Monday, March 24, 2014

Being Educated to Alternative Education


Starting early in 1994, I undertook an informal study in depth of alternative education.  I was an active member of the Association for Experiential Education (AEE) since a couple of years before, frequently debating Outward Bound’s slogan, “Challenge by Choice” with Association colleagues, as, in my humble opinion, there is no choice in participation in school challenge programs and in the challenges in Outward Bound programs, and appropriately applying Experiential Education strategies, especially cooperative challenge activities, as the lead trainer and leader of our Boy Scout Troop’s Venture program, which specialized in deep winter/snow camping and trekking. However, I thought to look for other alternative professional associations as AEE was far more involved in outdoor education rather than the customary academics and I needed to network with folks in alternative academics to find a paid teaching position. So, I hooked up with the National Coalition of Alternative Community Schools.  NCACS had a teacher education program through which I thought I could obtain a direct line into a teaching position but it required a cooperating school and, unfortunately, there were no NCACS affiliated schools in NYC at the time.  Still, they had a reading list through which I plowed in earnest.  There is where I discovered Maria Montessori and John Holt, who most informed me on children and the way they learn.





Maria Montessori over one hundred years ago in Italy observed children striving to satisfy their immediate needs as motivating individual learning behavior. She noticed what she called “sensitive periods”, those times when a child’s mind is more in need of acquiring a specific knowledge set than at other moments as constituting their immediate learning needs and the most powerful intrinsic motivation to learning engagement.  However, as she looked at the learning environments of the day, she observed very young children unable to grow mentally or physically healthy, no less competent in the formal learning required of them: These environments were looking to satisfying adult need, not child need.  Indeed, the structured relationship of adult ordered children blocked the powerful intrinsic desire of children to satisfy sensitive period demands.  She also noticed how energetic and irrepressible natural curiosity was for learning spiting the adult attempts to suppress it in favor of adult ordered activities. She understood that when natural curiosity is allowed its expression adults need not force a child to learn, especially during the sensitive periods. The intrinsic motivation of natural curiosity to satisfy the specific sensitive period needs, she thought, was to be the foundations upon which schooling should be ordered.  From these observations and thoughts, she developed her “Method”.





The Method centers itself in adults preparing a learning environment for children to engage filled with material and activity calculated to resonate with each sensitive period and be driven by the child's natural curiosity to satisfy sensitive period needs. In the Method adults do not tell children what to do beyond an initial explanation on how to use the prepared environment. The adults consciously observe how each child interacts with the materials and the activities ascertaining each child’s needs and if required altering the environment-the material and the activity-to put in the way of the child the elements to satisfy his and her needs.





Later, John Holt observed similar intrinsically motivated learning behavior.  He saw youngsters learning through a slow process of inquiry, where, by way of natural intuitive observation, they form extremely tentative hunches which are self-tested against experiences. They continuously and unconsciously survey the consequences of their hunch testing, noticing regularities and patterns. They begin to ask questions, to make deliberate experiments, sharpening their own awareness of the interplay of action, environment and results and in the process cultivate a reflexive and then an intentional self-regulation, within which there is a growing meta-cognitive process propelling intentional knowledge seeking and use.





However, Holt insists that compelled by adults to constantly prove either they know or do not know, youngsters stop trying to self-test, confirm and strengthen their faint hunches and give up. This is also the case when youngsters are compelled by adults to undertake objects of learning in which they have no interest or native inclination. This learned helplessness debilitates during conventional school days and well throughout a life-time.





Considering both Montessori and Holt, it becomes crystal clear that it is necessary for formal learning to be constructed to the youngsters themselves, to the way their brains/minds function and to the behavioral characteristics driving the manner through which they move through the world.  Schooling so founded would be very different than what most currently think of as school.





First, the course of study over a term and over an entire school residency would emerge unique to every child as each engages learning through his and her different intrinsic predispositions. Children possess different neurological constructions-different spectrums of strengths, interests, abilities, temperaments, learning and communication styles and rates of emotional, cognitive and social development. These natural instincts and individual differences drive attraction to differentiated knowledge seeking, acquisition and use and when given the free play to develop according to individual intrinsic motivations will yield quality differentiated outcomes.  





Progression through such a learning system would be according to cognitive, social and emotional development criteria than by satisfaction of content mastery.





Second, schooling constructed to the spectrum of different neurological constructions and individual intrinsic predispositions would require the supportive service of deep mentoring relationships with those thoroughly versed in the social-emotional and cognitive styles of the school’s population, in the negotiation between native inclinations and credentialing decisions and in the culture of the school to assist students in maneuvering through the channels of the academy and to help them help themselves to work through their natural inclinations and individual differences to achieve schooling success and healthy personal growth.  A teacher or an administrator and a youngster would enter a process mutually respectful of the wisdom of each to attain a common understanding of and an agreement on learning goals and the action steps required to reach those goals; this includes a mentor working with children on social-emotional and psycho-dynamic issues. The agreement process on what is undertaken to be learned and when and how learning is to happen is known as a “negotiated learning”.





Third, in a learning environment so much on the side of the child, as recommended by the ideas of Maria Montessori and John Holt, would have as a central assumption that emotional readiness to accept a learning task comes well before the task. Any learning first depends on how a youngster feels about herself, empowered or powerless, competent or stupid. Compelling a task when someone feels powerless or stupid just frightens, discourages and deepens helplessness. Youngsters must be provided time for emotional development first, when youngsters come to feel safe in trusting their native leaning instincts and their unique ways of knowing.





Free and self-organized imaginative play is the activity leading to emotional readiness. Youngsters should engage in whatever play the environment supports for as long as they wish. In early childhood and primary education programs there would be such as Lincoln Logs and blocks, toys and puzzles, sand and water tables, costumes and theatrical makeup, paints and crayons, newsprint and paper, hammers, nails, saws and wood, etc. There would be performance spaces and child friendly kitchens and appliances. There would also be indoor and outdoor playground equipment and open space. Even for the adolescents in a secondary education program play is essential.  It can be in wood or in metal or in performance with acting or music or in the arts with drawing, painting, sculpting. Or they too can take to the kitchen or the indoor/outdoor playground equipment and open space. Or, they can play in the outdoors, camping, hiking, backpacking, canoeing, rafting, skiing, biking, etc. Then, when in their own time they feel ready, each will engage in whatever formal academic learning is chosen.





Fourth, learning engagement within a school built to the spectrum of different neurological constructions and individual intrinsic predispositions would tend to be through the student choice of one or more of three ways: through independent, individual or cooperative small group engagement with the materials and activities open to students, through self-selected small, whole group adult facilitated topic study or activity and/or through self-initiated one-to-one instruction either with another student or with an adult.  The initiation of learning engagement approach would be up to the child, based on a felt need to connect with the knowledge, the materials, the activities, the adults and classmates, rather than the fully adult initiated whole group classroom process of the traditional taking all decisions away from the youngster.





Ultimately, formal learning according to the spectrum of individual neurological difference and intrinsic motivation is required to turn its attention to preparing youngsters for life itself, not for jobs or careers. To have as the goal of formal learning the social utility of a disciplined, trained workforce is to give to education a far too narrow, counter-productive and harmful one. Schooling ought to be looking to the larger function of socialization, of providing the society and the nation with healthy citizens capable of making their own decisions. Or to sum it up: The goals of our intentional learning communities ought to be to cultivate in all youngsters a solid psychological foundation for future growth and a cognitive dexterity for adaptability to life’s vicissitudes. Indeed, schooling should be about the healthy, happy growth in self-awareness, self-regulation and self-actualization. In the end it’s all about taking care of the psychic side of life, for once that is healthy, the rest will follow in good order. The 21st century and beyond need mentally healthy citizens who can leverage their good health in which ever way they discern is in their best interest and in the best interest of family, community, country and civilization.





The biggest problem with all this new knowledge and its insights was that there were no schools in and around Metro NYC for me to apply to use them.   There were a number of Montessori schools, but they were in violation of Montessori's Method:  Rather than employing her Method, founded on the self-selection of learning within an adult prepared environment these "Nonessori" schools were as directing of children's learning and conduct as you would find in any conventional school.




The Christmas season of 1995 found me with quite an array of instructional strategies and grand insights into children, adolescents and young adults and learning but no place to employ them and no prospects of being invited to do so.




I took the hint and began looking elsewhere for paid work.  I was not yet a scuba instructor, not yet getting paid for my contribution to the sport, that would come in less than six months.  I needed as full-time as I could get.  And I found it as a Sales Associate in an Eastern Mountain Sports store in Manhattan.

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

The Methods Chase

(Author's Note:  For those who have yet to catch on let me say that these recent blog posts have been summarizing my history in the field of education.  I think it enlightening, especially for some who are not in the field, to see one person's struggle to be a professional in a career which over the last thirty years has been "de-professionalized".  I have a few more such posts and then I will move on to comment on other things.)




The Board of Examiners, the credentialing department of New York City’s Board of Education, said I, with a BFA in Communication Arts, a MA in Media Studies, plus sixty-three credits in a Ph.D. in Media Ecology, was unqualified to teach Communication Arts in the City schools but I was qualified to teach Social Studies. That I had substantial knowledge in Irish, American and European history, politics and government allowed me to be not too angry at the decision. Besides, there was at the time no need for Communication Arts teachers in the City system but a high need to fill Social Studies vacancies.


Now, preparing to be a professor requires in-depth disciplinary learning and high level training in research, but nothing in the art of teaching, nor in the social science of Learning Theory.  However, to be City licensed and State certified to teach in the public schools of New York City, one needs to have sufficient course work completed in these areas. So, I went back to school in academic year 1990-91 and completed the required courses to be a New York City Social Studies teacher. 


The singular fellow teaching us to teach was then the Chair of the Social Studies Department of Brooklyn’s Abraham Lincoln High School, an urban public school noted for its championship football and basketball teams and its rather rough student body.  One would expect our professor to prepare us for students we would be facing as newly minted teachers, urban ninth graders, as the brand new teacher in this public system is given the most challenging students, and ninth graders are all that.  Certainly, he came from a school which held classrooms full of such youngsters.  But, no, he chose to educate us to a teaching method he used for his honors classes, The Developmental Lesson. 


I immediately took to this process as it is based on the Socratic Method, which I had made my own during the ten previous years.  The way this professor had us style each day’s Socratic lesson was as an argument answering a specific question.  These turned out to be mini debates where a teacher would elicit evidence from students through asking them “pivotal questions”.   The evidence would be placed on the board in a manner so that the accumulated "proofs" would definitively answer the lesson’s question.  Students would copy what was placed on the board as notes for study.  In this practice, evaluation of student learning was mostly essay type as such writing was thought best at reproducing lesson arguments to answer test questions which were in actuality the ones contemplated in each day’s class.  Frankly, I enjoyed the year and waited anxiously for appointment.


However, academic year ’91-’92 had to be spent as a substitute teacher in five Brooklyn high schools. But, in September, 1992, I was appointed to teach Social Studies in one of the tougher Brooklyn high schools. And, as expected, in that school, Erasmus Hall High School, I was given a ninth grade program.


I employed Developmental just the way I was taught to do.  This was very difficult to accomplish as it required students to do homework, to actually read with understanding the assignments in preparation for the next day’s discussion, which to a young ninth grader they did not do.  The short, narrowly conceived “warm-up” work given at the very start of each period as a way of getting students settled into a learning frame of mind did work to an extent as a substitute for homework.  But, they were so habituated to being talked at as an instructional strategy they had trouble grasping the concept, no less the practice, of, the Socratic Method upon which Developmental Lesson instruction is based. As a consequence of all this, we were struggling to get through each period.


For my troubles I got "straightened out" by the Principal and by the students themselves. The Principal demanded a definite lecture, a talking to, factoid on the board, textbook teaching/learning instructional strategy, not Developmental, and the students didn't actually know what they wanted but they did not want Developmental either. Wanting to remain employed in the teaching capacity in that school, I did as told moving completely away from Developmental to the type of lecture talking to, factoid on the board, textbook teaching/learning the Principal wanted with the result that the ninth graders, who were all two to three years behind on any and all schooling criteria, were far more lost in the weeds than ever.


The tragedy of the situation was that these youngsters needed a wholly different way of being formally educated, but none was available, so they floundered.  As might be expected, this situation didn't last, not at all. I saw what I was required to do creating worse student outcomes than if left to what I was doing before and I resented having to force bad outcomes when I knew better; yet, I felt in order to remain employed I had to do as told. It did not take long for me to implode: I resigned my appointment to become a scuba diving instructor.


I mean, if all this wasn't telling me something. Still, my head was in school teaching, so I thought all I needed was to get more and different instructional strategies.  Thus, informally through a whole lot of reading I acquired Experiential Learning, Project Based Learning and techniques in the Johnsons' Model of Cooperative Learning. I even took a graduate level course in the Johnsons’ Model.  But, the City schools, and even the private schools, refused me any additional employment in Social Studies denying me opportunity to apply them. Now, one had to wonder if the negative decisions on all of my attempts to regain a school teaching position-I had a bunch of interviews-were a clear rejection of the array of instructional strategies I presented as being fundamental to my teaching. More, I was offering myself as a Cooperative Learning teacher and I have to wonder if the principals with whom I was interviewing had already decided very much against Cooperative just in the way the Principal of Erasmus Hall had decided very much against Developmental.  Unfortunately, I was not thinking in that direction as I continued to go after each vacant position offering each principal a grant assortment of pedagogical possibilities, Cooperative Learning most prominent among them.


There was a glitch with private schools complicating any consideration of my pedagogical approach: their reliance on academic degrees as qualification. My academics were in Communication/Media Arts and although I possessed City license and State certification in high school Social Studies as well as a store of knowledge in American and World History and in Economics and Government-the subjects of Social Studies-the conventional private school community in NYC would only recognize degrees in History or Economics or Politics/Government as marking prospective teachers eligible for employment in Social Studies. And, as it happened then, there were no vacancies in the private high schools for Communication Arts teachers.


So, rather than taking the hint I began looking at private alternatives to the conventional schooling to build a teaching career.

Monday, March 3, 2014

An Active Learner From a Way Back

An only child is a lonely child in desperate search of conversation with anyone who will chat for even the briefest of time as talking for the lonely child provides that indispensable human connection when personal interiors mix with each other and both intuit they are not alone. As an only child, from the moment I could sense there was a world outside my skin, I craved conversation and the connection it furnished.


And it didn't take much for me to catch on that a question started conversation. Indeed, the art of conversation almost always starts with the simplest of questions: “Hey, how the heck are you?”; or “Whatsup?” or “Whatsdewin?” Naturally, there are moments when the questioner really has no interest in having the question answered, but uses it as an opening to let the other enter the mutual exchange. Nevertheless, it is the question which prompts the conversation.


The consistent use of the opening question inside my family circle must have begun well before the time when today I can look back and remember a first time, but there isn’t a moment in memory when I can recall any other way conversations were started. And the territory covered by conversations overheard between my mother and father, house guests and assorted relatives and in which I was invited to engage when beginning as a teen I was thought mature enough ranged the width of the universe and the depth of the human soul. Neal Postman, a true lover of conversation himself, echoed Marshal McLuhan when I heard him say that television supplies the first curriculum. While we did enjoy our television, for me from the earliest age, it was conversation which supplied my first curriculum and my earliest experiences of being taught. It seemed to me then that learning what was important to know came through conversation, that a deep desire to know could be quenched through conversation, that the opening to conversation, to learning, was always through a spoken question and that the transformational moment moving the object of learning wider and deeper was centered in a spoken question. It was not so much later consequent to seeing my father and mother frequently reading and then referring to what was read in conversation I understood that silently engaging writers in their books and articles stimulated the inner reflective thinking on which verbal expression through conversation rested and in which questions were formed, leading me to unselfconsciously know the intimate connections among reading, reflective thought, questioning, conversation and learning. Thus, from the earliest of ages I knew learning was a process of reflective inner thinking stimulated by reading and conversation ignited by a personal impulse of wanting to know given voice through asking questions. And teaching is, conversely, putting reflective inner thinking opportunities in the way of individuals and providing external expressive pathways to individuals while allowing individual questions to drive reading, thinking and conversation.


But, when I entered kindergarten, teaching and learning wasn't exactly like that. In fact, there were all these experiences of color, of shape, of letters and numbers, of all sorts of combinations of things, and there was free play. There was also being read to and sing-a-longs and play acting. As I moved through to the first grade it occurred to me at an instinctual level that learning was more than an effect of reading and talking. Ultimately, I “refined” my unconscious understanding of learning: I intuited learning to be a process of reflective inner thinking stimulated by sensory and mediated experience ignited by a personal impulse of wanting to derive meaning from these experiences through asking questions of the individual and collected experiences. Indeed, at the dawn of the academics of first grade I was quite the activist learner.


But, I was also fairly compliant and so when told to do whatever academic thing I obeyed, perhaps not doing as well as I could, but not rebelling, not self-sabotaging, either. Still, anytime when the teaching resonated with my activist predilections, I excelled. English-what is now called English Language Arts-was the area teachers engaged us in asking questions of what we read, and to the degree us little kids could talk about how we interpreted what we read we had class discussions. However, since the rest of elementary school required youngsters to be passive learners, completely accepting teacher supplied information into our little brains for ready recall on tests, I did not excel in these other subjects and to the degree that even English had us strictly obedient to teacher demands, my drive to being an “A” student was blunted. Nevertheless, up until sixth grade, I remember feeling okay and doing well enough. In sixth grade, though, the bottom started to fall out. I wanted to assert my way of learning beyond an occasion in English. But, that was not happening. And so I got depressed and while I remained a well mannered young man, I struggled to do the school work I was told to do. And consequently my grades suffered. I did not fail any subject, but came close to it at times.


English was the high school subject in which I did best and for the same reasons as I did in elementary school. Yet, the need for me to be a compliant passive learner remained. I did okay, but felt miserable suffering a deep depression my sophomore and junior year. Even today, I do not understand the reasons I come out of it at the very start of my senior year, but I did. Then, I was more like I was in early grade school with pretty much the same results, feeling okay but doing mediocre academics.


It took ten years for me to earn my undergraduate degree as I was in and out until I was old enough to accept the passive role I had to affect. And when I did, I was able to excel and graduated Summa Cum Laude. And go on to do my Masters and complete all the course work on a Ph.D. And then the active learner revolted so disagreeing with my dissertation chair as to self-sabotage the dissertation process.


In the meantime, I pledged to myself that whenever I got the opportunity to teach, I would employ instructional strategies requiring all students to be active learners. In fact, as I traveled through course work at all levels, but especially at the undergraduate, I would note the points of disagreement I had with the passive strategies professors were employing and cook-up methods transforming them into active strategies. I would listen closely to the lectures and as it droned on I would turn what the professor was saying into questions he/she could ask the class.  I would occasionally, raise my hand to ask a question to see if I could start a conversation among my fellow undergrad classmates, but it was always unwanted and thus to no avail.  Still, when I was hired for my first college course, I already had a good idea on how to organize instruction. Unfortunately, my active learner approach-which I learned is called the Socratic Method-along with my unique organization of course content put me at odds with some students and with supervision and so I was not invited back. As I keep on saying, I should have taken the hint, but I didn't and went through the 1980's from college to college as an adjunct working well with most students, upsetting a few and greatly annoying supervision until the hard economics of the City University of New York kick me out to the street.


So, I took my activist learning proclivities and pedagogical pledge into the New York City high schools.