I’ve been in education since 1932 as student, teacher, administrator, textbook and professional book author, publisher consultant, teacher educator, contributor to professional journals, newspaper columnist, and visitor to schools as far east as Greece and as far west as Japan. I have opinions that helped shape
Connections: Investigating Reality:
On the challenge – Forget rocket science and brain surgery. Compared to educating–helping learners better align their mental models of reality with reality–both are relatively easy. Educating is inherently the most complex of all undertakings.
Aim – The main aim of educating is simple, and every learner needs to know exactly what it is–some version of, "making more sense of experience by understanding the sense-making process."
"Covering the content" – Forget this too. It hasn’t been possible since the Enlightenment, and the assumption that it should be done (or at least attempted) is naive and destructive. It’s best to see it for what it is–dynamic, constantly changing, never equally appropriate for all students, and with the possible exception of a tiny fraction of it, not worth storing in memory. Choose from it what helps explain and elaborate the sense-making process. That process is the main content.
Textbooks – My brother and I have written two for Prentice-Hall, but I consider them a major obstacle to learning. If educators demanded that they be no more than, say, fifty pages long, improvement in the quality of American education would be almost instantaneous.
Pacing – The whole idea of a "pacing guide" is ridiculous, a futile attempt to standardize the unstandardizable. If you’re trying to help learners understand something really important, there’s no point in moving on to a second idea until they understand the first, even if that takes days, weeks, months.
CIR tries to lay out the whole of the "liberal education" ball of wax, so don’t rush it. Take as long as it takes.
Teacher Role – The longer I taught, the less I said to students. I came to see myself as a co-learner and behaved accordingly, mostly just asking questions, always looking for ones so thought-provoking I could just wander around from group to group and say nothing at all, just listen and learn.
Class Organization – Writing
CIR, my brother and I assumed that most of the work would be done in small groups. Learners learn a lot by "thinking out loud," and small groups maximize opportunities to do that. At the end of an activity, it’s often useful to let the groups "have at it" with each other, or pool their insights and conclusions.
Target Audience –
CIR was written with adolescents to adults in mind, so the language is simple even when the ideas aren’t. Because it focuses mostly on the real world and user experience of it, it automatically "adjusts" to different ability levels.
"Standards" – The usual subject-matter standards that
No Child Left Behind forced states to adopt are suicide pills, reinforcing the worst aspects of traditional education–-that the point of it is to "cover the material," that fragmenting knowledge is OK, that innovation and change aren’t necessary. If higher authority says they have to be honored, know that there’s no legitimate standard that
CIR can’t accommodate, that it’s just a matter of fitting it in where it makes the most sense.
"Accountability" – When you’re making judgments about complex performance, there’s no avoiding subjectivity (which is one of many good reasons for team teaching). Standardized tests devalue the very qualities and abilities most essential to individual and collective survival.
Acceptance –
CIR will be rejected for mainstream use as long as the present thrust of "reform" (doing what we’ve always done, only longer and harder) continues. The most likely users are those working with learners either so far advanced or so far behind, their scores on standardized tests are of little concern.
Implementation: We think that, in about two hours a day,
CIR can do a better job of realizing the aims of a traditional liberal education than is now being done in five or six hours, and that the rest of the day should be used for doing what we say we think is of supreme importance but don’t actually do–help individual learners identify and pursue their interests and maximize their talents and abilities. Magnet school administrators should be particularly interested in instruction that decreases time spent on general study.
Marion
