School Days, EducationNews.org
Practice is comprised of clear input and repeated output. What’s the point of it? Where are we going with it?
The typical input-output cycle used in schools today contains a systemic flaw. Understand that the very concept of practice means getting better at something, and to get better, you at least retain what you could do before. Practicing to improve a skill you know you’ll shortly dismiss is pointless. Why go to all that work if the end will be the same as if you didn’t do it at all? Since enjoyment of the skill isn’t the point of the activity, why bother?
The systemic flaw about “practicing knowledge” in schools today is that the aim is not to gain permanent knowledge but only to pass a checkpoint. They realize that it doesn’t matter how much they actually know later, because the system only checks their credit, leaving them little incentive to carry the practice cycle to its conclusion. Let’s examine this cycle to understand the indispensable features of it.
Knowledge, we might agree, is not just assignments. It refers to one’s entire internal model of the world painted in pictures, words, visceral feelings, vague impressions, explicit ideas, and actions. Its purpose is to link us with the world around us and assign meaning to the stimuli pouring upon us. While we may debate what exactly to teach, there tends to be general agreement on the minimums needed to function in society and that lack of them leaves one at a disadvantage. Our society depends heavily on numbers and words, a focus that in another society might be about plants and animals. What the numbers and words say is another issue, but first we need to know that we can absorb whatever numbers and words have to offer us. We’re first omnivorous, learning everything we lay hands on, and then decide which niches to claim as our specialties.
Once determining the knowledge that’s valued (or the means by which to select it), attention turns then to installing it–apprehending and saving. The first occurs by presentation by teacher or book or other means, and also from students’ ability to search out, understand, and think about the knowledge. This brings knowledge onto the porch. What brings it inside the house, distinguishing mastery from apprehending, is just saving what’s apprehended.
Because so much instruction fails to distinguish between these two, misdirection of educational resources is common. Apprehending occurs on the surface, and saving occurs in the deeper layers of mind. The difference between them is easy to grasp. In your own experience, here’s deep learning: A month after a course ends, someone asks you a question about it and you can explain it thoroughly, drawing from knowledge as fresh a month later as it was at the time of the final exam. Here’s surface learning: You answer, “Yes, we had something about that. The text was thick. It was…was…hard!”
For instruction to produce depth, we begin with a simple two-step. We first intend to save the learning and then identify what to save. If we intend but don‘t identify, activities are vaguely focused. If we identify but don‘t intend, activities are never undertaken. We register a firm first impression of a chunk worth saving (but not too much at once); then encode it in the brain in several ways, and then recall it at increasing intervals of time. As other pieces of knowledge related to it arrive, we integrate them. We revisit the expanding field periodically until it registers as permanent. The system is the same for kindergartners and graduates: get one point, save it, get another, save both, get another, save all three, and so on.
Instead, students customarily leave school after passing only through external checkpoints of credits, time in a classroom, courses completed, and grades assigned. They lack any assurance that even their “good grades” mean they actually can replicate and use what they labored to learn. Missing from the US system is the “save it” step. Typical experience is to get a point, forget most of it, get another, forget most of it, and so on; resulting not only in education poor in its outcomes, but also discouraging to students who realize that their effort does not pay off. We deprive them of a substantial reason for investing in learning when they realize that the system requires them to appear to learn regardless of whether they actually do or not. They comply, they listen, they try to do the assignments, but they know they still don’t know the material.
Even undertaking practice, then, presumes that you aim toward a sustained body of knowledge. You aim to continue knowing what you knew before and add to it. This replaces the Bathtub Model of education, in which knowledge pours in through a faucet above and out through a drain below at the same rate. Water entering doesn’t stay long. The Bathtub Model is a companion to the Wheelbarrow Model: load up some learning, move it, dump it, and go back for another load.
To understand the lunacy of these widely used models, we look back decades ago when mastery of knowledge was still important but a profound change occurred that bedevils education even today. Before 1900, eighth graders often knew more about the world than do college students now. The reason was that educators believed that knowing was important and that classroom activity caused it. They asserted intent and method. They knew what they wanted and used classroom time to achieve it.
Complaints arose early in the last century that the curriculum was outdated, pre-ordained, and imposed by authoritarian methods. Educators wanted students to show up well in the world (e.g. with good habits, good health, and social responsibility), and expected that guiding their behavior would equip them better than would knowledge. Progressive Education took hold with John Dewey its spokesman.
In his influential 1919 book titled Democracy and Education (available online), Dewey on page 36 specifically discards academic learning. “The development within the young of the attitudes and dispositions necessary to the continuous and progressive life of a society cannot take place by direct conveyance of beliefs, emotions, and knowledge. It takes place through the intermediary of the environment.” He continues: “The deeper and more intimate educative formation of disposition comes, without conscious intent, as the young gradually partake of the activities of the various groups to which they may belong.”
He builds on the impact of group norms by advocating communication, training, fostering, nurturing, cultivating, setting up conditions, direction, control, and especially guidance, declaring “We never educate directly but indirectly by means of the environment.”
Note the phrases “without conscious intent” and “We never educate directly.” Such assumptions discount conscious self-management. To the contrary, students actually respond moment by moment not just automatically (leaving them helpless if the stimuli on them drop away), but respond thoughtfully. They weigh their current perceptions against all they know about the situation. It’s true of all of us, indeed, that we quickly assign routine aspects of our environment to unconscious patterning, but for anything we wish to change, our first impulse is to make it conscious and then focus on it intently.
By opposing the “piling up knowledge,“ Dewey ignored the connection between what students know and how they act. The two don’t occupy separate spheres. In any given field and in all the competences we want for students, the less you know, the less versatile your behavior is likely to be. Although individual teachers and schools may valiantly buck the trend, schools today inherit a system that rejected the conscious mastery of learning. Knowledge mastered gives people options for what to do.
Often I’ve been befuddled by administrators’ lack of interest in generating student mastery. Back in the 90s, I’d assembled an early version of the approach I explain here, documented it with references, illustrated it with practical experiences, organized it into a thoughtful explanation, and obtained time with a Commissioner of Education, the top educator in one state. She welcomed me graciously, accepted my document, and told me she would read it. At a followup appointment, she informed me that she’d read my book, congratulated me, told me it aligned very well with the research, handed me a detailed summary of “the research” assembled by her own staff, gave my book back to me, and wished me well.
I’d found the one person in the state with the most power to change education, had been told that my methods worked and aligned with what else was known, and that was the end of it. A division director there told me privately that their data showed that a third of the state’s students dropped out, a third were coasting, and a third received a good education. “In other words, our schools really serve just a third of our state‘s students,” he concluded. The state used neither my approach nor their own compilation. The idea that government itself should actually use “the research” to alter classroom practice was not open for discussion.
We don’t need demographic studies and testing instruments to understand our results. A rule of thumb for possessing useful knowledge is whether, when you’re taking a walk, you can call it up and think about it. What a student can explain to you correlates with how much he/she thinks about it. Engage them in conversation about a subject they had and say, “I‘m interested. Tell me everything.” Then compare the number of minutes of knowledge they have about it with the number of months they spent studying it. I predict vague surface impressions and an inability to apply reasoned judgment.
My own K-12 schooling fell in the middle of the last century’s arc of change. A few of my teachers were “old school,” expecting comprehensive knowledge, and others weren’t. Among the latter was my sophomore year world history teacher. We’d “covered” hundreds of pages of small print in our text, and with the end of the term looming a few weeks away, a courageous student asked him, “Mr. S., what are we going to have on our final exam?“
He smiled and said, “Don’t worry. Before the test we’ll go over some review questions.“
We leaned back and grinned at each other. What in prior generations would have been teacher-complicit cheating was now cutting-edge methodology. The point wasn‘t what you actually knew but that you got through checkpoints, and the school would help you do that. Set up a favorable environment, osmosis does the work, and teachers needn‘t stress students by requiring sustained learning, often turning instead to “good experiences.”
While experience can be positive, it’s important to understand what also makes it educative. It should enable us to do later something we couldn’t do before. A new ability, a new perspective comes under our personal management. The educative element may not be immediately obvious so we need to reflect on it, extract it, sort out what’s worth saving, and install it explicitly. What ideas are implied? What can we do better? How will we think differently? If asked, how would we re-create this experience for someone else?
Once I visited a district’s demonstration school, wandering from room to room, and at the end of the day entered the kindergarten. The room was fragrant with the smell of freshly baked bread. Their day had been occupied with making and eating it. On two easels, the teacher had neatly printed out all the ingredients and all the steps, but at this point in the day the children were restless. They’d “had a good experience” but something more was needed.
Imagine them going home and saying to their mother “I know how to make Swedish rye bread!” and actually doing so. By the end of the day the experience was well embedded in their physical senses and vivid in their imagination, and the remaining piece stood before them on the two easels. The teacher could have spent the last half hour of the day saying “Let’s close our eyes now and imagine every step,” and “Can you see all the ingredients on the table?“ and “Let’s make sure everyone can tell back all the ingredients and all the steps.” They’d have gone home prepared to demonstrate.
Why wouldn’t a teacher spontaneously take that next step of confirming knowledge at the deepest level possible?
I believe it has to do with a misunderstanding about the function of conscious knowledge. If you believe that the experience itself was enough, then there‘s no need to select details to remember deliberately. Perhaps you assume that children experience so much that they‘ll automatically retain what‘s of value to them, so again there‘s nothing worth taxing them to remember or master.
More realistically, however, if we lean too heavily on osmosis and don’t deliberately mine the experience for what’s worth saving, we’re likely to lose it. The fact is that to do anything in the world or even to understand it, we refer to our mental plans. When the teacher’s guiding hand is removed from our shoulder and we must soldier on by ourselves, we consult our idea. If we retain nothing consciously (even though we were obedient to the hand), we’re helpless and lost, which describes many dropouts. Many who leave are confused, unsure of their ability to learn, and haphazard with their mental plans, but few who leave are proud of knowledge they’ve mastered. Schools need to extricate themselves from the goo of vague learning and return to the deliberate intent that students actually know something.
It can help to have good models, to place students at least in their imagination in the company of people who use knowledge properly.
Many years ago a line in a professional journal struck me as possessing considerable mileage, a comment from Ivan Pavlov: A scientist must accustom himself to the gradual accumulation of knowledge. Several threads are valuable for our discussion. .
Scientist — This could be anyone who expects to have a life of the mind or to manage their life by means of deliberately acquired knowledge. We should find this quality in anyone who claims to be educated.
Must — An element of necessity or inevitability arises not from an arbitrary declaration or preference, but from the nature of knowledge itself. If you want to have a life of the mind, this step is unavoidable.
Accustom – This word pictures one settling comfortably into a habit, a manner of proceeding with all knowledge, rather than a random or sporadic event. It suggests that one has done away with hurry and pressure, and sends roots into the task–a marathon runner rather than a sprinter.
Gradual — Knowledge builds one facet upon another without haste or pressure. One cannot go to the refined until the familiar adorns one’s mental environs, a process that can only be gradual, the activity of years.
Accumulation — The word means not just obtaining an idea and discarding it to find something else, but obtaining, keeping, and building on what’s retained. B after A, C after B, D after C. If one reaches L-M-N having discarded A-B-C, one is faced with starting over, and nothing ever accumulates.
Pavlov made important contributions in many fields aside from the study of conditioned reflexes for which he’s best known, and was the first Russian to win a Nobel Prize (Physiology/Medicine, 1904). On the lookout for what else he might have said on the theme above, I ran across a letter he wrote to the young scientists of Russia shortly before his death in 1936, which appeared in the magazine Science, April 17, 1939. As you read this, you might keep in mind 1) that he was expressing not just a casual opinion but the final fruit of a lifetime in science, the most valuable ideas he could think of to say to people he cared deeply about. 2) His own scientific work demonstrated the validity of his comments. 3) The ideas are the polar opposite of thinking governing US education for over three-quarters of a century. He wrote:
“What can I wish to youth who devote themselves to science? Firstly, gradualness. About this most important condition of fruitful scientific work I never can speak without emotion. Gradualness, gradualness, and gradualness. From the very beginning of your work, school yourselves to severe gradualness in the accumulation of knowledge.
“Learn the ABC of science before you try to ascend to its summit. Never begin the subsequent without mastering the preceding. Never attempt to screen an insufficiency of knowledge even by the most audacious surmise and hypotheses. Howsoever this soap-bubble will rejoice your eyes by its play, it inevitably will burst and you will have nothing except shame.
“School yourselves to demureness and patience. Learn to inure yourselves to drudgery in science. Learn, compare, collect the facts! Perfect as is the wing of a bird, it never could raise the bird up without resting on air. Facts are the air of a scientist. Without them you can never fly. Without them your ‘theories’ are vain efforts.
“But learning, experimenting, observing, try not to stay on the surface of the facts. Do not become the archivists of facts. Try to penetrate to the secret of their occurrence, persistently search for the laws which govern them.
“Secondly, modesty. Never think that you already know all. However highly you are appraised, always have the courage to say of yourself–I am ignorant.
“Do not allow haughtiness to take you in possession. Due to that you will be obstinate where it is necessary to agree, you will refuse useful advice an friendly help, you will lose the standard of objectiveness.
“Thirdly, passion. Remember that science demands from a man all his life. If you two lives that would not be enough for you. Be passionate in your work and your searchings.”
Pavlov suggests a manner of learning every student needs: encounter, learn, remember, build on, and apply. This process, again, differs from the typical school sequence: encounter, learn, forget, start over. Compare the two methods. The organizing principle of the first is the determination to retain usable knowledge, assimilating a comprehensive body of permanent, mastered knowledge. The second surrenders after obtaining familiarity.
Assuming you understand what I’ve said, may I offer you a word of compassion?
I grasp the difficulty you’re under. You’re directed to methods that produce familiarity. From them as a start, however, it’s but a few steps to mastery. Once obtaining the knowledge, the mastery model just distinguishes more carefully what to save and applies more deliberate effort to save it. The basic requirements of the latter are the same as for the former–available in every classroom and under teachers’ control. The steps are doable and an acceptable use of class time. We achieve familiarization and speed on past it. Three factors distinguish:
1. Selecting what to save: We enable students to access knowledge, and distinguish what’s worth saving from what needs only to be understood.
2. Practicing it to save it. For engaging long-term memory, we arrange for students to practice and assimilate what we identified. Learning is encoded firmly in short-term memory (by presentation), recalled at once to assure an accurate initial impression (explained to a partner or written down), and then repeatedly reconstituted or reconsolidated at expanding time intervals (recalled later).
3. Demonstrating it steadily instead of rarely. We enable students to perform and display the results of their effort, and generate a positive atmosphere around the activity. Students demonstrate their mastery daily rather than reserving this just for the days before high-stakes testing.
Signs that learning is rising to this level are 1) students can explain a connected series of ideas, and appropriately place details in context. 2) They can think a train of thought about the subject and follow out an idea using only what’s in their mind. 3) They engage each other in intelligent conversation about a subject. 4) A nearly infallible sign of genuine learning is that one wants to talk about it with others who possess parallel knowledge.
Saving is the turning point. Arguably, the work of education could be summed up in two words, installing knowledge. The first word is activity and the second content, “install” and “knowledge.“ Do the first to the second. Such an intent constant, hour by hour, affords a valid way to measure success. It aligns with what we expect of ourselves when we tell someone we know something, and also with what the big tests and society ultimately require. It also aligns with what truly satisfies students–their own mastery, their own competence. In short, we make our measure of success
the ability to call up deliberately
what one has learned
and maintain it.
This standard has three aspects, one customary and two not. The familiar one is “call up what one has learned.” Students do this when they answer a question or take a test. So far, so good. If they do even this much, numbers of them negotiate the checkpoints.
The other two aspects are less familiar. “Deliberately” implies learning deeply enough that it’s under one’s conscious control. One doesn’t guess nor depend on a question that supplies most of the answer. One ceases to rely on hints or scaffolding or clues, and has done more than transfer information from one piece of paper to another or declare themselves present in class. “Deliberate” implies enough mastery to tell whether a point is complete, better right here or over there, now or later, with this nuance or that; and the confidence to bring it up at will in any context. “Deliberate” expands drastically the idea of “calling up” and evolves into skilled expression of well-mastered learning.
Though even that much could transform education, we can take it further. The third element alters the game entirely: “and maintain it.” We ask students to maintain “the skilled expression of well-mastered learning.” Maintaining means saving, retaining permanently, turning knowledge into a continuing inner resource. This steady, ongoing intent is indispensable for accumulating knowledge yet ignored as a school responsibility. “Students can do this themselves if they wish,“ goes the thinking, “and it’s not our job to insure it.“ In so saying, the school contradicts the retention of knowledge. By its courses, credits, review questions, cramming, and final exams, the system tells students unmistakably, “Hit this quickly and go on. Hey, you’re done with that! Drop it and go on to the next thing.”
By now, a nagging suspicion may have arisen in your mind saying “But I don’t have time to do all that!” To the contrary, we always have time to do what’s important. If we experience a sense of dispersion of effort, we haven’t yet done the necessary prioritizing. If saving knowledge is important, even of first importance, we put it first in our use of time.We figure out the most efficient methods to sustain everything learned, and then run our classroom accordingly. What we end up with is what students intuitively regard as success: to master something and be able to demonstrate it to others. We design instruction to make it inevitable that everyone accumulates knowledge as the whole point of being in school.
“Your assignment for tomorrow then is…“ review your teaching practices and separate them into two groups, those leading to long-term retention of knowledge and those not. Plan how you can use more of the first and less of the second.
Used with the permission of EducationNews.org
