Daniel makes stuff, and, in his spare time, writes about things like movies, kid culture, and geek stuff.
'Playing to Learn' – The Obama Administration and Education Reform

Susan Engel, writing in an Op-Ed last week in the New York Times, paints a portrait of what classrooms would look like if our educational policy really aligned with what we know of how learning works:

The Obama administration is planning some big changes to how we measure the success or failure of schools and how we apportion federal money based on those assessments. It’s great that the administration is trying to undertake reforms, but if we want to make sure all children learn, we will need to overhaul the curriculum itself. Our current educational approach — and the testing that is driving it — is completely at odds with what scientists understand about how children develop during the elementary school years and has led to a curriculum that is strangling children and teachers alike.

In order to design a curriculum that teaches what truly matters, educators should remember a basic precept of modern developmental science: developmental precursors don’t always resemble the skill to which they are leading. For example, saying the alphabet does not particularly help children learn to read. But having extended and complex conversations during toddlerhood does. Simply put, what children need to do in elementary school is not to cram for high school or college, but to develop ways of thinking and behaving that will lead to valuable knowledge and skills later on.

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What they shouldn’t do is spend tedious hours learning isolated mathematical formulas or memorizing sheets of science facts that are unlikely to matter much in the long run. Scientists know that children learn best by putting experiences together in new ways. They construct knowledge; they don’t swallow it.

Along the way, teachers should spend time each day having sustained conversations with small groups of children. Such conversations give children a chance to support their views with evidence, change their minds and use questions as a way to learn more.

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Our success depends on embracing a curriculum focused on essential skills like reading, writing, computation, pattern detection, conversation and collaboration — a curriculum designed to raise children, rather than test scores.

The piece has garnered quite a bit of discussion, and I think it clearly sums up where we are with education reform today. With a full year’s worth of aggressive overhaul in the Obama/Duncan Education Department now behind us, it seems that now we’re starting to collectively ask the pertinent question: What is education for, and if we’re serious about crafting a system to meet that need, what would our classrooms really look like?

On this, Engel seems to hit the mark perfectly.

Related: Lori Pickert offers an annotated excerpt of the piece, with links to relevant writing of her own – extremely useful if you want to dive in and flesh out some of the concepts Engels puts forth. Nancy Flanagan also offers followup to some of the criticism around Engels’s piece, reaffirming Engel’s message that education should be constructivist in nature and centered around children’s inquiry and discovery – if only, indeed, because that’s exactly the approach other countries that are surpassing the U.S. in educational results are taking. And there’s nothing nonsensical about that.

Feb 09, 2010 :: Tagged under: , , :: #