, unfortunately, because such rising above is a lot to expect of a child, as is expecting them to have faith in learning for learning sake or see education as and end in itself.
In my own case, I still have not met anyone who believes in formal education as much as my parents did. Even so, all I learned in grade school was how to read for comprehension. The main thing high school taught me was how to write (and type!) I did not approach the kind of critical thinking Sadker and Sadker (2003) write of until junior year. I did not know how “to seek the truth” for myself until college (Sadker & Sadker, p. 364). So I thought it more than a little odd that Stiggins (as cited in Ornstein, Behar-Horenstein, & Pajak, 2003) sees the teacher’s role as motivating students rather than teaching them. By extension, then, I assume the student’s role is to be motivated rather than to learn.
I am not being deliberately dense. I do acknowledge Stiggins’ point (as cited in Ornstein, Behar-Horenstein, & Pajak, 2003) that students need to be offered choices and feel that they have a stake in their own curriculum. However, Kohlberg (as cited in Ornstein, Behar-Horenstein, & Pajak) brings up a point that echoes my own experience: “students prefer to let teachers make decisions about staff, courses, and schedules” (p. 177). As a high school literature teacher, I used to give an essay assignment with most novels or plays. I always gave four or five choices with the last one always worded to the effect: “A topic of your own choosing. See me before starting work on it.” No sophomores or seniors ever took this option. Kids tend to shy away from grappling with messy problems, the very thing they should be doing (Sizer and Sizer; Sternberg and Lubart, as cited in Ornstein, Behar-Horenstein, & Pajak, 2003).
If the students are reticent about venturing in this direction, their parents apparently are delighted at the prospect. According to Stoddard (2004), a recent survey of more than 2,000 parents supported the hypothesis that promoting identity, interaction, and inquiry are the top priorities parents have for their children’s education. By “identity,” she means “students learn who they are. . .and develop their unique gifts;” by “interaction,” Stoddard means “children learn how to get along with others and form healthy relationships,. . .caring communication;” by “inquiry,” she means “curiosity, passion for learning. . .learn how and where to search for truth” (p. 37). I assume this is why I drift between essential and perennial. I believe in the curricular content emphasizing “great books” (Sadker & Sadker, 2003, p. 364), but also believe in the social lessons inherent in throwing hundreds of kids into the same building for seven hours a day. The best result for general education and special education of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1997 (IDEA 97) has been special education students mixing with the general school population. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) took up the accountability for all students that IDEA 97 initiated, but the latter’s emphasis on assessment may undo the best part of the former law.
Conclusion
Since the 1980s (and probably before that, but definitely by the 1983 publication of Nation at Risk), schools have become domestically what the United States has become internationally during the same span. While schools have been trying to succeed, even trying to improve society, they are blamed for persistent failures and society’s downward spiral. This goal is too much for society to expect of schools and for them to expect of themselves. However, it is easy to see why the temptation to become a child’s family away from home is so inviting. Teachers cannot help but be a role models, but they have to keep ever in their minds that these are not their children to rear but their students to teach. The issues cannot become how can we feed, clothe, and tend to the medical needs of the young, but how do we get these students to the higher Bloom and higher Kohlberg levels. No matter the level of support they are getting for succeeding in school, what kinds of rewards is the school system offering them for learning? Many schools have goals that say something about “creating lifelong learners.” Creating independent learners is the same goal and more: it includes striving to learn even when the odds are against doing so are great because support is minimal. This is more than the idea that education is an end in itself, but that it is as necessary to keep learning as it is to keep living.
References
Hirsch, E. D. (1999). The schools we need and why we don’t have them. New York: Anchor Books.
Orstein, A. C., Behar-Horenstein, L. S., & Pajak, E. F. (2003). Contemporary issues in curriculum (3rd ed.). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Orstein, A. C., & Hunkins, F. (2004). Curriculum foundations: Principles and theory (4th ed). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Sadker, M. P., & Sadker, D. M. (2003). Teachers, schools, and society (6th ed). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Stoddard, L. (2004). The best thing we can do for children? Let teachers act as professionals. Education Week, 37-38, March 31.