Archive
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Don’t Let Data Drive Your Dialogue
Comments Off on Don’t Let Data Drive Your Dialogue“Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.’” – Mark Twain
Why should our dialogue be “driven” by data? I certainly understand that data can provide a provocation, challenge, affirmation or contradiction that sparks dialogue – but why should it “drive” that dialogue? Data itself has no meaning, until it is organized and displayed in charts or graphs that can be interpreted, usually in multiple ways. These interpretations may usefully inform our dialogue, decisions and subsequent actions so data definitely can be valuable, but it often seems to be granted undue reverence simply because it is numerical. Although insight can derive from analysis of data, equally it can arise out of intuition and, in fact, I wonder if some analyses are not actually rationalizations subconsciously imposed on data to justify intuitive speculations.
The notion of “data-driven dialogue” was introduced to counter the perception of an excessive reliance on unjustified opinion and personal preference in educational discourse. I think this correction was required and believe there is more work to be done to reduce the aversion to data that still exists for some. However, evidence can take many forms and wisdom has many roots. All should be valued. Numerical data is only one form.
Some not only revere numerical data but argue that data is only useful if it is derived from the self-declared “gold standard” of randomized controlled trial methodology – for example, the American government’s What’s Working Clearinghouse has this bias. This fanaticism arises from a hyper-rational perspective on human experience. Positivist science can be highly informative, but I cannot imagine why one would not also welcome the insights that have been distilled from experience through more qualitative processes.
At the school level, richer insights will arise through triangulation based on multiple methods than through any one avenue alone. Data should be used to inform our dialogue at every opportunity but it does not speak for itself. Data is created through an imperfect and incomplete recording and codification of experience and only acquires meaning through fallible human interpretation.
It is in this interpretive process and in the subsequent discussion of what to do about what one has learned that dialogue is required, and this dialogue is the process through which understanding is constructed and commitment to action develops. Data informs the dialogue but does not determine its outcomes. The insights, questions and perspectives that teachers bring to the interpretive process are the source of its power and consequence as much as the data that instigates the dialogue.
So let’s not let data drive us, but also let’s not denigrate it. Professional dialogue is more powerful when it is informed by evidence of all sorts, including numerical data, as well as the intuition and wisdom of experience.
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Teachers Need Feedback Too
Comments Off on Teachers Need Feedback TooJust as teachers assess their students’ learning and provide feedback about it, so too should students assess their teacher and provide feedback.
This is not a quest for popularity, or even approval, but rather the common sense response to a teacher’s duty to enable learning, not simply present information. Since communication occurs in the listener, one has to seek feedback in order to know what is being communicated and how. Students’ perception is the reality within which a teacher works.
So how might one ask students to provide feedback? Actually, you don’t even have to ask. Their moment-to- moment and day-to-day response is generally highly informative, except that you have to disentangle it from the heavy overburden of compliance and approval seeking that permeates school life, and the social norms that often mask students’ true feelings, especially in adolescence.
However, its also useful to make an explicit request for feedback. This signals your desire to be supportive, yields useful information and creates an opportunity to catch serious issues early in the year. I found the following simple questions, answered anonymously, to be be very informative after a month or so.
- In general, how are you feeling about the course so far? [Likert Scale]
- Is there anything you think I should … to help you learn better? – Stop [Open Ended], Start [Open Ended], Continue [Open Ended], or Change [Open Ended]
- How satisfied are you with your own effort and engagement so far? [Likert Scale]
- Is there anything in particular you think I should know? [Open Ended]
Having asked for feedback, it is important to report the results to your students along with any comments on the results, particularly any adjustments you intend to make. Generally, I found a range of responses that invited some explanation about why I did what I did, but only relatively minor adjustments to procedures. Occasionally, however, I learned something more substantial, and perhaps even challenging. Sometimes, I got a distressing response from an individual student that I would have liked to follow-up on but since the responses were anonymous my only option was to reinforce for all students my previous invitation to see me individually if they had any questions or concerns.
Whatever the particular response, this was a very productive exercise that helped to establish open communication with my students and helped me to be a better teacher.
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Is a Teacher a Friendly Critic or Critical Friend?
Comments Off on Is a Teacher a Friendly Critic or Critical Friend?Supportive relationships between teachers and students create safety and provide encouragement but they are not uncritical. In fact, constructive feedback – in both directions – is an essential feature of a healthy relationship, but the manner and spirit of that feedback determines whether it enhances or undermines the relationship.
Students should see their teacher as a critical friend, not a friendly critic. The distinction is important because feedback not only provides information about current learning but also contributes to students’ emerging sense of self-efficacy as a learner, which affects their inclination to engage in future learning. Therefore, encouragement should be in the foreground and correction comes later. In learning, fluency precedes accuracy.
Students decide, generally sub-consciously, about whether and how to engage with an activity based on a sort of cost-benefit analysis and one of the “costs” to be considered is the likelihood of failure. If a student does not feel that s/he has a reasonable likelihood of success then s/he will generally find reasons and ways not to engage, even if the task itself is attractive.
The following recommendations for building confidence in students are based on self-efficacy theory, which holds that the underlying motivators of human action are perceptions of personal control and competence. (Motivation in education: theory, research and applications, Chapter 3, by Pintrich & Schunk, 1996)
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Help students develop their self-perceptions of competence within a content domain. Provide assistance in areas of difficulty, but focus on constructive, encouraging and specific feedback about what students can do rather than what they cannot do.
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Help students to maintain relatively accurate but high expectations and self-efficacy beliefs, and to avoid the impression of incompetence. Towards this end, use formative assessment frequently to provide descriptive feedback and supportive suggestions, and make much more limited use of summative evaluation and critique.
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Because students’ perceptions of competence develop not just from accurate feedback from the teacher, but through actual success on challenging academic tasks, assignments should be relatively challenging but reasonable.
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Minimize the amount of relative achievement information that is publicly available to students. Do not use comparative evaluation.
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Foster the belief that competence or ability is a changeable, controllable aspect of development rather than a question of innate talent or intelligence. Focus on encouragement rather than praise and stress the merits of effort and persistence.
Supportive relationships with students are based on a commitment to student learning and faith in their ability to learn, but also includes constructive feedback about learning that provides helpful guidance and builds a realistic but confident sense of self-efficacy.
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Waiting for Superman: A Canadian Perspective
Comments Off on Waiting for Superman: A Canadian PerspectiveCanada has consistently performed well in international achievement assessments and is a top performer internationally in Reading, Math and Science. Canada has a unique decentralized education system where funding and policy decisions are made by provincial and territorial governments. Variations in achievement levels and in funding reflect differences in population, geography and economy. Canada’s public education system is open to all children and several provinces provide partial financial support to support independent schools making them more affordable to some families. In response to the desire for choice by families many local school districts allow parents to choose which public school their children will attend. Alberta is the only province that has incorporated charter schools into their public education system. Many school districts, especially in large urban areas offer alternative schools or programs, specialist schools or programs for arts, sports, languages, science and technology. While parents can choose these schools for their children pre-qualifications or lotteries may be used if programs are over-subscribed.
While Canadian students are doing well, the public believes the quality of education, needs to improve. Canada’s schools produce more equitable results than almost all other countries but there is much work to do to make sure all children share the benefits of a good education. It’s time to build on Canadian success to make sure that all children and youth thrive in this rapidly changing world. -
The Hard Work of Learning and the Challenges of “Good” Teaching
Comments Off on The Hard Work of Learning and the Challenges of “Good” TeachingEveryone knows what ‘good’ teaching is. Or do they?
We confront this issue regularly at the university level, where most courses end with detailed student evaluations of the instructor. As might be expected, based on student ratings, university professors are distributed along the scale from abysmal to awesome. But there’s a problem. When student ratings of “good teaching” are compared to instructors’ effectiveness in supporting learning (measured through common examinations, for example), we rarely see a strong correlation. The instructors who have walls covered with teaching awards fare no better than their scorned colleagues. How can this be?
The answer seems to be that students are more occupied with immediate experiences, such as atmosphere and personality (whereby good teaching is assessed in terms of feelings of comfort, security, feedback, being valued, etc.), and instructors are more focused on the longer-term benefits of actually learning something (whereby good teaching is assessed in terms of achievement, retention, life success, etc.). As educators ourselves, we confess to leaning more toward the latter conception. Unfortunately, even when this distinction is made clear, the results and claims of the research on good teaching have been ambiguous at best.
Perhaps the most commonly cited studies into the matter fall into the category of “value-added” research. Investigators using this approach look for statistical relationships among such variables as student achievement, teachers, class size, and school funding – a strategy that is not without its problems. For example, a frequent criticism is that this research casts effective teaching strictly in terms of student achievement on standardized performance evaluations. We suspect that readers are well aware of the issues around this construct.
Nevertheless, there are some compelling aspects to this research, thanks in large part to the wealth of data that has been collected through the No Child Left Behind initiative in the United States. In particular, some researchers have shown that, regardless of school demographics and related factors, some teachers seem to inspire their students to outstanding results – year after year. And, of course, the students of other teachers (often in the same school and teaching the same grade) have consistently poor results. As Green summed up this body of inquiry, “When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school’s control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to.”[1] Why this is the case has been illuminated by Hattie in his synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. He listed 138 key influences on students’ learning, categorized into the domains of student, teacher/teaching, school, curricula, and home. Variables relating to what teachers do in their classrooms account for 19 of the top 30.[2]
Perhaps the most intriguing result generated so far was reported by Hanushek and Rivkin. Gauging effective teaching according to student progress, the “top” 5 percent of teachers in their data set managed to encourage their students through an average of about 1.5 grade levels in a single year. At the other end of the spectrum, the “bottom” 5 percent of teachers consistently moved their students through only half a grade level, on average.[3] Even though we have a problem with the fact this research is based on standardized test results, the statistics give us pause. The differences are just too great, especially when they can be disentangled from social background, class size, and other distracters.
Values-added research – and most educational research for that matter – seems to assume that everyone agrees on what a teacher is supposed to do. That’s simply not a tenable assumption.
Unfortunately, these sorts of statistics may only be confirming what everybody already knew: there are some really great teachers out there. As for practical advice on how to distinguish among effective and ineffective teaching practices, the situation is not nearly as clear. For example, in a value-added study of high school teachers, Aronson and colleagues were unable to identify specific teacher characteristics or practices that could account for differences in student achievement – summing up with the statement that “the vast majority of the total variation in teacher quality is unexplained by observable teacher characteristics.”[4] To make matters worse, the list of qualities that do not predict effective teaching might be a little unsettling to many readers, including such factors as a graduate-school degree, deep background in a discipline, high SAT or IQ scores, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, and enthusiasm. These seem to be precisely the qualities that students name and that schools of education identify when pressed to distinguish what’s important.
How to proceed with the question of effective teaching, then?
We want to suggest here that what makes this question a difficult one is not the word effective but the word teaching. Values-added research – and most educational research for that matter – seems to assume that everyone agrees on what a teacher is supposed to do. That’s simply not a tenable assumption.
Changes in “Management”
Elsewhere we’ve offered one account of how the notion of teaching has evolved over recent centuries as prevailing sensibilities shifted and societal needs unfolded.[5] We won’t try to summarize here the evolution of the social role or the word’s meaning, but will mention that a conflicted history and contested usages are evidenced in the hundreds of metaphors and synonyms for teaching that are commonly heard today. A case in point is the obvious contrast between the recent teaching-as-facilitation metaphor that is familiar from constructivist-based writings and the more entrenched teaching-as-instruction interpretation that arose in the early stages of the Scientific Revolution. The two notions couldn’t be further apart in terms of the beliefs about learning that propelled them into common usage, or in terms of their entailments for classroom practice. But it’s not uncommon to encounter them in the same policy statement or teachers’ guide – sometimes in the same sentence.
Because teaching is too big a concept for us to deal with here, let us instead look at the evolution of the notion of management within teaching over the last century. We recently came across a history of teacher education in Calgary and were a little surprised to read about a heavy emphasis on management in Alberta normal schools at the turn of the 20th century. More specifically, the concern was with “management defects”, which included “faulty questioning, unrestrained calling out, too much teaching, too little seatwork, lack of method in teaching …, and inappropriate classification of pupils.” [6] Moving through this list, it almost seems as though management was used as a descriptor of everything the professional educator was expected to do within a classroom environment. Perhaps this is to be expected, given the backdrop of school organization around the model of a factory, and curricula structured after tasks on an assembly line.
But a significant shift in meaning occurred in the 1950s, when the broad notion of management was rather suddenly narrowed and conflated with the notion of control, which in turn was seen as the hallmark of good teaching. As behaviourism ascended to the dominant discourse in educational policy and research, discussions of management shifted from a breadth of concerns associated with the efficient functioning of a classroom to focused references to controlling students – their behaviours, their measureable learning outcomes, and so on. Even the group-based notion of “classroom management” was recast in terms of controlling individual actions. Needless to say, there was a concomitant change in understandings of teaching. As revealed in the practicum evaluation forms of the era, good teaching was recast in terms of effective control of what each student was doing.
This behaviourism-inspired conflation of management and control still lingers, illustrated in the fact that the phrases “classroom management” and “classroom control” are used interchangeably in many contexts. A more recent evolution has been to attempt to separate them once again, discard references to control, and soften conceptions of management. Within learner-centered discussions of classroom life, management tends to be recast not as the principal work of the educator, but as a necessary backdrop to teaching. That is, most commentators still agree it’s important to be able to manage a classroom, but that’s not the same as running a little factory or controlling the actions of each individual in a group. Rather, the current concept of management seems to be more about such specifics as efficient procedures and established routines. As might be expected, with this change comes a further revision in popular understandings of effective teaching. As reflected in the value-added studies, effective teaching is not framed in terms of the actual moment of engagement or the specific actions of the teacher, but in terms of the where students progress relative to where they began. Not surprisingly, as noted, researchers have been unable to reverse engineer this conception of the consequences of good teaching into the qualities and practices of good teaching.
Challenging Changes
It’s strangely easy to reconcile the different phases in the recent evolution of notion of management – that is, from the early 20th century usage as an overarching descriptor of the educator’s responsibilities, to its mid 20th century usage as a synonym for control, to the late 20thcentury usage in reference to a teacher’s background competencies. In fact, it’s so easy to see a harmony in these conflicting constructs that we are compelled to suggest that – while understandings of “management” and “effective teaching” have changed – the popular conception of the core notion of teaching has remained relatively stable.
Indeed, a constant across the evolutions noted above is that teaching has been conceived in terms of effecting change. That is, teachers have consistently and persistently been seen as responsible for ensuring that the persons who exit their classrooms are different from the persons who entered, and this responsibility for changing learners is most often interpreted in terms of causing things to happen.
No matter how you slice it, the evidence shows the teacher really, really matters.
We suspect that this entrenched and pervasive belief is at the heart of difficulties associated with specifying what it is that good teachers do that “not-so-good” teachers don’t do, and a reason that researchers can’t seem to find qualities or practices that are common to good teachers. It’s because, simply put, teachers don’t cause learners to change.
To contextualize this point, the past half century of research into learning – conducted across domains that include genomics, neurology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and ecology – has underscored that learners are complex, self-determining beings. How a student responds to whatever a teacher does is determined by that student’s complex history – genetic, experiential, social, cultural, and so on. True, the student’s learning is dependent on the teacher’s teaching. No matter how you slice it, the evidence shows the teacher really, really matters. But the student’s learning is not determined by the teacher’s teaching. And that’s a game changer that should prod us to rethink and redefine what teaching is all about.
To this end, our title is intended to be a little ironic. If we were forced to collect the consequences of emergent research into learning for the pragmatics of teaching, it would be that good teaching isn’t at all about changing students; it’s about challenging them.
This suggestion isn’t mere wordplay, and the trans-disciplinary conceptual shifts that sit underneath it are anything but subtle. It does more than present a further challenge to the thoroughly critiqued transmission-oriented, delivery-mode conceptions of teaching. It also renders problematic contemporary notions of teaching as facilitating and guiding. It is an assertion that teaching is not so much about easing people toward knowing something they don’t know, but about challenging them to notice in ways they might not have noticed. There are no specifiable ends to education here, only ever-expanding horizons of possibility.
We have no hard evidence for it, but our strong suspicion is that, if researchers were to reframe their analyses of what’s going on in the classrooms of those 5 percent of teachers whose students are excelling – regardless of where those students start and irrespective of social demographics – they would find that, in fact, what those teachers are up to isn’t all over the map. With regard to practices, they are doubtlessly challenging their students, refusing to make things easy and constantly expecting more than of learners than learners might imagine themselves capable. And with regard to qualities, they are undoubtedly curious – about where ideas come from, how students might have arrived at particular constructs, possibilities that arise when different people and different traditions are juxtaposed, and so on.
What does this look like? A simple example:
One of us (Brent) recently dropped into two mathematics lessons, taught by different teachers whose classrooms were adjacent to one another. The school’s policy was for all classes at the same grade level to stay more-or-less in sync, and so the topics of both lessons was adding single digit numbers for sums up to 18.
Before going any further, we should mention that both classes were exceedingly well managed. Each teacher was warm, approachable, attentive, and clearly adored by the students. The principal reported proudly that parents are thrilled to have their children assigned to either classroom. For some reason, however, one didn’t seem to sponsor the same sort of enthusiasm for mathematics, nor the same levels of mathematical insight, as the other.
The reason was obvious to us when Brent stepped from one room into the other. The first was organized around a carefully structured and rehearsed explanation, brief guided discussion, and then focused individual work on well-sequenced practice exercises drawn from a textbook. The other lesson seemed to be little more than a question printed tidily on the whiteboard: “How many different ways can you add two numbers together to get 15?”
The first of these lessons was about changing students – that is, about manipulating understandings by engineering learning experiences to fine-grained detail. It was a teaching about molding, shaping, instructing, informing, guiding, facilitating – about everyone achieving the same sort of functional competence. And, for the most part, the students performed. The outcomes were anticipated and achieved.
The other lesson was about challenging students. If we had been compelled to rate what was happening according to the management-based rubrics – regardless of which of the 20th century interpretations of the word management might be used – this lesson would not have fared as well. Students talked out of turn and over one another, some meandered off task and worked with a sum other than 15, some were using more than two addends to get to 15, some strayed even further afield and included numbers with fractions. One quiet pair in a corner even slipped into integers, hoarding their delight at the realization that the possibilities were endless when you allowed yourself to use “minus numbers”. Although the teacher attempted to anticipate such happenings, she confessed afterward that she really didn’t “do a good job of predicting” where things would go.
There were many things at work here, but none of them fall into the category of observable and measurable qualities. Our guess is that, had we the time and expertise to unpack what was going on, we would have found that the second teacher had a “growth mindset”,[7] believing intelligence to be more a matter of focused and demanding practice than genetic endowment. She likely had deeper pedagogical content knowledge, suggested by a prompt that invited multiple interpretations of number, addition, equality, and so on. We do know that she perceived herself more as a participant than an overseer, noting that she always learned new things about addition through this sort of prompt and confessing that she too found it “a little challenging.”
“Telling a kid a secret he [sic] can find out himself is not only bad teaching, it is a crime.”[8] To our ears, this statement by Freudenthal identifies a vital distinction between good and bad teaching. In a culture of education that is focused on changing students, it makes sense to tell, to show how, to lead, to facilitate discovery, to guide toward insight. A teaching that is focused on challenging learners is organized around the much more demanding tasks of setting situations that allow students to negotiate the level of difficulty, of trusting they will choose the tougher route when they are able, of really listening to where they’re coming from and what they know. It is our hope that, as teaching refashions itself in this rapidly evolving world, it finds its excellence in its challenges.
EN BREF – « Bien » enseigner, tout le monde sait ce que c’est. Vraiment? Quoique la définition d’une bon enseignant ait évolué, les enseignants ont toujours été jugés responsables d’apporter le changement. Selon le modèle à valeur ajoutée en vigueur, un enseignement efficace n’est pas décrit en fonction d’actions spécifiques, mais plutôt en fonction des progrès des élèves par rapport à leur point de départ. Cependant, selon les nouvelles recherches, un bon enseignement ne vise pas à changer les élèves, mais plutôt à les stimuler. Voilà qui transforme la dynamique et qui devrait nous inciter à repenser et à redéfinir la nature de l’enseignement. Un enseignement destiné à stimuler les apprenants est organisé en fonction des tâches beaucoup plus exigeantes d’établir des situations permettant aux élèves de négocier le niveau de difficulté, de s’en remettre à eux pour choisir la voie la plus difficile lorsqu’ils le peuvent, ainsi que de vraiment écouter ce qu’ils ont à dire et ce qu’ils savent.
[1] E. Green, “Building a Better Teacher: Can Educators be Educated About How to Educate?” New York Times Magazine, 2 March 2010. Accessed online, 1 June 2010, at www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html?pagewanted=1.
[2] J. A. C. Hattie, Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-analyses Relating to Achievement (Abington, UK: Routledge, 2009).
[3] E. A. Hanushek and S. G. Rivkin, “Generalizations About Using Value-added Measures of Teacher Quality,” American Economic Review 100, no. 2 (2010), 267–271.
[4] D. Aaronson, L. Barrow, and W. Sander, “Teachers and Student Achievement in the Chicago Public High Schools,” Journal of Labor Economics 25, no. 1 (2007): 95–135.
[5] B. Davis, D. Sumara, and R. Luce-Kapler, Engaging Minds: Changing Teaching in Complex Times (New York: Routledge, 2008).
[6] R. M. Stamp, Becoming a Teacher in 20th Century Calgary (Calgary, AB: Detselig, 2004): 17.
[7] C. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York: Ballantine, 2006).
[8] H. Freudenthal, “Geometry Between the Devil and the Deep Sea,” Educational Studies in Mathematics 3, no. 3/4 (1971): 413–435.
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Educated Parents, Educated Children: Toward a Multiple Life Cycles Education Policy
Comments Off on Educated Parents, Educated Children: Toward a Multiple Life Cycles Education PolicyPhilanthropists and policymakers sometimes opt to fund childhood education to “stop illiteracy at the source” at the expense of funding for adult literacy education. In 2000, The New York Times published an article about a gift of $100 million being given to schools in Mississippi to promote the teaching of reading to children. The article says that the philanthropist giving the money and “many experts are less than bullish on the prospects for attacking adult illiteracy.” The philanthropist is then quoted as saying, “What this program says is that we can’t solve the adult literacy problem but we can work with the children.”[1]
In Canada in 2006, the new Tory government announced cuts of $17.7 million in what was already a skimpy federal budget for adult literacy education. According to a government official, “[T]hey want to focus instead on better teaching children how to read and write.” Adult literacy education was characterized as “repair work after the fact”; the government needs to “get it right from the get-go…rather than doing it after the fact.”[2]
This type of thinking is based largely on a mistaken understanding of “the source of illiteracy” and leads to half-hearted strategies for improving both children’s and adult’s literacy. It focuses on each new child as the beginning of a new life cycle, and then thinks in terms of doing whatever can be done to help the child acquire literacy skills. If this does not turn out well, then a small amount of remedial help may be given in adulthood to help the person acquire higher levels of literacy in a “cradle to grave, lifelong education” policy of education.
However, this focus upon a single life cycle fails to recognize the key role that the education of adults plays in the transfer of literacy from one generation to the next. That is, adult literacy education may promote the development of literacy not only in one life cycle but in multiple life cycles, depending on how many children the adults have. From this point of view, the potential for developing literacy actually begins before birth in the dispositions, skills, knowledge, language, and literacy of children’s parents.
I will argue here that the value of adult literacy education is a good investment for improving the educability of children. First, however, I need to deal with a couple of mistaken ideas that are widely held and that hinder the development of adequate resources for adult literacy education.
IQ, Brain Development, and Early Childhood Education
Cultural beliefs about cognitive development – and when it is possible and/or desirable to develop it – appear to contribute to the marginalization of adult literacy students and the system that serves them. One of those beliefs is that the brain’s intellectual capacity is developed in early childhood, and if children’s early childhood development is not properly stimulated there is likely to be intellectual underdevelopment leading to academic failures, low aptitude, and social problems such as criminal activity, teenage pregnancy, and welfare dependency. Since it will be difficult – if not impossible – to overcome these disadvantages later in adulthood, why invest much in adult education?
This sentiment was revealed by articles written in the Chicago Tribune by prominent columnist Joan Beck. First, she argued for early childhood education because “[h]alf of adult intellectual capacity is already present by age 4 and 80 percent by age 8… the opportunity to influence [a child’s] basic intelligence – considered to be a stable characteristic by age 17 – is greatest in early life.” Two years later, in another article, she said the earliest years of life can make a permanent difference in the lifelong level of a person’s intelligence: “It’s not just that the child will learn more. It’s that his brain actually will have more neurons and interconnections so it will become more intelligent and more capable of learning and thinking for the rest of life.”[3]
But Joan Beck was wrong about early stimulation, both for intellectual development and for the development of the brain. Regarding intellectual development, Beck based her statements about half of intellectual capacity or learning on research by Benjamin Bloom in 1964.[4] But Bloom did not show that half of one’s intellect was achieved by age four. Rather, he argued that IQ at age four was correlated .7 with IQ at age 17. This means that almost half (.7 squared, or 49%) of the variance among a group of 17-year-olds’ IQ scores could be predicted from their group of scores at age four. But the ability to predict half of the variability among a group of people’s IQ scores is a long way from the idea that half of an individual’s IQ is developed by age four. Furthermore, it does not necessarily say anything about intelligence. That prediction could be due to internal factors such as the child’s intelligence, but it could just as well be due to external factors, such as parental styles, schools, or socio-economic level.
In fact, developing half of one’s intellectual capacity is not even conceptually possible because, for one thing, there is no universal understanding of what “intelligence” is. Further, even if we could agree on what “intelligence” is, there is no such thing as “half of one’s intellect” because no one knows what 0 or 100 percent intelligence is. Without knowing the beginning and end of something, we can’t know when we have half of it.
Regarding the unique importance of early childhood brain stimulation for intellectual development, for over a decade the James S. McDonnell Foundation in St. Louis has supported extensive research in neuroscience. In 1999, John Bruer, President of the Foundation, wrote a book in which he explains that the findings of neuroscience do not support the claims made about early stimulation of infants and children under three years of age and their brain development.[5] Earlier, Bruer discussed major misconceptions that educators have of brain science. For instance:
(a) Claim: Enriched early childhood environments cause synapses to multiply rapidly. Bruer states, “What little direct evidence we have – all based on studies of monkeys – indicates these claims are inaccurate…. The rate of synaptic formation and synaptic density seems to be impervious to quantity of stimulation. …Early experience does not cause synapses to form rapidly. Early enriched environments will not put our children on synaptic fast tracks.”
(b) Claim: More synapses mean more brainpower. Bruer states, “The neuroscientific evidence does not support this claim, either…. Synaptic densities at birth and in early adulthood are approximately the same, yet by any measure adults are more intelligent, have more highly flexible behavior, and learn more rapidly than infants.”[6]
While brain science has the potential to help us understand human learning, it does not offer evidence-based information to guide education in the classroom.
More recently, in a 2007 update of that position, Bruer and his colleague Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek reported the outcomes of a meeting of a distinguished international group of neuroscientists and cognitive scientists convened at the University of Chile in Santiago for a conference on Early Education and Human Brain Development. During the meeting it became clear that, while brain science has the potential to help us understand human learning, it does not offer evidence-based information to guide education in the classroom.[7]
To make this point about brain science in a strong voice, the participants drafted the Santiago Declaration (presently available at the McDonnell Foundation’s website, www.jsmf.org/declaration). The Declaration lists several principles about education on which there was consensus among the participants, concluding with this statement: “The principles enunciated above are based primarily on findings from social and behavioral research, not brain research. Neuroscientific research, at this stage in its development, does not offer scientific guidelines for policy, practice, or parenting.”
The Intergenerational Transfer of Literacy
Importantly for adult education and literacy educators, in his 1999 book Bruer makes the policy argument that, with a better understanding of the limitations of present day neuroscience for understanding education, “[w]e might question the prudence of decreasing expenditures for adult education or special education on the grounds that a person’s intellectual and emotional course is firmly set during the early years.”[8]
Consistent with Bruer’s point of view, I have for some years been struck by the many data sets that indicate the strong relationship between parents’ education level and their children’s achievement in literacy. In 1983, I argued that a body of research existed to suggest that more highly educated parents transmit literacy intergenerationally via oral language skills and the modeling of literacy skills. Therefore, if we could find ways to provide education for adults, we might get double value from education dollars because investing in the education of adults could improve the educability of their children. I have referred to this as getting “double duty dollars” when investing in adult education. We pay for the adults’ education, and we get improved education for both the adults and their children.[9]
More recent research studies have confirmed the importance of the intergenerational transfer effects of parents’ education levels on children’s literacy achievement.[10] According to Feinstein and associates, in a 2004 report from the Center for Research on the Wider Benefits of Learning in London, “The intergenerational transmission of educational success is a key driver of the persistence of social class differences and a barrier to equality of opportunity…. Parental beliefs, values, aspirations and attitudes (termed here ‘cognitions’) are very important, as is parental well-being. …Parenting skills in terms of warmth, discipline and educational behaviours are all major factors in the formation of school success.…We conclude that the intergenerational transmission of educational success is a key element in equality of opportunity. There are substantial benefits of education that accrue to individuals and society in terms of what education enables parents to pass on to their children.”
As it turns out, what many have considered to be the long-term cost-beneficial effects of educating children in early childhood education programs may actually have been the results that the programs had on educating the children’s parents.
It is not only parents’ education level that can have an intergenerational transfer of literacy effect. Their measured levels of basic skills also influence this transfer. Augustin De Coulon and associates reported, “The impact of parents’ basic skills on children’s cognitive outcomes is positive and highly significant…. This relationship holds even when we allow for the myriad of other factors that also influence child development, including parental qualification levels and parental ability. This means that parents’ basic skills have a positive impact on their children’s cognitive skills, regardless of the education level and early ability of the parent…. The intergenerational transfer of basic skills is always significant, and it is particularly large for parents with low levels of qualifications.”[11]
Early Childhood Education as Adult Education
Nobel prize-winning economist James Heckman, in an interview in 2005 at the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis, argued against universal preschool and in favour of focusing preschool programs on disadvantaged children. Asked whether public funding should go for universal early childhood programs or for at-risk children, he pointed out that the evidence is very strong that family background is a major predictor of children’s future behaviour. Because a disproportionate number of problem kids come from disadvantaged families, Heckman said, “[t]he simple economics of intervention…suggests that society should focus its investment where it’s likely to have very high returns. Right now, that is the disadvantaged population. It is foolish to try to substitute for what the middle-class and upper-middle-class parents are already doing.”
As it turns out, what many have considered to be the long-term cost-beneficial effects of educating children in early childhood education programs may actually have been the results that the programs had on educating the children’s parents. Robert G. Lynch, of the Economic Policy Institute, in citing research on the importance of preschool programs, noted in 2004 that many early childhood education programs also provide adult education and parenting classes.[12] This suggests that perhaps a significant percentage of the benefits these preschool programs produce might result from the effects of their parenting and literacy education activities for adults.
This idea is supported in The Obama Education Plan: An Education Week Guide, compiled by the staff of the Education Week newspaper. In the chapter on early childhood education, the position is taken that many of the benefits measured in longitudinal studies of early childhood programs appear to reflect, at least to a certain degree, the effects on the parenting behaviours of parents whose children participated in these programs. In this chapter, Lawrence Schweinhart – one of the developers of the well-known Perry Preschool program, which is generally cited as evidence for the cost-benefits of early childhood education – says, “All the programs in the long-term studies worked with parents. In fact, in the High/Scope Perry Preschool program, teachers spent half their work time engaged in such activities.”[13] Clearly, this strongly suggests that much, if not most, of the success of early childhood, preschool programs depends on adult education to improve the skills and knowledge of parents.
Frederick Morrison and colleagues conducted an extensive review of research on childcare and preschool, which led them to question the effectiveness of both childcare and preschool programs that do not focus on improving parenting skills. Concerning childcare, they say, “Overall, parenting appears to be a more important source of influence on children’s development than is childcare. …high-quality childcare will not offset the negative effect of poor parenting, and poor-quality childcare will not prevent success for children with effective parents.”[14]
Poorly educated children are the source of adult functional illiteracy, and functionally illiterate adults are the source of poorly educated children.
Given this emerging understanding of the role of parents in such programs, it seems reasonable to consider that many of the long-term changes in children following their participation in early childhood education result from changes in their very highly disadvantaged parents. This would help explain why a generally short-term education program for children could sustain them through primary, middle, secondary school, and into adulthood long after they had completed preschool. It would also help explain why such programs are likely to have a greater effect on disadvantaged families than on more highly advantaged families who, as Heckman said, already do what preschools teach parents to do.
From Parents to Progeny: Toward a Multiple Life Cycles Education Policy
Given the important intergenerational effects of parents’ education level on the achievement of their children, I believe we need to shift our education policies from a focus on one life cycle to a focus on “multiple life cycles” education. Such a policy would explicitly recognize that adults transfer their educational achievements to the achievement of their children.
It would also recognize that adult education should be valued as much as is early childhood education, and that nations should provide adult education systems on a par with children’s education systems. Poorly educated children are the source of adult functional illiteracy, and functionally illiterate adults are the source of poorly educated children.
Perhaps through education based on a Multiple Life Cycles policy, in which children are guaranteed a right to educated parents, the vicious intergenerational cycles of functional illiteracy can be stopped at both sources.
EN BREF – Compte tenu des importants effets intergénérationnels du niveau d’instruction des parents sur la réussite de leurs enfants, les politiques d’éducation devraient mettre l’accent sur les « cycles multiples de vie » plutôt que sur un seul cycle de vie, reconnaissant explicitement que les adultes transfèrent leurs réalisations en éducation au succès scolaire de leurs enfants. De telles politiques affirmeraient également que l’éducation des adultes devrait être aussi valorisée que l’éducation de la petite enfance et que les nations devraient offrir des systèmes d’éducation autant aux adultes qu’aux enfants. Une mauvaise instruction des jeunes est à la source de l’analphabétisme fonctionnelle des adultes, et les adultes analphabètes sont à la source des enfants mal instruits. Grâce à une instruction fondée sur une politique de cycles multiples de vie garantissant aux enfants le droit à des parents instruits, il pourrait être possible de faire cesser aux deux sources le cercle vicieux intergénérationnel de l’analphabétisme.
[1] Kevin Sack, “Gift of $100 Million Planned to Aid Literacy in Mississippi,” The New York Times (January 20, 2000).
[2] The Headline News web page of the National Adult Literacy Database (NALD), October 4, 2006 www.nald.ca
[3] Reprinted in the San Diego Union, 13 October 1991 and 21 April 1993.
[4] B. Bloom, Stability and Change in Human Characteristics (New York: Wiley, 1964).
[5] John Bruer, The Myth of the First Three Years (New York, The Free Press, 1999).
[6] John Bruer, “Education and the Brain: A Bridge Too Far,” Educational Researcher 26, no. 8 (1997): 4-16.
[7] Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek and John Bruer, “The Brain/Education Barrier,” Science 317 (7 September 2007): 1293.
[9] Thomas G. Sticht, Literacy and Human Resources Development at Work: Investing in the Education of Adults to Improve the Educability of Children (Alexandria, VA: Human Resources Research Organization, 1983).
[10] L. Feinstein, K. Duckworth, and R. Sabates, A Model of the Inter-Generational Transmission of Educational Success (London: Center for Research on the Wider Benefits of Learning, 2004); A. De Coulon, E. Meschi, and A. Vignoles, Research Note: Parent’s Basic Skills and Their Children’s Test Scores (London: Institute of Education, National Research and Development Center for Adult Literacy and Numeracy, May 2008).
[11] DeCoulon, Meschi, and Vignoles.
[12] R. Lynch, Exceptional Returns: Economic, Fiscal, and Social Benefits of Investment in Early Childhood Development (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, 2004), www.epinet.org; F. Morrison, H. Bachman, and C. Connor, Improving Literacy in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).
[13] The OBAMA Education Plan: An Education Week Guide (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009), 23.
[14] Frederick Morrison, Heather Bachman, and Carol Connor, Improving Literacy in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 48-49.
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