aboutlearning

Blog week 11/23 

“The purpose of schooling is not in keeping in school but in pushing out into the world young citizens who are soaked in habits of thoughtfulness and reflectiveness, joy and commitment.”

—Ted Sizer in Horace’s School

 

Is the Rigor in the Standards?

 

Standards are the structural content components, the base all students need. They are a part of rigor, but only a part. In 4MAT language, they are the Quadrant Two ideas and understandings that make up the content fields. They also list the skills, the Quadrant Three practices necessary for students to do the work of manipulating, testing and critiquing the ideas and procedures for themselves. Teachers need both the ideas and the lists of skills as their instructional base. They are the What and the How of learning. 

 

But they are only a part of the learning cycle, the bottom half of 4MAT. They must not be taught by themselves. When students receive only knowledge and skills, they miss the reasons and the possibilities of learning, the Why and the If, 4MAT’s Quadrants One and Four. In the absence of Quadrant One (meaning) and Quadrant Four (creativity, possibilities), our students are bored or lost.

 

Learner Centered and Standards-Based

 

We must connect the information and skills in ways that intrigue and motivate learners, so they master them and use them in their own lives. We must put the Self of each student into these ideas and skills. We must become adept at Quadrants One and Four. 

 

Each teacher has particular kids in particular places and in particular times, 

All teachers must consider the context of the learner’s worlds and must understand the uniqueness and heart of individual learners. Teachers must mold and fit instruction to their learners. 

 

Practical Issues for Teachers

 

So how do teachers, with the current crush of standards coverage do this in practice? Do teachers have choices? Are the standards a set of handcuffs or a treasure trove of content ideas? Consider the following example from literature.  A compilation of several state definitions looks like this:

 

Students will have an understanding that literature addresses universal elements of what it means to be human, and will have knowledge of literary elements, character, plot setting, etc.  

 

No problem with that!  As a teacher, this standard offers many choices. I can create a list of novels, short stories, award winners for different grade levels from my district curricula and other sources and use those lists to plan my instruction

 

I can examine what teachers in my grade level are using in Washington State, the Midwest, the South and the East Coast. I would be interested in examining a list of culturally diverse works so I could pick and choose based on who my students are and where they live and have lived. I need to make choices that fit my students as well as insuring that they include the elements in the standards base. 

 

Engaging Individual Learners

 

So a part of this thing called rigor is found in the standards. But teachers work with particular kids and there are definitely different ways to reach different kids.  

 

By plugging instruction into 4MAT, teachers can accommodate both learner individuality and the context of learners’ lives. They can add the necessary elements of learner engagement at the outset of instruction and creativity at the culmination, taking the standards into account during the knowledge acquisition and skills development phases of the instructional cycle. 4MAT allows teachers to deliver standards that are attached to learners.

 

Only by taking the ideas and skills of the standards and using them to design instruction that will engage and motivate students and return the learning to them for transfer into their lives can we capitalize on the gifts of the standards while caring for our students as emerging individuals.

 

Elliot Eisner told me once that our kids should graduate from high school as “idiosyncratic gourmets”. If Dr. Eisner is right, then it is imperative that we know them, each and every one, and that we understand and design content to fit them, to engage, motivate, and empower them.

 

It amazes me that there is so little understanding of the art of teaching where the attention of a caring adult who really knows the child is the magic ingredient, where the techniques and strategies teachers use focus primarily on each one, where there are small enough classroom numbers that allow the time to figure out how to reach each child.

 

Standardized testing as the cure for our ills contradicts what we know about how human beings learn and what tests can and cannot do.

—Deborah Meier, Educational Reformer, Writer and Activist

 

Meier says she doesn’t like the word rigor, so I looked it up.

 

intellectual rigor meticulousness, thoroughness, carefulness, diligence, scrupulousness, exactness, exactitude, precision, accuracy, correctness, strictness.

 

operated under conditions of rigor strictness, severity, stringency, toughness, harshness, rigidity, inflexibility, intransigence.

 

How do these definitions fit with Sizer’s notion of what education should be? And if this is our primary function, we have forgotten our mission. 

 

 

 

¹ With Rigor for All: Teaching the Classics to Contemporary Students, Carol Jago, 2000.

 

² The Teacher’s Attention: Why Our Kids Must and Can Get Smaller Schools and Classes, 

   Garrett Delavan, 2009.

 

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