"Mindless Progressivism"

While I was thinking about how I want to digest the 36 principles listed below, I came upon this comment on James Paul Gee's site:


"It surprises me how often educators who know better lapse back into “mindless progressivism”, a theory that children learn best by participation and immersion in interest-driven activities.  People can participate in an interest-driven group and still gain few of the higher-value skills that participation in the group leads others to attain.  That is why an emphasis on production is important.  Learning to produce the knowledge or outcomes an interest-driven group is devoted to leads to higher-order and meta-level thinking skills.  If only a few are producers and most are consumers, then a group is divided into a small number of “priests” (insiders with “special” knowledge and skills) and the “laity” (followers who use language, knowledge, and tools they do not understand deeply and cannot transform for specific contexts of use)."


To re-state (if necessary): putting kids into groups based on interest doesn't guarantee learning, or at least not the higher-level stuff that teachers really want.  Teachers need to emphasize the creation of some kind of appropriate product (the students need to make something).  If only a few students move into this way of thinking, instead of all, then the group can be divided and less effective overall.  


I take this as a caution.  I'm on the cusp of pushing students into groups, hopefully with an appropriate emphasis on a product.  But that doesn't guarantee learning all by itself.  


Thanks, Jim.    

36 Learning Principles from James Paul Gee

36 Principles of Learning 
(from James Paul Gee, What Language and Literacy Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy)

(found online at http://mason.gmu.edu/~lsmithg/jamespaulgee2 - )

1) Active, Critical Learning Principle - 
All aspects of the the learning environment (including ways in which the semiotic domain is designed and presented) are set up to encourage active and critical, not passive, learning.

2) Design Principle - 
Learning about and coming to appreciate design and design principles is core to the learning experience.

3) Semiotic Principle - 
Learning about and coming to appreciate interrelations within and across multiple sign systems (images, words, actions, symbols, artifacts, etc.) as a complex system is core to the learning experience.

4) Semiotic Domains Principle - 
Learning involves mastering, at some level, semiotic domains, and being able to participate, at some level, in the affinity group or groups connected to them.

5) Meta-level thinking about Semiotic Domain Principle - 
Learning involves active and critical thinking about the relationships of the semiotic domain being learned to other semiotic domains.

6) "Psychosocial Moratorium" Principle - 
Learners can take risks in a space where real-world consequences are lowered.

7) Committed Learning Principle
 - Learners participate in an extended engagement (lots of effort and practice) as an extension of their real-world identities in relation to a virtual identity to which they feel some commitment and a virtual world that they find compelling.

8) Identity Principle
 - Learning involves taking on and playing with identities in such a a way that the learner has real choices (in developing the virtual identity) and ample opportunity to meditate on the relationship between new identities and old ones. There is a tripartite play of identities as learners relate, and reflect on, their multiple real-world identities, a virtual identity, and a projective identity.

9) Self-Knowledge Principle
 - The virtual world is constructed in such a way that learners learn not only about the domain but also about themselves and their current and potential capacities.

10) Amplification of Input Principle
 - For a little input, learners get a lot of output.

11) Achievement Principle - 
For learners of all levels of skill there are intrinsic rewards from the beginning, customized to each learner's level, effort, and growing mastery and signaling the learner's ongoing achievements.

12) Practice Principle - 
Learners get lots and lots of practice in a context where the practice is not boring (i.e. in a virtual world that is compelling to learners on their own terms and where the learners experience ongoing success). They spend lots of time on task.

13. Ongoing Learning Principle
 - The distinction between the learner and the master is vague, since learners, thanks to the operation of the "regime of competency" principle listed next, must, at higher and higher levels, undo their routinized mastery to adapt to new or changed conditions. There are cycles of new learning, automatization, undoing automatization, and new re-organized automatization.

14) "Regime of Competence" Principle
 - The learner gets ample opportunity to operate within, but at the outer edge of, his or her resources, so that at those points things are felt as challenging but not "Undoable."

15) Probing Principle - 
Learning is a cycle of probing the world (doing something); reflecting in and on this action and, on this basis, forming a hypothesis; reprobing the world to test this hypothesis; and then accepting or rethinking the hypothesis.

16) Multiple Routes Principle
 - There are multiple ways to make progress or move ahead. This allows learners to make choices, rely on their own strengths and styles of learning and problem-solving, while also exploring alternative styles.

17) Situated Meaning Principle
 - The meanings of signs (words, actions, objects, artifacts, symbols, texts, etc.) are situated in embodied experience. Meanings are not general or decontextualized. Whatever generality meanings come to have is discovered bottom up cia embodied experience.

18) Text Principle
 - Texts are not understood purely verbally (i.e. only in terms of the definitions of the words in the text and their text-internal relationships to each other) but are understood in terms of embodied experience. Learners move back and forth between texts and embodied experiences. More purely verbal understanding (reading texts apart from embodied action) comes only when learners have enough embodied experience in the domain and ample experiences with similar texts.

19) Intertextual Principle
 - The learner understands texts as a family ("genre") of related texts and understands any one text in relation to others in the family, but only after having achieved embodied understandings of some texts. Understanding a group of texts as a family ("genre") of texts is a large part of what helps the learner to make sense of texts.

20) Multimodal Principle - 
Meaning and knowledge are built up through various modalities (images, texts, symbols, interactions, abstract design, sound, etc.), not just words.

21) "Material Intelligence" Principle - 
Thinking, problem-solving, and knowledge are "stored" in material objects and the environment. This frees learners to engage their minds with other things while combining the results of their own thinking with the knowledge stored in material objects and the environment to achieve yet more powerful effects.

22) Intuitive Knowledge Principle
 - Intuitive or tacit knowledge built up in repeated practice and experience, often in association with an affinity group, counts a good deal and is honored. Not just verbal and conscious knowledge is rewarded.

23) Subset Principle
 - Learning even at its start takes place in a (simplified) subset of the real domain.

24) Incremental Principle - 
Learning situations are ordered in the early stages so that earlier cases lead to generalizations that are fruitful for later cases. When learners face more complex cases later, the learning space (the number and type of guess the learner can make) is constrained by the sorts of fruitful patterns or generalizations the learned has founded earlier.

25) Concentrated Sample Principle - 
The learner sees, especially early on, many more instances of the fundamental signs and actions than should be the case in a less controlled sample. fundamental signs and actions are concentrated in the early stages so that learners get to practice them often and learn them well.

26) Bottom-up Basic Skills Principle
 - Basic skills are not learned in isolation or out of context; rather, what counts as a basic skill is discovered bottom up by engaging in more and more of the game/domain or games/domains like it. Basic skills are genre elements of a given type of game/domain.

27) Explicit Information On-Demand and Just-in-Time Principle - 
The learner is given explicit information both on-demand and just-in-time, when the learner needs it or just at the point where the information can best be understood and used in practice.

28) Discovery Principle - 
Overt telling is kept to a well-thought-out minimum, allowing ample opportunities for the learner to experiment and make discoveries.

29) Transfer Principle - 
Learners are given ample opportunity to practice, and support for, transferring what they have learned earlier to later problems, including problems that require adapting and transforming that earlier learning.

30) Cultural Models about the World Principle
 - Learning is set up in such a way that learners come to think consciously and reflectively about some of their cultural models regarding the world, without denigration of their identities, abilities or social affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models that may conflict with or otherwise relate to them in various ways.

31) Cultural Models about Learning Principle - 
Learning is set up in such a way that learners come to think consciously and reflectively about their cultural models about learning and themselves as learners, without denigration of their identities, abilities, or social affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models of learning and themselves as learners.

32) Cultural Models about Semiotic Domains Principle - 
about their cultural models about a particular semiotic domain they are learning, without denigration of their identities, abilities, or social affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models about this domain.

33) Distributed Principle
 - Meaning/knowledge is distributed across the learner, objects, tools, symbols, technologies, and the environment.

34) Dispersed Principle
 - Meaning/knowledge is dispersed in the sense that the learner shares it with others outside the domain/game, some of whom the learner may rarely or never see face-to-face.

35) Affinity Group Principle - 
Learners constitute an "affinity group," that is, a group that is bonded primarily through shared en devours, goals, and practices and not shared race, gender, nation, ethnicity, or culture.

36) Insider Principle
 - The learner is an "insider," "teacher," and "producer" (not just a consumer) able to customize the learning experience and the domain/game from the beginning and throughout the experience.

Gee also has a good site at http://www.jamespaulgee.com/.  

Christmas

Christmas is such a thoughtful kind of day for me.  It's a lifetime of layered experiences - so many strong memories over such a long period.  So much resonance.  It's one of those days where a movie director might be able to teach us how to make sense of these simultaneous overlaps.  Last night I was watching a little bit of the movie Chicago, and the constant cuts back and forth between real and fantasy are a nice mutually-reinforcing tension builder.  It's like that, only with multiple cuts.

Let me try to untangle that in a little bit.  Gotta go.

Coal

I checked out a bunch of stuff on the coal industry yesterday.  I've been messing around with the idea of a book about coal and labor unions.  It's a topic that kids don't know a lot about, and I would be pitching the book for a YA/middle-level audience, a la Albert Marrin or Marc Aronson.

Aronson was at the NCTE conference in Chicago, and he is both an excellent presenter and an engaging, incisive author.  I really liked Sugar Changed the World, and his book about the coal mine rescue in Chile (Trapped) got me thinking about the coal industry again.

My thinking here is some kind of modeling or write-alongside my students.  I'm interested in digging deeper into this topic, and I'm thinking about ways to do that in front of my students so that they can see and learn from that example.  Perhaps it would help, too, to have some of them along on this trip.

Drive by Daniel Pink

Someone suggested this book to me a few weeks ago, and then someone else - I don't remember who in either case - suggested it as well, so I thought it was officially my job to read it.  So I did.

It's not written for teachers, and there are a number of places where it's obvious that the author (Pink) is not sympathetic to or informed about the interests of educators.  But that doesn't mean that it can't be useful.

It's mostly interested in explaining what motivates people, and the essential insight is that carrot-stick motivation strategies don't work.  Paying people to do good things can sometimes make them not want to do good things anymore.  It can also hurt creativity.  According to the majority of studies, extrinsic rewards can limit and even damage creativity.

I think most teachers already know that extrinsic rewards can be bad for intellectual work.  Any kind of payment sends the message that the work isn't rewarding enough in itself, that it requires some kind of outside motivator to be worth doing.

The most useful part of the book, in my opinion, is the way that it breaks down intrinsic motivation into three essential components - so-called Motivation 3.0 -

1. Autonomy - acting with choice of method and means to achieve desired results.  For this to be effective, people need autonomy over task (what they do), time (when they do it), technique (how they do it), and team (who they work with).  
2. Mastery - seeking skill or fluency, as a result of appropriate challenges (not too difficult, not too easy).  There are three "laws" of mastery - it is a mindset (a way of thinking about being good at something), it is a "pain" (it takes effort and hard work), and it is an asymptote (it is something that people can work toward but never achieve).  
3. Purpose - some sense of an end that is important or worth working toward other than money or extrinsic reward.  

I think that most teachers already knew a lot of this.  I think that some of the thinking and the language around this helped clarify the "why" for me, but I don't think that this stuff is as groundbreaking as it wants to pretend.  The challenge, of course, is implementing these things in a consistent, responsible way in the classroom.  Giving middle school students the chance to choose who they work with can easily go wrong.  But what an incentive, and a powerful tool, if it is done right!  

Now, the goal is to get through some of the material I have on inquiry.  

Text Frames and Nonfiction Writing

This is a really useful way to conceptualize nonfiction writing that works "both ways" - for reading and for writing instruction.  That is the essential insight of authors like Lucy Calkins, Katie Wood Ray, Laura Robb, Doug Buehl, and Ralph Fletcher.  (Or at least one insight common to all of them.)

What is a text frame?  It is a way of structuring or arranging ideas in a text.  It might be thought of as a kind of genre, a convention, a pattern, a formula, a rhetorical strategy, a heuristic, or even a trend.  The easiest example is chronological order.  A writer might choose to arrange her ideas in "time-order," or the order in which they occurred, or in a kind of beginning-middle-end narrative order.  This arrangement suits narrative - one of the most common ways and reasons for writing - because it tends to represent the experience of the story.  Writers often choose this strategy because it is common, engaging, and simple.  Readers can easily interpret and empathize with this arrangement.  

It makes sense to teach this text structure first for two reasons.  First, it is the simplest and most common.  Students will be able to understand it easily, because they use it and encounter it more often than any other.  Because it is so common, students will be able to apply this understanding to future encounters with chronologically-ordered text.  This ubiquity will also make it easy to locate models for students to learn from.  Second, pointing out this strategy to students, and suggesting that there are others, will help students notice large-scale textual patterns and help them think about the possibility of other patterns.  It will push them toward noticing holistic features - a powerful higher-order thinking skill.  

Hopefully, when you start to teach text structure, you will open a door for students to thinking about texts in bigger terms, on a larger scale.  When students seem to understand the concept of chronological order (which should not be a big leap), there are two good questions to ask:

1. What kinds of texts are organized in way other than chronological order?
2. Why would an author choose to compose a text that is not in time order?

Question 1 is really a reading question.  Question 2 is a writing question.  But both are really the same question.  I hope this helps explain how text structure - the concept as an instructional focus - illustrates how writing and reading instruction reinforce each other.  

Teaching Nonfiction Writing

I'd like to post some of my thinking here about nonfiction writing.  I recently read the book, Because Writing Matters, a short compilation of the collected thinking of the National Writing Project.  This is an organization that is near to my heart, since I attended the Summer Leadership Institute this past summer with the Illinois Writing Project.

I proposed a breakout session at the upcoming DuPage County institute day conference (I don't remember the official title), and I am considering how I can use this material.  It's useful for establishing the warrant for writing instruction, the purpose and value of writing instruction to teachers at K-8 schools where writing is not explicitly tested and only indirectly mandated through state learning standards.  (How do you usefully promote writing instruction to teachers by saying, "You are supposed to be doing it anyway."  That's a little too parental.)

There are chapters that outline the value of writing instruction for purposes of promoting learning and for improving test scores.  But that also feels disingenuous, at the very least.  Writing is not only - or, in my view, should not be considered only - a means to some other end.  It is an end in itself, a valuable and useful tool that students need in order to be successful in high school and college.

I think that this book is more about arguing for a particular policy or instructional choice.  It does not necessarily provide methods for promoting effective writing instruction.  Perhaps that case is obvious and does not need to be argued.  If it ever does, this book is a useful tool for defending the instructional choices that we make.