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I agree with you completely, Miss Eyre. In fact, it was a social studies teacher who complained to me about the workshop model. That’s not my area, but I could see group work doing well for discussions of current events, or debates. However, some social studies teachers complain they can’t really work in current events as they have to teach whatever relates to whatever Regents exam they’re preparing kids for. That’s kind of disappointing–I’d hope my kid’s social studies teacher would help to inspire an interest in current events.

I do group work when I have an activity that calls for it, or when I know I’ll be able to effectively get my kids to converse. I favor pair work more because it can lead to more participation. In ESL, you have to be very careful to make sure the kids converse in English. If I group them at the wrong time, or with the wrong partners, the kids will converse in their first languages and the activity will be an utter waste of time–counter-productive, even.

This is superb, Arthur. It makes me laugh because it makes sense! You nailed it in many places, including here: “The problem, perhaps, is too many people are paid too much to figure out what makes things work. They need instant results or they’re likely to need real jobs in the very near future.” This search for the one right way of teaching is silly, but there’s an awful lot of money and hype invested in it.

As you say, we should be versatile, and we should also be true to ourselves. Indeed it would be awful if everyone tried to write like Joseph Heller–they couldn’t do it. Nor can all teachers be warm and nurturing, or stern and forbidding. Nor do all classes need exactly the same thing.

I look forward to Part Two!

Diversity is the prerequisite for abundant life. That same principle, I think, holds true for intellectual and cultural life. Schools should have such rich environments. So, who gives a damn if a teacher reaches students one way or another? Cooperative, developmental and/or workshop… Whatever works. It’s anal, careerist bureaucrats that have the single minded approach. 

Why not “differentiate” the instruction? Sorry for using that word. Besides the fact that I have been unable to find any cognitive science article supporting the premise that we should teach to the student mode over the content mode, it’s also a futile burden on teacher planning time. How do I guide my kinesthetic students to do a dance to the Declaration of Independence in lieu of writing an essay about it?

Back to motivation. I use the premise of teacher bias in the classroom. I am hopelessly biased in favor of democracy and freedom and use every opportunity to shamelessly indoctrinate my students. There are neocon colleagues of mine doing their best to indoctrinate the students to their way of thinking; join the military (so their own kids don’t have to…), me-first competition ethic… I want students to be exposed to these teachers as well. Let them decide who has a handle on reality. It works as a motivator because the teacher is being authentic. 

I vote for diversity and authenticity. 

Good grief.
Why should there even need to be a “Part Two?”
Shouldn’t an effective teacher be able to get through to me on the first try, regardless of whether I was paying attention, and regardless of my parents’ involvement or lack thereof?

(Kidding, kidding, please.)

Why is the experts always seem to lecture ( chalk & talk ) as they tell you that is not how students learn best. Things that make you go hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

“They complimented me profusely on my use of cooperative learning, and I decided it was best to thank them without explaining why I’d embraced this particular methodology….”

Your a lot of fun to read! Great stuff. Hope you win in the upcoming election. They need your sense of humor in the UFT exec. board not to mention your intelligence.

The one phrase I always loved to hear when some big shot came in to explain the establishment’s latest directive was, “The research shows that such and such is a far better procedure.” Of course I would go look for the research and never find it.

To me ther problem was their desire to turn my subject area, mathematics, from a natural preparation for post secondary mathematics to elementary mathematics. Nobody said high school must be fun. I had to work hard to master my math in high school and all my teachers taught developmental lessons. There is not the slightest proof there is anything wrong with the developmental lesson in mathematics; especially in preparation for what students will face in college. Can you imagine a college professor reaching into his or her bag to pull out algebra tiles to show students how to combine polynomials?

Of course one of the reasons for the demise of our country in mathematics is the imposition of these fuzzy math courses such as IMP (they offered it in Philadelphia where it was called PIMP) and when I was working as an AP Math, I had a Superintendent who decreed the only way to teach math was anything but the developmenal lesson because math was supposed to be fun (remember we’re talking about high school kids)….thank goodness I retired before they “mandated” the workshop model in 9th year math. Here is what we do. If kids cannot learn secondary school subjects prtoperly, it is our job to dumb them down, to make them fun. Of course, as I have discovered by teaching in a CUNY college, they come in ill prepared despite the fact their transcripts show they passed the Math A (now integrated Algebra) Regents exam; sure they passed…if they got 28 credits out of 84, they were considered to have passed. How many more students will our educational leaders ruin, destroy their chances to suceed in college before they learn the importance of properly teaching secondary school subjects on a secondary school level.

“The problem, perhaps, is too many people are paid too much to figure out what makes things work.”

First they are paid too much to “figure it out”, and then they’re paid too much to train us in their gospel, and then to continue selling us the same stuff. Lucy Calkins must be one wealthy woman. Her workshop materials/books are the gifts that keeps on giving, I mean costing.

Good practice should be passed around from teacher to teacher in a supportive, collaborative manner. I’ve been teaching a long time, and it’s a wonder how much gets recycled (and charged for).

As usual, another fine piece by Mr. Goldstein.

I’d just like to suggest some possible sources for the here-today, gone-tomorrow fads and fake panaceas that are constantly being imposed on teachers, students and schools.

One of them has been ongoing, at least as long as I’ve been a student or teacher, and that is the ease, comfort (and financial benefits, for some) of proposing a cure-all technique, rather than face the difficult, expensive and years-long effort of adequately funding the schools at the classroom level and providing a comprehensive web of services and backstops for needy families.

For example, the powers that be will seemingly will do anything to avoid directing resources to lower class size in urban districts, just as they will go to great lengths to avoid discussion of issues outside the schools that affect student academic performance. Instability in family situations, employment and housing? That’s all off the table, and monied interests outside the schools pay for pseudo-scientific research that places all responsibility on the backs of teachers. This provides the additional benefit of placing a hammer above the heads of working teachers, who are constantly being poked, prodded, cajoled, “incentivized,” and when that doesn’t work, threatened to utilize yet another technique that any seasoned teacher has already used in some form or another (but was foolishly more committed to actual teaching than to marketing).

Another reason for the widespread infestation of these sham panaceas is far less benign, and comes from the efforts to impose a business model on teachers. Billionaire businessmen who purchase elective office also like the imprimatur of name brands like Teachers College and Harvard to try and dominate teacher’s pesky habits of controlling their own classrooms. But a business model cannot permit worker control of the work process, and will go to great lengths to overcome it. It goes back at least to the early 20th century, and Frederick Winslow Taylor’s efforts to bring “scientific management” (sound familiar?) to the industrial workplace.

Taylor began as a shop-floor worker himself, a machinist, at a time when metal workers still had proud craft traditions and controlled the pace of work. By utilizing time and motion studies, Taylor broke down the work process into its basic components, in an effort to take away the autonomy that highly-skilled machinists had traditionally enjoyed, to de-skill the work and bring it under the control of management.

Thus the explanation why, for example, the head of the New Teacher Project is not an educator, but a labor relations lawyer. Thus Eli Broad’s revealing statement that he couldn’t care less about instruction, but is focused on school governance. And thus, the bogus halo provided to “Lemov’s Taxonomy,” (again, note the fraudulent scientific terminology) in which a self-proclaimed expert (who barely had a cup of coffee in the classroom) is handsomely subsidized to come up with a management checklist for keeping teachers in line.

At the moment, the only reason for being optimistic that this cohort of opportunists, self-promoters, parasites, and deluded-idealists-played-for-rubes will fail is the common sense and humanity of actual teachers, actual children and actual parents.

Arthur,

Your reference to Fast Food Nation and the de-skilling and concomitant collapse of job protections in the meatpacking industry is apt, and one of many examples of the degradation of work in the past century. The masterpiece on this topic is Harry Braverman’s “Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century.”

The classroom is one of the last holdouts of worker control of the labor process – which is best for students, since it is their teachers who are actually with them day after day – and thus the unrelenting attacks against teachers and their unions.

Richard Mills told a colleague that the reason he didn’t embrace new methods was because he was too lazy to rewrite his lesson. What Mills didn’t know was that this particular colleague never reused old lessons and exams and was a master at what he was doing. This happpened at a meeting which introduced Math A, the end of math instruction in NYS. The teacher was just standing up for education. Arthur, could Mills be talking about you? Are you just too lazy to embrace a new method of teaching? (Only kidding, so no one jump down my throat.)