Some Critical Thinking

The always-thoughtful Diane Ravitch has an interesting piece in the Boston Globe where she takes the 21st Century Skills movement to task. Her argument is that while critical thinking is important, you can't think critically unless you have the knowledge upon which to base your thinking. Therefore, rather than try to explicity teach "critical thinking" the same we would, say, teach the parts of a cell, we should focus on the core knowledge that will provide a foundation for such thinking.

I'd say that she's at least 85% right. Assuming (and this seems like a possibility at least) that she doesn't object to focusing on critical thinking after the core knowledge is in place, she may even be 100% right. The fact is, without facts, we don't really have anything to think critically about. We can spin the wheels in the brain, but ultimately we won't come up with anything unless we actually know something to begin with. (The one possible exception might be Descartes' "I think therefore I am.")

That said, I think that there is a value in lessons on thinking critically and the connections and flaws that we can develop through that process.

In high school, I was a member of the debate team, which made me probably the coolest kid in the whole school. The first step to each debate topic was to stock up on facts and figures and the arguments of the past. That was the core knowledge part of the thing. But in the end, that wasn't enough. It wasn't until my senior year when I'd really absorbed the formalized way of thinking and arguing that I was able to start winning debate tournaments. Until that point - until I'd really started to learn what critical thinking meant in that context - I was well-prepared, but ultimately ineffectual.

So the balance must be found. Certainly the base of knowledge is critical, but so too is a systemitized way of thinking. Without both, neither is much good.

P.S. Could Teach for America be reading this blog? Looks like they're working more on professional development for their teachers. Sounds familiar.

Using Great Teachers

The news on this has been out for a while now, but it's worth highlighting, nonetheless. A new study of North Carolina schools found that good teachers not only benefit their own classrooms, but they help improve the performance of other teachers in other classrooms. In other words, having a master teacher in a school can help all of the teachers at the school.

This was immediately spun into the debate over merit pay for teachers and both sides are using it to support their own claims. Follow the link above for all the gory details. That's a good point to consider in light of this and not surprising, since that's one of the hot button topics right now and so all discussions seem to come back to that at some point.

However, I tend to find myself thinking about the need and possibility for more professional development in schools. In all the push to get rid of the bad teachers and reward the exceptional teachers, we tend to forget about the ones in the middle who are just plain average. These are the hard workers who do good things, but are not the kind of people who are going to be in the running for teacher of the year. Frankly, this population makes up the majority of teachers and so we should probably focus some of our attention on them.

Since we know that great teachers can positively impact more average teachers, why don't we focus on mentoring programs and staff-led development on an ongoing basis. In all of our talk about reforming education, too many people are trying to work to totally reinvent the wheel rather than make what we have the best it can possibly be.

Teach the Teachers

In our continuing quest to improve education for all across the country, recent reform efforts have spent a lot of time blaming teachers. Think about how often you hear about unions killing education reform efforts or protecting bad teachers who shouldn't even be in the profession. My personal take is that while there is certainly room for improvement in the teaching corps, the way to reach it is not to conduct some sort of purge. Why don't we focus on making the teachers we have better?

Turns out that the U.S. isn't so good at that. In a report from Stanford University and the National Staff Development Council, effective professional development must be "sustained, focused on important content, and embedded in the work of collaborative professional learning teams that support ongoing improvements in teachers’ practice and student achievement." When that happens, professional learning can have a powerful effect on student learning. That makes sense to me. Who's really going to argue that better teachers would be, well, better teachers? Unfortunately, professional development in the U.S. is "episodic, often fragmented, and disconnected from real problems of practice."

Think about the rhetoric you're hearing. Everyone agrees that good teachers produce good student learning. That's a given. With that as a given, which makes more sense? Should we fire every teacher who isn't a great teacher and launch a massive recruitment drive to hire an entire cohort of new teachers who will magically be better and more successful (presumably because they're being paid more and don't have tenure)? Or should we focus data-driven professional development that will turn the teachers we have into better teachers? Consider that there are over 3 million teachers in this country.

When we try to improve student outcomes, we work with the students we have, provide them extra support, and push them to achieve their best. We don't just try to expel them from school. All I'm saying is that we should extend teachers the same courtesy.