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Chasing our tails with CCSS

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There is no need for us to chase our tails with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Since the publication of CCSS a couple years ago, educators have been trying to “unpack” and amalgamate the grade level skills and skill strands contained therein. But most appear to be chasing their tails by trying to assimilate performance standards into the established unit-driven, content-based instruction (CBI).

There are a couple plausible explanations for insisting that square, CCSS pegs should fit into round, content-based holes. The most obvious explanation is that CCSS, as a body, “appears” to be content-based. To be sure, CCSS is organized along a content related structure of English Language Arts (ELA), Mathematics, and Next Generation Science Standards. Another explanation lies within the formatted presentation of unit-type segments. Presumably the authors, themselves, were not entirely sure of how to teach standards (as opposed to content), only that performance standards were necessary. A third explanation acknowledges that instruction of skills is a seismic shift from imparting knowledge. The ramifications of this shift are frightening to those who may also acknowledge that very little from traditional, teacher-centered methods are effective in creating an environment wherein students learn to problem solve using their own skills as opposed to teacher merely showing them how.

Of course, there is the consuming notion that most teachers, themselves, learned their craft and trade through the very traditional methods which Standards-based Instruction (SBI) so willingly discounts. Often enough, the protests will encompass information which students just have to know, and that this information seems to be discarded in favor of basic skills. This is an invalid assumption. There is no aspect of SBI which negates subject area knowledge. Indeed, skills may not be developed to any level of complexity without an ever-increasing knowledge of the topic being investigated. But there is an inverse relationship. SBI allows the subject to be dealt with in a more critical manner as opposed to the subject being expanded for the student by the teacher. Whereas, in the latter case the teacher assesses student understanding by having the student repeat what what told, presented or assigned as opposed to the teacher assessing student understanding by allowing the student to demonstrate problem-solving skills within a subject area using the student’s own skills to show understanding of the material.

I don’t mean to imply that imparting knowledge is a bad thing. On the contrary, it’s a good thing. That’s what experts do. The primary difference between SBI and CBI lies in how students accumulate the knowledge. We must teach students how to gain information and understanding from a vast array of topical content; of content they, the students, must be allowed to select and investigate for themselves. We build their capacity for understanding by teaching them skills which allow them to think for themselves and to draw their own conclusions. The traditional method of CBI restricts their exposure to both content and thought processes and relegates them to the roles of note-taker and information regurgitator. The analogy here lies with the quote often attributed to William Butler Yeats, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

A typical content-based high school course will have an established amount of content which (presumed) experts have determined make up the knowledge a student should digest in order to fill the pail and thus ordain him/her credit worthy. Textbooks are created which guide both teachers and students through the material in an orderly fashion, hopefully reaching the last chapter at the end of the school year. All necessary content is covered within this format. Periodic unit assessments test whether (or not) the students have been paying attention and/or doing their homework. By the end of the year (or semester or whatever) the teacher will have taught all the material and, presumably, the students will have “learned” it.

How this relates to the difficulty in accessing and adopting CCSS lies in what the student can actually do relative to his/her own capacity for gaining knowledge independent of the teacher. Critical thinking, critical reading, problem-solving and metacognition are subordinated to “learning” a bunch of academic stuff. Relegating students’ minds to the back of the priority list in favor of all this stuff simply does not increase students’ capacity to think for themselves. This is where CCSS comes in.

When we talk about student independence and responsibility for learning (a la Charlotte Danielson and others) we should concern ourselves with our students’ capacity for independent thought. Lectures and other teacher-centered approaches do not challenge students to think for themselves on a daily basis. Sitting in a classroom while a teacher waxes on about whatever subject might be next on the agenda does not engage students in independent thinking or independent learning. We are not looking for parrots, particularly in elementary and high school. Although there is a certain amount of rules taking and memorization in the early elementary grades while children are developing their concrete operational base, there should be increasingly less direct, formula-based instruction as students begin to apply basic skills to increasingly real and relevant applications.

Students have to learn how to think for themselves. And teachers have to learn how to teach students to think for themselves. It’s messy, to be sure. I would imagine that for many educators the ideal classroom contains students who thirst for knowledge. This ideal situation is a rewarding experience for teachers and students, alike. But even if we have a classroom in which the students strive to do their best, without the skills needed to independently read, comprehend, analyze and evaluate information, the thirst goes unquenched. When students cannot fluently read the science texts, or intuitively relate math concepts, or rationally decipher op-ed primary source from fact-based reporting or literary prose they are just relying on what the teacher says. They decide whether to believe or not; they decide whether to care or not based entirely on the teacher-student dynamic. In the hand-holding culture of traditional instruction it’s really that simple.

Skills-based instruction such as that which is at the heart of CCSS gives all students a fighting chance to succeed. After X amount of content-based instruction about things students either don’t understand or don’t care about, what’s left? What can they do? As educators we cannot control parental involvement. We cannot control politics, budget, urban violence, or mainstream media and culture. But we can control what happens in the classroom. Being aware of external social forces may help us understand the problem and assist how we shape our students’ academic experience. But these external forces are not responsible for bad teaching. Requiring kids to sit through teacher-centered content-based lectures and do homework “because it’s good for them and they need the practice” has not worked for the mainstream student for forty years. At some point, educators have to get serious about the profession and quit taking the easy road and blaming others. We must stop chasing our tails by trying to insert CCSS into our content-based, teacher-centered formulae and begin restructuring our classroom instruction to skills-based, student-centered lessons which promote independent, critical thought. We need to start teaching students how to think for themselves. And so another quote seems appropriate, this from Plutarch, “The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”

The Educators’ Guide to Skills-Based Learning and Assessment Curriculum – 5: Incremental Cognizance

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SBLAC 5: Incremental Cognizance

The benchmark curriculum is a type of standards-based curriculum. The SBLAC system (remember? Skills-based Learning and Assessment Curriculum) is a type of benchmark curriculum. SBLAC assumes that higher order thinking is a product of intellectual capacity. Intellectual capacity is created and expanded through the accumulation of skills and knowledge stored in a person’s mind like a tool kit. Just as there is an infinite variety of tools based upon use, specialization, quality and the experience of the person using the tool, intellectual skills have infinite variety.

When we set out to establish a true standards-based curriculum such as SBLAC, we must first identify the skills and knowledge that will make up the benchmarks. What are the standards? Fortunately, we have two source documents which provide the pool from which to select the standards; CCSS and ACT’s CRS for core subjects and ISBE’s ILS for non-core subjects. Our chore is merely to determine which of them to benchmark and where to put them sequentially. For purposes of college readiness, nearly all of the CRS and much of the CCSS skills are relevant. With the exception of a few CCSS high school standards and late high school ILS descriptors much of the late grade school continuum is rather sporadic for a focused approach. The ELA reading and writing standards become esoteric in that they take off on tangents which, if not fully developed in earlier years, become new information rather than developmental skill building. It must be clear that both the CRS and the CCSS are progressive and sequential. Therefore, placement within a curriculum map must be carefully considered. Identification and placement of the targeted, benchmark skills are crucial.

For every skill taught in grade school, there is a set of sub-skills which must be mastered before the new skill – the benchmark, in this case – can be mastered. Once mastered, this benchmark becomes a sub-skill of the next level of skills and benchmarks. The progressive nature of skills and knowledge must be evident to the individual accumulating the skill (i.e., the student) in order to assimilate it into the skill set or tool kit. When teachers and students think of resources to assist in problem-solving, be it math or ELA, these mental skills are as valuable, if not more so, than dictionaries, graphing calculators, progression charts or rulers. Just as a tradesman has course and fine tools from which to choose, a problem solver needs a progressive set of intellectual skills which may be applied to a given situation. But the problem-solver must be aware that the skill exists, what it is used for, and when to apply it given the situation.

Often children are taught skills and have accumulated knowledge for which they have no known purpose or application. Just as often, a teacher becomes frustrated by a child who may have demonstrated mastery or proficiency of a skill previously but cannot bring the skill to bear when needed at a different time or within a different context. A child will claim to not know information or how to do something when the teacher knows absolutely that the child has successfully negotiated the same terrain earlier. What went wrong? Is this child just lazy?

A child can master a skill only if it is presented as a skill. More often than not, however, children learn tricks and tidbits that they perform on certain cues. This is a basic drawback of content-based instruction which relies on units of information. Remove the trained cue (attempt to apply a skill within a distinctly different context) and the trick is gone. Unaware that the trick has value outside of the initial context, without the original context the tidbit becomes trivia. Try to connect the dots with no numbering system. This is what happens to students who perform tricks in class to satisfy a short-term requirement from a specific teacher within a specific unit of study. The phenomenon is common in content-based curricula because topic-related units are taught followed by unit tests. There is no appreciation that a valuable skill, which has relevance in a multitude of applications, may be utilized by the child as a gift to be placed in his/her tool kit. Students (and, perhaps, the teacher) may be clueless that a valuable skill has been brought to bear in a problem-solving way.

There is a metacognitive transition which must occur for the child to claim ownership of the new skill. He/she must acknowledge the event. Children know that to master a new Wii® application a person must start slow and train the fingers and hands to make certain, often times unnatural, movements in association with a television screen in order to negotiate a new game. The more they play, the better they become. Eventually, they can show others how to negotiate particular aspects of the game because of their own mastery of the necessary skills. The relative value of such mastery notwithstanding, this is a metacognitive experience. The child (or adult) deliberately thinks about what mental and physical skills to bring to bear in order to solve problems and negotiate obstacles. Once mastery evolves into expertise, deliberate thought is not necessary to bring the basic skills to bear and the child (or adult) manipulates the challenges and obstacles with ease. At this point, the deliberate thought can be focused on improvement of skills and nuances of the game, itself. It is the same thought process which must be tapped into for the child to learn algebra or English grammar.

We can identify the skills and knowledge. But we seem to have significant difficulty both incorporating them into our classroom goals and objectives and developing strategies which encourage children to focus on the skills and knowledge necessary to be successful in life after high school. Why is it so difficult to focus on those tasks we have identified? Why can’t we train, instruct, assess, and develop the skills we want the students to master? Why do we spend so much time doing other things? Tangents! We spend a lot of our time and our children’s time with, well, drivel when we need to focus on the things that experts say are necessary for the children’s success in life after high school; and for what the state is paying us to teach, it seems pretty plain and simple.

The basic idea of SBLAC is that for students to progress beyond the Third Grade Brain they have to know that there is meaning and value to this whole education thing. They also must be shown how the progression works. They are not as smart as they think they are, but they are not dumb, either.

Regarding the need for metacognition, it may be possible that it is unnecessary for deep understanding and there could even be people, I imagine, capable of a certain level of complex communication and/or expert thinking without knowing it (please read The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, by Dr. Oliver Sacks). But these tasks of deep understanding, complex communication, and expert thinking have serious limitations when considered independent of conscious thought. To deeply understand something without knowing it is clearly the exception. To unwittingly engage in complex communication seems absurd. For the mind to conduct expert thinking unaware that it is taking place is an infinitesimally rare event.

Naturally brilliant people will use their minds to gather extensive knowledge. The experts are capable of being experts only in so much as they are aware of their expertise. Even so, technical expertise is only as valuable as its technical currency, which requires constant and continual updating and upgrading. Expert thinkers must be aware and conscious of their thought processes in order to be of value. Problem solving demands that the person or people solving the problem possess the potential skills and knowledge to do the work.

The idea that person can develop his/her mind is not at all unlike the athlete (or any person for that matter) developing muscles on the body. With or without a toned body, a person can go to the gym and “work out.” But an un-toned person can lift weights, do exercises, get tired and leave sweaty and will have accomplished little more that lifting weights, doing exercises, and getting tired and sweaty. If that was the purpose, then hallelujah. Themselves, these attributes do not assume a quality workout and likely do not portend a well-toned physique. While it may be doing work or even working out, it is random physical activity that likely risks injury and may or may not have value other than psychological.

The modern gym is equipped with weight machines which identify for the user which muscles or muscle group a particular activity is to utilize and strengthen/tone. The person doing the exercise must consciously be aware of which muscles he/she is using to perform the task and limit exertion to those muscles. To do otherwise risks injury because the direction, arc, hand and leg placement are specifically designed to work with a particular muscle or muscle group in a specific manner. It is particularly risky when one overloads the weight before he/she has control of his/her muscles. The mind will convince the body to get the weight moving through the repetitions but all the muscles of the body will pitch in to get the job done. Back and groin strains are a common result.

By consciously training the muscles, one can build targeted muscles and muscle groups and develop physical definition through a conscious, directed regimen of physical exercise. The mind is similarly developed. Unfortunately, however, we seat our students in the classroom and do not tell them what muscles we’re working on. To the child many classrooms are places where educational things happen like the gym, where sweaty things happen. Continuing with the weight machine metaphor, often we want to teach and learn more so we overload the weights (by increasing the “rigor”) we are using and the kids just give up. Equally as dangerous is when students cannot push the weight and we simply lighten the load, often to the point of no real work being accomplished, anyway.

The point here is the need for conscious recognition by the student that the work is being done for a specific purpose which has specific take-aways. The metacognitive acknowledgement demands that the student is aware of his/her own thought processes. The child must know the skill, the value of the skill, where it lies within the established skill bank, and what its purpose is in a variety of applications. Without these conscious attributes present during the instructional activity, learning is marginalized. We’re back to performing tricks or less.

The problem, of course, with performing tricks is that as an intellectual activity it is essentially mindless. While the activity being taught is, from the standpoint of the teacher, problem-solving, from the point of view of the student these tricks and activities are ethereal. They are not tied to real life regardless of how well the teacher may present the functional application of the material. Too few students appreciate the progressive nature of problem-solving and continually start back at the beginning of any individual task at hand. Unable to search their own knowledge for solutions and processes previously associated with a specific challenge they will “best guess” with a related trick or give up altogether (a la B, B, B, B . . .). Without an acknowledged tool kit students are helpless.

So forget the tricks. They are little more than random, fluffy educational activities designed to make us all feel good about ourselves and our students. Unless classroom activities are specifically focused on building the skill base, unless they are designed to put a tool in the tool kit or improve a tool already there, we are wasting precious time. Regarding the Rigor and Relevance Framework (See http://www.icle.net/rrr.html.), Christine LaRocco of the International Center for Leadership in Education tells us that we must keep relevance in front of rigor. Particularly when students are failing our expectation already, making instruction more difficult or complex is not a solution. We need to make our instruction relevant, first.

And be mindful that the skill base is built incrementally. Just as a person cannot walk into a gym one day and walk out with a perfectly toned body, a student’s tool kit cannot be filled up in a single semester. Most students are unaware that they even have a tool kit much less know that they have any tools to put in it. They must be made aware of the skills and knowledge that they possess. They must be enlightened as to the progressive nature of both CCSS and CRS. They must accept a realistic perception of their skill levels in the various disciplines before any meaningful progress can be made. Just as a person who goes to the gym to get fit, lose weight, or train for the marathon, students need a good diagnostic sense of where they are relative to the standards, good advice on where to set their goals, and a plan and tracking system to measure progress. Only then are they ready to begin filling up their tool kits.

The Educators’ Guide to Skills-based Learning and Assessment Curriculum – 4: Focus on the Mission

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SBLAC 4: Focus on the Mission

Think for a moment about the reason for testing. We would not want doctors practicing medicine without first passing the medical boards. We would not want a lawyer to represent us if he/she had not passed the bar exam. As menial as it seems, in most states drivers must pass a notional drivers test and vision exam in order to drive our streets and highways. We test our food, our drugs, and our automobiles for minimal standards. When they don’t pass, they’re not released to the public. Educators who oppose standardized testing are similar to automobile executives who would sell you a car that did not run, as long as it made it all the way through the assembly line. It sounds absurd. It is absurd.

The idea behind the assessments is to first determine the skills and knowledge that you want your people to possess. This “high-stakes testing” junk is not an answer and never should have been presented as such. State assessments are not a solution to the problem; they merely identify the problem. The assessment, then, is just the means of determining whether an individual has mastered the relevant skills and knowledge. Although I am quite stymied as to why this concept is so outrageous to many people, I am equally confused as to how a system can go from kindergarten through 12th grade and so completely disregard these known and published standards.

Yes, the standards we discuss in this case are published and posted. They are assumed to be common knowledge throughout the K-12 system. Every educator I know tells me he/she is familiar with them. But regarding the ILS, the sad reality is that the vast majority of high school freshmen do not possess the late elementary skills and knowledge that would put them in a position to begin high school. Perhaps this is because Illinois Standard Achievement Test (ISAT) only tests Goals 1, 2, 6, and 7. As even willing high school faculty struggle to teach high school standards, the sheer enormity of the task often relegates standards-based instruction to mere lip service. Winking and nodding our way through both ILS and CRS has become a way of life as teachers continue to teach their specialized content while sporadically invoking a college readiness skill here and an Illinois learning standard there.

The frustration associated with test failure rates when we have supposedly been teaching the standards via our content can only be imagined. There is a universal concern that something is wrong with the process because when we do what the education wonks say to do, we should be getting better results. It must be the assessment. These are intelligent kids whose skills and knowledge are just not captured in a multiple choice test. These are capable children whose potential and creativity are just not measured by the high stakes testing offered via the NCLB solution. How can we quantify a child’s intellect with something as impersonal as a two-day multiple choice standardized high-stakes test?

Quite frankly, how else could we quantify a child’s intellect other than via a comprehensive standardized assessment? Irrespective of the voluminous arguments to the contrary, children who possess the skills pass the tests. Regardless of the myriad conflicting explanations of why a “smart” student does poorly on a standardized test, the bottom line is that he/she simply has not mastered the skills and knowledge being assessed; which begs the question, “What have we been teaching the students?”

Lessons which have little or nothing to do with specific, measurable testable skills are the enemy of the successful student. Recalling our first assumption, a content-based curriculum is not a standards-based curriculum. Students are assessed on skills competency, on their mastery of established and published standards. When we create classroom activities that children like in order to hold their attention, we are giving in to future underachievement. Watching movies when we should be reading, drawing pictures and pasting fancy coversheets when we should be writing and formatting, or reminding students of previously covered material when we should be requiring them to search their brains for answers and problem-solving solutions are examples of teachers as enablers of mediocre students.

Children eat up class work until third or fourth grade. When the work gets tougher, when students begin to build upon previously learned material, there is no way to make it easier or less than what it is. There is a huge difference between being taught something new and learning to manipulate a previously learned skill. If we try to teach fifth, sixth, and seventh grade skills using first, second, and third grade techniques, we may have covered the higher level content, but the students haven’t mastered higher level skills. Instead of using apples and oranges, we’re simply using Jonathans and Valencias. If the child does not know that we’re not using Granny Smith and Navel or Golden Delicious and Persian, he/she is not building on previously learned knowledge, but rather learning new stuff. If the lesson does not carefully and specifically explain the skills that take you from an apple to a Jonathan apple and as opposed to a Granny Smith or Golden Delicious apple, then we are missing the point. Then our instructional method is not standards-based or skills-based, but rather, osmosis-based. Being in a room where educational-type things happen is often confused for having been taught something.

No one benefits when we tell kids a bunch of stuff and hope they figure out why we bothered. In the example above, early on a child can discern an apple from an orange. But what makes an apple a Jonathan apple? If confronted with a Jonathan, a Granny Smith and a Golden Delicious, we might select a Jonathan as the red apple from the other two which are green. But what distinguishes a Granny Smith from a Golden Delicious? There are discerning skills at work which the child should consciously bring to bear on the problem. Memorizing pictures of various types of apples does not help the child use these discerning skills in any other example. Why, specifically, are they different? What are the closer relatives and what makes them more similar? What are some of the things that make close relatives different? Higher order thinking is not about piling on more information and memorizing more detailed pictures. It’s about evaluating and analyzing the problem for patterns and possible solutions using ever more sophisticated skills. Benjamin Bloom told us this fifty years ago and all we seem to have now is that lame pyramid everyone in education seems to revere but does not understand.

Merely being in a classroom when the material is presented will likely not produce high academic achievement. The value of the metacognitive experience cannot be overstated with regards to a student having any idea what he/she is doing. We cannot create a metacognitive transition without forcing a new skill. The reading, the writing, the remembering are the tools. They are the skills we are trying to master and hone. But the content is relative. Remembering is a skill. What we remember from school is less important than the fact that we can remember, that we have the ability (the skill) to go back into the brain and consciously pull out problem solving skills and knowledge on command. We often spend eight to twelve years playing various games with content but completely miss the point about a standards-based education, the Rigor and Relevance Framework, and Bloom’s Taxonomy. Worse, we usually disregard completely the skills that we know will be assessed in the end.

If we do not teach to mastery the skills and tasks that a child is supposed to master as he/she progresses through childhood, there is no conceivable way we can jump to the end of the development continuum expecting significant success. This is essentially what we are doing and only about 50% of our children meet our standard, nationwide. We do it year after year and blast the test for telling us our children do not meet the standard. “The test is biased.” “The test is faulty.” “The test is an outrageous affront to our children and our educational system!”

The fact that only 52% of Illinois children meet/exceed the learning standards and the education system is not considered an abysmal failure is what is truly outrageous. When we know what tasks the children are responsible for and do not teach it, that is outrageous. If we focus on content and creativity while our children cannot read story problems in math and cannot decipher a simple data presentation using an x/y axis or cannot write a short essay using proper form and grammar, that is outrageous. To know that half of our young adults do not have the basic skills we expect from them after 13 years of education and continue to teach the same material in the same manner is to stick our heads in the sand and admit there is nothing we care to do about it. Now, that is outrageous.

So what can be done about the situation? Essentially the only way to prepare children for a skills-based assessment is with a skills-based curriculum. It would appear that true standards-based instruction from the first grade on would be the logical solution. It should include the early sub-skills of the later testable PSAE skills (both ILS and CRS). If such-and-such is being assessed, then it only stands to reason that we teach such-and-such. But we don’t. We teach this-and-that. Think about it. We teach this-and-that but we assess such-and-such. Why don’t we teach such-and-such? If we tested this-and-that, then we would be okay to teach this-and-that. It is a mindless contradiction that educators refuse to teach what they will ultimately assess and that they insist on testing that which has not been taught. Many elementary teachers and administrators insist they teach what is tested. But the problem with their argument is that by focusing so restrictively on a handful of reading and math standards assessed on the ISAT, the grand expanse of skills assessed on the PSAE are left without subskill mastery. To say the Common Core State Standards will now take care of that, my response is “Hogwash.” We’ve had standards before. We essentially ignored them. If we continue a content-based approach to CCSS, we will get ILS-like results.

Honest standards-based instruction assumes very little. Every task, every skill is composed of sub-skills which are, themselves, composed of sub-skills. It is absolutely essential that we ascertain a child’s understanding of the prerequisite sub-skills before we introduce a new skill. For example, we must be sure a child has mastered the skill of fraction conversion before we try to teach him/her about algebra. By assuming that a child has the basic skills and knowledge to begin algebra instruction we often find ourselves as de facto educational entertainers just making conversation. Trying to make sense out of concepts for which the students do not possess the requisite skills is a task of Herculean proportions. And our track record of success reflects the depth of the problem. Ninth grade algebra has the highest failure rate of any general education topic in high schools.

More than two thirds of Chicago children do not meet state standards at the end of the 11th grade. Consider that this percentage only reflects the number of children who are still in school at that point. It should be painfully obvious that what we’re doing is not working. Educators often violate their own principles just to get students to do something resembling academic effort. Some teachers may have students turn in papers with atrocious English grammar promising not to count off for it. They just want the children to turn something in. As a group, we often reward every minimal effort, regardless how miserable. Yet we wonder why, after eleven years of this, the students cannot meet the standard. Clearly, a line must be drawn.

The Media and Misunderstanding Standards-based Instruction

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A significant amount of discussion has revolved and evolved around the concept of standards-based instruction (SBI). Discussants join the conversation from a variety of viewpoints, experiences and foundational understanding. The most unfortunate reality of the topic of SBI is that most of the contributions lack a fundamental appreciation for what it actually is. It has become as nebulous, and yet as ubiquitous, as “instructional rigor.” SBI, in many instances, has become nothing more than code for marketing of instructional design material and content-based textbooks which seem to want to assure teachers and school administrators that buying a particular product will increase students’ chances of scoring well on state mandated tests. More often than not, the materials and texts have little, if anything, to do with standards-based instruction.

The concept of standards-based instruction is much too complex to be given the short shrift of peripheral educational reform critics, instructional wonks, and purveyors of pedagogical claptrap. With the plethora of blogs, articles, websites and advertising devoted to SBI, precious little has anything to do standards-based instruction in any substantial way. Bandied about with indiscretion, SBI is as prevalent as Bloom’s Taxonomy but understood far less. Benjamin Bloom knew that educators who had never read the book or even comprehended it’s purpose were referencing the taxonomy pell-mell. It was popular. It was necessary for “intelligent” discussion of education and educational reform. It still is. But Bloom’s work is known more for its anecdotes than for the development of cognitive skills. There are critics and apologists, passionate educators and educational politicians staking their fortunes on one interpretation or another, none of whom may have ever opened a volume to know, for certain, just what Bloom and his colleagues were trying to accomplish.

It seems a vast majority of educators and educational writers attribute the accession of standards-based instruction onto the educational reform scene as an off-shoot of High Stakes Testing. While the connection may appear logical, even intuitive, it is misleading at best and patently false in most applications. Much of what constitutes High Stakes Testing assesses established standards; this is true. The ACT, SAT, GRE, ISAT and others do indeed test student skills in a number of academic areas. We must consider, however, that the skills and standards under consideration have been identified by state and national experts as those needed to advance to higher order thinking and more complex academic work. The Prairie State Achievement Examination is one such High Stakes Test taken over a two day period and used to determine a student’s relative proficiency on a number of academic skills. The resultant data are great indicators of student academic capacity but are, unfortunately, used primarily to rate students, schools and school systems based upon metrics concocted in educational think tanks. As Kim Marshall once told me, “I put it out there, but I can’t be responsible for how it’s used.”

So the question has been begged; what is standards-based instruction? SBI is a systematic approach to learning which utilizes proximal development of cognitive, problem-solving skills across disciplines to continually increase depth of understanding and interdpendency of skill relationships. In order to utilize proximal development of cognitive, problem-solving skills, an SBI practitioner must regularly assess student skills for proficiency and mastery. He must continuously review and reflect on the skills and skill levels under consideration. If the skill and level have already been mastered by the student, the student is not learning. If the skill and/or level has not been properly anticipated in previous work the lesson may appear too abstract or unconnected to established skills resulting in a variety of responses, few of which promote student learning. Gradually increasing depth of understanding of simple skills to complex skills, within a framework of skill “strands,” creates a progress map for mastery and expertise.

What is often lost in this simplified explanation is the very crucial role of cognitive and metacognitive development. When teachers teach units of instruction based solely upon topic content, student learning is isolated into specific knowledge within a particular aspect of a particular discipline. This type of instruction limits contextual implications and applications which are often unrecognizable outside of that particular classroom. Within the gathering of discipline-specific information there are few opportunities for student discussion and/or problem-solving. As students are assessed on retention of what was taught, they lack any real investigative skills which may be applied in other contexts. Content-based instruction usually does not require, or sometimes even request, that students develop cognitive skills to improve their understanding. Having observed hundreds of classrooms, I can tell you it’s often quite mindless.

Another barrier to standards-based instruction are the many brain-based neuromyths. These logical sounding pseudo-scientific nuggets are often little more than fabrication that have for one reason or another become accepted “truisms.” They dot the educational reform landscape like European starlings and daylilies. Once inserted into the dialogue, they take hold and seem as natural as any scientific rationale. Probably the favorite (surely the favorite of John Geake ) is the common belief that humans use only 10% of their brain. If this was true, Geake tells us, we’d all be brain-dead. Perhaps we are. Another of Geake’s favorites is the VAK (Visual/Auditory/Kinesthetic) learning styles theory. While we should all use a variety of instructional strategies in the course of teaching, VAK is just not based upon any scientific research supporting its widespread acceptance.

Introduction of VAK methods in the classroom would surely lead to greater student engagement than continual lecturing. By breaking up the monotony of a teacher talking for an hour or so at a time, students given a change of pace are not so easily lulled into unconsciousness. But the research here does not support VAK; the research opposes the droning lecture style. The research supports classroom discussion. The best way for students to learn is to have them participate in their own learning. Substituting one passive learning style for another does not improve academic skills or problem-solving capacity. Richard Elmore’s mantra, “Task predicts performance,” should be an ever conscious aspect of classroom instruction. What are the students doing? Students are never assessed on how well they stay awake in boring classes.