Good Old Alfie

Alfie Kohn is one of my heroes in education.  Though he is more liberal in his education beliefs than I, he still does a great job questioning the status quo, especially when it comes to grades and high stakes testing.

I came across this link to one of his best articles, "Confusing Harder With Better."

In his essay,  Kohn questions our insistence upon more rigor and higher standards.  Is this good?  What do these things really mean?  Are we just pouring on the work just to say we have higher standards?  How about making our students work smarter and not harder?

Here are some of my favorite passages -

"The intellectual life is being squeezed out of classrooms, schools are being turned into giant test-prep centers, and many students - as well as some of our finest educators - are being forced out."

How much attention is truly paid to the intellectual life of students?  How often do we look at them as co-learners or - gasp - learners from which we could learn something?

"When you watch students slogging through textbooks, memorizing lists, being lectured at, and working on isolated skills, you begin to realize that nothing bears a greater responsibility for undermining educational excellence than the continued dominance of traditional instruction."

How much time do we have our students do these things? 

"In short, maximum difficulty isn't the same as optimal difficulty."

I think this is all about having students work smarter and not just harder.  A great example of this was my first theme for College Comp 2.  I gave students the choice of doing a multi-media project (an iMovie or slideshow or blog) or writing a traditional essay.  Those who did the paper, did just fine, but they didn't really push themselves.  However, those who chose to create blogs or iMovies, absolutely poured themselves into the work.  And they learned far more than I ever could have hoped.  I'm not called to do away with essays, but a balance of different types of work is not a bad thing. 

"We have to look at the whole method of instruction, the underlying theory of learning, rather than just quibbling about how hard the assignment is or how much the students must strain."

The theory of learning?  When did we ever study that in depth in college?  I had two excellent methods classes, but - for the most part- my education classes (measurement and evaluation, human relations, discipline . . .) were ridiculously inadequate to what I encountered on my first day of real teaching.  Why for a person who spends so much time getting students to learn, did I have to basically teach myself about it?

"If kids are going to be forced to learn facts without context, and skills without meaning, it's certainly handy to have an ideology that values difficulty for its own sake."

This passage reminds me of the great quote from Linda Darling-Hammond: "If we taught babies to talk as most skills are taught in school, they would memorize lists of sounds in a predetermined order and practice them alone in a closet."



"Beyond the issue of how many of us could meet these standards is an equally provocative question: How many of us need to know this stuff -- not just on the basis of job requirements but as a reflection of what it means to be well-educated? Do these facts and skills reflect what we honor, what matters to us about schooling and human life?  Often, the standards being rammed into our children's classrooms are not merely unreasonable but irrelevant.  It is the kinds of things students are being forced to learn, and the approach to learning itself, that don't ring true.  The tests that result -- for students and sometimes for teachers -- are not just ridiculously difficult but simply ridiculous."

I love the idea (and this was proven by two of my College Comp 2 students in their great video, "Are You Smarter than a Millennial?") that how many adults could pass the standards we impose on children.  I'm not opposed to having younger generations learn new skills, but we always seem to have a sense of talking down to kids when we focus on what they don't know.  But do we ever examine what we don't know?

If a student - or better yet - a group of students would learn from planning, raising funds for, designing, and then building a memorial to Iraqi war veterans in their local community. To top it off, students could advertise and design a celebration to unveil the memorial.   This could incorporate a myriad of disciplines - math, business, history, sociology, science, English, advertising, music, tech writing . . .  heck, it might involve every single discipline offered in the school!


Now, students could do that - and think of all that they'd learn - or students could read a chapter in their books about the Iraqi war and then take a test.  Or they could study other skills in isolated classes.  But how much more effective would it be if they could put all of that knowledge and all of those skills into actual practice.  Talk about hands-on and real world skills!

But you can't pass a high stakes test that way and keep your school off AYP that way.

It's a damn shame.