Colonizing Classrooms: ASCD

I was angry and disappointed by the time I finished reading Susan Ohanian's recent blog post about ASCD receiving and accepting a $3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help "districts and states realize the capacity of the new standards to fundamentally change the learning experience of students."  

Ok, let's take a minute to dissect that intention.  Think agency and ask yourself, Where is the teacher's and students' agency in ASCD's intention?  

There is no agency by teachers or the students. 

ASCD is the actual agent.  Everyone else is a receiver (district, states, and students). Teachers are missing. I would surely agree that ASCD and its agents who carry out this task may well learn.  But know this: There is no positive learning without agency, be it by the teacher, administrator, or student. As Maxine Greene (1988) so wisely reminds us "A teacher in search of his/her own freedom may be the only kind of teacher who can arouse young persons to go in search of their own" (p.14).  It is the educator acting and the student acting that leads to meaningful learning.

Transactional theory (Rosenblatt, 1978) allows us to know that the standards are nothing more than marks on a page.  They, like any other marks on a page, have no meaning, until they are acted upon by a reader.  That transaction is where meaning happens and such transactions cannot result in the same meaning being composed by x # of individuals. Meaning, contrary to what ASCD says it is planning, cannot be packaged and sent ahead, like some manifest destiny run amok.  

ASCD says that it is "committed to translating high-quality research about how students learn into practical professional development for teachers".  Hmm. Translating.  Does ASCD believe that translation and meaning making are the same thing?  Meaning is made at points of utterance (Bakhtin, 1984). It is dialogic. “Language,” Mikhail Bakhtin writes, “is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of others” (1981, p. 294). 

It is simply foolish to believe that an utterance will mean the same thing for everyone, and more importantly that marks on a page have a set meaning that remain static. What these core content standards mean is ALWAYS dependent upon the speaker's intentions.  If we eliminate the speaker, or in this case the teacher, and ship the standards ahead, we have nothing left but an empty law that district administrators will be expected to ensure happens through imposed practices and policies. These attempts will only create more division among educators. Consider William Carlos Williams who in The Desert Music told us:

The law?  The law gives up nothing
but a corpse, wrapped in a dirty mantle.
The law is based on murder and confinement,
long delayed...(p.109)

These understandings of meaning are fundamental.  As such, this is not a semantic argument, but rather a philosophical and theoretical one.  If we believe that the marks on the page someone has named as standards are that which will "fundamentally change the learning experience of students"--we have situated learning and learners as epic. An epic is a place where everything has been predetermined. It is a time not of the present where one singer sings of that time and no one including the singer can alter the events of that past.  They are sealed from the present moment where meaning always exists.  Epics cannot be a metaphor for learning, classrooms, or schools.

 Mikhail Bakhtin (1986) suggests that meaning: 

only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning: they engage in a kind of dialogue...Such a dialogic encounter of two cultures does not result in merging or mixing. Each retains its own unity and open totality, but they are mutually enriched (p. 7, emphasis in original).

We want schools where administrators, teachers, and students retain their "own unity and open totality, but they are mutually enriched."  We do not want what ASCD states it will do: "translate the standards into multiple instructional techniques to ensure teacher understanding of the underlying concepts targeted in the common core standards". We know that meaning is made in classrooms between and among learners, that there are no "best practices" that exist outside of the context of teachers, students, school and community--no matter the intentions of ASCD who earns its money selling such promises through membership, books, DVDs, and packaged professional development.  Meaning cannot be sent ahead via the implementation of standards, no mater how one attempts to define that reality. 

Let us not be fooled into dressing up ASCD's attempt to colonize United States classrooms as professional learning. Learning requires agency, not translation. 

 

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. The dialogic imagination. (Michael Holquist, Ed., & Caryl Emerson, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press.

------------------------. 1986. Speech genres & other late essays. (Vern W. McGee, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press.

Greene, Maxine. 1988. The dialogic imagination. New york: Teachers College Press. 

Rosenblatt, Louise. 1978. The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Williams, William Carlos. 1962. Pictures from Brueghel and other poems. NY: New Directions Books.

Why Uncertainty Matters: Measuring Teacher "Effectiveness"

Maxine Greene (1988) wrote: A teacher in search of his/her freedom may be the only kind of teacher who can arouse young persons to go in search of their own" (p. 14).  It represents a singular truth that I believe and have believed across decades.
 
There have been many teachers who have helped me to understand that learning is essentially about searching for one's freedom and that the idea of freedom is often a far too slippery concept to hold still and study.  A paradox, perhaps. Mrs. Seeliger, my second grade teacher, found joy in the smallest of things and demonstrated that the inconsequential is critical and worthy of one's notice.  I still can recall the winter day in second grade when she placed Charlotte's Web in my hands. Many years later I reread the book at a friend's home in Massachusetts on a different winter afternoon. The constant between the events was pleasure.

Ms. Donovan, a high school social studies teacher valued experiential learning. Many years later, I still recall being the judge in our class's simulation of the Triangle Factory Fire case. Our findings and sentencing clashed with the outcome of the actual case. In addition to learning about the particulars of the case, I also carried  the uncomfortable understanding that justice is not always blind, especially for those without powerful advocates.

More recently, Ruth Vinz, doctoral adviser and friend told me, Slow down when else in your life will you have this time to theorize, research, read and write?  Draft after draft of writing, Ruth read and consistently inspired me to work in order to understand the dilemma from slightly different points of view. Perhaps more than any other, Ruth helped me to value uncertainty.  

Although different, each of these teachers demonstrated what it might mean to live a wide-awake life through their passions, capacity to reflect, curiosity, and desire. They occasioned in me a desire to want. After many schools, degrees, and lots of informal learning choosing to live a wide-awake life represents the most significant and profound learning I have experienced.

In a recent Edutopia post, Maxine Greene clarified the term, wide-awakeness. She said:

I use the term wide-awakeness. Without the ability to think about yourself, to reflect on your life, there's really no awareness, no consciousness. Consciousness doesn't come automatically; it comes through being alive, awake, curious, and often furious.

American Bus Stop: No Lemming Left Behind

These days we seem to be overly interested in measuring teacher effectiveness.  Yet, the question of "effectiveness" is a poor question, if not a wrong one.   It suggests the plausibility of schools being causal worlds of inputs and outputs, where variables can adequately be controlled and effectiveness rightly and singularly determined.  And yet, when I think of the teachers I mention in this post, none of them could aptly be measured via a single test measure (such as my performance on a state assessment), nor could anyone have projected what their range of influence might be decades after contact.  

U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, State Representatives from Florida, a "Teacher Effectiveness Panel" in NJ, and so many others, want all of us to foolishly think we can equate the measure of a teacher via the results of a single round of test scores with "effectiveness".  I can't help but wonder if Secretary Duncan would submit himself to such examination and be satisfied with the determination of his effectiveness based on a single measure. One might ask: How well did Arne Duncan do as Superintendent of Schools for Chicago based on test scores during x year in comparison to y year?  Based on that criteria was he effective? Let's assume there was no "Texas Miracle" for this Secretary, would that negate all that he had done if the results demonstrated less student achievement via a single measure? (See Larry Miller's blog for the skinny on this).


Perhaps a better measure would be to ask to what end is a teacher/administrator in search of his/her freedom? How do they inspire and guide young people to go in search of their own freedom?  In what ways do all of these learners live wide awake lives and how do we support them in these quests as a public committed to public education? 

I realize that we could not capture such depth using a bubble sheet and a #2. But then again, that might be for the best.  In understanding this limitation, we would also acknowledge that we cannot know the trajectory of our efforts with any great certainty and would be best to not waste effort and time trying to do so.   As Ilya Prigogine explains “for a large class of dynamic systems, small perturbations in the initial conditions are amplified over the course of time. Chaotic systems are an extreme example of unstable motion because trajectories identified by distinct initial conditions, no matter how close, diverge exponentially over time” (1997, p. 30).

We would do well to remember that teaching, like learning, is nomadic and trying to assess such dynamic systems using a single measure at a particular point in time is wasteful, wrong, and will reduce what we value to the limits we can measure.


Work Cited:
Prigogine, I. (1997). The end of certainty: Time, chaos, and the new laws of nature. NY: The
Free Press.