WHEN FEEL-GOOD TEACHING METHODS JUST AREN'T ENOUGH

Saturday, October 12, 2002

How do teachers perceive their role in the classroom? And what do they expect of their students? The Manhattan Institute commissioned a survey of fourth- and eighth-grade teachers to explore those questions. Some of the answers they found are alarming, especially to people dedicated to the success of education reform based on meeting state standards.

Only a small minority of these teachers identified their core responsibility as teaching students specific information and skills, which is something they have to do in order for their students to succeed. Three-quarters of them thought their primary mission was to teach children ``how to learn,'' a content-free and hopelessly imprecise goal.

The Manhattan Institute looks favorably on certain styles of teaching and learning now regarded by the enlightened members of the education profession as hopelessly old-fashioned, such as the belief that teachers (and more generally, adults) should determine what children ought to learn. But you should not jump to the conclusion that the survey was tailored to support their views. First, it was conducted by the Center for Survey Results and Analysis at the University of Connecticut, which is both respected and independent. And second, the results look more like the institute's nightmares than its dreams.

The survey size was 400 fourth-grade teachers, 200 each in math and English, with a sample error or 5 percent, and 800 eighth-grade teachers, 200 each in math, English, science and history/social studies, with a sample error of 3 percent.

Among fourth-grade teachers, 40 percent said they leaned more toward teacher-directed learning and 55 percent toward student-directed learning. Those are, to be sure, very vague terms; I can readily imagine teachers who give the same answer yet manage their classes day-to-day in very different ways. I used to teach math, and sometimes would devote the whole hour to students' questions. The students might have thought that class was student-directed -- I rather hoped they did -- but by the end of the hour I would have told them the same things I would have told them in a formal lecture with a few questions at the end.

The question whether it is most important to teach students specific information and skills, or whether learning how to learn is most important for students, is likewise subject to interpretation (notice, also, that the wording of the question subtly suggests where responsibility for the outcomes lies). I'm not sure how I would answer it in a survey, because I think that knowing how to learn -- knowing how you yourself learn -- may be the ultimate goal, but that the experience of having learned a great many different skills is the necessary means to achieve it. And I suspect that abstract instruction in ``how to learn'' isn't useful apart from specifics.

But there wasn't much ambiguity in the results of the survey; the eighth-grade teachers opted for ``how to learn'' over ``specific skills'' 72 percent to 13 percent.

Given the widespread indifference to whether children learn specific skills, perhaps it isn't surprising that children's actual answers don't figure largely in their teachers' evaluations of their work. Some 40 percent of teachers said they placed the greatest emphasis on whether the student approached the task in a creative, thoughtful way. Another quarter preferred to emphasize how hard the student tried. And only a quarter thought the most important thing was whether the student got the correct answer.

Among newer teachers, those with less than 10 years of experience, only 16 percent thought correct answers were important.

That's almost a caricature of a question. Yes, creative and thoughtful matter, but only after you know what you're doing. If you don't, you can be creative, thoughtful and totally wrong. Or right but inefficient. A third of the eighth-grade math teachers thought their role was to set problems for students and then act as ``facilitators'' while the students tried to figure out the solution for themselves. Except for the most talented children, that's a recipe for failure.

More than half the fourth-grade teachers say they base their final grades on a student's abilities rather than a classwide standard.

Now guess what happens when children taught in accordance with these feel-good methods encounter standards-based statewide tests, as administered in the Colorado Student Assessment Program or mandated by the new federal No Child Left Behind Act. The professors of education who trained teachers to think this way, the teachers themselves, and no small number of parents will rise up as one to proclaim that dismal results prove testing is bad and must be ended. Just you wait.