A Quillette article currently on the sidebar about Direct Instruction, a formal version of the general idea, which has more than one meaning. I have written in the past about the better results one gets from phonics and drill-based math than the inquiry-based methods. Yet the ed schools continue to insist otherwise, to the point of not even looking at the data.
Some may draw a connection between the way teachers tend to plan classes and the popularity of inquiry learning—as a teacher, I know it is possible to keep students busy investigating, researching, and presenting their ideas, perhaps with a poster, without having to devote as much time and attention to the picky details of producing a more structured plan.
Well, I hope that's not the reason. But I do remember that making posters, displays, and drawings often took up quite a bit of time without imparting much information. A very small amount of info could make a lot of display.
Even out of school--the equivalent of those posters is powerpoint presentations, and those take three days short of forever.
ReplyDeleteI read about a law professor at an Ivy League college who required her students to make posters to illustrate some point...
ReplyDeleteSeveral years ago, Jeff Bezos established a policy that internal discussion/decisions at Amazon were not to be based on presentations, but on written documents. He just tweeted yesterday that this was still his view.
ReplyDeleteSeems relevant to the educational question.
That's the best I've ever liked him, hearing that.
ReplyDeleteMy lay observations, which may be inaccurate, are also that most recent changes in pedagogy at the elementary school level have either reduced the teacher's workload, or shifted focus to activities that are more interesting to the teacher than basic instruction.
ReplyDeleteMy observations are less of the classroom itself than of the halls outside where we were doing science supplemental demonstrations. Kids seemed to wander in and out of the elementary school classrooms at will. I gather there have been temper tantrums that involved furniture in the air.
ReplyDeleteAVI..."That's the best I've ever liked him, hearing that" Bezos sometimes has interesting thoughts; for example, he remarked that if someone has generalized anxiety, it may reflect important decisions that they know at some level that they need to make but keep avoiding.
ReplyDeleteOTOH, just the other day he was tweeting about the importance of Civility...had to wonder if he ever read his own newspaper.
All of us when teaching, not just those who take it up as a profession, tend to gravitate toward those skills we were good at ourselves, reasoning (probably accurately) that is what we would teach well, and (probably inaccurately) that is what is most necessary*. So what we see taught at any level is what the teacher was good at and thinks valuable. As a natural human tendency it is not shameful. But it is shameful that entire institutions do not correct for this by discovering what is really needed and measuring how to get there.
ReplyDeleteScience fairs at Christian elementary schools were wonderful for one child but ridiculous for another. We leaned hard on our children to attempt difficult things and measure what happened, and if they didn't get dramatic or expected results, that was also valuable. So son #1 did stuff with blenders and things tipping over trying to get some grip on aspects of chaos theory in junior high. Results were all over the map and he had some guesses why but nothing definite. One of the exhibits he lost out to was a vinegar-and-baking-soda volcano. Very pretty and well-labeled.
Son #2 was at a different school where they applauded his ambitious questions every year, even when he didn't quite pull them off. I don't remember if they even gave awards, but they had a continuing problem of kids not being there to explain what they had done because they were all running to the other experiments, massively excited.