Think Ayn Rand and then think 2025. Think John Gault and then think the American commonwealth. Think the consequences of industrial leaders shuttering their talents and then think the American people shuttering their care factor. Think the tenets of democracy and then think the pettiness of empirical rule.
When a slim majority of our electorate believes an egotist will elevate their status and cure their woes, what happens if everyone else shrugs? We are finding out.
“Education is an opportunity, and children should make the most of it. You can never have too much education.” Guilty as charged. As a principal, superintendent, and school board member, I overloaded children aged 5-18 with too many education requirements and compelling programs. School was an open frame of time, and I led educators in prescribing as many things as we could for the education of children. We labeled our programs as curricular and extracurricular opportunities and were proud of the total education available to our children. Even after traditional academics, activities, arts, and athletics, we wrapped our arms around atypical school activities, like sailing, bowling, archery, trap shooting, biking and hiking, and electronic gaming and made then school sponsored. Schooling was the full Monty.
Seldom did we experience an existential moment, notably “what am I doing and why am I doing it”, the answer always was “this is good for kids.” Today I am no longer convinced of that answer. I would do it differently. Rousseau, come back!
Nature or nurture should be nature and nurture.
Adults have forever wrestled with the question of the best way for children to learn about the world. Do we let children explore and experience the world and from their natural learning prepare themselves for adult life? Is education the child’s responsibility? Is self-education a natural and adequate phenomenon? Or do we create, pre-plan, and program their education to ensure they learn what we want them to learn? Is education the adults’ responsibility? Does education require direct nurturing?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau helped us understand the value of allowing children to explore and learn naturally. In writing Emile (1762), he created an educational philosophy aligned with the physical and mental development of a child and their exposure to experiential learning. He said that children learn best through direct interaction with a natural environment that optimizes their curiosity and exploration. Learning should be hands-on and active. He was opposed to adults lecturing children, rote memorization of information, and mandatory school attendance. To Rousseau, experiencing life and its consequences taught children critical thinking, moral, and social lessons that were superior to didactic lessons in a school. Life is full of problem-solving needs and children develop skills to match and meet their needs.
Rousseau’s philosophies live in Montessori, Waldorf, and outdoor education programs. They are apparent in school curricula that uses problem-based, project-based, and inquiry-based education. And they are apparent in early child education’s play-based learning curricula.
Horace Mann provided the contrary view; the education of children is a public responsibility and should be regimented. Mann is labeled the “Father of American Public Education.” He espoused universal, free, compulsory education of all children. At a time when a lack of social and economic status barred children from education, Mann led the movement for common schools that would meld all children into a more unified and democratic society as adults. Mann’s schools were taught by professionally trained teachers and used a standardized curriculum focusing on reading, writing, arithmetic, history, and science. He embedded teaching of common morals, civic responsibility, and character development. Schools were funded by local taxes to ensure that all families could afford to enroll their children. Mann created our educational industry.
Regardless of political leanings today, most adults hold to these as the purpose of universal 4K-12 education.
Democracy requires educated citizens, and public education equips children with the basic knowledge necessary for informed decision-making, civic engagement, and understanding their communities.
Economic self-sufficiency requires foundational skills for personal and professional growth that contribute to the economy and self-support.
Public education instills shared values, tolerances, and cooperation necessary for diverse people to live in a stable and unified society.
Mann’s philosophies live in the WI statutory requirements for teacher preparation and subject area curricular requirements. A quick review of any public school’s vision and mission statements and district policies demonstrates Mann’s influence today.
Why revisit Rousseau?
We have forgotten to balance the fundamental elements of nature and nurture for the best education of children. We are ambushed by these very misleading and disruptive arguments.
The education of children is a national priority that ensures the international dominance of the United States on economic, scientific, and political issues.
Through public education we shape the ideological thinking of the next generations. They must be taught the right ideology.
Because education is funded with public tax dollars, we demand that all children achieve our predetermined outcomes.
Public education is the primary daycare provider for children in the United States. The state has a responsibility for the total welfare of children while parents work.
Each of these is balderdash if we believe that the primary and fundamental purpose of education is to cause children to develop into wholesome, inquiring and thinking individuals who are prepared to participate and thrive in a democratic society. To achieve this purpose, we need to provide balance between nature and nurture.
Too much nature creates a Lord of the Flies scenario, and too much nurture creates a totalitarian scenario. As we bent toward too much dictum in the education of children in the last 30 years, we need to take our adult hands off the throttle and allow children opportunities to learn from their innate curiosities and wonderment.
In the argument of nature versus nurture, who speaks for children?
In my late career thinking, I observe that few adults speak for children. We speak from self-evident biases and for our self-serving needs. Almost all, if not all, critical decisions about the education of children are made by the political negotiations of adults. There are no children at the table or in the room.
In our post-pandemic data, it is clear that when children do not see themselves and their needs being met in their public education, they bail out. The major dilemma we face in this decade will not be the loss of academic achievement and the onset of socio-emotional problems in youth. The problem will be that as children matriculate into middle and secondary education, they lose faith in the efficacy of the education adults deliver to them. Our issues today are not lack of achievement but lack of engagement. We need to reassess the overwhelming manner in which we dictate schooling and life for children and reincorporate more of Rousseau. We need to rebalance the virtues of nature and nurture in the educational development of all children. If we do not, we will stand alone in classrooms that children have fled.
“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.
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…”
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.
Teacher preparation in the United States is in crisis mode. There are not enough new teachers each year to replace teachers who leave the classroom. The cold fact is that four in every ten young teachers leave classroom teaching for other employment in their first five years of teaching. “Multiple reasons rise to the top of the list. Student behavior is a leading complaint Long hears from teachers who contemplate or leave teaching, and one he believes is among the hardest to address. ‘I don’t think anyone has the answer,’ said Long, referring to accounts of extreme student behavior targeting teachers that has resulted in physical or emotional harm.” Zachary Long quit teaching and with his wife co-founded Life After Teaching. He helps teachers who want to quit teaching to quit.
Student behavior runs teachers out of teaching. It is a fact, but it need not be a continuing fact. When we know teachers quit teaching because of unsuccessful classroom management, we need to aggressively improve how we prepare teachers.
When your boat is taking on water, you can abandon the ship, or you can fix the hole in the hull. We tolerate and accommodate the abandonment of classrooms even though we know a huge “hole” in teacher preparation is classroom management.
A review of teacher preparation curriculum in local colleges of education tells the story. Our local university, for example, provides teacher candidates with 72 credits of college course work toward a major in K-9 education. But there is only one three-credit course that teaches classroom management, and it combines learning theories with student behavior. When we know that an inability to manage children in a classroom setting is one of the leading causes of teacher attrition, is this adequate?
EDUC 340. Supporting Learning and Behavior in the Classroom. 3 Credits.
Course provides pre-service teachers with an understanding of how students learn in educational contexts. Learning theories reviewed, & learning strategies to enhance learning and prevent/manage behaviors are introduced and applied in direct interaction with a learner. Course may be repeated 2 times for a total of 6 credits. Fall and Spring.
No Longer Is It a Hit Them Hard and Often Response
How to organize and manage groups of students is an age-old problem. The first Normal Schools (state teacher prep schools) endorsed corporal punishment for misbehaving students. Students went to the proverbial woodshed where their teacher administered discipline with a paddle. Teachers taught children to behave by fearing physical punishment. Although some schools began banning corporal punishment as early as 1914 it continued as a disciplinary practice in many states in the late 1990s.
When a wooden paddle was considered too harsh, teachers used a gym shoe. I saw the well-known design of a Converse gym shoe on the backsides of my male classmates in the 60s.
On the first day of my first teaching assignment my principal gave me a well-worn wooden paddle and told me to use it. When I asked what a teacher should do if a child’s behavior did not improve, he implied I should hit them harder and more often. I put my paddle in a closet.
Student Discipline as Pedagogy
As often as we talked about paddling back in the day, we clearly understood most of our teachers would never raise a hand to a student. They created patterns of good student behavior through good teaching. It was not a matter of experience, however. We knew veteran teachers whose classrooms were unruly and undisciplined and novice teachers whose students focused on learning not misbehaving. Even before I began my teacher preparation, it was clear that good teaching and good student discipline are linked.
Our task in teacher preparation today is to create highly qualified teachers of both curriculum and student discipline. A teacher who will stay in the profession needs to learn both.
Toolbox Preparation for every Teacher
Classroom management is as important as teaching methods. If a teacher cannot focus children’s attention on the curriculum, how can a teacher teach the curriculum? It is a what to do first dilemma – teach teachers how to teach or teach teachers how to manage children as learners. Both are equally important, and each needs equally strong emphasis.
Field experience tells us that fitting a student management philosophy to a teacher is like fitting shoes. One will feel better, wear better, and be more satisfying than all others. Therefore, teacher prep programs must teach teachers a variety of philosophies and strategies so that a teacher can find a personal plan that refines student behavior and enhances student learning.
The CESA 7 (WI) Teacher Development Center treats Instructional Methods and Classroom Management as toolbox courses that every teacher candidate, regardless of the license sought, must master. In Classroom Management, candidates study several behavioral management philosophies and strategies that allow the candidate to develop a personal and philosophical “fit” to their classroom management plans.
Candidates study and are assessed for their knowledge and understanding of five philosophies and strategies. They know the basis and background of each, their authors, and field studies of their applications. Candidates must know the following:
Choice/Logical Consequences
Discipline with Dignity
Assertive Discipline
Social Justice
PBIS
As an “apprentice” teacher development program, teacher candidates are employed by a school district and enrolled in the TDC. From day one they are classroom teachers under the supervision of school principals, mentors, and CESA 7 supervisors. CESA 7 enrolls candidates from districts throughout Wisconsin; districts that know CESA 7’s reputation for quality instruction and personal support given to of its apprentice teachers. The TDC licensing program requires four semesters of teacher prep coursework, daily teaching, and synthesis of TDC instruction into classroom applications.
Classroom Management and Instructional Methods are the first courses candidates must complete in their licensing program. The CESA 7 candidate supervisor emphasizes and guides apprentices to engage their students in the teacher’s learned classroom management design. This “guided” implementation sets up the relationship between learning and behavior and expectations for both the teacher’s and all students’ commitment to both.
Support of Novice Teachers is Critical
A second most common reason for teachers to leave teaching is their perceived lack of professional support. It starts with a principal and administrative structure that is hard pressed to meet daily crisis demands and leaves new teacher support as a low priority.
The Learning Policy Institute says, “New teachers who do not receive mentoring and other supports leave at more than two times the rate of those who do.”
The CESA 7 TDC answers this dilemma with constant support from its classroom-visiting supervisors, a 24-7 online project specialist, and a curriculum and instruction consultant. TDC experience shows that its staff often understands and responds to candidate classroom problems before the school principal is aware of a problem.
Unlike IHEs that supervise student teachers during a clinical semester only, the TDC conducts supervisory observations and counseling throughout the candidate’s enrollment. Through this process, principals and TDC supervisors see, critique, and guide the development of each candidate’s classroom management practices. TDC teachers do not guess at student behavioral management. Candidates apply the methods they studied, use informed supervision, and refine strategies that work. And, they have ongoing professional feedback on the effectiveness of their classroom management.
The Big Duh!
We know that good teaching and good classroom management go together. We know that positive professional and administrative support is essential for novice teachers. We know that too many teachers leave their chosen profession too early because of problems with student discipline and a perceived lack of professional support. We know that novice teachers who learn and implement good teaching and good student discipline programs are more likely to continue their careers as classroom teachers.
When we know these things as true, teacher preparation programs must fix the hole in our teacher development programs that lead to teacher resignations. We can fix these problems and children can have the prepared teachers they deserve.
There is a long-standing adage in school campus planning that says, “don’t pave the sidewalks until you see where students are walking – pave where they walk and have killed the grass.” That seems like a practical plan. On the other hand, academic curriculum planners do not inquire as to what children want to learn. They assume the tradition of college preparation. If we planned K-12 curriculum like we plan K-12 sidewalks, the curriculum children learn in school would be different than it is today.
What do we know?
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction boldly claims the mission of preparing children in Wisconsin to be college and career ready. The DPI says, “Public schools are working to graduate every child ready for college and career.” But what does college and career ready mean?
“In addition to having knowledge in academic content areas, the Wisconsin way of college and career readiness values skills and habits. Our graduates must be critical thinkers, able to communicate effectively, collaborate with others, and solve real world problems. Ultimately, we want our kids to be good adults.”
Reads like a good plan. There are two end points in public education: preparation for college and preparation for entering a career. However, reading like a good plan and being a good plan are vastly different.
Again, from the DPI. “The state graduation requirements under Wis. Stats. 118.33 and 118.33(1m)(a)1, Section 3266R total 15 credits and the successful passing of a civics exam. The 15 credits include the following:
English/Language Arts – 4 credits
Math – 3 credits
Science – 3 credits
Social Studies – 3 credits
Physical Education – 1.5 credits
Health – .5 credit in grades 7-12 (needed but not part of the 15 credits due to grades 7-8)
Further, the DPI describes elective credits, in the range of 8.5 credits, that a school board may add to the state’s 15 credits. In examining a variety of school districts, most boards strengthen the college preparatory pathway by adding credits in social studies, science, PE, foreign language, the arts, and computer technology.
Further yet, the small print in district publications describes articulated or dual credits and apprenticeship programs. Articulated or dual credits are awarded for courses at the high school or technical college or college/university that a high school student may take and receive both high school and post-high school credit.
The reality is “A minority of students said their school offer opportunities to learn job-related skills, practice applying or interviewing for jobs, or work on projects related to a career they want to pursue.” “Less than a quarter of high schoolers reported having ‘a lot’ of conversations about non-college pathways such as apprenticeships or internships (23 percent), careers that don’t require a degree (19 percent), or starting a business of their own (13 percent).”
The curriculum we provide, and the curriculum children want.
Let us backward design high school curriculum.
“In October 2023, 61.4 percent of 2023 high school graduates ages 16 to 24 were enrolled in colleges of universities, little changed from the previous year. Among recent graduates, ages 16 to 24, 57.6% of men and 65.3 percent of women were enrolled in college. Among 16- to 24-year-olds, 43.7% of recent high school dropouts were working or looking for work. There were 18.0 million people ages 16 to 24 who were not enrolled in school, 45.6% of this age group.”
Using the sidewalk paving model, 60% of high school students need a college prep curriculum and 40% need a career prep curriculum. Therefore, 40% of a high school curriculum should be CTE.
From the DPI –
“Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs provide students with a foundation for a wide range of careers that reflect the contemporary workplace.
Academic & Technical Skills – CTE programs promote life-long learning in a global society.
Work-based Learning – CTE programs strengthen business and education partnerships to provide students with opportunities to reinforce skills and behaviors for the workforce.”
These are the sixteen Career Clusters, and the Pathways described by the DPI.
The DPI site describes an Academic and Career Planning process that “…leads naturally to a career pathway. In K-12 education, a career pathway is a series of connected career and technical education and training opportunities that move seamlessly into a a post secondary options for a specific career area. A high school career pathway includes:
A sequence of career and technical education courses
Opportunities to earn industry-recognized credentials
Work-based learning experiences
Dual-enrollment opportunities
Career and technical student organization related activities
The Big Duh!
I know grads of our local school who own, manage, and run businesses, resorts, construction companies, studios, serve in hospitals and clinics, law enforcement, and are paraprofessionals in schools. They are highly successful in work that does require a baccalaureate degree. As I reflect on their secondary school experience, they completed a college prep curriculum because we said, “it will be good for them” and “they will be prepared for college should they decide to go.” The reality is our school did not assist them in their career pathway, we got in the way.
School boards do not need to invent career and technical education or its pathways. They exist. School boards need to re-evaluate their priorities, acknowledge the 40% of graduates who do not enroll in a college or university, and start paving a CTE curriculum where students’ footprints already exist.
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