THE WEATHER OUTSIDE IS FRIGHTFUL--BUT THINKING IS DELIGHTFUL

It’s an Ezra Jack Keats kind of day here. We got 14 inches of snow overnight as the new year crept in, and he who has the four wheel drive rules this temporary universe—no school today, which should be the first day back after a two-week holiday sojourn.

I love snow days. Besides the extra hours of sleep, there’s the luxury of unstructured time to dig into the important rather than urgent professional reading, neglected ed-blogs, musing about the big questions in education. Teaching school has rightly been compared to fire-fighting, addressing one crisis after another, with little time for contemplation or sweeping ideas about what is truly worth learning. I know many very competent teachers who are efficient planners and organizers—the clean-desk-before-going-home types—but the teachers I admire most are those who see beyond the never-ending parade of assignments, activities and grades. The wonderers, as in: I wonder if any of this will be important in the long run—a question well worth asking every now and then.

It’s easy to teach school on auto-pilot, especially in the past half-dozen years, with the rise of “managed instruction” and “lesson protocols”— nifty euphemisms for “we decide what counts and how you’re going to teach it.” Enough such management and teachers stop asking critical questions and just start shoveling out the content—which is why this interview, with Grant Wiggins was the perfect snow day antidote.

It was (enlightening) fun to read Wiggins’ thoughts about whether young minds should be left alone to answer essential questions, those big-idea queries that theoretically engage and focus student thinking. Wiggins says that leaving students on their own to construct personal meaning to provocative questions is “dereliction of duty,” that we need to teach kids to evaluate and critique their own opinions and beliefs, to poke at their thinking. Here’s a quote: You are entitled to your opinion, but that doesn't make it intelligent or defensible. Indeed, I think there are no Right (thought-ending) answers — but some answers are better (more defensible intellectually) than others.

I can hear the acolytes of E.D. Hirsch screaming—no right answers! Of course, standardized tests have right answers, just as standardized people have a common body of accepted knowledge; they do things correctly. Given the speed at which the world is changing, however, might a certain mental plasticity be an even greater asset than that inflexible body of fixed knowledge? Just asking.

Wiggins also notes students want to believe their ideas have value—a sentiment that struck me as powerful. Much of the discourse around low achievement data presumes that kids don’t know much until we teach them—that students’ impressions and answers aren’t worthy unless they align with official curricular knowledge. Having sat with a circle of third graders discussing the Drinking Gourd, two full years before their formal introduction to the Civil War era, I can testify that 8 year olds have profound, sincere and divergent thoughts about human worth and captivity. They also like to sing—and get big points from me for that simple detail.

The plow just went by. There will be school tomorrow—and kids acclimated to late nights, rich food and lots of entertainment will stumble into their classrooms like a subset of the seven dwarfs—Sleepy, Grumpy and Dopey. Will there be essential questions to jump start their brains?

Comments

[TeachMoore]

I especially liked your last point about students' prior knowledge and their ability to think and do things beyond the what the curriculum guide or test blueprint says they should. Unfortunately, that extensive knowledge and creative thinking can get them in trouble on their standardized tests. I once saw a student who came up with creative (and correct) responses to questions on the state test that were not among the choices given. She wanted to write them in the margins and get credit for them, which of course was illegal. I think we are cheating untold numbers of children out of expressing their true intellectual potential because we are forced to use such pathethically limited measurement tools.

[Nancy Flanagan]

Hey, Renee. Thanks for your post. I think we should give extra credit to all plausible answers and bonus points for creativity. It's that innovative, cross-pollinating spirit that will rule the world in 2025.