Summary of Literary Review

There are two opposing viewpoints on how to properly instruct children in the classroom. There is the teacher-centered approach where the role of the teacher is to dispense facts and the role of the student is to listen and memorize said facts. In the child-centered, or constructivist, approach the children are more in control of their education. They do hands on activities to promote a higher order of thinking (analysis, critical thinking), and projects are usually branched off from the main topic of discussion. Critics of the child-centered approach say that children waste too much time with such activities and would be better served learning mathematics facts and physics. Advocates of the child-centered approach say that allowing children to make discoveries of their own is vital to obtaining a higher order of thinking which better serves children throughout their lives. Supporters also assert that in most classrooms there is simply only the occasional child-centered activity but that classrooms have largely remained teacher-centered (Abbeduto, 2006).

Summary of Yes Position

Teachers needs to rethink their role as teachers. Is a teacher simply the dispenser of information or is a teacher the facilitator of learning? Windschitl states that current teachers simply copy the teachers they had had as children which hinders the goal of going beyond the teacher-centered method of rote memorization to learning. He says that therein lies the problem of creating a truly constructivist classroom. Educators are married to the current norms of curriculum and standardization. A part of the issue may lie in the greater depth of knowledge teachers will need to have in the topics that they teach. Windschitl uses the concept of density as an example. In a constructivist classroom there would be different groups of students tackling the issue of density using a variety of methods. One group may take a purely mathematical approach while another may use the story of the Titanic. The teacher would need to have an understanding of the mathematical concepts with density as well as the complexity of the issue as illustrated in the sinking of the Titanic. Once a teacher reconciles this issue the hands on, child-centered, approach will lead children to be more engaged in the topic being studied and allows them to learn how to think critically and analytically, as well as learning problem solving skills. Windschitl believes that the constructivist approach can be reconciled with state standards. He also states that teachers needs to have a firm understanding of why they are using the constructivist approach instead of the widely accepted teacher-centered approach, since it is inevitable that someone would ask them why they run their classroom the way they do. Assessments will need to be made of each child’s progress using journals, reports, and other projects that demonstrate the student’s understanding of the topic being studied which will aid in determining whether or not the class is meeting the standards of education. To aid teachers in giving children the best education possible school administrators need to be supportive in the “less is more” concept, encourage teacher collaboration, and school wide changes such as block scheduling. (Windschitl, 1999).

Summary of No Position

Hirsch sets out to debunk the constructivist approach through research comparing ineffective American classrooms and effective Asian classrooms. He states that classrooms that are filled with projects where children are responsible for their own learning did not perform as well as children in teacher-centered approached classrooms, where there was more focus and time allotted to learn a subject. Hirsch asserts that there is importance in drill and practice which helps children retain the information being learned, following the adage of “use it or lose it”, and that the constructivist approach does not offer enough in the way of drill and practice thereby cheating the students out of retaining information. He also argues that breadth is more important than depth. Students need to learn as much as they can about various subjects because by the time a child is in college the focus of study narrows. Hirsch also asserts that the policy of “best practices” by organizations such as the National Association for the Education of Young Children, is not founded upon research but upon pedagogical romanticism. Children learn best by the teacher introducing new material in small increments and by having the teacher make connections to previously learned topics that relate to the new material. Whole class instruction should dominate in the classroom, and students should be given challenging work to keep their interest. Hirsch states that children in classrooms with whole class instruction and a focused schedule are more motivated and interested in the subjects being taught than children in classrooms that are filled with workshops and projects. Teachers that exude warmth as well as a businesslike air have more successful classrooms than teachers that exude warmth but are more concerned about a child’s self esteem. Over concern about a child’s self esteem causes them to give praises without giving instruction on how to improve their work. Hirsch addresses the idea of higher order thinking, and states that higher order thinking is the difference between a novice and an expert and is domain specific. Thus the idea that constructivist approach fosters higher order thinking in the various academic subjects is unfounded. The class period should be “formed into a little drama with a beginning, middle, and end, well directed but not rigidly scripted by the teacher” (Hirsch, 1996).

My Position

Windschitl and Hirsch are both shortsighted. A blend of the two methods is best. Windschitl makes his argument by discussing how to solve some of the challenges of the child-centered approach, completely ignoring the fact that it is impossible to have students responsible for their own learning all the time. Hirsch claims that traditional methods of teaching are best as is indicated in current research. What the research he used actually says is that time, focus, and knowing what to expect for the day, or class period, are essential for academic success, as well as having teachers with high warmth, giving constructive feedback, and are businesslike in manner; which, in my experience, can also be interpreted as firm but fair. All of those qualities are necessary in a teacher whether it be in a child-centered classroom or in a teacher-centered classroom.

Hirsch’s attack on the less-more admonitions of various national education organizations that promote best practices is foolish. Less does not mean eliminate. More does not mean replace. Best practices promotes that which is developmentally appropriate, and takes into account the diversity in the classroom. As Dr. Clifford Hansen, a music teacher at San Jose City College, once said, if I have 30 students in a classroom then I need to have 30 different ways to explain the concept I am teaching (Glasgow, 1969, paraphrased). Dr. Hansen understood that while for some learning the circle of fifths in the lecture is sufficient, other students will need to see a diagram, to hear it, to see it played, to play it themselves, or see it demonstrated in a real piece of music, or any combination of these. Does providing sufficient time and attention to the individual needs of his students in understanding the concept of the circle of fifths take away precious time from instruction? I think not.

On the other hand there are times when the teacher does act primarily as the dispenser of knowledge. In Kindergarten there is much in the way of teacher directed activities because the children are too young to take charge of their own academic learning. A child is not going to discover phonics without a teacher telling them about the relationship between sounds and letters and words. This does not mean that there can not be some activities that give children creative freedom, such as painting a holiday themed picture. When the opportunity occurs you can give them the time they need to create a good piece of work, the tools they need to do so, and the techniques on how to use the tools effectively and how to create a particular effect a child might be looking for (Knight, 2007). Time, tools and techniques also apply to other subject areas, such as math. Students need time to master a new mathematical concept, they need the tools to work with the new math problem, and they need the techniques to effectively use their time and tools. The concept is true in every classroom.

An artist can not be rushed when creating a piece of art without compromising the intended finished work. A child learning how to read can not be rushed without compromising their ability to become fluent readers. A child learning number sense can not be rushed into learning addition and subtraction without compromising their future understanding of multiplication and division. Breadth is important. People need to be well rounded. In fact, breadth is so important that there are general education requirements in college. However, depth is also needed, otherwise the information will have no lasting value to the student and will not be retained.

The old adage of, “practice makes perfect”, is true and correct. We know that the more you read the better you get at it. The more you work at playing the piano the easier it gets to sight read and to play more complex pieces. Practice is important. No one with their head on straight will say otherwise, and I dare say that most advocates for a child-centered approach have their heads on straight. Practice, however, does not denote understanding. If a six year old can read at a 5th grade level that does not mean they understand what they are reading. If a preschool aged child knows their ABCs it does not mean that they connect it to reading. This is where we need reflective inquiry and innovative classroom activities to gauge the actual understanding of students, and help facilitate understanding. Reflective inquiry is often out of the picture in a teacher-centered classroom where the teacher does most of the thinking (Brown, 2003). The teacher-centered approach does work, but it does not mean that we can not do better. Mimeographs and type writers have been replaced with the more efficient computer. Should we still widely use those today? Granted, the teacher-centered approach is not nearly so outdated, and still has its place, but the argument that it’s worked for all these years, as is (Hirsch, 1996), is a bit fallacious and closed minded. Modern thought and technology have simply made old ideas better.

Both the teacher-centered approach and the child-centered approach have value. When this is understood by teachers they pedagogically improve. Over generalizations of the two approaches lead to a dichotomy that should not exist and can be harmful (Schuh, 2004). Either approach “is not appropriate in all situations and cannot cover all of the complexities and idiosyncrasies of subjects and teaching situations” (Ahara, 1995). Polarizing the issue can cause an unbalanced approach to teaching, which would be a great disservice to students.

References

Abbeduto, L. (2006). Should Schools Adopt a Constructivist Approach to Education? Taking Sides: Clashing Views in Educational Psychology, 4th Ed., 148(2). McGraw-Hill

Ahara, K. (1995). Teacher-centered and child-centered pedagogical approaches in teaching children’s literature. Education, 115(3), 332.

Brown, K. L. (2003). From teacher-centered to learner-centered curriculum: Improving learning in diverse classrooms. Education, 124(1), 49-54.

Hirsch, Jr., E. D. (1996). Reality’s Revenge: Research and Ideology. American Educator.

Glasgow, J. (1969). Personal Journal.

Knight, R. (2007). The Three T’s. Creative Arts Lecture. Yuba College.

Schuh, K. L. (2004). Learner-centered principles in teacher-centered practices? Teaching & Teacher Education, 20(8), 833-846. doi:10.1016/j.tate.2004.09.008

Windschitl, M. (1999). The Challenges of Sustaining a Constructivist Classroom Culture. Phi Delta Kappan.

The idea that students can choose for themselves what it is that they are writing needs to be true. I recall in seventh grade my teacher saying that we were each going to write a story about anything we wanted. We each had to tell her briefly what we were going to write about. I, being a fantasy fan, wanted to write about fairies and elves. She told me I couldn’t write it, because the story had to be based in reality. I was devastated. She had said anything. However, that is not what she meant. She meant anything within a certain context, and that context was our own world. I managed to get away with writing a story about a family taking a hike in the woods, coming upon some strange creature that could possessed people, and then everything seemed fine at the end but the younger brother had red eyes indicating possession. My teacher really liked the ending. Was it completely based in reality? No, but it was close enough that she allowed it, thank goodness. I don’t know what it is that teachers have against fantasy or science fiction stories. It requires the same amount of work, more so even to have the imaginary world make sense since you have to build the world and the people, customs, culture, from the ground up, along with consistency and continuity to avoid storyline pitfalls or loopholes.

It’s also a bit hypocritical. In elementary school many of the books that are read to students are anthropomorphic, which is not based in reality at all. Then there are books like the Magic Tree House series or the Adventures of the Bailey School Kids where things happen that are not possible. What? A tree house that can transport Jack and Annie back and forth through time using books as the medium? Impossible! But children love it! And teaches a bit of history at the same time. What? Strange unexplainable things happening at a school with genies and unicorns and such things? Impossible! But what fun to read! So, the message is, we can read fantastical stories but we can’t write them? Does that make sense? Just because a piece of writing is not based in reality does not mean it doesn’t have any value. I dare say, it even helps people talk about things that are very difficult to talk about since what’s happening in the story is not real, but we can still relate to it. No matter the genre being written the author still draws upon his or her knowledge and experience when writing.

Now, if an assignment is to write a persuasive piece or a journal then fantasy writing would not be appropriate, but with those pieces of writing the parameters are set. After you figure out the purpose of your writing, then the writing process is the same. Why should it matter if a child chooses to write a story that has elves traveling in spaceships instead of about humans traveling in airplanes? I believe that it is important to allow students the creative freedom to write any kind of story. I recently read a story by a first grader that was about a mom killing a baby, finding someone to help her kill everyone, then the two killed everyone but then they had no one else to kill so they killed each other. The illustrations were quite gory. One might think that this was a disturbed child but the child was exposed to horror movies by her older siblings and this was her way of working out what it was she was watching. Students need that freedom of expression and creativity.

I remember in high school art class that while we could pick the subject matter of our pieces, we always had to work within the medium provided, be it embossing, watercolor and ink, or tempura paints. At Yuba College, I took a Creative Arts Class that was geared towards preschool aged children. We had to work with the very tools that we were going to ask our preschoolers to use and do the activities we would ask them to do. Ramona Knight explained what was expected of us (lots of art projects with directions for a portfolio), and after talking for about 45 minutes she said, okay, get to work. I raised my hand and asked, what are we doing? She said, whatever you want. I was flabbergasted. What did she mean whatever I wanted? After establishing that she really meant whatever you want, I was in a state of shock. I did not know what to do. I literally spent the next hour and a half out of that three hour class doing nothing. Miss Ramona (we called everyone Miss so and so, it’s a preschool thing) after a while suggested that I look through the textbook to see if anything caught my eye. Time was ticking by, and I didn’t want to be left with nothing to show for my three hours of class. So, I picked blotto art, and I was really happy with the results. I still have it. Once I managed to get over the hurdle of really having a choice I was able to enjoy the class. It was. . . liberating.

I was so used to having someone tell me what I had to do, especially in an academic setting, that for a while I didn’t know how to do something completely on my own. There is something wrong with that. There are times when it’s good to teach specific techniques and how to use certain tools, but sometimes we need to have the choice to really do what whatever we want.

Tompkins, G. E. (2010). Literacy for the 21st Century. A Balanced Approach. 5th edition. Allyn & Bacon: Pearson Education.

I remember syllables being a frustrating topic in school. It was my mother who made it interesting for me. We didn’t do clapping in school, we simply had to count the syllables on our fingers. My mother had me do clapping. After a while the clapping got boring so we switched to tapping, snapping, head bobbing, and using simple musical tunes. We wouldn’t sing the words, we would speak the words with rhythm, much like the character Professor Henry Higgins played by Rex Harrison in the movie My Fair Lady. That was fun. I was also shown how to separate words out by their syllables. My mother showed me how the dictionary does that very same thing at the time as telling a user how to pronounce a word. There was some disparity there however because the way we speak and the proper pronunciation of words, and consequently the number of syllables in a word are different. A common one is the word family. When we speak we often say fam-ly. However it should be fam-i-ly. While one can come to grips with the commonality of lazy speech it gets particularly annoying in poetry where syllable count matters. I remember reading a free verse poem where the poet had three line stanzas in a 7-12-7 pattern, if I recall correctly. I do not remember what the poem was about, but what do recall was seeing the word family at the end of a line and immediately thinking the poet had gone over the syllable count. Then it occurred to me that the poet was using fam-ly not fam-i-ly. This inconsistency is something to watch out for, especially when you start having your students write Haiku’s. I recall seeing in my daughter’s Kindergarten class at the end of the year the teacher asked the kids to provide words to figure out the syllables to. One child said family. Guess how many syllables they clapped together? Yep, you guessed it. Two. I silently twitched out of politeness.

My mother is a musician, which is probably where she got the idea to incorporate rhythm songs with syllables, and as such she passed on some of that musicianship to me. Because of this background I found the beats analogy annoying since the length of sounds are not taken into account. For example, take the long a. It takes a bit longer to say the word “shake” then it does to say the word, “can”, but both constitute one beat. In music if the quarter note gets the beat and the note lasts longer than a quarter note then the note does not equal one beat, it’s two beats or a beat and a half. If you say, “Will you shake this for me?” the word shake lasts longer than the other single syllable words. So why is shake only one syllable and not one and a half? It is also longer than the other words. The length of a word, according to Cunningham, is supposed to be a clue in about how many syllables a word has. (2009). Yet, at the same time, you can have a four letter word that has two syllables such as “very.” The word very has four letters, the word shake has five letters, but “shake” is monosyllabic while “very” is disyllabic.

In essence I believe that a teacher needs to consider these issues when teaching the concept of syllables. It needs to stay novel. After a while clapping gets boring, so shake it up with other syllabic activities. Some students need to see how the word is broken up into syllables. They also need to be made aware that there is more to figuring out the number of syllables than the way we speak and how many letters a word has. This is where seeing the word broken up syllabically can be of great help in the classrooms. It can also lead to discussions on why there is such a difference between the spoken word and proper pronunciation. We want the subject to be engaging, not an eye roller. If it weren’t for my mother I probably would have thought of syllables as one more dreaded thing to deal with at school. Instead it was something I understood and could help struggling classmates with.

Cunningham, P. M. (2009). Phonics They Use: Words for Reading and Writing. 5th edition. Allyn & Bacon: Pearson Education.

Many children are obsessed with having magic powers. My daughter Hazel pretends she’s powerful like a character in Naruto or Avatar. Hazel told me last year in the beginning of the school year that she wanted to be powerful. She was mostly playing, but I took the opportunity to sit her down and ask her if she wanted real power in real life, that’s not pretend. She emphatically said yes. So I told her that knowledge is power. I asked her if she knew what knowledge was. She shook her head no. I told her it was knowing things, and that she needed to know as many things as possible, and that she needed to think about things deeply, otherwise people would be able to trick her into doing things she didn’t want to do. Her eyes were big and wide when she asked, “How do you get knowledge?” The answer was, you start by learning how to read and then it’s by learning as much as you can. After that she was more motivated to take the risk of reading on her own. This strategy also worked on her best friend Minhtri, an ELL boy, who is also a Naruto fan. He can now read better than many of the students who have English as a first language. It helps, of course, that he has support from his parents to learn how to read English, but it doesn’t change the marked improvement I noticed in his reading ability after explaining that knowledge is power and how to obtain said knowledge.

I believe that we are still having a literacy power struggle. The basal readers kids are required to read are uninteresting, and in my opinion are worse than Dick and Jane books. There’s no substance to them. They seem to discourage reading. Insisting that children read thirty minutes a day leads many parents who are not avid readers to tell their children they have to read for thirty minutes because their teacher or principal said so. Such tactics demotivate reading. And the less you read, the less good you will be at It, and as a result the less knowledgeable you will be.

The math curriculum is another problem area in this. It is only recently that it is shifting to something more than arbitrary rules and rote memorization. Math is a dreaded subject for most students, and Hazel had already developed a bit of math anxiety. She didn’t want to do any math outside of school. So I asked her, do you know what math is? She said no. I told her it was simply playing with puzzles and patterns using numbers (and shapes too). Her entire view on math changed and she does math for fun now. Sometimes we do it together. This has aided in her ability to think more thoughtfully on things. Mathematics is a precursor to critical thinking skills since you need to understand the fundamentals of statistics, as well as proper procedures in conducting valid studies so that when you read an article about some new study you’ll be able to determine whether or not the study is valid. If you have little to no understanding of what the numbers mean or how those conducting the study came to their conclusion then you will be easily duped by bad science and propaganda.

Public schools generally do not teach children how to become critical thinkers. In most classrooms the teachers have a, do as I say or else, kind of atmosphere and as such do not encourage children to learn how to effectively argue with her if they disagree with her. I teach Hazel how to argue with me. She does not get anything when she fusses, whines or pitches a fit in any way, but she often gets her way when she can present her argument logically and calmly. For example, if she asks me to let her watch an episode of Avatar and I say not right now, she will ask a clarifying question, such as later today? This is good, because it removes false assumptions. I encourage this kind of behavior. If I say, later today, she will look at the time and if it’s nigh onto evening she’ll then say, but Mom, you’re going to be making dinner soon and after dinner we have to clean up and then it’s bed time, I won’t have time to watch it later. I had just told her she could watch it later today, but her argument is reasonable and sound and delivered calmly. As such, she gets to watch Avatar sooner rather than later. However, if she pulls the same argument but has a conniption fit instead she doesn’t get anything. Of course, she doesn’t always do this perfectly. After all, she is only six years old, but it has dramatically increased her reasoning capabilities and has thus aided her at school, church, and in her social life.

When you are a child, building the foundation for knowledge, and thus power, is much simpler. When you are an adult it is harder to learn how to think critically. You end up challenging preconceived notions which can be a scary thing, and it stretches your brain in ways you are not used to. Many adults start the process but do not finish the process of becoming a critical thinker. I believe that those in politics and other positions of power prefer it that way. After all, the less knowledge you have the more easily manipulated you are and the more susceptible you are to various propaganda. It also means that even if you know in your gut that you right about something but you don’t know how to logically back it up and the opposing position does, then you are on the losing side of the battle.

I work hard to foster the quest for knowledge and reasoning capabilities in children I have influence over. I believe that doing so is vital to their future. I haven’t heard any complaints yet!

Botelho, M.J., & Rudman, M.K. (2009). Critical Multicultural Analysis of Children’s Literature. Mirrors, Windows, and Doors. Routledge.