July 17, 2023
As a young, new teacher I was naïve. I thought school reform was simple: Understand how learning happens, and design schools based on that understanding. It’s not rocket science. And yet . . .
For decades as researchers have provided educators with increasing insights into how people learn, thousands of teachers have worked to integrate these new understandings into their classrooms. Still, the same old problems persist: too many disengaged students graduating with poor skills and knowledge, a tenacious achievement gap, growing teen depression and suicide, and teachers burning out. Although the causes are many, one of the most significant is that changing what goes on in the classroom isn’t enough. It’s way past time to stop expecting teachers to carry the burden of inventing new practices for a system that resists fundamental change and that, therefore, will undermine their efforts. Classrooms themselves are one antiquated part of a larger structure—a factory model based on discredited assumptions about learning and the brain. New insights require new structures. A group of us learned this lesson several years ago when we redesigned our ninth-grade curriculum.
We had two overriding goals. The first was to emphasize interdisciplinary skills development (reading, writing, reasoning, speaking/listening, and studying) over memorizing discrete departmentalized facts. We focused on integrating science, English, arts, and history because the five skills, in various appropriate forms, enhance success in those four disciplines—and those disciplines overlap. Creativity is no less essential to scientists than it is to artists; writing is a powerful tool to deepen learning in any sphere. Literature and scientific advances can deepen our understanding of history, just as art can enhance our powers of scientific observation. We defined specifically the many components of each of the five skills and established progressions for developing them and criteria for assessing them.
The second goal was to give the students more control over what they studied. Teachers would focus on skills development, and students could focus more on areas of knowledge that interested them—albeit within a range established by the four subject areas. We especially wanted to encourage them to delve into ideas, genuine questions, and facts that mattered to them. So we pared down the topics that typically comprise ninth-grade curricula in these disciplines, creating more and more freedom for students as the year unfolded. The spring trimester focused on individual projects of their design, through which they could demonstrate their level of skills development. Each project culminated in several finished pieces and an individualized oral exploration (“defense”) before a panel of teachers.
We anticipated that reactions to this somewhat radical divergence from traditional expectations could undermine our vision. Any departure from familiar notions of school would be jarring for teachers, students, and parents, and the gravitational pull of the way things have always been could be overwhelming. Teachers tend to be passionate about their field of study and enjoy teaching the concepts and facts of a single discipline, usually in four or five classes at two or three different grade levels using established departmental guidelines. They are accustomed to working alone to assess and report grades for their students’ knowledge of biology or U.S. history, not working together to design projects or activities and to evaluate students’ analytic or scholarly skills across several disciplines.
Educators also tend to prefer the comfort of a familiar schedule of classes that meet for x number of minutes each day and y number of times each week, always with the same roster of students. They are good at creating lessons designed to cover topics under the supervision of department chairs, who are always eager to increase the amount of time students are required to study their discipline. Everyone also expects adults—college admissions officers, school administrators, and teachers—to establish graduation requirements and classroom goals, the same expectations for everyone. Students are accustomed to doing as they are told.
So unless we could create within this traditional system some new structures to support even this modest change from the norm for ninth graders, we knew we would fail. Change tends to create anxiety, and the response to anxiety is to revert to the comfort of old practices. New structures can provide barriers to this regression.
In brief, here’s what we did. To ensure that teachers focused on skills, we created a different transcript for ninth graders. In addition to their customary grades in math and foreign languages (which, for various reasons, we hadn’t included in this new program), they would receive grades in the five skill areas—no grades in science, arts, history, or English. The ninth grade would be taught by a team of volunteers from each of the four disciplines—teachers who understood and were enthusiastic about the new goals. To further help maintain a skills focus, these teachers would teach only the ninth grade, and we scheduled time each day for them to meet as a team—to discuss student progress, coordinate activity plans, help each other sustain the focus on skills, and report midterm and end-of-term grades. To protect these teachers from pressure from their department heads to add more discipline-specific topics and factual content, oversight of the program would come from the curriculum committee, where the department heads had to work together to decide on any curricular changes.
Another important structural challenge was creating a separate schedule for the ninth grade within the larger regular daily and weekly schedules of the school—because a third goal of the program was to free it from the tyranny of the traditional school schedule. Instead of a fixed schedule determining the use of time and even the class rosters, we wanted the evolving needs of the program and students to determine the schedule (length and frequency of sessions) and give the teachers the flexibility to regroup students as needed. We were able to design this open, adaptable schedule by simply creating large chunks of unstructured time (three consecutive hours some days, two consecutive hours other days) into which we placed all ninth graders and these teachers. The teachers could use this time and divide the students as needed—from having all teachers and students meet together to mixing regular, more traditional classes with individualized teacher-student conferences and with rest time.
The full story of our work on this ninth-grade program is much longer and more complex. My purpose here is not to present the program as a model to emulate but simply to use it to illustrate the importance of creating and sustaining structural support for the innovations that must occur when we adopt new goals and school designs to improve student learning and development. Research into the neurobiology of learning; the rapid, inexorable development of technology; the lessons from covid; the complexity and urgency of the national and planetary problems we face, all emphasize the urgent need as well as the opportunity to design a better system—one that will nurture deep “transcendent” thinkers. Tinkering with what goes on in classrooms originally designed for the ditto-head model of transmitting knowledge from one teacher’s brain to a roomful of 15 to 25 students’ brains and clinging to the practices and policies of flawed notions of human development and learning must give way to new structures that will support new insights.
Insights that suggest new philosophies and models of education can be exciting and transformative. For example, neuroscientist and educator Mary Helen Immordino-Yang writes, “It is neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about things that you don’t care about”—a seismic observation with profound implications. Research into the fundamental connection between emotion, thinking, and learning suggests a need to rethink all school structures—classrooms, graduation requirements, course loads, assessments, schedules, department structures, teacher training, student-teacher ratios: everything.
Unfortunately, what typically happens to new insights is that educators attempt to absorb them into the existing structures, usually by expecting teachers to tinker with what they do in their classrooms. For example, perhaps the classroom model made sense when we believed that all brains were the same and teaching and learning were used as synonyms. It made less sense when we came to believe in two types of brain: normal and disabled. But instead of rethinking the model, we simply invented differentiated instruction and clung to the traditional classroom. Now, we have discovered that all brains are different, yet we continue to scramble to rejig the same old structure—many seem to hope that technology will save it. More likely, the classroom will become an even more complex Rube Goldberg machine that will, eventually, collapse.
If the past predicts the future, too many educators will likely interpret new insights about emotional relevance to mean that teachers must make their curriculum meaningful for the students (instead of, for example, building curricula on what interests the students and imagining new structures to support this approach). So teachers will once again enthusiastically point out how science or history will be important to them when they grow up; teachers will incorporate more real-world problems and projects into their lesson plans; they will connect ideas to current events; they will model the emotional connection between themselves and the subjects that they love. When these strategies fail, they will resort to the traditional threats: tests, grades, visions of looming disasters like summer school, parental expectations, and lost college and job opportunities. Schools as factories of fear.
And they will miss the deeper significance of the role emotion plays in learning: Students need to experience school as a place where they can spend a significant amount of time each day and at every age engaged in ideas and genuine questions that they care about right now. It’s not the job of adults to make what matters to adults matter to students; it’s not our job to create the questions or projects; it’s our job to begin with what already matters to them and help them develop their own projects in order to pursue their questions and develop their love for their studies. To do our job we will need new structures to support a new understanding of learning. If educators—especially administrators—continue to insist that we can never change the system, we will have squandered an opportunity.
What we have in our current school design are structures and practices based on the old emotionless, rational, empty-vessel, transfer-of-knowledge, linear, conveyor-belt, normal-brain concept that equates teaching, telling, and learning. What research offers is a concept of learning based on the unbreakable connection between emotion and thinking; an individual, idiosyncratic, nonlinear process of building-collapsing-rebuilding webs of interrelated skills; a developmental need to ensure the healthy functioning of the salience, executive control, and default mode networks; an understanding that all brains are different (amazing how rapidly the useful idea of neural diversity has been co-opted by educators to refer only to learning disabilities). These two conflicting concepts of learning remind me of the fate of the Titan, the imploded submersible, which provides an instructive illustration of the need to align structure and function. Although the investigation into the disaster of the Titan continues, James Cameron (experienced submariner and film director) said that OceanGate, which designed the sub, “was trying to apply aviation thinking to a deep submergence engineering problem, and we all said that it was a flawed idea.” The carbon fiber hull made sense for space travel but not for the extreme pressures of the deep sea. This example nicely captures the essence of the problem with school design: We have been applying factory-model education thinking to a deep neurobiological problem.
Despite about 15 years of real success for our ninth-grade program, it ultimately failed. As the founding teachers left the program and as new, clueless administrators occupied the oval office, no one provided proper training or oversight for the new teachers, and slowly the old structures—separate departmental interests, the fixed schedule, the emphasis on everyone’s memorizing the same body of facts, the familiar transcript—reappeared. We never achieved escape velocity from the gravitational attraction of tradition. Evidently, school reform is rocket science after all.
You may also be interested in reading more articles written by Alden Blodget for Intrepid Ed News.
