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| The More Complex the Paradigm, the More Thinking and Work it Involves Outside the Classroom
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Article Author:
Ellen
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I have known for well over four decades that many teachers cannot or will not use even detailed instructional units that my colleagues and I have found to be tried and true. In 1962, The United States Office of Education proposed to support demonstration centers for the teaching of English. I developed a proposal through Case Western University in Cleveland and my local school district (Euclid, Ohio) to host a demonstration center on curriculum and instruction for junior high English. We proposed conferences (six per year for two years), curriculum materials in the form of fairly extensive unit descriptions (see ERIC documents ED 017 491, ED 017 492, and ED 017 493). We were fortunate to win one of four demonstration center projects, the Cheap MBT Shoes only on-the-spot-come-and-see center. The other three were all for movie and TV-taped demonstrations.
Between 130 and 240 participants attended each conference to visit classes, meet and talk with teachers, hear speakers, and accept several printed copies of instructional units. During the first year of the center, 1963—64, at one conference one of the distributed units was our ninth-grade honors unit on satire. This was the fifth year that I had used the unit, and I had revised it every year. As far as I was concerned, it was a winner. Students were excited about it. Their discussions were lively and their writing insightful. Recently, one young man and two of his classmates from my ninth-grade class of 1963—64 had recently celebrated their 40th high school reunion. The talk at the reunion prompted them to contact me. That led to a dinner party mini-reunion at my home. When our conversation led to our discussions in class, we set about reconstructing some of them. Rick Yeager recalled them as having been "exhilarating." That is how I recall them too.
One of our visitors during that first year of the Center told me that she was going to try the unit with her twelfth-grade students. She returned to a later conference and confronted me to say that the satire unit had not worked with her students. I evinced some surprise and talked with her for a while. She spoke mostly about using the major works. Eventually I asked her directly if she had used the early parts of the unit, those parts designed to introduce students to interpreting exaggeration, symbolism, and irony, to simplify the early learning tasks and make the later more complex tasks more accessible. "No," she said, "my students didn't need that. They are older, you know. I simply do not have time to do all that preliminary stuff. We have so much to cover." With that, she turned and walked away. Here was a teacher who had simply cut the foundations of the proposed learning and then blamed the failure of her unprepared students on the unit. It did not occur to me until much later that this teacher was one who had been socialized simply to assign tasks without preparing students for how to do them. She saw no reason to help students learn how to do the basic tasks of interpreting irony, for example. She is not alone in this thinking.
It may be relatively easy to shift a simple practice from one kind to another. For example, it may be relatively easy to begin providing at least some positive feedback to students on their writing instead of simply marking all errors, although some teachers appear unable to make even that change. But it is much more complex to shift from one large cluster of practices, represented by the paradigms that Peter describes, to another, especially from the relatively simple presentational to the highly MBT Lami complex structured process. To answer Peter's question of the paradox about why teachers do not change, I would argue that the more complex the paradigm, the more thinking and work it involves outside the classroom. Then again, any teacher who does not or will not believe that most students can learn what our strongest students learn will see no reason for greater complexity. |
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