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Hortons Hear Teachers

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“I am here. I am in this classroom. I am responsible for teaching these children. I am here – does anyone see me? Does anyone care?” When the bell rings and classroom doors close, even though there are children in the room and there are other teachers in nearby classrooms, every initial educator feels alone on the job. And their feeling of being alone does not stop after the first day. Being the only adult in their classroom is their new daily reality. It is not until their Horton hears their silent cry with an “I hear you and I see you and I care,” that they will breathe easier and settle into being a teacher.

Hortons are professional teacher friends.

Ask teachers about their long-term teacher friends and most will name and describe a teacher or small group of teachers they met in their first days and months as a classroom teacher. Many say their friends found them, they did not find their friends. An early teacher friend is a Horton, just like the Seuss elephant who singularly heard the microscopic community of Whoville. A teacher Horton hears and sees starting teachers and connects with them. But not every teacher is so lucky as to have a Horton.

Hortons and professional teacher friends are different than friend friends. Hortons and teacher friends band together, like kids from the same neighborhood who create invisible understandings that withstand the tests of time. Through their common moments of joy and tribulation, teacher friends make teaching a wonderful career.

Some teacher friends will be other starting teachers, and some will be veterans who “clicked” into a friendship with a young teacher. Many will be job alike teachers – people who teach the same subjects or the same grade levels or share other similarities in their teaching assignments. A Horton is a particular veteran teacher who makes a unique professional connection with a newcomer teacher.

Very few Hortons are school-assigned mentors. Mentors fulfill assignments, Hortons fill needs.

Starting teachers who do not have PTFs typically do not last long as teachers. Although low compensation, extra hour work, and low public esteem are listed as the major reasons for early career resignations, the lack of PTFs is a significant contributor to job dissatisfaction. Consider teachers in your school who resigned in their first years. Did they have Hortons? Bet they did not.

Hortons are just Hortons doing what Hortons do.

Hortons come in all shapes and sizes meaning there is no singular characteristic that describes them.

I saw a Horton knock on a new teacher’s classroom door, walk in, introduce herself, and at once strike up a friendship. Until Horton’s retirement, they were professionally and personally inseparable.

Another Horton watched a new teacher for several days, found a seat next to the rookie at a meeting, and without fanfare began to help a new colleague to understand and interpret information that was being presented. Sensing a willing veteran opened the rookie to sharing his trepidations about school and listening to professional guidance.

Some Hortons view a new teacher as a team member knowing that a strong teaching team requires strong teachers. They prioritize making a rookie part of their team. They also have the insight to coach toward best practices not just talk about them. Their soft explanations and demonstrations exemplify professional collegiality.

Athletics, arts, and activities provide easy Horton connections. Teacher shortages also beget coach and director shortages. Many first-year teachers accept or are assigned extracurricular contracts as part of their employment. Being part of a coaching or theatrical staff or being an activity advisor connects a new teacher with other school adults and creates a unique relationship with school parents. Coaches, directors, and advisors are visible, and extracurricular visibility creates teacher visibility.

Most Hortons are persistent. They know a first-year teacher faces many challenges and will have good and not so good days at school. By recognizing and acknowledging a rookie’s good days, they make a newcomer more receptive to consolations and suggestions when improvements are needed.

Hortons are more likely to be Hortons out of school as well. If they are parents, they help to lead and guide the activities their children join. They join and attend community activities. Their capacity to share is internally not externally motivated and reinforced.

Schools create solitary teachers.

That reads a bit harshly, but it is a true statement. School isolates teachers, starting teachers especially. It happens in these two ways.

First, school principal attention to a new teacher lasts a proverbial ten minutes after the teaching contract is signed. Administrative assistants and school secretaries take care of new teacher onboarding. The principal quickly shifts to the search and hiring of other vacant teaching positions or to any other crisis that dots an administrator’s daily calendar. Once a starting teacher is shown to her classroom, she is on her own.

This is not a criticism of principals. The pandemic and post-pandemic responsibilities of a school principal have changed significantly. The stress of finding and keeping faculty and staff is only one of many, though it may be their most important task.

Second, classrooms are “black boxes.” Most teachers close their classroom doors because what happens in their classroom is their business and no one else’s business. Visitors to classrooms are rare because every other person in the school has their own classroom or job responsibilities. Everyone in school does their job in relative isolation to each other. A math teacher is her classroom is as invisible as a custodian sweeping halls or cleaning a toilet during class time. Exceptions are in the school kitchen; the hustle and bustle of preparing student snacks and lunches requires constant teamwork.

How and why does this happen?

New teachers are easily lost in late August, September, and October. Everyone at school gets into the hype of a new school year. Teachers have new assignments of children to teach, and all fall sports and activities garner the enthusiasm of new seasons. Excitement surrounds and sweeps up starting teachers, but it does not overcome the isolation of their black box work. First-year teachers drift into the backwaters of a new school year.

Doing a good to exceptionally good job in the first year decreases visibility. Problems get attention, but doing well gets no attention. A first-year teacher who is poorly prepared, communicates badly with students and parents, and has trouble with school deadlines, especially if these deficits reach the school board, will have frequent and pointed conversations with a principal. A rookie whose peer, student, and parent relations are okay to good, even exceptionally good, will sail into the second semester without drawing notice. They fit into the expectations of veteran teachers and are lost in the overall impression of “no problems with that one.”

Schools are stingy with accolades and positive reinforcement. Consider the news releases about your local schools to confirm this statement. Athletics get the most press. School musicals and plays come next. Upside academic performances are overshadowed by the downside state assessment news releases. And most teachers humbly avoid the limelight. Good news reflects on students not teachers.

January and February are important months for first-year teachers. Statutorily, teachers who will not receive a continuing contract must be given written notice by the school board. This may be the first time a board member has heard the names of first-year teachers who were not associated with peer, student, or parent problems. At the same time, Boards consider next year’s budget and school staffing. If layoffs are necessary, the order of layoff is “the last hired is first fired.” Some teachers are one-year teachers in multiple school districts when school financing is lean across the state.

Invisibility looks and feels like this.

A first-year teacher is a mailbox in the school office. Communications come to the mailbox not the person. A rookie has more conversations with the school secretary and custodian than any other teachers.

Invisibility breeds hesitancy. First-year teachers are slow to speak in department, grade level, or school faculty meetings. Few veterans call on them for an opinion. As new teachers, they are silent and viewed as peers-in-training. They go to meetings silently, sit silently, and leave silently.

Most arrive at school early and leave late because they are new to their curriculum and need time to prepare lessons and lesson materials. As early/late people, they do not mingle with their coming and going colleagues.

They eat alone in their classrooms. Being alone breeds loneliness.

The Big Duh!

There is a happenstance when a Horton hears, sees, and connects with a new teacher. The number of teachers who resign their positions in the first three years of their career tells us there are not enough Horton connections. Sadly, there are excellent potential teachers in those resignation – they find success in their next careers.

If we intend to build a high-quality teaching faculty in every school, we are required to close the happenstance ratio. I suggest that we keep retiring Hortons, those in their last years as classroom teachers, to serve as post-employment Hortons. Let’s just label them as Hortons, a new, very part-time faculty position. Hortons will not teach students, they will teach teachers how to acclimate to productive, active faculty members. Unlike mentors who may fulfill assignments, post-retirement Hortons continue to fulfill needs.

Let’s set a goal of reducing early teacher resignations by 20% by hiring Hortons.  A Horton will pay for herself in the savings the district will not need to spend on constant turnover replacement costs. More importantly, Hortons will save teaching careers that otherwise end too early.

AI Is Icarus Deja Vu

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The decision to use or approve the use of AI in school is not difficult. Yet educational journals are littered by the debate. As school people, we like our rules to be clean and definitive. “No running in the halls” is one of those dictums we uphold. Yet, when the weather is too cold or the ground is too snow covered for the track team to run outdoors, they run in our hallways after school. Most rules are two-sided coins. “Do not” on one side and “do when” on the other.

Thus, we need a two-sided rule for artificial intelligence. The right rule “of thumb” is — AI is approved when the goal is investigative, consensus building, problem solving, and efficiency AND AI is not approved when the goal is original thought, critical thinking, and skill development. Using AI should not be generalized to all student work but attached to the goals we are teaching children to achieve.

Human and artificial intelligences – what do we know?

In the annals of homo sapiens, intelligence has guardedly been a human characteristic. Scientists acknowledge that certain animals display specific kinds of intelligence. Dolphins and whales communicate with each other, dogs are trained to sniff everything from humans buried in snow to traces of drugs and explosives and to be empathetic to humans, and parrots can parrot human speech. We acknowledge that birds and other migratory animals travel great distances returning to seasonal, ancestral locations. Being trainable or being guided by inbred DNA is not intelligence.

Until recently we reserved intelligence for humankind. We defined our intelligence as “… the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new and trying situations: to reason or use skilled reason; the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one’s environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria: or mental acuteness.”

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/intelligence

The term “artificial intelligence” was the stuff of science fiction. AI was Hal, the master computer in Space Odyssey 2001, that helped manned space travel so well that it took control of its human passengers. It was “brainy.” We labeled smart computers as artificially intelligent and placed AI below human intelligence.

Ooops! Humans made AI intelligent.

Icarus lives to fly again. The hubris of our species created algorithmic machines that successfully meet our definition of intelligence. Was it inevitable? Probably. In some ways we are too smart for our own good.

When asked a question, AI finds an answer. Asked if A is better than B, AI will evaluate and judge the two. Asked to assimilate, assess, and evaluate data using the questioner’s values, AI provides an informed and weighted response. AI is better than sliced bread!

When I asked AI to provide me with an outline for writing this blog, within seconds my screen displayed a concise statement of pros and cons and suggestions for reconciliation between the two. Yet, I write on.

Artificial intelligence has been a contradiction in school. Our tradition is to foster human intelligence along the continuum of our academic, activities, arts, and athletics curricula. We strive for educated and mentally nimble children who will become intelligent adults. While intelligent thinking and problem solving has always been human, we are long accustomed in school to using scientific calculators for higher math and science problems and computer-assisted modeling, engineering, and manufacturing. We want the preciseness and ease of the CAD CAM systems we program in our maker labs. We want to do the thinking and use machine intelligence to do the work.

As teachers of academics, we want children to remember and use facts. Yet we, and they, reach for our smart devices to Google information we cannot recall or investigate the facts of a question we cannot offhandedly answer. Googling is both part of our vocabulary and accepted practice in our real world.

I recently had robotic surgery and accepted that my surgeon sat at a computer console to manipulate machine arms and hands cutting and sewing inside my abdomen.

The old lines between human and artificial intelligence seemed clear but now are blurred. We need to deblur the lines between our intelligences.

Which fork should I use? Contextual applications.

When I sit at a formal dining table, I recognize the various silverware. In the Emily Post setting, there are five forks – oyster fork to my right, dessert fork above the plate, and fish fork, salad fork, and entrée fork to my left. Each is designed for a specific use, yet my mouth and stomach do not know which fork I used once I am chewing and digesting my meal. However, prying oysters from a shell with the forks to my left would be difficult and messy. There is a purpose for each fork, and we abide with those defined purposes.

The uses of intelligence can and should be associated with educational purposes and contexts.

Definitions of purpose:

  • Think about human intelligence when the teaching/learning goal involves original student thought, critical thinking and judgement, defined skill building, and personalization of outcomes. Human intelligence, like physical conditioning, requires purposeful and continuous mental and emotional exercise. As educators, we build student capacity for originality, critical judgements, and value-laden decisions when we pedagogically teach these. The arts give significant examples of separating humans from artificial intelligences. AI has a difficult time with “beauty” and “that painting appeals to me.” In student work, we attach words like integrity, honesty, and ethical when we want to ensure human ingenuity and avoid plagiarism or “cut and paste” submissions. Beauty and integrity are in the eye of the human beholder.
  • Think about artificial intelligence when the teaching/learning goal is efficiency and the outcomes not the process for achieving outcomes is the priority. AI can ethically be used as a tool for gathering, assimilating, and cataloging information. The speed at which AI can assemble and categorize information is beyond human ability. AI can ethically be used to suggest and consider the best solutions. AI can ethically be used to gather and categorize samples of art, music, and poetry but leave it to human intelligence to enjoy and appreciate them.

The Big Duh, Icarus!

Real world — In the real world, few people care how a person can remember, recall, or find information. The issue is “what is that information?” In their out-of-school lives, students use Google and AI naturally to get access to information, directions to where they want to go, and conduct comparative shopping. Using artificial intelligences for these tasks is part of their real world.

In their real world, our graduates are learning use and work and prosper in AI-assisted careers. As educators we need to be well-informed about how AI is changing the world around our schools and even our personal lives.

School world — In school, we hold artificial rules about artificial intelligence. And this begs the question of why? Part of my answer is that I do not want our students to become Icarus-like flying too close to a modern-day Hal and now know they have succumbed to the great fall. As educators we need to keep Icarus flying but not too close to the sun. We need to teach students to use and build their real-world AI contexts in school AND we need to teach students to use and build their human intelligence contexts in school and in life.

To further mix metaphors, the genie of AI is out of the bottle. Children need to use their AI-genie constructively, positively and contextually in their real-world and school lives.

Teaching Is Caring and More

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“Students don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” In the hubbub about public education, this message has risen and spread in the blogosphere. It is a kind of billboard message we read along the highway that catches a passing eye and then rolls around in our heads. However well intentioned, I read it as a shaming message. It infers educators do not care enough about the children they teach, and it conflates knowledge with teaching. Instead, I posit this: the profession of teaching requires caring, but teaching is not one of the “caring professions.”

Teaching and learning.

Our mission as educators is to cause children to learn. This simple sentence says it all. We can play around with the various nouns but not the verb. Educators, teachers, coaches, directors, mentors — each name properly says who we are. Children, students, adult learners, kiddos — they are the subjects of our teaching, people who will be changed by their education. The verb is what we do. We are in the profession of causation.

As a verb, the word “cause” has simple meaning. It means “to make something happen.” In the profession of education, teaching causes or makes learning happen.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/cause?q=causing

The French mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes examined his world to understand fundamental truths. He observed that the physical world has abundant examples of situations where one action results in a predicted outcome. His empiricism led him to four questions that created his theories of cause and effect.

  • What would happen if I did X? 
  • What would happen if I didn’t do X? 
  • What won’t happen if I did X? 
  • What won’t happen if I didn’t do X?

Concepts of direct instruction derive from Descartes. A teacher determines an educational outcome and constructs a lesson that teaches students to achieve that outcome. Teachers plan and deliver instruction that causes learning.

Jean-Jacque Rousseau conceived that the best education occurs when children explore and experience their world. Rousseau is not empirical but relies on the happenstance of events; learning is not planned but is what is encountered in life. Problem- and inquiry-based learning derive from Rousseau. Teachers plan and facilitate rich environments in which students learn.

We see both schools of thought today in education. Early childhood education that is play-based allows children to experience situations from which they learn. Later, curriculum is both direct and inquiry-based and methodologies of explicit and implicit instruction are used to cause student learning.

Teachers are taught, trained, and licensed to cause children to learn and experience learning in childcare and 4K thru grade 12 settings.

Teaching professionals and Caring professionals.

The concept of caring is complex in the field of education. While we intuit what caring means, definitions help us to better understand what it is and is not.

  • As an adjective, caring means displaying kindness and concern for others.
  • As a noun, caring refers to the work or practice of looking after those unable to care for themselves, as in the caring professions.

All the synonyms for caring as an adjective — kind, warmhearted, softhearted, tender, concerned, thoughtful, responsible, considerate, benevolent, humane, sympathetic, understanding, and patient — apply to teaching. Teaching requires caring but its outcomes are different from those of a “caring” professional.

We expect teachers to know and understand the personal, familial, cultural, ethnic, social, and linguistic backgrounds of the children they teach. These expectations are explicitly written and described in the initial preparation standards for teaching licenses. We expect teachers to use this understanding to construct meaningful and appropriate instruction for individual children every day and each year the child in school. Caring is understanding children as individuals and each child’s educational conditions that must be effectively accommodated to teach children to learn. Caring is a commitment to move each child from not knowing to knowing, not able to do to doing, and not thinking about to thinking about.

These are examples of the “caring” professions: social worker, human services professional, human resources professional, law enforcement officer, lawyer, legal assistant, victim advocate, academic advisor, emergency medical technician, nurse, crisis counselor, psychologist, mental health counselor, firefighter. Each of these “caring” professionals requires specific teaching, training, and licensing for them to practice their profession.

https://www.snhu.edu/about-us/newsroom/social-sciences/helping-professions

Legal limitations to caring in schools.

While we expect teachers to care about the students they teach, we also demand a distancing of teachers from students. Teachers are not parents or guardians of the children they teach. There are legal and professional guardrails that keep caring teachers out of the realm of caring family members

We endow teachers with the status of “parentis in loco” meaning in the absence of the parent. In school, on the school campus, on school buses, and during school activities away from the campus, teachers, coaches, and directors are to care for the safety and welfare of students. We make rules and regulations to help school personnel know their responsibilities in caring for student safety and welfare. We also take careful precautions that limit the extent of care. “You can administer a band aid for a cut or abrasion, but you cannot stitch or authorize stitching.” “You may comfort a child who is in distress, but you cannot hug the child.” You may be criminally prosecuted if you cross professional lines.

And there are lines of teacher-student intimate contact that cannot be crossed.

Teaching also has professional limitations. A teacher has a contract to teach a specified curriculum to a specified group of children for a specified period of time. And to be parentis in loco during the child’s school experience but not outside that defined experience. At the end of the school day, teachers and students separate and go to their respective homes. During vacation periods, teachers and students lead separate lives. The idea that teachers are inextricably linked to the school classroom is told by a child who sees her teacher in the aisle at a grocery story on a weekend and asks “what are you doing here? Don’t you belong at school?”

The calling to teach.

In school interviews, I ask candidates for a teaching position, “is teaching your calling or your job?”  The question requires an old-fashioned concept of “calling” that is not commonly used today. A calling involves an intrinsic need to do something that you feel uniquely qualified to do or passionately enjoy doing. Even if the candidate does not recognize the word, those that feel a calling to teach usually convey the concept without defining the word.

We hire teachers who approach teaching as a job as well as those who are “called.” Those who see it as a job can become effective teachers. However, teachers who are called add a significant care factor missing from those who think of teaching as a job only. A calling plus effective teaching skills make an outstanding teacher.

Teaching is not childcare though childcare may be part of schooling.

School has changed because both parents or guardians in a household work to support their family. Working hours and school hours do not align and many families need some form of childcare before and after school. This relates to the supervision and care of infants and young children. The cost of childcare in 2023 averaged $13,600 per child.

To help their school families resolve this, many schools added childcare programs before and after the school day. School classrooms, gyms, libraries, and studios are available at these times for childcare activities. Schools make efficient childcare facilities because they have space, access, and toilets.

The purpose of daycare is simple: to provide parents with enough help to be able to function as independent adults: to go to work, to do chores, to take care of other adult responsibilities

https://www.chapeds.com/blog/1076359-pros-and-cons-of-daycare/#:~:text=The%20purpose%20of%20daycare%20is,other%20responsibilities%2C%20and%20so%20on.

Teaching and childcare are two distinct professions, and each requires training and a license to practice. “The childcare licensing program is a component of the services provided by Department of Children and Families (DCF). The program is accountable for the statewide licensure of Wisconsin’s childcare facilities, including family childcare, group childcare, and day camps. The purpose of the program is to promote the health, safety, and welfare of children in licensed childcare. The Department ensures that licensing requirements are met through ongoing inspections of childcare facilities.

Under Wisconsin law, no person may provide care and supervision for four (4) or more children under the age of 7 for less than 24 hours a day unless that person obtains a license to operate a childcare center from the Department.”

https://dcf.wisconsin.gov/cclicensing

What do we know?

Caring matters but not all caring is the same. Children know when adults care for them. Children learn the difference between caring parents and guardians and caring teachers and caring adults in childcare centers. Each care for children in a distinct way, at a distinct time in the child’s life, and with distinct outcomes.

When a caring teacher and child connect, we see how a significant adult can add greatly to the quality of how and what a child learns. Teaching fundamentally is caring about the adults children today will become in the future.

And frankly, teaching children today is underpaid, under-respected, and, given all the social and media distractions, downright hard. Why would a person be a professional teacher if he or she did not care deeply about children?

Teach For Enduring and Expansive Learning Not Coverage. Know the Difference.

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“Your teacher covered that last year” or “this semester we will cover” still rankles my professionalism as a teacher. Teaching for coverage means nominal teaching and learning. It means spending the least amount of time engaged in teaching and learning for the sake of topical accountability. Coverage teaching is like the proverbial river that is a mile wide and an inch deep – it emphasizes breadth without depth. In my naivety as a young educator I believed that if something was worth teaching it was worth learning well and that meant deeper teaching and learning. Conversely, why waste time and energy on teaching things we did not plan for children to learn well? I still believe this.

Years ago when I heard my principal or district curriculum leader talk of coverage, I assumed they were generalizing about the amount of information in any grade level of our social studies curriculum and the finite amount of instructional time in an academic year. But they weren’t. “You can’t teach everything in your curriculum with the same level of intensity” I was told. “So, cover it all.” It took me a long and troublesome time to understand this, however understanding did not mean accepting it.

There is a line between coverage and knowing and understanding.

Early on in teacher training, we are taught Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy. In the 1950s Bloom established six levels of thinking, learning, and understanding with labeling that helps us explain a rationale for teaching and learning designs. Seventy years later, I still like how Bloom helps me to add depth to the “wide river” of information we teach. The model below shows a revised taxonomy – the terms have been modified from Bloom’s original for clearer explanation of the cognitive levels.

bloom’s taxonomy revised – Higher order of thinking

Although there is a vertical dimension to the taxonomy, Bloom did not intend for all teaching to involve all six levels. Curriculum planners use the levels as goals for teaching and learning. Some learning, in fact most of what we learn, is meant to be at the remembering/understanding level of usage. Other learning is meant to be scaffolded into a variety of applications, or to inform careful analyses, or to evaluate options and opportunities, and to create original work. Though it looks like a ladder, a user does not use every rung to engage in higher order cognition. Instruction and learning can scaffold from understanding to analyzing, or evaluating, or creatin.

Coverage teaching is the act of “mentioning” without the explicit intention of remembering. There is a lot of mentioning in education. Synonyms for mentioning cause us to smile and acknowledge that teachers mention without teaching. When a teacher “alludes to, refers to, touches upon, hints at, speaks about briefly, broaches or introduces only,” that is mentioning. Children may or may not hear or read what a teacher mentions as an aside. Things that are mentioned are characterized as “things it is nice to know but it is okay not to know.” Like, the value of pi is abbreviated to 3.14. As an irrational number, Pi can be calculated out to an infinite number of numbers but who cares? A math teacher covers or mentions that fact but directly instructs that the usable value of pi is 3.14. Best practice does not include “mentions” in assessments of student learning, although there is a lot of bad practice in the field.

Coverage may be all the questions on Jeopardy that sound somewhat familiar but just will not come to mind.

I think of coverage as the blank space below the bottom of Bloom’s taxonomy; it is the noise in the world we are not intended to remember.

Remembering and understanding is the meat and potatoes of most teaching. The information – facts, data, concepts, generalizations, and skill sets we want children to know, we teach with high intention. In the language of backward design, if we intend to test children on something, we intend to teach it well so that it will be remembered and understood.

Direct instruction is one of many teaching strategies most often used when we teach for remembering and understanding.

Children learn the alphabet and numbers, sight words and number facts early as foundational knowledge. In school we use direct instruction to drill and practice and ensure memory of these. Retention theory drives our teaching for remembering – we use immediate drill and practice/repetition to strengthen short-term memory and interval practice over time to ensure what is learned is retained and recalled in long-term memory. In a spiraled social studies curriculum, we teach US History in elementary, middle school, and high school because we want all children to know their national stories. Repetition and elaboration cause remembered learning.

Remembering is a student’s identical retelling of information or identical demonstration of what was taught. We require correct and complete retelling.

Understanding is explaining what was taught with fidelity in the student’s own words and doing the skill with fidelity in the student’s own style. Understanding is using what is remembered and making an inference about it or summarizing it in simpler language or combining several pieces of information into meaningful statement that keeps the significance and essence of what is being combined.

There also is a line between knowing and understanding what we learn and the rest of Bloom – what comes next is the so what of education.

Separating the noise of information from the teaching of remembering and understanding, gets us to the “so what” levels of Bloom where what was learned is applied, analyzed, evaluated, and built upon creatively. These four Bloom levels give us the rationale for why teaching for remembering and understanding are such a large part of our school calendar. Without foundational memory about stars, planets, moons, suns, constellations, galaxies, and a universe(s), nothing we see in the sky above us would make sense. Space would just be space. Lifesaving surgery would be butchery. Agriculture and manufacturing would just be guessing work.

Other teaching strategies become available when students have a knowledge and understanding of foundational information and skills. I use the C3 Framework for social studies as an example of instructing above the remembering and understanding line. C3 (College, Career, Civic Life) uses an inquiry process for students to investigate, expand and integrate their knowledge of civics, economics, geography, history, and the behavioral sciences.

“The C3 Framework, like the Common Core Standards, emphasizes the acquisition and application of knowledge to prepare students for college, career, and civic life. It intentionally envisions social studies instruction as an inquiry arc of interlocking and mutually reinforcing elements that speak to the intersection of ideas and learners.” C3 uses “questions to spark curiosity, guide instruction, deepen investigations, acquire rigorous content, and apply knowledge and ideas in real world settings…”

https://www.socialstudies.org/standards/c3

This is not coverage teaching!

Parallel to C3, curricula in every school subject, from art to woodworking, builds upon information and skills students learn at the remembering and understanding levels of instruction. The front of a refrigerator in most student homes is covered with student drawings and finger paintings. Over time, shelves and walls display how student application of basic information and skills blossoms into more intricate and sophisticated art. Student art displayed in local galleries, libraries, and art shows illustrates how student artists apply of fundamental concepts and skills, analyze and interpret subjects, and create new and original art.

Tech ed students manufacture, ag students grow and cultivate, computer science students program and engage in robotics, ELA writers craft poems and stories, and marketing ed students create businesses, apply accounting, create and manage product, lead and supervise personnel in the pursuit of economic growth. Once students know and understand, they can pursue their personal interests for a lifetime.

Know and be the difference.

There is so much in a teacher’s annual curriculum and so little time that it is easy to fall into the coverage mode of teaching. But why? In today’s world, coverage learning is what any child can achieve using Google or AI.

Two centuries ago, teachers were the source of information and applied learning. A century ago, students could read books for information; it was teacher directed and interpreted learning that moved children to young adults ready for college or work. Today, information sources abound, so much so that it hard to know information from noise. Today it takes a teacher to forge information into memory and understanding. And it takes a teacher to guide, monitor, and mentor how students illustrate and expand their learning. Well-conceived and instructed learning remains a springboard for life’s successes.

There is no time or place today for coverage teaching.

In an over-informationed world we are under-literate.

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Literacy is like a tomato. Do you say “tomaeto” or “tomahto”? Just as either says tomato, the concept of literacy has different definitions for the same word. Some of these definitions technically apply yet are not adequate measures of what it means to be literate in today’s parlance. So, what is the big deal about literacy? Is being literate critical to adult life? Given how much information adults are exposed to every day, can we expect adults with varying levels of literacy skills to effectively consider and understand the constant barrage of information? The answer is “no,” yet our world ultimately spins on the voices and decisions of under-literate adults.

Literacy is a status.

Literacy historically is a status based upon measures of reading and writing. As a statistic, “High literacy rates have been found to correlate to everything from access to economic opportunity, to better nutrition, to environmental sustainability.” We generalize that citizens of economically advantaged nations have high literacy rates and citizens of underdeveloped nations have low literacy rates. A nation boasted its high literacy rate as a cause-and-effect proposition. “Our people enjoy a better standard of living because they are literate.”

https://ncte.org/blog/2020/03/literacy-just-reading-writing

What should we know about this status?

Using the percentage of the population 15 years and older who can read and write as a measure of literacy, Andorra, Finland, Greenland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Norway, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and North Korea tie for #1 with 100% of their citizens being literate. North Korea? If a dictator says everyone can read, everyone is literate. The United States is in a large group of nations ranking #2 with 99% of the population rated as literate. Sounds good, but is it?

https://www.uscareerinstitute.edu/blog/which-countries-have-the-highest-and-lowest-literacy-rates

These data raise questions as to how we decide an adult is literate at the international level. This is how the data are gathered.

“The breakdown of strategies for deciding literacy covers four categories:

  • self-reported literacy declared directly by individuals,
  • self-reported literacy declared by the head of the household,
  • tested literacy from proficiency examinations, and
  • indirect estimation or extrapolation.

In most cases, the categories covering ‘self-reports’ correspond to estimates of literacy that rely on answers provided to a simple yes/no question asking people if they can read and write. The category ‘indirect estimation’ corresponds mainly to estimates that rely on indirect evidence from educational attainment, usually based on the highest degree of completed education.”

https://ourworldindata.org/how-is-literacy-measured

Based on self-reported data collection, many adults in the world consider themselves to be literate. But are they? Literacy is more than a statistical number.

Literacy is a functional tool.

Literacy is a tool. “… literacy is the way that we interact with the world around us, how we shape it and are shaped by it. It is how we communicate with others via reading and writing, but also by speaking, listening, and creating. It is how we articulate our experience in the world and declare, ‘We Are Here!’”

https://ncte.org/blog/2020/03/literacy-just-reading-writing

This consideration of literacy, that is how we communicate and receive communication from others and how we create communicative information, opens new concepts of what it means to be literate. “According to a study by the University of California – San Diego, the average American consumes about 34 gigabytes of data and information every day. This volume is equivalent of around 100,000 words heard or read daily.”

In our age of digital and virtual information, adults are bombarded by and likewise spew volumes of information daily. A literate adult must be skillful and competent on both sides of receiving and sending literacy.

Interestingly the Cambridge Dictionary points to both definitions – status and tool. Cambridge defines literacy as “the ability to read and write.” And literacy is the “knowledge of a particular subject, or a particular type of knowledge. Computer literacy is becoming as essential as the ability to drive a car.”

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/literacy

UNESCO reinforces literacy as an essential tool. “Literacy is a means of identification, understanding, interpretation, creation, and communication in an increasingly digital, text-mediated, information-rich, and fast-changing world. On the historical international scene, literacy is a statistic of the population who can read and write. Literacy also is a broad array of functional skills that are applied in a successful adult life. For others, literacy is the ability to access and understand information in multiple contexts.”

https://ncte.org/blog/2020/03/literacy-just-reading-writing

This other “tomato” version of literacy opens the realm of higher order skills that are necessary for understanding, interpreting, analyzing, and evaluating information that is read and heard. And then doing something with or because of what one has read and heard. Literacy is making meaning of and considering what to do with information.

Able to read. At what level of reading?

Self-reporting is not an adequate measure of how we use literacy as a tool. “The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) defines literacy across six levels. People with Level 1 or below literacy skills are considered to have very poor literacy skills, while Level 3 is considered the minimum literacy skills required for coping with everyday life.

  • Below Level 1: Adults can read brief texts on familiar topics and locate a single piece of specific information. Only basic vocabulary knowledge is required, and adults are not required to understand the structure of sentences of paragraphs.
  • Level 1: Adults can read relatively short digital or print texts to locate a single piece of information that is identical to or synonymous with the information given in the question. Knowledge and skill in recognizing basic vocabulary, determining the meaning of sentence, and reading short paragraphs of text is expected.
  • Level 2: Adults can make matches between the text, either digital or printed, and information. Adults can paraphrase or make low-level inferences.
  • Level 3: Adults are required to read and navigate dense, lengthy or complex texts.
  • Level 4: Adults can integrate, interpret or synthesize information from complex or lengthy texts. Adults can identify and understand one or more specific, non-central idea(s) in the text in order to interpret or evaluate subtle evidence-claim or persuasive discourse relationships.
  • Level 5: Adults can search for and integrate information across multiple, dense texts; construct syntheses of similar and contrasting ideas or points of view; or evaluate evidence-based arguments. Adults understand subtle, rhetorical cues and can make high-level inferences or use specialized background knowledge.”

As a literacy tool, how well do we read?

We get a different portrait of literacy in the United States when we use the OECD’s evidence-based data. Remember that the U.S. claims a 99% literacy status using self-reporting and other non-scientific methods.

“The most recent national survey on adult literacy is from 2012-2017, conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics as part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). The U.S. ranks 16th among the 33 OECD nations included in this study.

Nationally, over 1 in 5 adults (in the United States) have a literacy proficiency at or below Level 1. Adults in this range have difficulty using or understanding print materials. Those on the higher end of this category can perform simple tasks based on the information they read, but adults below Level 1 may only understand very basic vocabulary or be functionally illiterate.

On the upside, “46% of adults in the U.S. have a literacy proficiency at or above level 3. Adults at Levels 3, 4, and 5 have varying degrees of proficiency in understanding, interpreting and synthesizing information from multiple, complex texts to infer meaning and draw conclusions.”

https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy

Huh!

Approximately half of the adults in the U.S. have functional literacy tools that are “considered the minimum literacy skills required for coping with everyday life.” The other half of that statistic have less that minimal literacy skills.

The application of literacy as a functional tool is not just eye-opening for the United States. Using the OECD study, 14.9% (or 1 in 7) adults in England have literacy levels below Level 3, which is the equivalent to the literacy skills expected of a nine to 11-year-old.”

https://literacytrust.org.uk/parents-and-families/adult-literacy/what-do-adult-literacy-levels-mean/#:~:text=People%20with%20Level%201%20or,for%20coping%20with%20everyday%20life.

These conclusions are supported by other studies. A Gallup analysis of literacy information gathered by the US Department of Education reports that “About 130 million adults in the U.S., roughly half of Americans between 16 and 74 – have low literacy skills. In this study, literacy is broadly defined as the ability to read and write, but more accurately encompasses the comprehension, evaluation and utilization of information, which is why people describe different types of literacy – such as health, financial, and legal. Low literacy skills can profoundly affect the day-to-day success of adults in the real world, and these impacts extent to their families, too.”

https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy

Literacy and public education.

Reading achievement has become the annual dip stick for measuring educational effectiveness in the U.S. since No Child Left Behind became national policy in 2002. State, school district, and school report cards annually publicize the percentage of students who meet the state’s performance expectations in reading. In a nation that self-reports its adults to be literate, children in school struggle with reading.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction reported, “For 2023-24, assessment results show public school student proficiency rates in ELA were at 48%. Students participating in the state’s Private School Choice Programs had a proficiency rate of 30.9 percent. Assessment results show proficiency gaps among different student subgroups continue to exist.”

https://dpi.wi.gov/news/releases/2024/student-assessment-results-forward

It is worthwhile to note that “meeting expectations” on a statewide reading or ELA assessment is not a high standard. State “expectations” are minimal levels of reading ability, very much like Level 2 on the OECD literacy assessment. The number of children meeting “expectations” is nothing to really cheer about. They met a low bar.

In truth, every graduation class fits into the OECD and Gallup estimation of adult literacy in the U.S. – about half of the graduates and young adults in our country meet minimal literacy standards.

When we apply literacy as a status to high school graduates, our society annually receives semi-literate young adults into our communities and general employment. As a result of education, more than half of our adult citizenry can only minimally read and write.

When we apply the second definition, we realize that the hierarchy of our layered economic society does not require every adult to be highly literate. Many high school graduates lack the ability to fully read and listen to complex and technical information and then translate it into their daily lives and jobs fulfill society’s economic needs. They are employed and pay taxes. Their earnings circulate in our consumer-based economy. They are law abiding and live socially in our cities, towns, and countryside. The majority do not need more than a high school diploma plus technical or on-the-job training to live in the United States.

“In 2021, the highest level of education of the population age 25 and older in the United States was distributed as follows: 

  • 8.9% had less than a high school diploma or equivalent.
  • 27.9% had high school graduate as their highest level of school completed. 
  • 14.9% had completed some college but not a degree.
  • 10.5% had an associate degree as their highest level of school completed.
  • 23.5% had a bachelor’s degree as their highest degree.
  • 14.4% had completed an advanced degree such as a master’s degree, professional degree or doctoral degree. 

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/educational-attainment.html

Incomplete literacy can lead to incomplete understanding.

The ability to read, understand, and evaluate information has become more essential as the volume of daily information has increased. When a person hears or reads almost 100,000 words daily, a person must either try to process all that information or begin to categorize and ignore selected types and sources of information. My best bet is the latter. People become increasingly selective in the media they listen to and the text they read, ignoring sources that do not agree with their personal points of view. As they scan text and skim media, they disregard sources they do not agree with and pay attention only to sources agreeable to their perspectives. The loss of a 360-degree listening and reading narrows their understanding to the range of information they choose to hear and read.

Let’s do the arithmetic. In Wisconsin, less than half of our students meet minimal expectations on statewide reading assessments. With their high school and associate degrees, they elect to hear and read only words that express their points of view about our state and world. If this is true, then we need to add a third tomato – incomplete literacy. Given that literacy is a tool, when the tool or reading and listening is applied only to what we want to read and hear, then we have achieved incomplete literacy.

We always do get what we settle for.

Our national and state Founding Fathers valued education. Because they believed a literate populace would be better able to take part in our democratic form of government, they supported public education. The ability to read was essential for voters to make informed choices of leadership and the policies their leaders would execute. As a nation of immigrants, literacy in the English language has always been a pathway to citizenship.

With all that purpose and history, today we have achieved a nation that is minimally and incompletely literate and this is considered good enough for our economic and political welfare.

In a world that is over-informationed, we are under-literate. As educators, we have work to do!