Ideas for Real Reform

Introduction

Recent advancements in brain research, cognitive psychology and other cognitive sciences have created a new climate for understanding intelligence and learning. Theories of cognitive modifiability, multiple intelligences, and constructivism emphasize the uniqueness of each brain and its ability to grow connections throughout one’s lifetime. The people who support the model currently in vogue, standards-based learning, are oblivious to this momentous research and base their programs on a prescribed set of outcomes that all students are expected to master, in sequence, by a particular time.

Of course schools have historically been designed to teach specific learning thought to be of value to society. These included information, skills and processes that became both more specific and abstract as the students grew older. Interest, aptitude and parent prodding were among the forces that moved individual students along particular paths as they advanced through the various grades and stages of scholarship. Children either learned, or didn’t learn, to manage their own learning. Few, if any, were taught to do this and serendipity seems to have played a major role for those who actually found a way to set their own path through the land mines of academia.

Surviving in the modern world requires individuals to understand what they need to know to navigate successfully the domains of family, work and society in general. Further, they need to apply this knowledge in appropriate circumstances and be able to adjust the process if the first approach is not successful. It is argued here that current research shows that it is both possible for an individual to improve what we commonly call intelligence and for the individual to learn the skills needed to manage such improvement.

The following sections present three different models of programs that provide alternatives to the drill, test, punish model for instruction that dominates school programs in the U.S. today. These are just three examples of the many models that have been developed using current brain research and learning theory as a foundation for program design.

Connections: Investigating Reality (Marion Brady) is a free course of study designed primarily for adolescents and older students, working in small, cooperative groups. It’s downloadable from this page.

The program’s overarching aim is expanding learner ability to “make sense” of reality, an aim we consider essential to the achievement of all other legitimate aims of a general education.

The activities in Connections rely heavily on ordinary, first-hand user experience, require the use of all thought processes, progress slowly through increasing levels of conceptual (as distinct from textual) complexity, and, as is true in all attempts to make sense of experience, move constantly across and beyond arbitrary disciplinary boundaries.

Its final “product” is meant to be a comprehensive, seamless, systemically integrated, permanent, “master mental model of reality”–a kind of template which, superimposed on real-world experience, routinely translates information into knowledge, and knowledge into wisdom.

Learning in Depth (Kieran Egan) is a program in which each child is given, during the first week of schooling, a particular topic to learn about through her or his whole school career, in addition to the usual curriculum. Topics might include such things as apples, ships, the circus, cats, the solar system, etc. Students will meet regularly with their supervising teachers, who will give guidance, suggestions, and help as students build personal portfolios on their topics. The aim is that each child, by the end of her or his schooling, will have built genuine expertise about that topic. The expectation is that this process will transform for most children their relationship to, and understanding of the nature of, knowledge. It should also transform for each child the experience of schooling.

Personal Intelligence Management (Bob Valiant): Even though thinking skills may be of great importance in the work place and in life, we are left with the problems of adding all of this new work to the curriculum and of managing the development of the skills. The first of these is not as difficult as might be perceived. As the general curriculum is delivered the thinking skills are embedded in the instruction, primarily through questioning strategies of the teacher. We believe that the only effective way to solve the second problem is to teach the students to manage their own thinking. This would be consistent with the study of human development and with research findings in the cognitive sciences.

Piaget first presented the idea that learning progresses through developmental stages. Kohlberg and others have shown that many human characteristics such as moral growth also proceed through stages as an individual matures. Kurt Fischer and others have more recently refined the ladder-like model of development with one of recurring growth cycles for both behavior and brain development. These cycles are individual and based on the life experience of each person, making it nearly impossible to manage the process in a lock-step curriculum. A way to do this is to teach each person to be aware of their own thinking (metacognition) and to use this knowledge strategically. The teacher’s role is to introduce new thinking skills where developmentally appropriate, make the use of the skills explicit, use the curriculum to practice the skills at an optimal level, and help the student develop a “Thinking Journal” that will follow them throughout their school years. The journal will include a thinking map and periodic inventories of learning style, multiple intelligence profile, and other behavioral data as appropriate.