Did we miss Wiggins & McTighe point?
If we want to know what the great souls of history would say about all this, we need only look to their own words — but we needn’t take only their word for it. Those at the forefront of contemporary educational theory and research have offered us the empirical evidence to support this enduring ancient wisdom.
Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, authors of the seminal book, Education by Design, draw on the insights of educational theorists throughout the ages, including Socrates, Plato, John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Howard Gardner, and other sages of the ages to make a powerful case for an dialogic educational methodology that has its roots in ancient thought. By their lights, our education system currently has students marching through content at the expense of meaning. Wiggens and McTighe call this, “teach, test, hope for the best” education.” (3) But given a barrage of recent evidence that students don’t retain what is learned in this way, we might as well call it in-one-ear-and-out-the-other education.
Wiggins and McTighe take up the philosophers mission when they profess their purposes: “What it means to know and understand knowledge and understanding, and how knowledge differs from belief and opinion –[this is] what we are striving for in this book.”[62] What we need, they say, is “a better understanding of understanding.”[40]
Understanding by Design has been called “the definitive guide on curriculum design,” and yet the philosophical insights contained in it apparently hover over the heads of American educators, who have adopted many of its practical applications, but seem to have missed it's primary point.
In traditional methods of education, they argue, “we pay much attention to knowledge…and too little attention to the quality of understanding.” Without a better understanding of how to teach for understanding, we retain assessment habits that “focus on the more superficial, rote, out-of-context and easily tested aspects of knowledge.”(40) The traditional teaching method is, “in essence, one of imposition from above and from outside…even though good teachers will use devices of art to cover up the imposition so as to relieve it of obviously brutal features.”(Dewey n.d., 17-18)
Dewey argues that even those who qualify as good students by this method don’t display actual deep understanding of what is being taught. (2)
What is Understanding?
One common meaning of the word understand involves the idea of having an insight or intuition that may not be expressible clearly in words. (79) “Good explanations are not just words and logic, but insight into essentials.”(81) But the problem with insight is that “it’s so difficult to assess…slippery and ambiguous…” (79) “Genuine insight” might be had, yet “without necessarily being able to fully or effectively articulate it…”(McTighe 1998, 79) “Our intuition may be ahead of…our ability to prove it and explain it.”(81) And so teachers might find “student insight inside poor explanations.” (81) And “sometimes deep understanding is best revealed by a single yet profound insight.” (80) “Indeed, a useful way to describe the problem of insight and imagination out pacing performance ability is that a student’s perception, empathy, and self knowledge are more sophisticated that his current ability to explain, interpret, and apply” it.(82) And as long as we make it our primary task to properly assess which degree of understanding the student has reached, then “our assessment needs to reflect this complexity.”(81)
Which opens the door to the question whether assessment (which takes up the lions share of our educational efforts) ought be our primary task? It’s possible, the ancients might say, to pay too much attention to where a given student is ‘at’ at any given time, while we neglect the more important concern – is he or she moving forward?
Understood dialectically, assessment is “an umbrella term” used to mean the deliberate use of many methods “to gather evidence of student understanding.”(4) Because we can too easily lose sight of true understanding,(5) “the collective evidence we seek might include observation and dialogue, traditional quizzes and tests, and performance tasks and projects, as well as students self-assessments gathered over time.”(4, 13)
Dewey (1933) followed Aristotle, who followed Socrates, in arguing that “to understand something ‘is to see it in its relations to other things: to note how it operates or functions, what consequences follow from it, what causes it’.”(McTighe 1998, 46; Dewey, 137) These theorists draw a distinction between familiarity with general information, knowing the importance of, and having an ‘enduring’ understanding of…(McTighe 1998, 15) as well as between “superficial or borrowed opinion and ‘in-depth, justified understanding of the same idea…”(40) As they correctly observe, “this idea is as old as Plato.” (*)
We often say we know what we do not truly understand, but only believe. Beliefs may be true, but still we won’t know that for sure until we’ve thought it all the way through – which is to say, asked the questions that being true understanding home to us. This is why the question and answer process is so important to education – because only when all queries have been addressed will questions be quieted because the soul is satisfied that it understands. And if it does not, questions will remain, and itch until we scratch them.
We might wisely trust this natural process to generate progress in learning more than we do. But once questions have been stifled, or even scolded, too many students will simply settle for belief that what is offered them is the ‘right answer’, at least the one that will be marked as ‘right’ on the test. The problem is, without having satisfied the mind’s craving for understanding, this weak form of knowledge is likely to slip away as soon as the test is over, and sometimes even before the test.
To have this kind of understanding or insight, they say, is to have ‘true knowledge, to “really know,” in the strong sense. (39-40) For this, “We must do a better job of teaching and assess self-reflection in the broadest sense.”(60)
Wiggins and McTighe agree with Socrates that deep understanding is unshakable — “you understand only if you can teach it, use it, prove it, explain it, or read between the lines.”(41) Understanding in this sense means the “student really ‘gets it’.”(5) And we can have a ‘deep’ or ‘in-depth’ understanding, as opposed to shallow or shaky, which reflects “a continuum of understanding that ranges from niave to sophistocated, from simplistic to complex, (as opposed to merely right or wrong).(48)
Hence the reason this tethering process is an essential part of learning, because it ameliorates understanding from shallow to deep.
On Reflection, Thoughtfulness, and Circumspection
For an ever deeper understanding of understanding, the authors suggest we look to its synonyms, e.g. insight and wisdom, maturity, all of which reflect the tendency toward reflection, thoughtfulness, circumspection and mindfulness
“Understanding implies the ability to escape a niave or inexperienced point of view…to escape the understandable passions, inclinations, and dominant opinions of the moment to do what circumspection and refection reveal to be best.”(41) “Maturity is evident when we look beyond simplistic categories to see shades of perhaps unexpected difference, idiosyncrasies, or surprises in people and ideas.”(58)
Dewey wrote that “We can summarize the habits of mind that relate to the development of understanding …as the propensity to ‘thoughtfullness’ (1933) (*) (The Bradley Commission on the Teaching of History (Gcignon, 1989) developed three important habits of mind which they claim “generally apply to most subjects.”(p.171) These modes of thoughtful judgment include self-regulation, critical thinking, and creative thinking…significance of past, difference in what is important and what is inconsequential, historical empathy vs. present mindedness, comprehend toe interplay of change and continuity, “and avoid thinking that either is somehow more natural, or more to be expected than the other… p.172)
“When we say someone is thoughtful,” Wiggins and McTighe go on, “we mean someone who is not only ‘logical’ but who has the right habits of mind. They are heedful, not rash, they look about, are circumspect…[they do not] take observation at face value but probe them to see whether they are what they seem to be.” (171) However, it is a significant and important fact that “We cannot ‘teach’ a habit per se, and knowledge alone will not lead to or change a habit. A new habit of mind, like any habit, has to be cultivated over time…and supported by teacher modeling, exhortation, coaching, and feedback.”(171) So we cannot teach a habit, but we can model and exercise it.
Sizer (1984) agrees, “Much of understanding is about thoughtfulness, and thoughtfulness is awakened more than trained.”(161) To this end, Wiggins and McTighe advocate what educational philosophers have been trying to teach us for many centuries. “We need to cultivate circumspection.”(43)
According to Bruner (1973 a, p.449) “The cultivation of reflectiveness is one of the great problems one faces in devising curriculum: how to lead children to discover the powers and pleasures that await the exercise of retrospection.”(154)
“Such mindfulness can only come about by active reflection upon and analysis of performance (what works, what doesn’t, and why), sophisticated insights and abilities best “reflected in varied performance and contexts.”(5)
Teachers must help students see that beneath “seemingly unproblematic knowledge lurk problems” that they must continually “be led to recognize the need for uncoverage of…the need for rethinking.”(26) “[T]he most valuable lesson a chef can teach a cook,” for instance, is that “a slavish devotion to recipes robs people of the kind of experiential knowledge that seeps into the brain…most chefs are not fettered by formula, they’ve cooked enough to trust their taste.”(O’Neill, 1996, p.52) Likewise, the learning mind must come to trust its internal inclinations about whether something does or does not makes sense, for if it doesn’t, questions will arise to which answers must be sought.
“In a curriculum for understanding, rethinking the apparently simple but actually complex is central to the nature of understanding and to a necessarily iterative approach to curricular design.” (25) For this reason, “Curriculum should be organized to pursue our questions, not simply catalogue what is known.”(150) And to this end, we should “postpone a great deal of teaching and formal summaries of knowledge until learning and attempts to perform have occurred.”(151)
*Hence the important role of attitude and habits of mind in development of understanding – open-mindedness, self-discipline (autonomy), tolerance for ambiguity, and reflectiveness…makes possible seeing the world through multiple lenses…."(171)
The bottom line, as Sizer (1984) put it, is that ‘Understanding is more stimulated than learned. It grows from questioning oneself and being questioned by others.’ (116-117)
The authors caution of a misconception alert here though, for to say “course work derives from questions” is “not teacher probing of student answers or the asking of leading questions.”[emphasis added] To say that questioning is a critical part of the learning process is “very different from teachers ‘using questions to check for factual knowledge, move toward the right answer, or sharpening student responses. Too often, students leave school never realizing that knowledge is answers to someone’s prior questions, produced and refined in response to puzzles, inquiry, testing, argument, and revision,”(33) for which textbooks are only banks of resources. Students ought to be encouraged to mine those texts, and all available resources, they argue, to the end of finding answers they themselves have generated. To encourage this, we must “persist in asking questions, delaying or avoiding giving answers, confronting students with problems and putting mysteries and the need to rethink things constantly before them.”(142)
John Dewey (1916) grasped the unwitting harm in teaching the residue of other people’s learning in a sequence logical to the writer and explainer only. “The adult educator,” he worried, “is constantly prone to a misunderstanding that the content and organization suitable for experts are best for novices. But “If the aim of curriculum is to make adult knowledge accessible to the student, the challenge is not merely to provide a simple summary of what we know. The student must come to see the value and verify the correctness of the knowledge …[as] the original knowledge creators did.” (152)
“[T]his problem of sequence is worsened by the common tendency to teach to the textbook…[which is] an * organized account of adult knowledge in a field of study,” better seen as the reference book it is. But “the sequence of such products is ill-suited for developing understanding. The logic derives from a catalogue of completed content instead of from the needs of learners to ponder, question, explore, and apply the knowledge.” (150) From the learners point of view, the linearity and vocabulary–laden quality of finished explanations are illogical for learning what is new, problematic, and opaque.”(151) For all our good intentions and seeming advances, we too often end up killing the interest in true learning with an imposed age-grade march through the content in adult-generated order.
And apparently, misunderstanding is a bigger problem than we realize. Research into misunderstanding over the last twenty years indicates the urgency of this widespread problem, for “even some of the best students…later reveal significant misunderstanding of what they’ve learned.”(151) The NAEP’s research shows “a stark gap between the ability of students in general to learn basic principles, and their ability to apply knowledge or explain what they learned.”(*New York Times, 1997, p. 19) Proving Dewey’s point,“ students can learn definitions and statements about complex theories as mere verbal formulas without really understanding them,” just as Plato worried. (88) And any teacher of literature knows that the deep meaning of most great literature “gets lost, unseen – perhaps denied – by many students.” (142)
“The logic of curriculum should suit the learners, not the experts, sense of order.”(154) (Tyler (1949) Student of Dewey) It should be organized to be accessible from the learners point of view. As Tyler said, “A logical-to-the-learner ordering of schooling must make possible increasing breadth…the building of a unified worldview out of discrete parts.”(154) Such education allows them, and us, to “rethink what they thought they knew.”(113)
“The constant rethinking of basic ideas is central to developing understanding and avoiding misunderstanding…” (111)
For this and many reasons, “Teaching for understanding requires rethinking what we thought we knew – whether the ‘we’ involves students or educators.”(6) Practicing better, more active, listening skills is key, and this must begin with the teacher. The teachers’ job is to clarify “understanding”, because “such matters of understanding are abstract and subtle,” and thus “prone to student misunderstanding” – and worse, teacher misunderstanding! And what chance has the truth got then?
Learning as Discovery
To this end, Wiggins & McTighe emphasize the need to revisit big ideas. They risk a brief foray into “fancy philosophical language” in their claim that we must “Teach by raising more questions and answering fewer questions. Ask and re-ask big questions…”(164) They call this discovery by uncoverage. “[E]ducation for uncoverage requires students to find questions in knowledge.”…”uncover the big ideas”(113) To this end, “School must be made more like discovering a new idea than like learning adult knowledge explained point by point.”(151)
“Big ideas are often obscure or counter-intuitive…to grasp, then requires reflection and persistence.”(173) For this reason, students should be let to “struggle to grasp such ideas and see their value, just as great minds before us did.”(113) “The student needs to interpret, apply, see from different points of view… We cannot fully understand an idea until we retrace, relive, or recapitulate some of its history – how it came to be understood in the first place. The young learner should be treated as a discoverer, even if the path seems inefficient. That’s why Piaget (1973) argued that to understand is to invent’.” (151) They need to be more active in their development… [develop] tolerance for ambiguity and suspension of disbelief is key to the discovery of big ideas…(173) Thus, “a key challenge in teaching for understanding is to challenge the students’ niave epistemology”…[their assumptions] that knowledge is neat and clean, to the more mature view that ‘knowledge and coming to know” is messy. There are problems, and controversies, and assumptions that lie “behind seemingly problemless knowledge. Our job is to help them see “that there is always a need to make sense of content knowledge through inquiry and applications – to get beyond dutiful assimilation to active reflection, testing and meaning making.(26)
So the task is, according to Dewey, discovering the real connection within experience between past and present. And we do this best by taking knowledge of the past as both an end in itself and a means to more learning. In this way, learning takes place through the exercise of intelligence in the solving or problems. “Problems are the stimulus to learning,” Dewey argued, and “the task [is] to move back and forth between the known and the problematic."(153) Moving from problem to problem causes “knowledge to increase in depth and breadth. In this way, coursework could develop student thinking and interest, but do so purposefully and systematically, pointing toward the full fruits of each discipline.”(153)
Education is not a unidirectional march through recipes, but a nonlinear experimentation with intelligent trial and error…more “a zigzag sequence of trial, error, reflection, and adjustment.”(151) Because “the logic of understanding is thus more like intelligent trial and error than follow the leader,” alternative approaches “unfold in a different, nonlinear order.”(135) For this reason, “[A]ny topic should focus on the inherent opposites – the plausible multiple perspectives… – findable in all subjects. These opposites serve as * for the selection and organization of content’.”(143)(Egan, 1986, pp.26-27)
Understanding is therefore, Wiggins & McTighe conclude, “a family of interrelated abilities”, which includes explanation, interpretation, application, perspective, empathy, and self-knowledge -- facets of learning by which we engage in purposeful exploration of interconnections between seemingly isolated facts and the ‘big ideas’ that give them meaning.(3) Each of these six FACETS are important, but the last three are essential. “The latter three facets of understanding – perspective, empathy, and self-knowledge – often play a key role in revealing insight or its absence.”(82) These are the facets of understanding that ancient philosophers would have us explore at greater length, for they constitute the essence of dialectic understanding.
On Perspective
Wiggins and McTighe explain, “Perspective involves the discipline of asking, How does it look from another point of view?”(54) *To talk of an interesting perspective is to imply that complex ideas have legitimately diverse points of view.”(41) “Students cannot be said to have perspective, hence understanding…unless they have some insight into point of view.”(54) “Perspective as an aspect of understanding is a mature achievement, an earned understanding of how ideas look from different vantage points.”(54)
“Gardner argues that, unlike “the child who speaks up in the Emporer’s New Clothes”, children generally “lack the ability to take multiple perspectives.(54) Indeed, one might argue that we all lack this…to the extent that self-interest narrows our concerns, but enlightened S-I can broaden us as well. So, while Wiggens and McTighe claim that “this flexibility becomes progressively harder as we age and become more sure of our knowledge,” I would argue that this is only true if, in getting older, we do become more narrow minded, too sure that we already know, instead of taking the perspective of others and growing instead more humble, more curious, and more empathic. It is the function of education, one might reasonably argue, to help us grow, away from narrowness, and toward breadth of understanding.
“If educators wish to develop greater in-depth understanding in their students, then how should they go about it?”(5) (According to Wiggins and McTighe, we should use what they call a ‘backward design’ when developing curriculum – meaning that we should begin with what we want students to understand and be able to do, then work backward toward it. Indeed, this method is consistent with the very meaning of ‘curriculum’, the etemology of which is a “’course to be run’, given a desired end point.”(4) This method of teaching facilitates the many paths toward the end of understanding (3). Backward design curriculum development is compatible with a number of prominent educational initiatives, the authors point out, including among others, the Socratic method, problem-based learning (Stepian & Gallagher, 1997), 4-MAT (McCarthy, 1981).(5) And that this method emphasizes the need for constant rethinking and takes ideals as targets at which to aim the real, which would have been applauded by many of the ancients, including the Greeks.)
“Joseph Schwab (1978) came closest to envisioning an education for perspective. He developed what he called the art of ‘eclectic’: the deliberate design of course work that compelled students to see the same important ideas…from many different theoretical perspectives.” The point of Schwab’s curriculum is to build on prior learning,(154) and “to modify their thinking, as appropriate, “in light of the new points of view.”(155) Schwab’s “eclectic” form of college curriculum has “the goal of rethinking the same ideas.”(135) It “requires a continual deepening of one’s understanding…”(153)
“The process is a continual spiral,”(79) Dewey argues.(Dewey 1938) The idea of the “spiral curriculum…was first articulated by Dewey…and rooted in a long philosophical and pedagogical tradition running back through Piaget…Hegel…Rousseau.”(153) And in such a spiral curriculum, “big ideas, important tasks, and ever deepening urgency must recur in ever increasing complexity…”(135) Popularized by Bruner (1960) the “spiral curriculum” was based on the “stark postulate that ‘any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any age of development’ (Bruner, 1960) (In the words of Gardner (1991) “The test of understanding…involves the appropriate application of concepts and principles to questions and problems that are newly posed.”(52) “Jean Piaget (1973/1977) argued more radically that student understanding reveals itself by student innovation in application.”(52))
On Empathy
By contrast, empathy is “the learned ability to grasp the world from someone else’s point of view. It is the discipline of using one’s imagination to see and feel as others see and feel. It is different from seeing in perspective, which is to see from a critical distance, to detach ourselves to see more objectively. With empathy, we see from inside the person’s world view; we embrace the insights that can be found in the subjective or aesthetic realm.”(McTighe 1998, 56)
“Sometimes understanding requires disinterest, while at other times, it requires heartflelt solidarity with others.”(43) “…to understand another we need the opposite of distance – [we need] a conscious rapport…”(43)
Empathy is “central to the most common logical use of the term understanding.”(56) ““Understanding in the interpersonal sense suggests not merely an intellectual change of mind but a significant change of heart. Empathy requires respect for people different from ourselves.”(57)
“Empathy is the deliberate act of finding what is plausible, sensible, or meaningful in the ideas and actions of others, even if they are puzzling or off –putting. Empathy can lead us not only to rethink a situation, but to have a change of heart as we come to understand what formerly seemed odd, alien, seemingly weird opinions or people to find what is meaningful in them.”(56)
Indeed, “When one person fails to understand another, there usually is a failure to consider or imagine the possibility of different points of view, much less ’walking in their shoes’.”(41) It’s clearly better if “we can openly and honestly consider other explanations, theories, and points of view as well as unfamiliar ways of living and perceiving.”(168)
“The danger” some think empathy entails “is the loss of perspective,” which some worry can happen, if empathy is not itself understood in its deep sense. “If understanding is forgiveness,” as Shattuck says (1996), then one “heads easily to moral laxness where all is forgiven (emphasis in original). According to this view, “When we understand empathically, we easily veer into relativism.”(153-154)
One might argue, though, that there is nothing wrong with such relativism, Socratically conceived, if all points of view are understood in dialectic relationship to all others. What we have then, as we will see, is more like a relative complementarity, a form of relativity that makes possible something meaningfully thought of as the whole truth. For when we think, as the ancients did, that truth stays true, then we do not believe something merely because it appears to us, but because it synchronizes with all other things we know to be true.
Complementarity does not leave the door open to the ‘moral laxness’ that pure relativism suggests, because all perspectives are tethered by the justice that holds all perspectives together. In other words, we may all see the same world differently, but that it is the same world requires that we live by the same law of nature or golden rule that we would have others observe in how they behave toward us. All would agree to the objectivity of such justice, and still admit that it will show itself differently in different circumstances, from different perspectives. When we put ourselves in others shoes empathically, we can see that applying justice is an idiosyncratic process of putting one foot in front of the other. For while nature’s laws stay the same for us all, unique circumstances call upon us to understand how the golden rule applies in any given situation.
As Socrates and Confucius both argued, something is not good because the gods approve it; rather, the gods approve it because it is good. Discerning what is good is what the mind is good for, and this too is an essential part of learning, for which we need perspective, empathy, and ultimately self-knowledge.
On Self-Knowledge
Self-knowledge, by contrast, requires both perspective and empathy, for it amounts to “the wisdom to know one’s ignorance,”(McTighe 1998, 57) a skill which enhances “our capacity to accurately self-assess and self-regulate.”(58) “‘Know thyself’ is the maxim of those who would really understand, as the Greek philosophers often said!”(58)
“Through self-knowledge we also understand what [how much] we do not understand…” As Socrates argues to Meno, we are unlikely to seek for what we think we already have. Knowing enough to know that we don’t know as much as we might like to think we do is the kind of humility that opens us to real learning toward understanding. “Experts who are also wise individuals are quick to state that there is much they do not understand about a subject. (They have Socratic wisdom).”(59) And Socrates would argue, this is essentially the same thing as knowing how much we have to learn.
“Self-knowledge is a key facet of understanding because it demands that we self-consciously question our understandings to advance them. It asks us to have the discipline to seek and find the inevitable blind spots or oversights in our own thinking…”(59) It compels us to ask, “What are the limits of my understanding? What are my blind spots? What am I prone to misunderstand because of prejudice, habit, or style?”(57)
In Learner–Centered Assessment on College Campuses: Shifting the Focus from Teaching to Learning, Huba and Freed argue (with Bateson 1990) that “Self-knowledge is empowering…and feedback is the foundation of learning about ourselves and about the effect of our behavior on others.”(M. H. Freed n.d. in McTighe, 1998, 142)
“Christensen (1991) states it this way; ‘Self-knowledge is the beginning of all knowledge. I had to find the teacher in myself before I could find the teacher in my student and gain understanding of how we all taught one another.’”(103,143)
On Understanding Student's Resistance
As all this illustrates, and Wiggins and McTighe emphasize, “There are different kinds of understanding, more than just text book knowledge…”[1] Importantly, “[W]e seek to understand people as well as ideas. Those two kinds of understanding are intimately related in teaching. Unless we understand students, we will not get them to understand ideas.”[2]
Unfortunately, as James Zull observes in The Art of Changing the Brain, one of the worst habits of educators is that so “Often, our perspective of teaching is from above. We view the learner as needing our help, which we hand down to him. From this perspective we can forget that the actual learning takes place down there in the brain and body of the learner.”[3]
“[K]nowledge of the methods alone will not suffice;” Dewey says, there must be desire, the will to employ them. This desire is an affair of personal disposition.”(Dewey, 1933, pp. 29-30) Indeed, “There is no foolproof way to increase a student’s knowledge without her permission.”[1*] “Understanding is caused by the learner who willingly overcomes old ideas and habits…”[1*] “Deep understanding takes courage and mutual respect. Learning requires trust in the teacher because new understandings are threatening…sometimes at the personal, sometimes at the cultural level. Good ideas may be rejected in favor of older ideas. Great minds – not just naïve and ignorant ones – are subject to intellectual inertia, blind spots and resistance.”[1*] “[T]eachers can only design possibilities and build trust.”[1*]
The importance of trust in the teacher-student relationships is made apparent in much contemporary research. Frederick Erikson illustrates in his work on ‘culturally responsive pedagogy,’ that over-control in the classroom leads to resistance in the attitude of the student, and rather than promote learning, it can actually have the opposite effect, and make the student defy all attempts to help him learn. Likewise, rather than decreasing variation and promoting mutual understanding among students and among cultures, it can actually strengthen differences.
Erikson studied the teacher-student communication process, showing how the teacher/student dialogic interaction can both or either educe trust or elicit resistance, and in this, can feed or actually thwart learning.
But the interactive process of teaching and learning too often involves social typing and labeling reflecting the biases of the teacher (J. H. Robinson (1982a), Miltman (1981), and Bond (1982). Low expectations of minority children can, according to Spindler, bring about the worst possible outcomes for some by way of self-fulfilling prophesy. [4] As do teacher ascriptions of SES, which, when low, lead to control behaviors, which lead to low achievement in students. [5]
Many resist, rather than comply. Educational theorist, Frederick Erikson, makes the case that it is through the poor handling of misunderstandings and conflicts that inevitably arise between teacher and student that we manage to turn many (especially minority) children off to learning in our schools. By way of culturally and personally unresponsive pedagogy, where teacher values and biases carry authority, economic and other power relations are played out in classroom communication. What he calls 'resistance theory' makes the case that resistance to learning grows when conflicts in the classroom are resolved in ways that children consider unfair, and in this way, rather than encouraging kids to try harder, authoritarian methods of education often turn kids off to school learning. This is not to say it turns them off to learning altogether, for kids are learning all the time. It merely turns them away from schools and too often toward other 'teachers', few of which have their best interest at heart (e.d. gangs, hate groups, and television). ... If the teacher fights the children with his formal authority from the early grades on, the children will equate the teacher's code with senseless suppression." [6] Some minority children simply "stop playing the game",[p.204] and win the "battle for attention" by withholding their own,[p.191] i.e. deliberate inattention,[p.191] and even deliberate failure,[p.193] which is counted as something of a success among peers.
Thus, Erikson asks that we as teachers take more responsibility for those conflicts that only they can reconcile toward better outcomes, sometimes just by understanding. Anyone who has been through the western system of schooling is familiar with the overt power struggles that occur in our classrooms, whether personally or by observation of those held up as examples to the rest of us. We might not be as aware of the more subtle, and perhaps more destructive, forms of punishment dished out through the negative use of grades, labels, and personal feedbacks, but we can be sure those most affected are aware of what we ignore. Such teacher/learner interactions often lead to an ascription of blame to the student, but in fact, student reaction to teacher action is an emergent and constantly shifting phenomenon, Erikson argues, one which is continually negotiated, at both the institutional and existential levels, like the relationship of surfer to wave.[p.36] Failing to recognize this, teachers tend to attach a clinical label to student behaviors, ignoring in the process "the dialectical relation in which the teacher is inadvertently coproducing with students the very behavior that he or she is taking as evidence of an individual characteristic of the student. Given the power difference between teacher and student, what could be seen as an interactional phenomenon to which teacher and student both contribute ends up institutionalized as an official diagnosis of student deficiency."(Mehan 1978, 1980, 1987) (*repeated)
Seen this way, this interaction shows itself to be a political process acted out by individual teachers and students, as economic, race, generational and other power relations are played out in classroom communication.
Socrates gives us the example of an incompetent parent, teacher, or leader, who practices their authority in such a way that does not earn respect or allegiance from children, students, or constituents, and instead of winning their cooperation, actually elicits a resistant effect, that is, making them evermore “averse and reluctant to compliance,” and even has “the effect of making them take pride in disobeying their authority.”(p.353) By contrast, “those who are well looked after turn out to be grateful and to grow in their loyalty.”(p.316)[7] He cautions those who would treat any over whom they have power, that “you’ll gain more produce by sowing and planting what the land readily grows and nurtures than by sowing and planting what you want.”(p.341)[8]
Recognizing the interaction between teachers and students as a political process gives rise to an insightful point of view -- one which illuminated the difference in action and reaction, insistence and resistance. For "to speak of school success or failure is to speak of learning or not learning what is deliberately taught there."[p.36] "When we say they are 'not learning', what we mean is that they are not learning what school authorities, teachers, and administrators intend for them to learn as the result of intentional instruction."(Gering and Sangree 1979) "Learning is ubiquitous in human experience throughout the life cycle, and humans are very good at it," Erikson admits. "Yet in schools, deliberately taught learning seems to be a problem. It is [too often] differently distributed along lines of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and language backgrounds..."[p.36] "Learning what is deliberately taught can be seen as a form of political assent. Not learning can be seen as a form of political resistance."[p.36] Both actively rebellion and passive resistance can "provide a medium of resistance in a situation of political conflict."[p.41]
One example of this is the so called problem of the 'final t', a conflict brought about by trying to change the language habits of children who belong to minority groups who typically drop the final t in many words. Negative evaluations of the student’s communication style gives rise to distrust and resistance in the student. It is a small conflict, but it is not trivial if it escalates by was of a positive feedback loop that feeds itself into a generalized attitude of opposition. Resentment develops inside the child as cognitive dissonance between the cultures of home and school, and thus the relationship between teacher and student does not bond, at best, Erikson says, and at worst, can become pathological in their interaction patterns.[p.42]
Mutual trust is sacrificed, and over time students become increasingly alienated from school, and teachers from students.[p.41] A process Erikson calls 'complementary schizmogenesis' sets in, involving the "progressive cultural differentiation across time as a means of symbolic distancing between competing groups that are sub-systems of a larger system."[p.40] Conflict escalates by a positive feedback loop that feeds itself into a generalized attitude of opposition. Such that, "by the end of the year, the children spoke a more exaggerated form of that dialectic than they had done at the beginning of the year."[p.40] In this way, "Social bias in schooling orders the classroom in the same images as the society and in turn transmits the biases of the society to children." [9]
It may be, Erikson concludes, that the threat to trust inherent in engaging in such battles as that over pronunciation of the letter t may simply not be worth it in the long run.[p.47] More culturally responsive pedagogy would recognize that "to choose to fight and temporarily win a small battle over the pronunciation of a final consonant is to risk losing the war, by setting off a long-term process of schizmogenetic cultural conflict."[p.47] Thus, as teachers and institutions, we are behooved to reexamine what battles we believe to be worth the risk of this alienation, which could have lifelong consequences for the child. If deliberate instruction is to succeed, Erickson argues, "the legitimacy of the school and its teachers [must be] affirmed at the existential level as trust by individual students."[p.36-37] Therefore, we must move toward transformation in learning, not.
It is the relationship of trust which is the significant variable, Erikson argues, for "assent to the exercise of authority involves trust," and trust involves risk. It takes only a moment in time to turn trust one way or another, and to set up patterns of resistance that carry on indefinitely. In order to restore and preserve trust, we have to take seriously all impediments to it. For it is in the earning of trust that kids let down their learning blocks. Subtle respects foster trust: subtle controls foster resistance. The teacher is active in facilitating trust, and can transcend the inevitable miscommunications inherent in negative feedback and evaluations. Teachers must therefore be charged, Erikson argues, with responsibility for bringing out in a student one over another potential. Whereas teachers using authoritarian methods, which attach clinical labels to behaviors, ignore in the process "the dialectical relation in which the teacher is inadvertently coproducing with students the very behavior that he or she is taking as evidence of an individual characteristic of the student. Given the power difference between teacher and student, what could be seen as an interactional phenomenon to which teacher and student both contribute ends up institutionalized as an official diagnosis of student deficiency."(Mehan 1978, 1980, 1987) And the result is, understandably, resentment and resistance to what the students perceive to be unjust rules. As John Ogbu explains, students become cynical about the ends of formalized education, which are too often hegemonic reduction of variation. This is especially true of 'domestic minorities', who perceive it as the continuation of generations of injustice and inequality which sets the odds of success heavily against them. Certainly to the student, the biased distribution of grades feels the same as the biased distribution of jobs and economic resources feels to the adult minority member. In this way, small biases in judgment played out in the classroom become 'butterfly effects' in that they are the genesis of social conflicts that play themselves out on much wider scales.
For minority people the schools have been experienced as damaging attempts to recruit their children into an alien culture, Their self-images and identities were ignored, or actively attacked." "[10] The results of this mistake are characterized by resentment, conflict, failure, and alienation on the part of both students and teachers. [11] And many (e.g. Rosepoint, Harlem, Sisala, Kanuri, and Malitbog, and Cree) come to see education as a process of recruitment and maintenance for the cultural system.
How much damage is done? Examples abound--such as the Mistassini child, "rewarded for conformity to norms which contradict those which they learned before coming to school", develops "severe conflicts" in identity. [12] And the Mopass child who, forced to deal with the differences in communication codes between Whiteman schools and Native American culture, [13] creates "an artificial self" to cope with the pressures of the Whiteman school. [14] The contradiction between the values of the dominant culture and ones own community and tradition can result in severe pressure for those who must adapt, and an easy release of this pressure is a complete rejection of dominant cultural values. This can develop into oppositional values in the subsystem in general, such as when American blacks enact pressure against academic success, seeing the drive for it as "acting white".[p.41] Those domestic minorities who choose to live by the rules of the dominant culture often suffer severe identity crisis. We might reasonably wonder whether this effect isn't felt among even the young of the dominant culture, who divide endlessly according to class, interest, appearance, etc. Over-control by a dominant population might simply be understood in terms as broad as 'adults' over 'children’ and rebellion result in the form of generation gaps and struggles.
So it is especially important to remember and incorporate into our methods the importance of affectional ties, bonding, and trust, in educational relations.[1][see Eskimo practices] Evidence shows that ‘culturally responsive pedagogy' can result in higher achievement for all students. By emphasizing the communication process, subtle respects can be seen to foster trust, and subtle controls to foster resistance. Therefore, the teacher is understood to be active, not passive, in this process.
Thus, taken broadly, together these explain why students and teachers alike make the choices that they make, showing how communication works, passively and actively, to reinforce, reproduce, and/or resist existing power relations.[p.44] This process is not deterministic -- in that teachers are recognized to play an active role, in developing a relationship of trust with students, who are reactive. Rather, teachers are seen to be able to facilitate one side of the subject, and one side of the student, over other potentials, so should be charged with responsibility for which they manifest. In other words, teachers must earn trust, and facilitating more such relationships by way of 'culturally responsive pedagogy' is understood to be the responsibility of schools.
Example of how small respects and disrespects can both magnify might include Hawaiian first-graders who respond with much more enthusiasm and comprehension when allowed to dialogue in the 'talk-story' style familiar to their customs, "in which conversational partners repeat and amplify each other's ideas, which makes for a conversation environment appropriate for the kind of reading that was being asked of the children--'comprehension'."[p.31] Subtle expectations of 'Turn-taking' behaviors can be seen as an exercise in over-control, or, if more respectful, can be a "symbolic affirmation of themselves and their community;"[p.31] If handled in a way that is respectful of cultural and personal differences, the child "can feel that there is some safety in this new world, and that the teacher likes you."[p.31]
A sound educational design would therefore "deliberately foster the development of affectional ties between teachers and learners and would not expect learning to occur unless or until this had occurred."[15]
“The way to teach respect, of course,” Manitonquat says, “is to show it and give it.”(OI, p.12)
[1] (McTighe 1998, 41)
[2] (McTighe 1998, 168)
[3] (Zull n.d., xiii)
[4] (Spindler 1987, 161, 197)
[5] (Spindler 1987, 443)
[6] (Spindler 1987, 202)
[7] (Xenophon 1990)
[8] (Xenophon 1990)
[9] (Spindler 1987, 449)
[10] (Spindler 1987, 168)
[11] (Spindler 1987, 164-165)
[12] (Spindler 1987, 385)
[13] (Spindler 1987, (p.176; also McDermott, p.193 )
[14] (Spindler 1987, 166)
[15] (Spindler 1987, 110)
On Readiness in Learning
The evidence that "readiness and approach behaviors preparatory to learning can be enhanced by reducing fear and apprehension levels" should give us cause to reexamine the role of affection in educational relations and the proper qualifications for teaching. The emotional climate for learning determines what Chance and Jolly called an "attention structure", which agrees with Mieklejohn (1927) and Mason (1965) that we shouldn't expect to see learning without affectional ties.[1] (see Harlow and Harlow, 1965; Montague, 1970; Lancaster, 1975; Gard and Meier, 1977) This would bring us to better understand the importance of individuation in education for the sake of differing readiness and approach behaviors;(Mason, 1965; Chance, 1978)
If it is true that "permitting them to cling until arousal levels drop will facilitate approach, play, and curiosity behaviors", then "emotional education programs", such as the ancients prescribed, this "suggests that individual self-paced teaching designs will be stronger than socially derived unified schedules. Since the rhythms of activity/inactivity and hormonal flows vary…from individual to individual, no two persons are necessarily in a state of readiness for learning at any particular time."[1] As with the importance of individuation in learning, teacher-centered schools and methods of indirect-direction interfere with these critically important processes.[2] Also worth mention, we have much to learn about "cycladic rhythms,"[1][Chapple, 1970], about temperament and emotional reactivity patterns,[1] and about the importance of peer play in learning success,[1] from which it follows that classroom practices that interfere with peer relations have the potential to do more damage then typically recognized to individual student’s success. Montessori and Dewey were on the right track here, according to Dobbert and Cooke, but they didn't go far enough.[1]
Gatto agrees with Wiggins and McTighe that we ought to “strive to develop greater autonomy in students so that they can find knowledge on their own and accurately self-assess and self-regulate.”[1]
For all these reasons, as Gatto argues, we need to “help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness – curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insights simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs” in order to take the risks necessary to advance their understanding.[3]
On the Intrinsic Motivation to Learn
Deci and Ryan say this: “From birth onward, humans, in their healthiest states, are active, inquisitive, curious, and playful creatures, displaying a ubiquitous readiness to learn and explore, and they do not require extraneous incentives to do so. This natural motivational tendency is a critical element in cognitive, social, and physical development because it is through acting on one’s inherent interests that one grows in knowledge and skills. The inclinations to take interest in novelty, to actively assimilate, and to creatively apply our skills is not limited to childhood, but is a significant feature of human nature that affects performance, persistence, and well-being across life’s epochs “Ryan & LaGuardia, in press).
If our “young...are not excited about learning,” Alexander Meiklejohn made clear, it is “because they have been made, by compulsions and inducements of various sorts, to think of it as something quite different from what it is.”[4]
“We can, by the use of external rewards and penalties, induce unwilling students to use books. But what, in the process, do books become for the student? What is the meaning of education for him? The effect is to make of learning a disagreeable task which, so long as one is under the control of teachers, must be performed for the sake of other values. And from this it follows, that, after the pressure is removed, all motive force for [such learning] disappears with it.”[5]
For this reason, Meiklejohn argues, we must see to it that, “[T]o the utmost possible limit, all secondary forces should be eliminated from the teaching process ... “[6][T]he plain fact is...that the methods of inducement and compulsion do not give us the desired result.[7]
“What the teacher needs,” James Zull argues in The Art of Changing the Brain, “is an understanding of intrinsic motivation, rewards that are automatically connected with learning, and that we have evolved to want. If we want to help people learn, we should not worry about how we can motivate them but try to identify what already is motivating them.”[8]
“[L]earning is a natural process when it has to do directly with the life of the learner. If people believe it is important to their lives, they will learn. It just happens.”[9]
So, “if we want to help people learn we must help them see how it matters in their lives.“[10]
As Deci and Ryan put it, “To fully internalize a regulation, and thus to become autonomous with respect to it, people must inwardly grasp its meaning and worth.”(2000)
As Meiklejohn says:
“[W]hat you wish as a teacher is that they should see for themselves the human necessity which underlies all lessons, should feel its drive and compulsion, should undertake their own education. ...”[11]
“The challenge in teaching is to bring the text to life by revealing …that the text speaks to our concerns.”[12] Helping them to find answers to the questions, why does it matter? How does it relate to me? What does and does not make sense?[13]
Initial interests, Zull adds, “are not the aim, the goal, of teaching; they are the materials to be used in reaching a goal which is set by nothing less than all the [ultimate] interests for which a human being should have regard, whether he has them now or not.”[14] “[T]he primary appeal of all liberal teaching is not to a student’s interests taken as separate things, but to a judgment of value and worthfulness made by him as a responsible human being.”[15]
Meiklejohn was many years ahead of his time in this warning. Indeed, as we’ve said, recent studies as those performed by Deci and Ryan have proved his insight correct. In their research into self-determination, they provide evidence that extrinsic rewards and constraints condition the perception of an instrumental relationship between the activity and the reward, which serves to obscure the existence of underlying motivations. In other words, desire for the conditioned stimuli (e.g. grades, approval, prestige, etc.) serves to block so much as awareness, let alone appreciation, of any unconditioned stimuli, that is, the love of learning itself, which the mind generates when left to it’s own primary purposes.
As Deci and Ryan explain, when the perceived locus of causality, which by origin exists in the domain of the intrinsic motivational subsystem that organizes and governs behavior, shifts into the extrinsic subsystem, then the student becomes alienated from the intrinsic reasons for performing the act.[16]
In this way, extrinsic authority and rewards as we have traditionally employed can actually dampen and even kill the intrinsic incentive to learn. When students come to learn for the grade, or to avoid punishments and stigmas, just as adults come to work for the money and other benefits, rather than the pleasure inherent in good work, all joy that might otherwise have been inherent in the activity is gone. Once this cause has taken effect, it is very hard to tell, and even more difficult to change. Students who are conditioned to learn for the sake of the positive regard of their teachers, high grades, awards, citations, and ultimately well paying jobs and careers, are at risk of learning and living for the wrong reasons and can become so alienated from truth as a purpose that we might rightly wonder if they have learned anything at all but how to jump through hoops.
All of which is the same reason that “anything that has the semblance of an external authority is rejected by Zen.”[17]Because if you have one eye on the reward, then you only have one eye on the work itself – on the learning – the intrinsic reward.
Researchers Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan (1983) put it this way:
“The quality of behavior and experience is different when one is intrinsically motivated than when one is extrinsically motivated. Experiences (or perceptions) of being self-determined and competent strengthen intrinsic motivation while experiences of being controlled and incompetent undermine it.
Intrinsic rewards are spontaneous feelings that accompany competent, self-determined responding. The focus on competence and choice as instruments for achieving desired reinforcements misses the essence of what intrinsic motivation is about. Competent, self-determined interactions are rewarding in their own right.”
And while extrinsic rewards can be satisfying in their way, their price should not go unnoticed, for evidence shows that agent response to extrinsic motivation actually kills intrinsic motivation, which is to say, the joy of doing something for its own sake.
“The research began with the demonstration that extrinsic rewards can undermine intrinsic motivation (Deci, 1971; Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973), which we interpret in terms of the reward shifting people from a more internal to external perceived locus of causality. Although the issue of rewards has been hotly debated, a recent meta-analysis (Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, in press) confirms that virtually every type of expected tangible reward made contingent on task performance does, in fact, undermine intrinsic motivation. Furthermore, not only tangible rewards, but also threats (Deci & Cascio, 1972), deadlines (Amabile, DeJong, & Lepper, 1976), directives (Koestner, Ryan, Bernieri, & Holt, 1984), and competition pressure (Reeve & Deci, 1996) diminish intrinsic motivation because, according to CET, people experience them as controllers of their behavior. On the other hand, choice and the opportunity for self-direction (e.g., Zuckerman, Porac, Lathin, Smith, & Deci, 1978) appear to enhance intrinsic motivation, as they afford a greater sense of autonomy.”[18]
“Extrinsically motivated behaviors — those that are executed because they are instrumental to some separable consequence —can vary in the extent to which they represent self-determination.” “Differences in attitudes and adjustment were also associated with the different types of extrinsic motivation. For example, the more students were externally regulated the less they showed interest, value, or effort, and the more they indicated a tendency to blame others, such as the teacher, for negative outcomes. Introjected regulation was positively related to expending effort, but was also related to more anxiety and to poorer coping with failures. Identified regulation was associated with greater enjoyment of school and more positive coping styles. And intrinsic motivation was correlated with interest, enjoyment, felt competence, and positive coping.” What’s more, “a person who has identified with the value of an activity might lose that sense of value under a controlling mentor and move ‘‘backward’’ into an external regulatory mode.”
“Intrinsically motivated behaviors, which are performed out of interest and satisfy the innate psychological needs for competence and autonomy are the prototype of self-determined behavior.”[19]
Deci and Ryan differentiate between self-determination and self-regulation, arguing that when behavior is self-regulated:
“There is the same controller-controlled relationship; the only difference is that both the controller and the controlled are inside the skin of the same person. It is a person pushing him or herself around.”
“[I]ntrinsic motivation is based in the innate need for competence and self-determination. Intrinsically motivated behavior is the archetype of self-determination. One follows one’s interests; one accepts challenges from the world around; one attends to and is involved with the activity at hand; and one is free of the pressure associated with external controls. One’s internal nature, one’s intrinsic growth and development as a unique individual are the guiding elements of this type of behavior.”
This then is the lesson of philosophy inherent in taking responsibility for the search for truth, justice, wisdom. It is not, as Socrates would argue, a lesson we can ‘teach’ to our young, but it is one we can and should encourage them to learn first hand. We can encourage self-determination by help our young to think for themselves, follow their own intrinsic motivations, to promote good reasoning as an intrinsic part of early education.
If the ancients are right (as only those who take up their purposes ever discover), then the purpose of education ought to be to awaken, develop and discipline the mind in this way – navigating by intrinsic motivation. ,In this way, we can make it its own master, and find that dialectical balance that makes vision possible.
If the end of education was enlightenment in this sense, it would help our young understand the true value of what is inside them – of inner wealth. Which would, in turn, help them see that the goals we typically pursue are in fact too trivial for enduring interest, compared to the higher goods that are available to all who earn them.
Education based on a dialectic ideal would promote the value of intrinsic motivation, and likewise, intrinsic (karmic) rewards – which are more satisfying than any others we have been taught and conditioned to value. This truth is the central principle at the heart of all wisdom traditions - would that our system of education understood its value.
And for this reason, "[Children] must devote themselves especially to the discipline which will make them masters of the technique of asking and answering questions....Dialectic...study..."(Plato's Republic, 255)
As Mill puts it:
"No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead. Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think. Not that it is solely, or chiefly, to form great thinkers that freedom of thinking is required. On the contrary, it is as much and even more indispensable to enable average human beings to attain the mental stature which they are capable of. . . . Where there is tacit convention that principles are not to be disputed, where the discussions of the greatest questions which can occupy humanity is considered to be closed, we cannot hope to find that generally high scale of mental activity which has made some periods of history so remarkable. Never when controversy avoided the subjects which are large and important enough to kindle enthusiasm was the mind of a people stirred up from its foundations . . . and we can expect no fresh start until we again assert our mental freedom."[p. 41-42]
On the Wisdom of Less Teaching
For this reason, they conclude, “Teaching for understanding means, ironically, less teaching.” (*) Indeed, “The ultimate aim is to make ourselves unneeded as teachers.”(W&M, p.165)
Wiggins and McTighe quote Gragg (1940), who observed that:
“Teachers…are particularly beset by the temptation to tell what they know…Yet no amount of information…in itself improves insight and judgment or increasing ability to act wisely.”
“[S]tudents must come to see that understanding means that they must figure things out, not simply wait for and write down teacher explanations… Thus teaching for understanding means teaching in ways that challenge resistance to new ideas….This is the great irony of teaching. At times, being observant and silent is the best way to teach.”(W&M, p.175)
Traditionally, “[I]n the teacher-centered paradigm the professor is the expert information giver and the only evaluator in the course. Usually the direction of feedback during the course is from professor to student.”(Wiggins &McTighe, p. 142) But, Huba and Freed optimistically observe, “As professors and students shift from a teacher-centered to a learner-centered paradigm, ideas and practices will be put in place that support a comfortable view of mutual feedback.”(p.143) This stands to improve the learning climate in such a way that the “comfort leads to more open channels of communication and increased dialogue in class discussions.”(p.144)
If students are lucky, “Professors will begin to view themselves more as partners in helping students learn than as expert information givers… Dialogue between professors and students will increase, and respect for students as people and learners will be a more visible component of the course…the environment will be more supportive of a mutual feedback loop in which clear and accurate information is shared…. There will be mutual trust, a perception that feedback is a joint effort, and the type of conversation that encourages the learner to be open and talk.”(In Learner–Centered Assessment on College Campuses: Shifting the Focus from Teaching to Learning, Huba and Freed, p.143)
[1] (Spindler 1987, 100)
[2] (Spindler 1987, 110-112)
[3] John Taylor Gatto, Against Schools, Harper’s “School on a Hill” forum, September 2001
[4] (Meiklejohn 1932, 128)
[5] (Meiklejohn 1932, 125)
[6] (Meiklejohn 1932, 125)
[7] (Meiklejohn 1932, 121)
[8] (Zull n.d., 53)
[9] (Zull n.d., 52)
[10] (Zull n.d., 52)
[11] (Meiklejohn 1932, 128)
[12] (McTighe, Understanding By Design 1998, 49)
[13] (McTighe, Understanding By Design 1998, 48)
[14] (Zull n.d., 58)
[15] (Zull n.d., 57)
[16] (Ryan 1983, 58)
[17] (Suzuki 1964, 44)
[18] (Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations: Classic Definitions and New Directions (Contemporary Educational Psychology, 2000)
[19] (Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations: Classic Definitions and New Directions (Contemporary Educational Psychology, 2000)
On Deregulating Our Children
Why would one want to deregulate one’s children? Perhaps for the same reason so many in our conservative age are so fond of the principle of deregulation toward their own 'governmental' authorities and regulators. People resist being told what to do -- and believe they would do the right thing better if left to their own reasonings. Whether this is true or not in such realms as government regulation of big business is debatable. But it is certainly true with regard to learning. We literally cannot stop kids from learning -- except, as Gatto would argue, by standing in their way. If we believe as strongly as we lately seem to that government must keep its nose out of our business, then the argument has to hold in all cases where extrinsic forces stand in the way of the natural self direction of living beings. (Of course, this rhetoric turns out to be a ruse designed to promote freedom, not for people, but for corporations…but that subterfuge escapes the notice of those who never learned to look for contradictions in the reasoning of those who, say, get themselves elected appealing to people love of freedom, when what they really mean is some people freedom to impose their views on others, which is not freedom, but license…but more on that later). Anyway, one might be able to defend extrinsic incentives which allows a choice in the end, but mandatory compulsive authority, especially over something like learning, has the potential to ruin the love of it, and thus requires more justification than we bother giving our kids for the shameless over-authority exercised in institutionalized schools over what they learn and when they learn it.
The principle of deregulation, if it properly applies at the level of government and citizens, also properly applies at the level of teacher and student, for we have natural rights in either case, economic, political and educational relations. Such relations deserve further examination, because they are not properly hierarchical relations in which one group assumes the right of authority over another, that is, the right to author the other's actions, and given this, it is ironic indeed that the importance of this freedom was given such a strong defense by '90s Republicans, who really only meant to assert the rights of business to operate unhindered, but managed to give a boost to the rights of individual freedom from wrongful judgment and authority, which advanced (albeit inadvertently) the rights of individuals from institutional constraints across the board -- not an end they would have promoted had they seen it coming. So while they historically hold the most Calvinist of philosophies dear, being among the worst offenders of the moral law that limits unjust authority, modern libertarians have nonetheless shot themselves in the foot with their push for deregulation of business practices, for its opened the door for arguments against all those who would abuse power in all other realms of institutional activity -- including, and most especially, in education.
So we might discuss 'free market education' further, and to hold faith that we are growing out of this age of cynicism, of rampant disregard of individual differences and disrespect for how different peoples lives have different challenges, underappreciated for how significantly difficult certain challenges, such as poverty and racism, really are to overcome, and failure of empathy for the true beauty and depth of every living thing, in short, a failure of the golden rule -- for too little do we remember the imperative to do onto others as we would have them do onto us, perhaps because we do not even know ourselves. or what we would have done to us, given the choice.
It is important to understand how Socrates and Aristotle would have advised us to remedy the state we find ourselves in regarding education; contemporary theorists, as well as more recent thinkers (like Dewey, Mead and Meiklejohn) would add to the dialogue that the true purpose of teachers and schools is to help individual children toward their own truest purpose, meaning, to help them discover and actualize their unique intrinsic potential, i.e. their best work, indeed, their best self. The insight drawn from these great thinkers gives us perspective and puts us in a good position to make a convincing case for a better, or at least more inclusive, method of education than we currently have in place in this country.
As we have said, we must begin with the question -- what is the nature of the educational relationship? The justice is in the consent, they would say, and this is the heart of Socrates', Plato's' and Aristotle's philosophy, and it is this lesson I want to draw from the Socratic dialogue. That being the case, the challenge, to those who would rule over others, is to change the authoritative structure of educational relationships into respectful teaching relationships -- i.e. to guide instead of force, command or coerce. This is wherein it is fair to argue that politics and education are one, at least when they are functioning properly. As * put it, “Education is the function of government closest to the people.”
Our goal ought to be to provide a felt education, meaning, for the child to be the proper judge of when he has learned something, has understood. Difficult as it may sound, given our well-conditioned educational habits, it's up to us to follow their interests, not grade them on how well they follow ours! It's our job as teachers to empathize with flexible mind, with each child with whom we work, and to help guide by listening and aiding the child/person from where he is at to whatever the next level or step might be.
That's the job of a Socratic teacher, and it means absolutely individuating each child, like we would a friend. Are we ever able to accomplish this completely? probably not, but it is an ideal to aim at, a target, a standard by which to compare ourselves in order to better our teaching. Our purpose must be to be clear enough about our purpose to be able to be true to what it is...to keep the process of education honest...to aim continually at our ideal goals...to constantly realign ourselves to be living up to our pledge, and thus, to do our best, which is never perfect, but always perfecting.
And toward that end, we must think like revolutionaries, as Steve Jobs put it, and use business methods to our noblest ends. If it can be done well, we will do our best to see that it is. For if it is going to be an entity in its own right, then it is going to be a good one, well-motivated and true to its purpose -- of which the bottom line has to be, are we doing right by kids? What’s actually good for them, not merely what we perceive to be good for our economy, or for their economic good, at the cost of their character or spiritual interests.. Only then can and should we profit. Because only with honorable motivation can true success be achieved. So we must ask ourselves, are we being a true teacher, a true friend, to this child? Are we giving what we would have liked to have received from our teachers? Meaning, are we being fair? Being honest? Being true to our own best selves, that they might learn to be theirs?
Our job should be to get to know each child, through ongoing dialogue, as an individual, as well as in group interaction, and, as a team, with the parents and family, with the purpose of helping them find their hidden potentials, and recover the love of learning they were born with. This is not an easy task, especially with some already resistant kids, if only because we are only one influence in a life of many influences, but we can promise to do our best, imperfect as that is, to take each child seriously as a thinker, and a doer, and the person he or she would like to be. Every child has hidden potentials, and usually they're not hidden very deeply, and it is our goal to help them see around the doubts and fears they have internalized, and to take themselves seriously as intelligent human beings, capable of working with their environment to actualize the lives they desire, and make their best and happiest self become real.
Again, we are but one influence among many, so we cannot eliminate all barriers to success in a given child's life. But we can help them see that what is and what is not in their control, and help eliminate those blocks that are inside them. After all, pre-requisite to doing anything is believing that you can. In other words, you cannot do anything you don't try to do, and you cannot try to do anything you don't believe in your heart to be possible. The forces that discourage that belief, call it confidence, or self-respect, are many -- including some that are harder than others to overcome, such as poverty. Many such powerful extrinsic forces can be overcome only by an indomitable will to succeed, for which permission to dream might be necessary.
And eventually, adults who'd like access to tools and teachers to help them uncover unexplored potentials will come and ask for help as well, help them fill in the potholes along the highway of their education...all of us who 'missed that day of class', for one reason or another. Those who learn the hard way that the target we take aim at may not take us where we really wanted to go, but if we keep asking ourselves anew, which way to go, it will take us to what is best. Learning is a cumulative process, and going back to fill in the holes is part of the fun, to finally come to understand something that has long eluded us feels wonderful, restores confidence, mental exercise strengthens the mind, and the resolution to become one's better self inspires one's children and students.
Teaching must evolve to involve helping each child to believe in what's possible, and we do this best by aiding in the history of their successes. Learning can seem like a slow process (especially to those in doubt, who often need constant reassurance), but we take heart at progress, and urge parents to do the same, for not only is it better than regress (as I felt was my daughter's direction when she was registered in high school), but the very presence of doubt can be the cause of the underconfidence which is halting progress. Learning is a matter of feedback loops. Our job is to imaginatively search out those tools that each child might best use in any given learning challenge, whatever they might be (eventually including computers and internet technology), and in the meantime, to help them grow the self-concept they'll need to continue the learning that will move them toward their dreams. Some might worry that we could set them up for let down in this way, but to that I would respond in the words of Socrates, "that we will be better, braver, and happier people if we believe it right and wise to look for what we don't know, than if we believe there is no point in looking because what we don't know we can never discover." Dreams, like knowledge, are actualized, not merely in the realization, but in the progress that moves toward them -- which is to say, in the wisdom to believe.
So we might be on the verge of a true adventure in education, for we have, given the potential of our technology and the condition of our schools, the unique, and unprecedented opportunity, indeed responsibility, to reinvent the wheel of education. As with anything worth doing, timing is critical. Learning is among the most fundamental of human functions, knowledge the most fundamental of human needs, and gone wrong, it can ruin lives. Left to malfunction, without challenge, it can ruin entire generations of young people who would otherwise live constructive lives, if only we would help them do so, instead of engaging them in patterns of political competition among themselves over quantities of zero sum rewards. We know better. As teachers we can do better by them that we are allowed to in the education system such as it is. Dedicated and gifted teachers are often wasted on countless hours of grading and internal politics. Hard as we try, there is hardly time for notice, let alone individuation, of the gifts and challenges of particular individual students. With too many students and too little time, we are reduced to delivering lectures, and testing a few days later to see if they remember what was said a few days before.
This is, arguably, the best we could do, until now, at least, and the result is that we've become very good at sorting the young in this way, according to how well and quickly they do what they're told, good at judging with praise and blame those behaviors we like and dislike, which too often comes down to the art of guessing who will succeed and who will 'flunk' (a dastardly word, known, strangely enough, only in the vocabulary of schools) according as we know others judge. Yet many of us teachers, and I suspect, many of us parents, many of whom are teachers ourselves in one realm or another, share with us a sense that we can do better by our kids. Given all the many challenges of our 'new world' we can finally do education as well as we -- most of us -- once dreamed we could.
So come with us into this new world of learning, where children can find and enjoy teachers who have time for them, and can qualify that time with the rich availability of truly magical resources, the tools that engage the young in the world of knowledge by their already well-developed love of technology, and transfixed them in the fascination of all there is -- for each and every one of us -- to learn.
No longer constrained by proximity or availability or even by literacy, through the internet we have the world at our finger tips, quite literally, and if nothing else, this power of instantaneous access gives us the potential to cover so much more territory in the course of our education, and if not to finish it sooner, then to learn to continue our education well into the pattern of our lives. Not that online interaction will replace human contact or even traditional methods of education, it will only make it richer and more adventurous, and it will begin simply and humbly by offering aid, tutoring for lack of a better work, though 'coaching' is more like it, to young people who are entitled to the best we have to offer them. So we must attempt to answer to the need for better, personalized, education…especially since the time is so ripe.
On Education Without Compulsion
“Do we really need school?” Gatto asks. “I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: …is this deadly routine really necessary?” “Two million [and counting] happy home-schoolers” would suggest that it’s not.
“We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of ‘success’ as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, ‘schooling,’ but historically that isn’t true…plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons.”(*)
In fact, “A considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right” – including Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Lincoln, Edison, Melville, Twain, Conrad, and Margaret Mead.
The good news, Gatto says, is that the ‘tricks and traps’ of American school systems are relatively “easy to avoid:”
“Genius is as common as dirt,” Gatto concludes. We suppress it only b/c we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. Gatto’s solution, while it pricks at the conceit of our habitual methods, “is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.”[1]
For this reason, Gatto argues, we all must:
“Challenge [our] kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues.” “Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology – all the stuff school teachers know well enough to avoid.” We must help them “develop an inner life so that they’ll never be bored.”
“Schools train children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventures.”
[1] John Taylor Gatto, Against Schools, Harper’s “School on a Hill” forum, September 2001
If we want to know what the great souls of history would say about all this, we need only look to their own words — but we needn’t take only their word for it. Those at the forefront of contemporary educational theory and research have offered us the empirical evidence to support this enduring ancient wisdom.
Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, authors of the seminal book, Education by Design, draw on the insights of educational theorists throughout the ages, including Socrates, Plato, John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Howard Gardner, and other sages of the ages to make a powerful case for an dialogic educational methodology that has its roots in ancient thought. By their lights, our education system currently has students marching through content at the expense of meaning. Wiggens and McTighe call this, “teach, test, hope for the best” education.” (3) But given a barrage of recent evidence that students don’t retain what is learned in this way, we might as well call it in-one-ear-and-out-the-other education.
Wiggins and McTighe take up the philosophers mission when they profess their purposes: “What it means to know and understand knowledge and understanding, and how knowledge differs from belief and opinion –[this is] what we are striving for in this book.”[62] What we need, they say, is “a better understanding of understanding.”[40]
Understanding by Design has been called “the definitive guide on curriculum design,” and yet the philosophical insights contained in it apparently hover over the heads of American educators, who have adopted many of its practical applications, but seem to have missed it's primary point.
In traditional methods of education, they argue, “we pay much attention to knowledge…and too little attention to the quality of understanding.” Without a better understanding of how to teach for understanding, we retain assessment habits that “focus on the more superficial, rote, out-of-context and easily tested aspects of knowledge.”(40) The traditional teaching method is, “in essence, one of imposition from above and from outside…even though good teachers will use devices of art to cover up the imposition so as to relieve it of obviously brutal features.”(Dewey n.d., 17-18)
Dewey argues that even those who qualify as good students by this method don’t display actual deep understanding of what is being taught. (2)
What is Understanding?
One common meaning of the word understand involves the idea of having an insight or intuition that may not be expressible clearly in words. (79) “Good explanations are not just words and logic, but insight into essentials.”(81) But the problem with insight is that “it’s so difficult to assess…slippery and ambiguous…” (79) “Genuine insight” might be had, yet “without necessarily being able to fully or effectively articulate it…”(McTighe 1998, 79) “Our intuition may be ahead of…our ability to prove it and explain it.”(81) And so teachers might find “student insight inside poor explanations.” (81) And “sometimes deep understanding is best revealed by a single yet profound insight.” (80) “Indeed, a useful way to describe the problem of insight and imagination out pacing performance ability is that a student’s perception, empathy, and self knowledge are more sophisticated that his current ability to explain, interpret, and apply” it.(82) And as long as we make it our primary task to properly assess which degree of understanding the student has reached, then “our assessment needs to reflect this complexity.”(81)
Which opens the door to the question whether assessment (which takes up the lions share of our educational efforts) ought be our primary task? It’s possible, the ancients might say, to pay too much attention to where a given student is ‘at’ at any given time, while we neglect the more important concern – is he or she moving forward?
Understood dialectically, assessment is “an umbrella term” used to mean the deliberate use of many methods “to gather evidence of student understanding.”(4) Because we can too easily lose sight of true understanding,(5) “the collective evidence we seek might include observation and dialogue, traditional quizzes and tests, and performance tasks and projects, as well as students self-assessments gathered over time.”(4, 13)
Dewey (1933) followed Aristotle, who followed Socrates, in arguing that “to understand something ‘is to see it in its relations to other things: to note how it operates or functions, what consequences follow from it, what causes it’.”(McTighe 1998, 46; Dewey, 137) These theorists draw a distinction between familiarity with general information, knowing the importance of, and having an ‘enduring’ understanding of…(McTighe 1998, 15) as well as between “superficial or borrowed opinion and ‘in-depth, justified understanding of the same idea…”(40) As they correctly observe, “this idea is as old as Plato.” (*)
We often say we know what we do not truly understand, but only believe. Beliefs may be true, but still we won’t know that for sure until we’ve thought it all the way through – which is to say, asked the questions that being true understanding home to us. This is why the question and answer process is so important to education – because only when all queries have been addressed will questions be quieted because the soul is satisfied that it understands. And if it does not, questions will remain, and itch until we scratch them.
We might wisely trust this natural process to generate progress in learning more than we do. But once questions have been stifled, or even scolded, too many students will simply settle for belief that what is offered them is the ‘right answer’, at least the one that will be marked as ‘right’ on the test. The problem is, without having satisfied the mind’s craving for understanding, this weak form of knowledge is likely to slip away as soon as the test is over, and sometimes even before the test.
To have this kind of understanding or insight, they say, is to have ‘true knowledge, to “really know,” in the strong sense. (39-40) For this, “We must do a better job of teaching and assess self-reflection in the broadest sense.”(60)
Wiggins and McTighe agree with Socrates that deep understanding is unshakable — “you understand only if you can teach it, use it, prove it, explain it, or read between the lines.”(41) Understanding in this sense means the “student really ‘gets it’.”(5) And we can have a ‘deep’ or ‘in-depth’ understanding, as opposed to shallow or shaky, which reflects “a continuum of understanding that ranges from niave to sophistocated, from simplistic to complex, (as opposed to merely right or wrong).(48)
Hence the reason this tethering process is an essential part of learning, because it ameliorates understanding from shallow to deep.
On Reflection, Thoughtfulness, and Circumspection
For an ever deeper understanding of understanding, the authors suggest we look to its synonyms, e.g. insight and wisdom, maturity, all of which reflect the tendency toward reflection, thoughtfulness, circumspection and mindfulness
“Understanding implies the ability to escape a niave or inexperienced point of view…to escape the understandable passions, inclinations, and dominant opinions of the moment to do what circumspection and refection reveal to be best.”(41) “Maturity is evident when we look beyond simplistic categories to see shades of perhaps unexpected difference, idiosyncrasies, or surprises in people and ideas.”(58)
Dewey wrote that “We can summarize the habits of mind that relate to the development of understanding …as the propensity to ‘thoughtfullness’ (1933) (*) (The Bradley Commission on the Teaching of History (Gcignon, 1989) developed three important habits of mind which they claim “generally apply to most subjects.”(p.171) These modes of thoughtful judgment include self-regulation, critical thinking, and creative thinking…significance of past, difference in what is important and what is inconsequential, historical empathy vs. present mindedness, comprehend toe interplay of change and continuity, “and avoid thinking that either is somehow more natural, or more to be expected than the other… p.172)
“When we say someone is thoughtful,” Wiggins and McTighe go on, “we mean someone who is not only ‘logical’ but who has the right habits of mind. They are heedful, not rash, they look about, are circumspect…[they do not] take observation at face value but probe them to see whether they are what they seem to be.” (171) However, it is a significant and important fact that “We cannot ‘teach’ a habit per se, and knowledge alone will not lead to or change a habit. A new habit of mind, like any habit, has to be cultivated over time…and supported by teacher modeling, exhortation, coaching, and feedback.”(171) So we cannot teach a habit, but we can model and exercise it.
Sizer (1984) agrees, “Much of understanding is about thoughtfulness, and thoughtfulness is awakened more than trained.”(161) To this end, Wiggins and McTighe advocate what educational philosophers have been trying to teach us for many centuries. “We need to cultivate circumspection.”(43)
According to Bruner (1973 a, p.449) “The cultivation of reflectiveness is one of the great problems one faces in devising curriculum: how to lead children to discover the powers and pleasures that await the exercise of retrospection.”(154)
“Such mindfulness can only come about by active reflection upon and analysis of performance (what works, what doesn’t, and why), sophisticated insights and abilities best “reflected in varied performance and contexts.”(5)
Teachers must help students see that beneath “seemingly unproblematic knowledge lurk problems” that they must continually “be led to recognize the need for uncoverage of…the need for rethinking.”(26) “[T]he most valuable lesson a chef can teach a cook,” for instance, is that “a slavish devotion to recipes robs people of the kind of experiential knowledge that seeps into the brain…most chefs are not fettered by formula, they’ve cooked enough to trust their taste.”(O’Neill, 1996, p.52) Likewise, the learning mind must come to trust its internal inclinations about whether something does or does not makes sense, for if it doesn’t, questions will arise to which answers must be sought.
“In a curriculum for understanding, rethinking the apparently simple but actually complex is central to the nature of understanding and to a necessarily iterative approach to curricular design.” (25) For this reason, “Curriculum should be organized to pursue our questions, not simply catalogue what is known.”(150) And to this end, we should “postpone a great deal of teaching and formal summaries of knowledge until learning and attempts to perform have occurred.”(151)
*Hence the important role of attitude and habits of mind in development of understanding – open-mindedness, self-discipline (autonomy), tolerance for ambiguity, and reflectiveness…makes possible seeing the world through multiple lenses…."(171)
The bottom line, as Sizer (1984) put it, is that ‘Understanding is more stimulated than learned. It grows from questioning oneself and being questioned by others.’ (116-117)
The authors caution of a misconception alert here though, for to say “course work derives from questions” is “not teacher probing of student answers or the asking of leading questions.”[emphasis added] To say that questioning is a critical part of the learning process is “very different from teachers ‘using questions to check for factual knowledge, move toward the right answer, or sharpening student responses. Too often, students leave school never realizing that knowledge is answers to someone’s prior questions, produced and refined in response to puzzles, inquiry, testing, argument, and revision,”(33) for which textbooks are only banks of resources. Students ought to be encouraged to mine those texts, and all available resources, they argue, to the end of finding answers they themselves have generated. To encourage this, we must “persist in asking questions, delaying or avoiding giving answers, confronting students with problems and putting mysteries and the need to rethink things constantly before them.”(142)
John Dewey (1916) grasped the unwitting harm in teaching the residue of other people’s learning in a sequence logical to the writer and explainer only. “The adult educator,” he worried, “is constantly prone to a misunderstanding that the content and organization suitable for experts are best for novices. But “If the aim of curriculum is to make adult knowledge accessible to the student, the challenge is not merely to provide a simple summary of what we know. The student must come to see the value and verify the correctness of the knowledge …[as] the original knowledge creators did.” (152)
“[T]his problem of sequence is worsened by the common tendency to teach to the textbook…[which is] an * organized account of adult knowledge in a field of study,” better seen as the reference book it is. But “the sequence of such products is ill-suited for developing understanding. The logic derives from a catalogue of completed content instead of from the needs of learners to ponder, question, explore, and apply the knowledge.” (150) From the learners point of view, the linearity and vocabulary–laden quality of finished explanations are illogical for learning what is new, problematic, and opaque.”(151) For all our good intentions and seeming advances, we too often end up killing the interest in true learning with an imposed age-grade march through the content in adult-generated order.
And apparently, misunderstanding is a bigger problem than we realize. Research into misunderstanding over the last twenty years indicates the urgency of this widespread problem, for “even some of the best students…later reveal significant misunderstanding of what they’ve learned.”(151) The NAEP’s research shows “a stark gap between the ability of students in general to learn basic principles, and their ability to apply knowledge or explain what they learned.”(*New York Times, 1997, p. 19) Proving Dewey’s point,“ students can learn definitions and statements about complex theories as mere verbal formulas without really understanding them,” just as Plato worried. (88) And any teacher of literature knows that the deep meaning of most great literature “gets lost, unseen – perhaps denied – by many students.” (142)
“The logic of curriculum should suit the learners, not the experts, sense of order.”(154) (Tyler (1949) Student of Dewey) It should be organized to be accessible from the learners point of view. As Tyler said, “A logical-to-the-learner ordering of schooling must make possible increasing breadth…the building of a unified worldview out of discrete parts.”(154) Such education allows them, and us, to “rethink what they thought they knew.”(113)
“The constant rethinking of basic ideas is central to developing understanding and avoiding misunderstanding…” (111)
For this and many reasons, “Teaching for understanding requires rethinking what we thought we knew – whether the ‘we’ involves students or educators.”(6) Practicing better, more active, listening skills is key, and this must begin with the teacher. The teachers’ job is to clarify “understanding”, because “such matters of understanding are abstract and subtle,” and thus “prone to student misunderstanding” – and worse, teacher misunderstanding! And what chance has the truth got then?
Learning as Discovery
To this end, Wiggins & McTighe emphasize the need to revisit big ideas. They risk a brief foray into “fancy philosophical language” in their claim that we must “Teach by raising more questions and answering fewer questions. Ask and re-ask big questions…”(164) They call this discovery by uncoverage. “[E]ducation for uncoverage requires students to find questions in knowledge.”…”uncover the big ideas”(113) To this end, “School must be made more like discovering a new idea than like learning adult knowledge explained point by point.”(151)
“Big ideas are often obscure or counter-intuitive…to grasp, then requires reflection and persistence.”(173) For this reason, students should be let to “struggle to grasp such ideas and see their value, just as great minds before us did.”(113) “The student needs to interpret, apply, see from different points of view… We cannot fully understand an idea until we retrace, relive, or recapitulate some of its history – how it came to be understood in the first place. The young learner should be treated as a discoverer, even if the path seems inefficient. That’s why Piaget (1973) argued that to understand is to invent’.” (151) They need to be more active in their development… [develop] tolerance for ambiguity and suspension of disbelief is key to the discovery of big ideas…(173) Thus, “a key challenge in teaching for understanding is to challenge the students’ niave epistemology”…[their assumptions] that knowledge is neat and clean, to the more mature view that ‘knowledge and coming to know” is messy. There are problems, and controversies, and assumptions that lie “behind seemingly problemless knowledge. Our job is to help them see “that there is always a need to make sense of content knowledge through inquiry and applications – to get beyond dutiful assimilation to active reflection, testing and meaning making.(26)
So the task is, according to Dewey, discovering the real connection within experience between past and present. And we do this best by taking knowledge of the past as both an end in itself and a means to more learning. In this way, learning takes place through the exercise of intelligence in the solving or problems. “Problems are the stimulus to learning,” Dewey argued, and “the task [is] to move back and forth between the known and the problematic."(153) Moving from problem to problem causes “knowledge to increase in depth and breadth. In this way, coursework could develop student thinking and interest, but do so purposefully and systematically, pointing toward the full fruits of each discipline.”(153)
Education is not a unidirectional march through recipes, but a nonlinear experimentation with intelligent trial and error…more “a zigzag sequence of trial, error, reflection, and adjustment.”(151) Because “the logic of understanding is thus more like intelligent trial and error than follow the leader,” alternative approaches “unfold in a different, nonlinear order.”(135) For this reason, “[A]ny topic should focus on the inherent opposites – the plausible multiple perspectives… – findable in all subjects. These opposites serve as * for the selection and organization of content’.”(143)(Egan, 1986, pp.26-27)
Understanding is therefore, Wiggins & McTighe conclude, “a family of interrelated abilities”, which includes explanation, interpretation, application, perspective, empathy, and self-knowledge -- facets of learning by which we engage in purposeful exploration of interconnections between seemingly isolated facts and the ‘big ideas’ that give them meaning.(3) Each of these six FACETS are important, but the last three are essential. “The latter three facets of understanding – perspective, empathy, and self-knowledge – often play a key role in revealing insight or its absence.”(82) These are the facets of understanding that ancient philosophers would have us explore at greater length, for they constitute the essence of dialectic understanding.
On Perspective
Wiggins and McTighe explain, “Perspective involves the discipline of asking, How does it look from another point of view?”(54) *To talk of an interesting perspective is to imply that complex ideas have legitimately diverse points of view.”(41) “Students cannot be said to have perspective, hence understanding…unless they have some insight into point of view.”(54) “Perspective as an aspect of understanding is a mature achievement, an earned understanding of how ideas look from different vantage points.”(54)
“Gardner argues that, unlike “the child who speaks up in the Emporer’s New Clothes”, children generally “lack the ability to take multiple perspectives.(54) Indeed, one might argue that we all lack this…to the extent that self-interest narrows our concerns, but enlightened S-I can broaden us as well. So, while Wiggens and McTighe claim that “this flexibility becomes progressively harder as we age and become more sure of our knowledge,” I would argue that this is only true if, in getting older, we do become more narrow minded, too sure that we already know, instead of taking the perspective of others and growing instead more humble, more curious, and more empathic. It is the function of education, one might reasonably argue, to help us grow, away from narrowness, and toward breadth of understanding.
“If educators wish to develop greater in-depth understanding in their students, then how should they go about it?”(5) (According to Wiggins and McTighe, we should use what they call a ‘backward design’ when developing curriculum – meaning that we should begin with what we want students to understand and be able to do, then work backward toward it. Indeed, this method is consistent with the very meaning of ‘curriculum’, the etemology of which is a “’course to be run’, given a desired end point.”(4) This method of teaching facilitates the many paths toward the end of understanding (3). Backward design curriculum development is compatible with a number of prominent educational initiatives, the authors point out, including among others, the Socratic method, problem-based learning (Stepian & Gallagher, 1997), 4-MAT (McCarthy, 1981).(5) And that this method emphasizes the need for constant rethinking and takes ideals as targets at which to aim the real, which would have been applauded by many of the ancients, including the Greeks.)
“Joseph Schwab (1978) came closest to envisioning an education for perspective. He developed what he called the art of ‘eclectic’: the deliberate design of course work that compelled students to see the same important ideas…from many different theoretical perspectives.” The point of Schwab’s curriculum is to build on prior learning,(154) and “to modify their thinking, as appropriate, “in light of the new points of view.”(155) Schwab’s “eclectic” form of college curriculum has “the goal of rethinking the same ideas.”(135) It “requires a continual deepening of one’s understanding…”(153)
“The process is a continual spiral,”(79) Dewey argues.(Dewey 1938) The idea of the “spiral curriculum…was first articulated by Dewey…and rooted in a long philosophical and pedagogical tradition running back through Piaget…Hegel…Rousseau.”(153) And in such a spiral curriculum, “big ideas, important tasks, and ever deepening urgency must recur in ever increasing complexity…”(135) Popularized by Bruner (1960) the “spiral curriculum” was based on the “stark postulate that ‘any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any age of development’ (Bruner, 1960) (In the words of Gardner (1991) “The test of understanding…involves the appropriate application of concepts and principles to questions and problems that are newly posed.”(52) “Jean Piaget (1973/1977) argued more radically that student understanding reveals itself by student innovation in application.”(52))
On Empathy
By contrast, empathy is “the learned ability to grasp the world from someone else’s point of view. It is the discipline of using one’s imagination to see and feel as others see and feel. It is different from seeing in perspective, which is to see from a critical distance, to detach ourselves to see more objectively. With empathy, we see from inside the person’s world view; we embrace the insights that can be found in the subjective or aesthetic realm.”(McTighe 1998, 56)
“Sometimes understanding requires disinterest, while at other times, it requires heartflelt solidarity with others.”(43) “…to understand another we need the opposite of distance – [we need] a conscious rapport…”(43)
Empathy is “central to the most common logical use of the term understanding.”(56) ““Understanding in the interpersonal sense suggests not merely an intellectual change of mind but a significant change of heart. Empathy requires respect for people different from ourselves.”(57)
“Empathy is the deliberate act of finding what is plausible, sensible, or meaningful in the ideas and actions of others, even if they are puzzling or off –putting. Empathy can lead us not only to rethink a situation, but to have a change of heart as we come to understand what formerly seemed odd, alien, seemingly weird opinions or people to find what is meaningful in them.”(56)
Indeed, “When one person fails to understand another, there usually is a failure to consider or imagine the possibility of different points of view, much less ’walking in their shoes’.”(41) It’s clearly better if “we can openly and honestly consider other explanations, theories, and points of view as well as unfamiliar ways of living and perceiving.”(168)
“The danger” some think empathy entails “is the loss of perspective,” which some worry can happen, if empathy is not itself understood in its deep sense. “If understanding is forgiveness,” as Shattuck says (1996), then one “heads easily to moral laxness where all is forgiven (emphasis in original). According to this view, “When we understand empathically, we easily veer into relativism.”(153-154)
One might argue, though, that there is nothing wrong with such relativism, Socratically conceived, if all points of view are understood in dialectic relationship to all others. What we have then, as we will see, is more like a relative complementarity, a form of relativity that makes possible something meaningfully thought of as the whole truth. For when we think, as the ancients did, that truth stays true, then we do not believe something merely because it appears to us, but because it synchronizes with all other things we know to be true.
Complementarity does not leave the door open to the ‘moral laxness’ that pure relativism suggests, because all perspectives are tethered by the justice that holds all perspectives together. In other words, we may all see the same world differently, but that it is the same world requires that we live by the same law of nature or golden rule that we would have others observe in how they behave toward us. All would agree to the objectivity of such justice, and still admit that it will show itself differently in different circumstances, from different perspectives. When we put ourselves in others shoes empathically, we can see that applying justice is an idiosyncratic process of putting one foot in front of the other. For while nature’s laws stay the same for us all, unique circumstances call upon us to understand how the golden rule applies in any given situation.
As Socrates and Confucius both argued, something is not good because the gods approve it; rather, the gods approve it because it is good. Discerning what is good is what the mind is good for, and this too is an essential part of learning, for which we need perspective, empathy, and ultimately self-knowledge.
On Self-Knowledge
Self-knowledge, by contrast, requires both perspective and empathy, for it amounts to “the wisdom to know one’s ignorance,”(McTighe 1998, 57) a skill which enhances “our capacity to accurately self-assess and self-regulate.”(58) “‘Know thyself’ is the maxim of those who would really understand, as the Greek philosophers often said!”(58)
“Through self-knowledge we also understand what [how much] we do not understand…” As Socrates argues to Meno, we are unlikely to seek for what we think we already have. Knowing enough to know that we don’t know as much as we might like to think we do is the kind of humility that opens us to real learning toward understanding. “Experts who are also wise individuals are quick to state that there is much they do not understand about a subject. (They have Socratic wisdom).”(59) And Socrates would argue, this is essentially the same thing as knowing how much we have to learn.
“Self-knowledge is a key facet of understanding because it demands that we self-consciously question our understandings to advance them. It asks us to have the discipline to seek and find the inevitable blind spots or oversights in our own thinking…”(59) It compels us to ask, “What are the limits of my understanding? What are my blind spots? What am I prone to misunderstand because of prejudice, habit, or style?”(57)
In Learner–Centered Assessment on College Campuses: Shifting the Focus from Teaching to Learning, Huba and Freed argue (with Bateson 1990) that “Self-knowledge is empowering…and feedback is the foundation of learning about ourselves and about the effect of our behavior on others.”(M. H. Freed n.d. in McTighe, 1998, 142)
“Christensen (1991) states it this way; ‘Self-knowledge is the beginning of all knowledge. I had to find the teacher in myself before I could find the teacher in my student and gain understanding of how we all taught one another.’”(103,143)
On Understanding Student's Resistance
As all this illustrates, and Wiggins and McTighe emphasize, “There are different kinds of understanding, more than just text book knowledge…”[1] Importantly, “[W]e seek to understand people as well as ideas. Those two kinds of understanding are intimately related in teaching. Unless we understand students, we will not get them to understand ideas.”[2]
Unfortunately, as James Zull observes in The Art of Changing the Brain, one of the worst habits of educators is that so “Often, our perspective of teaching is from above. We view the learner as needing our help, which we hand down to him. From this perspective we can forget that the actual learning takes place down there in the brain and body of the learner.”[3]
“[K]nowledge of the methods alone will not suffice;” Dewey says, there must be desire, the will to employ them. This desire is an affair of personal disposition.”(Dewey, 1933, pp. 29-30) Indeed, “There is no foolproof way to increase a student’s knowledge without her permission.”[1*] “Understanding is caused by the learner who willingly overcomes old ideas and habits…”[1*] “Deep understanding takes courage and mutual respect. Learning requires trust in the teacher because new understandings are threatening…sometimes at the personal, sometimes at the cultural level. Good ideas may be rejected in favor of older ideas. Great minds – not just naïve and ignorant ones – are subject to intellectual inertia, blind spots and resistance.”[1*] “[T]eachers can only design possibilities and build trust.”[1*]
The importance of trust in the teacher-student relationships is made apparent in much contemporary research. Frederick Erikson illustrates in his work on ‘culturally responsive pedagogy,’ that over-control in the classroom leads to resistance in the attitude of the student, and rather than promote learning, it can actually have the opposite effect, and make the student defy all attempts to help him learn. Likewise, rather than decreasing variation and promoting mutual understanding among students and among cultures, it can actually strengthen differences.
Erikson studied the teacher-student communication process, showing how the teacher/student dialogic interaction can both or either educe trust or elicit resistance, and in this, can feed or actually thwart learning.
But the interactive process of teaching and learning too often involves social typing and labeling reflecting the biases of the teacher (J. H. Robinson (1982a), Miltman (1981), and Bond (1982). Low expectations of minority children can, according to Spindler, bring about the worst possible outcomes for some by way of self-fulfilling prophesy. [4] As do teacher ascriptions of SES, which, when low, lead to control behaviors, which lead to low achievement in students. [5]
Many resist, rather than comply. Educational theorist, Frederick Erikson, makes the case that it is through the poor handling of misunderstandings and conflicts that inevitably arise between teacher and student that we manage to turn many (especially minority) children off to learning in our schools. By way of culturally and personally unresponsive pedagogy, where teacher values and biases carry authority, economic and other power relations are played out in classroom communication. What he calls 'resistance theory' makes the case that resistance to learning grows when conflicts in the classroom are resolved in ways that children consider unfair, and in this way, rather than encouraging kids to try harder, authoritarian methods of education often turn kids off to school learning. This is not to say it turns them off to learning altogether, for kids are learning all the time. It merely turns them away from schools and too often toward other 'teachers', few of which have their best interest at heart (e.d. gangs, hate groups, and television). ... If the teacher fights the children with his formal authority from the early grades on, the children will equate the teacher's code with senseless suppression." [6] Some minority children simply "stop playing the game",[p.204] and win the "battle for attention" by withholding their own,[p.191] i.e. deliberate inattention,[p.191] and even deliberate failure,[p.193] which is counted as something of a success among peers.
Thus, Erikson asks that we as teachers take more responsibility for those conflicts that only they can reconcile toward better outcomes, sometimes just by understanding. Anyone who has been through the western system of schooling is familiar with the overt power struggles that occur in our classrooms, whether personally or by observation of those held up as examples to the rest of us. We might not be as aware of the more subtle, and perhaps more destructive, forms of punishment dished out through the negative use of grades, labels, and personal feedbacks, but we can be sure those most affected are aware of what we ignore. Such teacher/learner interactions often lead to an ascription of blame to the student, but in fact, student reaction to teacher action is an emergent and constantly shifting phenomenon, Erikson argues, one which is continually negotiated, at both the institutional and existential levels, like the relationship of surfer to wave.[p.36] Failing to recognize this, teachers tend to attach a clinical label to student behaviors, ignoring in the process "the dialectical relation in which the teacher is inadvertently coproducing with students the very behavior that he or she is taking as evidence of an individual characteristic of the student. Given the power difference between teacher and student, what could be seen as an interactional phenomenon to which teacher and student both contribute ends up institutionalized as an official diagnosis of student deficiency."(Mehan 1978, 1980, 1987) (*repeated)
Seen this way, this interaction shows itself to be a political process acted out by individual teachers and students, as economic, race, generational and other power relations are played out in classroom communication.
Socrates gives us the example of an incompetent parent, teacher, or leader, who practices their authority in such a way that does not earn respect or allegiance from children, students, or constituents, and instead of winning their cooperation, actually elicits a resistant effect, that is, making them evermore “averse and reluctant to compliance,” and even has “the effect of making them take pride in disobeying their authority.”(p.353) By contrast, “those who are well looked after turn out to be grateful and to grow in their loyalty.”(p.316)[7] He cautions those who would treat any over whom they have power, that “you’ll gain more produce by sowing and planting what the land readily grows and nurtures than by sowing and planting what you want.”(p.341)[8]
Recognizing the interaction between teachers and students as a political process gives rise to an insightful point of view -- one which illuminated the difference in action and reaction, insistence and resistance. For "to speak of school success or failure is to speak of learning or not learning what is deliberately taught there."[p.36] "When we say they are 'not learning', what we mean is that they are not learning what school authorities, teachers, and administrators intend for them to learn as the result of intentional instruction."(Gering and Sangree 1979) "Learning is ubiquitous in human experience throughout the life cycle, and humans are very good at it," Erikson admits. "Yet in schools, deliberately taught learning seems to be a problem. It is [too often] differently distributed along lines of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and language backgrounds..."[p.36] "Learning what is deliberately taught can be seen as a form of political assent. Not learning can be seen as a form of political resistance."[p.36] Both actively rebellion and passive resistance can "provide a medium of resistance in a situation of political conflict."[p.41]
One example of this is the so called problem of the 'final t', a conflict brought about by trying to change the language habits of children who belong to minority groups who typically drop the final t in many words. Negative evaluations of the student’s communication style gives rise to distrust and resistance in the student. It is a small conflict, but it is not trivial if it escalates by was of a positive feedback loop that feeds itself into a generalized attitude of opposition. Resentment develops inside the child as cognitive dissonance between the cultures of home and school, and thus the relationship between teacher and student does not bond, at best, Erikson says, and at worst, can become pathological in their interaction patterns.[p.42]
Mutual trust is sacrificed, and over time students become increasingly alienated from school, and teachers from students.[p.41] A process Erikson calls 'complementary schizmogenesis' sets in, involving the "progressive cultural differentiation across time as a means of symbolic distancing between competing groups that are sub-systems of a larger system."[p.40] Conflict escalates by a positive feedback loop that feeds itself into a generalized attitude of opposition. Such that, "by the end of the year, the children spoke a more exaggerated form of that dialectic than they had done at the beginning of the year."[p.40] In this way, "Social bias in schooling orders the classroom in the same images as the society and in turn transmits the biases of the society to children." [9]
It may be, Erikson concludes, that the threat to trust inherent in engaging in such battles as that over pronunciation of the letter t may simply not be worth it in the long run.[p.47] More culturally responsive pedagogy would recognize that "to choose to fight and temporarily win a small battle over the pronunciation of a final consonant is to risk losing the war, by setting off a long-term process of schizmogenetic cultural conflict."[p.47] Thus, as teachers and institutions, we are behooved to reexamine what battles we believe to be worth the risk of this alienation, which could have lifelong consequences for the child. If deliberate instruction is to succeed, Erickson argues, "the legitimacy of the school and its teachers [must be] affirmed at the existential level as trust by individual students."[p.36-37] Therefore, we must move toward transformation in learning, not.
It is the relationship of trust which is the significant variable, Erikson argues, for "assent to the exercise of authority involves trust," and trust involves risk. It takes only a moment in time to turn trust one way or another, and to set up patterns of resistance that carry on indefinitely. In order to restore and preserve trust, we have to take seriously all impediments to it. For it is in the earning of trust that kids let down their learning blocks. Subtle respects foster trust: subtle controls foster resistance. The teacher is active in facilitating trust, and can transcend the inevitable miscommunications inherent in negative feedback and evaluations. Teachers must therefore be charged, Erikson argues, with responsibility for bringing out in a student one over another potential. Whereas teachers using authoritarian methods, which attach clinical labels to behaviors, ignore in the process "the dialectical relation in which the teacher is inadvertently coproducing with students the very behavior that he or she is taking as evidence of an individual characteristic of the student. Given the power difference between teacher and student, what could be seen as an interactional phenomenon to which teacher and student both contribute ends up institutionalized as an official diagnosis of student deficiency."(Mehan 1978, 1980, 1987) And the result is, understandably, resentment and resistance to what the students perceive to be unjust rules. As John Ogbu explains, students become cynical about the ends of formalized education, which are too often hegemonic reduction of variation. This is especially true of 'domestic minorities', who perceive it as the continuation of generations of injustice and inequality which sets the odds of success heavily against them. Certainly to the student, the biased distribution of grades feels the same as the biased distribution of jobs and economic resources feels to the adult minority member. In this way, small biases in judgment played out in the classroom become 'butterfly effects' in that they are the genesis of social conflicts that play themselves out on much wider scales.
For minority people the schools have been experienced as damaging attempts to recruit their children into an alien culture, Their self-images and identities were ignored, or actively attacked." "[10] The results of this mistake are characterized by resentment, conflict, failure, and alienation on the part of both students and teachers. [11] And many (e.g. Rosepoint, Harlem, Sisala, Kanuri, and Malitbog, and Cree) come to see education as a process of recruitment and maintenance for the cultural system.
How much damage is done? Examples abound--such as the Mistassini child, "rewarded for conformity to norms which contradict those which they learned before coming to school", develops "severe conflicts" in identity. [12] And the Mopass child who, forced to deal with the differences in communication codes between Whiteman schools and Native American culture, [13] creates "an artificial self" to cope with the pressures of the Whiteman school. [14] The contradiction between the values of the dominant culture and ones own community and tradition can result in severe pressure for those who must adapt, and an easy release of this pressure is a complete rejection of dominant cultural values. This can develop into oppositional values in the subsystem in general, such as when American blacks enact pressure against academic success, seeing the drive for it as "acting white".[p.41] Those domestic minorities who choose to live by the rules of the dominant culture often suffer severe identity crisis. We might reasonably wonder whether this effect isn't felt among even the young of the dominant culture, who divide endlessly according to class, interest, appearance, etc. Over-control by a dominant population might simply be understood in terms as broad as 'adults' over 'children’ and rebellion result in the form of generation gaps and struggles.
So it is especially important to remember and incorporate into our methods the importance of affectional ties, bonding, and trust, in educational relations.[1][see Eskimo practices] Evidence shows that ‘culturally responsive pedagogy' can result in higher achievement for all students. By emphasizing the communication process, subtle respects can be seen to foster trust, and subtle controls to foster resistance. Therefore, the teacher is understood to be active, not passive, in this process.
Thus, taken broadly, together these explain why students and teachers alike make the choices that they make, showing how communication works, passively and actively, to reinforce, reproduce, and/or resist existing power relations.[p.44] This process is not deterministic -- in that teachers are recognized to play an active role, in developing a relationship of trust with students, who are reactive. Rather, teachers are seen to be able to facilitate one side of the subject, and one side of the student, over other potentials, so should be charged with responsibility for which they manifest. In other words, teachers must earn trust, and facilitating more such relationships by way of 'culturally responsive pedagogy' is understood to be the responsibility of schools.
Example of how small respects and disrespects can both magnify might include Hawaiian first-graders who respond with much more enthusiasm and comprehension when allowed to dialogue in the 'talk-story' style familiar to their customs, "in which conversational partners repeat and amplify each other's ideas, which makes for a conversation environment appropriate for the kind of reading that was being asked of the children--'comprehension'."[p.31] Subtle expectations of 'Turn-taking' behaviors can be seen as an exercise in over-control, or, if more respectful, can be a "symbolic affirmation of themselves and their community;"[p.31] If handled in a way that is respectful of cultural and personal differences, the child "can feel that there is some safety in this new world, and that the teacher likes you."[p.31]
A sound educational design would therefore "deliberately foster the development of affectional ties between teachers and learners and would not expect learning to occur unless or until this had occurred."[15]
“The way to teach respect, of course,” Manitonquat says, “is to show it and give it.”(OI, p.12)
[1] (McTighe 1998, 41)
[2] (McTighe 1998, 168)
[3] (Zull n.d., xiii)
[4] (Spindler 1987, 161, 197)
[5] (Spindler 1987, 443)
[6] (Spindler 1987, 202)
[7] (Xenophon 1990)
[8] (Xenophon 1990)
[9] (Spindler 1987, 449)
[10] (Spindler 1987, 168)
[11] (Spindler 1987, 164-165)
[12] (Spindler 1987, 385)
[13] (Spindler 1987, (p.176; also McDermott, p.193 )
[14] (Spindler 1987, 166)
[15] (Spindler 1987, 110)
On Readiness in Learning
The evidence that "readiness and approach behaviors preparatory to learning can be enhanced by reducing fear and apprehension levels" should give us cause to reexamine the role of affection in educational relations and the proper qualifications for teaching. The emotional climate for learning determines what Chance and Jolly called an "attention structure", which agrees with Mieklejohn (1927) and Mason (1965) that we shouldn't expect to see learning without affectional ties.[1] (see Harlow and Harlow, 1965; Montague, 1970; Lancaster, 1975; Gard and Meier, 1977) This would bring us to better understand the importance of individuation in education for the sake of differing readiness and approach behaviors;(Mason, 1965; Chance, 1978)
If it is true that "permitting them to cling until arousal levels drop will facilitate approach, play, and curiosity behaviors", then "emotional education programs", such as the ancients prescribed, this "suggests that individual self-paced teaching designs will be stronger than socially derived unified schedules. Since the rhythms of activity/inactivity and hormonal flows vary…from individual to individual, no two persons are necessarily in a state of readiness for learning at any particular time."[1] As with the importance of individuation in learning, teacher-centered schools and methods of indirect-direction interfere with these critically important processes.[2] Also worth mention, we have much to learn about "cycladic rhythms,"[1][Chapple, 1970], about temperament and emotional reactivity patterns,[1] and about the importance of peer play in learning success,[1] from which it follows that classroom practices that interfere with peer relations have the potential to do more damage then typically recognized to individual student’s success. Montessori and Dewey were on the right track here, according to Dobbert and Cooke, but they didn't go far enough.[1]
Gatto agrees with Wiggins and McTighe that we ought to “strive to develop greater autonomy in students so that they can find knowledge on their own and accurately self-assess and self-regulate.”[1]
For all these reasons, as Gatto argues, we need to “help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness – curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insights simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs” in order to take the risks necessary to advance their understanding.[3]
On the Intrinsic Motivation to Learn
Deci and Ryan say this: “From birth onward, humans, in their healthiest states, are active, inquisitive, curious, and playful creatures, displaying a ubiquitous readiness to learn and explore, and they do not require extraneous incentives to do so. This natural motivational tendency is a critical element in cognitive, social, and physical development because it is through acting on one’s inherent interests that one grows in knowledge and skills. The inclinations to take interest in novelty, to actively assimilate, and to creatively apply our skills is not limited to childhood, but is a significant feature of human nature that affects performance, persistence, and well-being across life’s epochs “Ryan & LaGuardia, in press).
If our “young...are not excited about learning,” Alexander Meiklejohn made clear, it is “because they have been made, by compulsions and inducements of various sorts, to think of it as something quite different from what it is.”[4]
“We can, by the use of external rewards and penalties, induce unwilling students to use books. But what, in the process, do books become for the student? What is the meaning of education for him? The effect is to make of learning a disagreeable task which, so long as one is under the control of teachers, must be performed for the sake of other values. And from this it follows, that, after the pressure is removed, all motive force for [such learning] disappears with it.”[5]
For this reason, Meiklejohn argues, we must see to it that, “[T]o the utmost possible limit, all secondary forces should be eliminated from the teaching process ... “[6][T]he plain fact is...that the methods of inducement and compulsion do not give us the desired result.[7]
“What the teacher needs,” James Zull argues in The Art of Changing the Brain, “is an understanding of intrinsic motivation, rewards that are automatically connected with learning, and that we have evolved to want. If we want to help people learn, we should not worry about how we can motivate them but try to identify what already is motivating them.”[8]
“[L]earning is a natural process when it has to do directly with the life of the learner. If people believe it is important to their lives, they will learn. It just happens.”[9]
So, “if we want to help people learn we must help them see how it matters in their lives.“[10]
As Deci and Ryan put it, “To fully internalize a regulation, and thus to become autonomous with respect to it, people must inwardly grasp its meaning and worth.”(2000)
As Meiklejohn says:
“[W]hat you wish as a teacher is that they should see for themselves the human necessity which underlies all lessons, should feel its drive and compulsion, should undertake their own education. ...”[11]
“The challenge in teaching is to bring the text to life by revealing …that the text speaks to our concerns.”[12] Helping them to find answers to the questions, why does it matter? How does it relate to me? What does and does not make sense?[13]
Initial interests, Zull adds, “are not the aim, the goal, of teaching; they are the materials to be used in reaching a goal which is set by nothing less than all the [ultimate] interests for which a human being should have regard, whether he has them now or not.”[14] “[T]he primary appeal of all liberal teaching is not to a student’s interests taken as separate things, but to a judgment of value and worthfulness made by him as a responsible human being.”[15]
Meiklejohn was many years ahead of his time in this warning. Indeed, as we’ve said, recent studies as those performed by Deci and Ryan have proved his insight correct. In their research into self-determination, they provide evidence that extrinsic rewards and constraints condition the perception of an instrumental relationship between the activity and the reward, which serves to obscure the existence of underlying motivations. In other words, desire for the conditioned stimuli (e.g. grades, approval, prestige, etc.) serves to block so much as awareness, let alone appreciation, of any unconditioned stimuli, that is, the love of learning itself, which the mind generates when left to it’s own primary purposes.
As Deci and Ryan explain, when the perceived locus of causality, which by origin exists in the domain of the intrinsic motivational subsystem that organizes and governs behavior, shifts into the extrinsic subsystem, then the student becomes alienated from the intrinsic reasons for performing the act.[16]
In this way, extrinsic authority and rewards as we have traditionally employed can actually dampen and even kill the intrinsic incentive to learn. When students come to learn for the grade, or to avoid punishments and stigmas, just as adults come to work for the money and other benefits, rather than the pleasure inherent in good work, all joy that might otherwise have been inherent in the activity is gone. Once this cause has taken effect, it is very hard to tell, and even more difficult to change. Students who are conditioned to learn for the sake of the positive regard of their teachers, high grades, awards, citations, and ultimately well paying jobs and careers, are at risk of learning and living for the wrong reasons and can become so alienated from truth as a purpose that we might rightly wonder if they have learned anything at all but how to jump through hoops.
All of which is the same reason that “anything that has the semblance of an external authority is rejected by Zen.”[17]Because if you have one eye on the reward, then you only have one eye on the work itself – on the learning – the intrinsic reward.
Researchers Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan (1983) put it this way:
“The quality of behavior and experience is different when one is intrinsically motivated than when one is extrinsically motivated. Experiences (or perceptions) of being self-determined and competent strengthen intrinsic motivation while experiences of being controlled and incompetent undermine it.
Intrinsic rewards are spontaneous feelings that accompany competent, self-determined responding. The focus on competence and choice as instruments for achieving desired reinforcements misses the essence of what intrinsic motivation is about. Competent, self-determined interactions are rewarding in their own right.”
And while extrinsic rewards can be satisfying in their way, their price should not go unnoticed, for evidence shows that agent response to extrinsic motivation actually kills intrinsic motivation, which is to say, the joy of doing something for its own sake.
“The research began with the demonstration that extrinsic rewards can undermine intrinsic motivation (Deci, 1971; Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973), which we interpret in terms of the reward shifting people from a more internal to external perceived locus of causality. Although the issue of rewards has been hotly debated, a recent meta-analysis (Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, in press) confirms that virtually every type of expected tangible reward made contingent on task performance does, in fact, undermine intrinsic motivation. Furthermore, not only tangible rewards, but also threats (Deci & Cascio, 1972), deadlines (Amabile, DeJong, & Lepper, 1976), directives (Koestner, Ryan, Bernieri, & Holt, 1984), and competition pressure (Reeve & Deci, 1996) diminish intrinsic motivation because, according to CET, people experience them as controllers of their behavior. On the other hand, choice and the opportunity for self-direction (e.g., Zuckerman, Porac, Lathin, Smith, & Deci, 1978) appear to enhance intrinsic motivation, as they afford a greater sense of autonomy.”[18]
“Extrinsically motivated behaviors — those that are executed because they are instrumental to some separable consequence —can vary in the extent to which they represent self-determination.” “Differences in attitudes and adjustment were also associated with the different types of extrinsic motivation. For example, the more students were externally regulated the less they showed interest, value, or effort, and the more they indicated a tendency to blame others, such as the teacher, for negative outcomes. Introjected regulation was positively related to expending effort, but was also related to more anxiety and to poorer coping with failures. Identified regulation was associated with greater enjoyment of school and more positive coping styles. And intrinsic motivation was correlated with interest, enjoyment, felt competence, and positive coping.” What’s more, “a person who has identified with the value of an activity might lose that sense of value under a controlling mentor and move ‘‘backward’’ into an external regulatory mode.”
“Intrinsically motivated behaviors, which are performed out of interest and satisfy the innate psychological needs for competence and autonomy are the prototype of self-determined behavior.”[19]
Deci and Ryan differentiate between self-determination and self-regulation, arguing that when behavior is self-regulated:
“There is the same controller-controlled relationship; the only difference is that both the controller and the controlled are inside the skin of the same person. It is a person pushing him or herself around.”
“[I]ntrinsic motivation is based in the innate need for competence and self-determination. Intrinsically motivated behavior is the archetype of self-determination. One follows one’s interests; one accepts challenges from the world around; one attends to and is involved with the activity at hand; and one is free of the pressure associated with external controls. One’s internal nature, one’s intrinsic growth and development as a unique individual are the guiding elements of this type of behavior.”
This then is the lesson of philosophy inherent in taking responsibility for the search for truth, justice, wisdom. It is not, as Socrates would argue, a lesson we can ‘teach’ to our young, but it is one we can and should encourage them to learn first hand. We can encourage self-determination by help our young to think for themselves, follow their own intrinsic motivations, to promote good reasoning as an intrinsic part of early education.
If the ancients are right (as only those who take up their purposes ever discover), then the purpose of education ought to be to awaken, develop and discipline the mind in this way – navigating by intrinsic motivation. ,In this way, we can make it its own master, and find that dialectical balance that makes vision possible.
If the end of education was enlightenment in this sense, it would help our young understand the true value of what is inside them – of inner wealth. Which would, in turn, help them see that the goals we typically pursue are in fact too trivial for enduring interest, compared to the higher goods that are available to all who earn them.
Education based on a dialectic ideal would promote the value of intrinsic motivation, and likewise, intrinsic (karmic) rewards – which are more satisfying than any others we have been taught and conditioned to value. This truth is the central principle at the heart of all wisdom traditions - would that our system of education understood its value.
And for this reason, "[Children] must devote themselves especially to the discipline which will make them masters of the technique of asking and answering questions....Dialectic...study..."(Plato's Republic, 255)
As Mill puts it:
"No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead. Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think. Not that it is solely, or chiefly, to form great thinkers that freedom of thinking is required. On the contrary, it is as much and even more indispensable to enable average human beings to attain the mental stature which they are capable of. . . . Where there is tacit convention that principles are not to be disputed, where the discussions of the greatest questions which can occupy humanity is considered to be closed, we cannot hope to find that generally high scale of mental activity which has made some periods of history so remarkable. Never when controversy avoided the subjects which are large and important enough to kindle enthusiasm was the mind of a people stirred up from its foundations . . . and we can expect no fresh start until we again assert our mental freedom."[p. 41-42]
On the Wisdom of Less Teaching
For this reason, they conclude, “Teaching for understanding means, ironically, less teaching.” (*) Indeed, “The ultimate aim is to make ourselves unneeded as teachers.”(W&M, p.165)
Wiggins and McTighe quote Gragg (1940), who observed that:
“Teachers…are particularly beset by the temptation to tell what they know…Yet no amount of information…in itself improves insight and judgment or increasing ability to act wisely.”
“[S]tudents must come to see that understanding means that they must figure things out, not simply wait for and write down teacher explanations… Thus teaching for understanding means teaching in ways that challenge resistance to new ideas….This is the great irony of teaching. At times, being observant and silent is the best way to teach.”(W&M, p.175)
Traditionally, “[I]n the teacher-centered paradigm the professor is the expert information giver and the only evaluator in the course. Usually the direction of feedback during the course is from professor to student.”(Wiggins &McTighe, p. 142) But, Huba and Freed optimistically observe, “As professors and students shift from a teacher-centered to a learner-centered paradigm, ideas and practices will be put in place that support a comfortable view of mutual feedback.”(p.143) This stands to improve the learning climate in such a way that the “comfort leads to more open channels of communication and increased dialogue in class discussions.”(p.144)
If students are lucky, “Professors will begin to view themselves more as partners in helping students learn than as expert information givers… Dialogue between professors and students will increase, and respect for students as people and learners will be a more visible component of the course…the environment will be more supportive of a mutual feedback loop in which clear and accurate information is shared…. There will be mutual trust, a perception that feedback is a joint effort, and the type of conversation that encourages the learner to be open and talk.”(In Learner–Centered Assessment on College Campuses: Shifting the Focus from Teaching to Learning, Huba and Freed, p.143)
[1] (Spindler 1987, 100)
[2] (Spindler 1987, 110-112)
[3] John Taylor Gatto, Against Schools, Harper’s “School on a Hill” forum, September 2001
[4] (Meiklejohn 1932, 128)
[5] (Meiklejohn 1932, 125)
[6] (Meiklejohn 1932, 125)
[7] (Meiklejohn 1932, 121)
[8] (Zull n.d., 53)
[9] (Zull n.d., 52)
[10] (Zull n.d., 52)
[11] (Meiklejohn 1932, 128)
[12] (McTighe, Understanding By Design 1998, 49)
[13] (McTighe, Understanding By Design 1998, 48)
[14] (Zull n.d., 58)
[15] (Zull n.d., 57)
[16] (Ryan 1983, 58)
[17] (Suzuki 1964, 44)
[18] (Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations: Classic Definitions and New Directions (Contemporary Educational Psychology, 2000)
[19] (Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations: Classic Definitions and New Directions (Contemporary Educational Psychology, 2000)
On Deregulating Our Children
Why would one want to deregulate one’s children? Perhaps for the same reason so many in our conservative age are so fond of the principle of deregulation toward their own 'governmental' authorities and regulators. People resist being told what to do -- and believe they would do the right thing better if left to their own reasonings. Whether this is true or not in such realms as government regulation of big business is debatable. But it is certainly true with regard to learning. We literally cannot stop kids from learning -- except, as Gatto would argue, by standing in their way. If we believe as strongly as we lately seem to that government must keep its nose out of our business, then the argument has to hold in all cases where extrinsic forces stand in the way of the natural self direction of living beings. (Of course, this rhetoric turns out to be a ruse designed to promote freedom, not for people, but for corporations…but that subterfuge escapes the notice of those who never learned to look for contradictions in the reasoning of those who, say, get themselves elected appealing to people love of freedom, when what they really mean is some people freedom to impose their views on others, which is not freedom, but license…but more on that later). Anyway, one might be able to defend extrinsic incentives which allows a choice in the end, but mandatory compulsive authority, especially over something like learning, has the potential to ruin the love of it, and thus requires more justification than we bother giving our kids for the shameless over-authority exercised in institutionalized schools over what they learn and when they learn it.
The principle of deregulation, if it properly applies at the level of government and citizens, also properly applies at the level of teacher and student, for we have natural rights in either case, economic, political and educational relations. Such relations deserve further examination, because they are not properly hierarchical relations in which one group assumes the right of authority over another, that is, the right to author the other's actions, and given this, it is ironic indeed that the importance of this freedom was given such a strong defense by '90s Republicans, who really only meant to assert the rights of business to operate unhindered, but managed to give a boost to the rights of individual freedom from wrongful judgment and authority, which advanced (albeit inadvertently) the rights of individuals from institutional constraints across the board -- not an end they would have promoted had they seen it coming. So while they historically hold the most Calvinist of philosophies dear, being among the worst offenders of the moral law that limits unjust authority, modern libertarians have nonetheless shot themselves in the foot with their push for deregulation of business practices, for its opened the door for arguments against all those who would abuse power in all other realms of institutional activity -- including, and most especially, in education.
So we might discuss 'free market education' further, and to hold faith that we are growing out of this age of cynicism, of rampant disregard of individual differences and disrespect for how different peoples lives have different challenges, underappreciated for how significantly difficult certain challenges, such as poverty and racism, really are to overcome, and failure of empathy for the true beauty and depth of every living thing, in short, a failure of the golden rule -- for too little do we remember the imperative to do onto others as we would have them do onto us, perhaps because we do not even know ourselves. or what we would have done to us, given the choice.
It is important to understand how Socrates and Aristotle would have advised us to remedy the state we find ourselves in regarding education; contemporary theorists, as well as more recent thinkers (like Dewey, Mead and Meiklejohn) would add to the dialogue that the true purpose of teachers and schools is to help individual children toward their own truest purpose, meaning, to help them discover and actualize their unique intrinsic potential, i.e. their best work, indeed, their best self. The insight drawn from these great thinkers gives us perspective and puts us in a good position to make a convincing case for a better, or at least more inclusive, method of education than we currently have in place in this country.
As we have said, we must begin with the question -- what is the nature of the educational relationship? The justice is in the consent, they would say, and this is the heart of Socrates', Plato's' and Aristotle's philosophy, and it is this lesson I want to draw from the Socratic dialogue. That being the case, the challenge, to those who would rule over others, is to change the authoritative structure of educational relationships into respectful teaching relationships -- i.e. to guide instead of force, command or coerce. This is wherein it is fair to argue that politics and education are one, at least when they are functioning properly. As * put it, “Education is the function of government closest to the people.”
Our goal ought to be to provide a felt education, meaning, for the child to be the proper judge of when he has learned something, has understood. Difficult as it may sound, given our well-conditioned educational habits, it's up to us to follow their interests, not grade them on how well they follow ours! It's our job as teachers to empathize with flexible mind, with each child with whom we work, and to help guide by listening and aiding the child/person from where he is at to whatever the next level or step might be.
That's the job of a Socratic teacher, and it means absolutely individuating each child, like we would a friend. Are we ever able to accomplish this completely? probably not, but it is an ideal to aim at, a target, a standard by which to compare ourselves in order to better our teaching. Our purpose must be to be clear enough about our purpose to be able to be true to what it is...to keep the process of education honest...to aim continually at our ideal goals...to constantly realign ourselves to be living up to our pledge, and thus, to do our best, which is never perfect, but always perfecting.
And toward that end, we must think like revolutionaries, as Steve Jobs put it, and use business methods to our noblest ends. If it can be done well, we will do our best to see that it is. For if it is going to be an entity in its own right, then it is going to be a good one, well-motivated and true to its purpose -- of which the bottom line has to be, are we doing right by kids? What’s actually good for them, not merely what we perceive to be good for our economy, or for their economic good, at the cost of their character or spiritual interests.. Only then can and should we profit. Because only with honorable motivation can true success be achieved. So we must ask ourselves, are we being a true teacher, a true friend, to this child? Are we giving what we would have liked to have received from our teachers? Meaning, are we being fair? Being honest? Being true to our own best selves, that they might learn to be theirs?
Our job should be to get to know each child, through ongoing dialogue, as an individual, as well as in group interaction, and, as a team, with the parents and family, with the purpose of helping them find their hidden potentials, and recover the love of learning they were born with. This is not an easy task, especially with some already resistant kids, if only because we are only one influence in a life of many influences, but we can promise to do our best, imperfect as that is, to take each child seriously as a thinker, and a doer, and the person he or she would like to be. Every child has hidden potentials, and usually they're not hidden very deeply, and it is our goal to help them see around the doubts and fears they have internalized, and to take themselves seriously as intelligent human beings, capable of working with their environment to actualize the lives they desire, and make their best and happiest self become real.
Again, we are but one influence among many, so we cannot eliminate all barriers to success in a given child's life. But we can help them see that what is and what is not in their control, and help eliminate those blocks that are inside them. After all, pre-requisite to doing anything is believing that you can. In other words, you cannot do anything you don't try to do, and you cannot try to do anything you don't believe in your heart to be possible. The forces that discourage that belief, call it confidence, or self-respect, are many -- including some that are harder than others to overcome, such as poverty. Many such powerful extrinsic forces can be overcome only by an indomitable will to succeed, for which permission to dream might be necessary.
And eventually, adults who'd like access to tools and teachers to help them uncover unexplored potentials will come and ask for help as well, help them fill in the potholes along the highway of their education...all of us who 'missed that day of class', for one reason or another. Those who learn the hard way that the target we take aim at may not take us where we really wanted to go, but if we keep asking ourselves anew, which way to go, it will take us to what is best. Learning is a cumulative process, and going back to fill in the holes is part of the fun, to finally come to understand something that has long eluded us feels wonderful, restores confidence, mental exercise strengthens the mind, and the resolution to become one's better self inspires one's children and students.
Teaching must evolve to involve helping each child to believe in what's possible, and we do this best by aiding in the history of their successes. Learning can seem like a slow process (especially to those in doubt, who often need constant reassurance), but we take heart at progress, and urge parents to do the same, for not only is it better than regress (as I felt was my daughter's direction when she was registered in high school), but the very presence of doubt can be the cause of the underconfidence which is halting progress. Learning is a matter of feedback loops. Our job is to imaginatively search out those tools that each child might best use in any given learning challenge, whatever they might be (eventually including computers and internet technology), and in the meantime, to help them grow the self-concept they'll need to continue the learning that will move them toward their dreams. Some might worry that we could set them up for let down in this way, but to that I would respond in the words of Socrates, "that we will be better, braver, and happier people if we believe it right and wise to look for what we don't know, than if we believe there is no point in looking because what we don't know we can never discover." Dreams, like knowledge, are actualized, not merely in the realization, but in the progress that moves toward them -- which is to say, in the wisdom to believe.
So we might be on the verge of a true adventure in education, for we have, given the potential of our technology and the condition of our schools, the unique, and unprecedented opportunity, indeed responsibility, to reinvent the wheel of education. As with anything worth doing, timing is critical. Learning is among the most fundamental of human functions, knowledge the most fundamental of human needs, and gone wrong, it can ruin lives. Left to malfunction, without challenge, it can ruin entire generations of young people who would otherwise live constructive lives, if only we would help them do so, instead of engaging them in patterns of political competition among themselves over quantities of zero sum rewards. We know better. As teachers we can do better by them that we are allowed to in the education system such as it is. Dedicated and gifted teachers are often wasted on countless hours of grading and internal politics. Hard as we try, there is hardly time for notice, let alone individuation, of the gifts and challenges of particular individual students. With too many students and too little time, we are reduced to delivering lectures, and testing a few days later to see if they remember what was said a few days before.
This is, arguably, the best we could do, until now, at least, and the result is that we've become very good at sorting the young in this way, according to how well and quickly they do what they're told, good at judging with praise and blame those behaviors we like and dislike, which too often comes down to the art of guessing who will succeed and who will 'flunk' (a dastardly word, known, strangely enough, only in the vocabulary of schools) according as we know others judge. Yet many of us teachers, and I suspect, many of us parents, many of whom are teachers ourselves in one realm or another, share with us a sense that we can do better by our kids. Given all the many challenges of our 'new world' we can finally do education as well as we -- most of us -- once dreamed we could.
So come with us into this new world of learning, where children can find and enjoy teachers who have time for them, and can qualify that time with the rich availability of truly magical resources, the tools that engage the young in the world of knowledge by their already well-developed love of technology, and transfixed them in the fascination of all there is -- for each and every one of us -- to learn.
No longer constrained by proximity or availability or even by literacy, through the internet we have the world at our finger tips, quite literally, and if nothing else, this power of instantaneous access gives us the potential to cover so much more territory in the course of our education, and if not to finish it sooner, then to learn to continue our education well into the pattern of our lives. Not that online interaction will replace human contact or even traditional methods of education, it will only make it richer and more adventurous, and it will begin simply and humbly by offering aid, tutoring for lack of a better work, though 'coaching' is more like it, to young people who are entitled to the best we have to offer them. So we must attempt to answer to the need for better, personalized, education…especially since the time is so ripe.
On Education Without Compulsion
“Do we really need school?” Gatto asks. “I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: …is this deadly routine really necessary?” “Two million [and counting] happy home-schoolers” would suggest that it’s not.
“We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of ‘success’ as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, ‘schooling,’ but historically that isn’t true…plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons.”(*)
In fact, “A considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right” – including Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Lincoln, Edison, Melville, Twain, Conrad, and Margaret Mead.
The good news, Gatto says, is that the ‘tricks and traps’ of American school systems are relatively “easy to avoid:”
“Genius is as common as dirt,” Gatto concludes. We suppress it only b/c we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. Gatto’s solution, while it pricks at the conceit of our habitual methods, “is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.”[1]
For this reason, Gatto argues, we all must:
“Challenge [our] kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues.” “Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology – all the stuff school teachers know well enough to avoid.” We must help them “develop an inner life so that they’ll never be bored.”
“Schools train children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventures.”
[1] John Taylor Gatto, Against Schools, Harper’s “School on a Hill” forum, September 2001