Analytic Essay
Discussion of Literature:
Throughout my time as a student of education (both during my undergraduate studies and my graduate work), I have often seen inquiry-based learning touted as the educational ideal--the way students deserve to learn and be taught (see story of question and beliefs from fall). I have also often found this inquiry-based approach to be in contradiction with standards-based assessments and traditional schooling methods most often identified as the ways to “lift children out of the traps of their failing schools.” I have tried to weigh what I believe learning looks like against what I believe schooling is for, and I have found myself caught in the ever difficult place between theory and practice. In order to best understand where theory might meet practice, rather than delving into all of the literature surrounding the assets of inquiry-based learning (as compared, most often, with direct instruction methods), I have decided to explore why we teach certain students one way and others another way. If we are to accept that some level of inquiry-based learning--if not, great amounts of it--in the classroom is ideal, then we must ask why certain students see less of it, how those students might benefit from more of it, and if our assumptions make as much sense as we thought.
Whenever I ask myself what education means and what education ought to look like, I return to the first book on education I read in entirety, the book I was reading when I first considered teaching as a life path: How People Learn. The greatest takeaway for me from the text has always been the importance of incorporating student background knowledge into instruction. Indeed this idea has shaped my questions about inquiry-based learning and direct instruction throughout my studies. Bransford writes, “A logical extension of the view that new knowledge must be constructed from existing knowledge is that teachers need to pay attention to the incomplete understandings, the false beliefs, and the naive renditions of concepts that learners bring with them to a given subject. Teachers then need to build on these ideas in ways that help each student achieve a more mature understanding. If students’ initial ideas and beliefs are ignored, the understandings that they develop can be very different from what the teacher intends” (Bransford, 1999, p. 10). In some ways, How People Learn can be taken to imply that direct instruction methods may at times be decent methods of furthering student understanding. That is, if students do have misconceptions or incomplete ideas, those missteps must not be ignored with a class trudging through whatever lesson follows sequentially. In classrooms pressured by testing scores and minimal resources, student understanding must still be constructed in a way consistent with reality, even if each new understanding is not found through organic curiosity and play. Even without the luxury of adequate resources allowing for more self-directed exploration, students deserve to know when something they understand is incomplete or incorrect so that they can construct even stronger, deeper understandings moving forward.
I want to be explicit in noting that I do not believe that students from poor, minority, or otherwise marginalized communities come to the classroom with disproportionately more misconceptions than other students. It is, instead, the fact that the standards by which students are measured are aligned with certain background knowledge and instructional techniques that require great amounts of resources that creates a system of disadvantage. Students from all backgrounds bring vast knowledge, experience, and understanding whether the mainstream educational regime recognizes this or not. Yosso writes, “These forms of capital [i.e., aspirational, social, navigational, linguistic, resistant and familial capital] draw on the knowledges Students of Color bring with them from their homes and communities into the classroom. They are not conceptualized for the purpose of finding new ways to co-opt or exploit the strengths of Communities of Color” (Yosso, 2006, p. 82). While Yosso makes no argument here about whether students should have direct, inquiry-based, or other types of learning, she does make a foundational argument for the potential effectiveness of an inquiry-based curriculum for students of color, given the great founts of knowledge they bring with them to the classroom. Yosso also points out that any use of these knowledges and abilities must be for the students rather than for the system more broadly (or, worse, for everyone except the students).
Yosso does not argue here, however, for a certain understanding of a school’s purpose. It often seems to me that when educators and community members discuss whether to employ traditional, direct-instruction techniques or more progressive, inquiry-based ones the underlying discussion is really about the goals of educating our children. In asking how children should learn I believe they are also--if not primarily--asking if our children should learn to be creative, emotionally fulfilled, economically productive, informed citizens, or something else. Labaree writes, “Conflicting goals for education can produce a contradictory and compromised structure for educational institutions that sharply impairs their effectiveness. They can also-through the medium of the consumer-driven mobility goal that plays such a key role in this compromised structure--lead to kind of credentialism that is strikingly counterproductive for both education and society” (Labaree, 1997, p. 73). While it is not the focus of my explorations here, there seems to be a ripple effect occurring when we struggle to define our goals for students: our entire educational system is compromised. Students are told school is for certain things (fulfillment, economic development of the self, to learn how to work hard, to learn survival, and others), but our actions with respect to urban schooling indicate that we believe school serves other purposes (economic development of the community, social reproduction, crime avoidance, and others). It seems exceedingly difficult, then, for educators and those who support them to devise ways to instruct students effectively without a unified, clear understanding of what the goals are and whose goals should take the highest value.
Anyon argues that our ideas of what school’s purpose is differ depending on the student population. She writes, “Differing curricular, pedagogical, and pupil evaluation practices emphasize different cognitive and behavioral skills in each social setting and thus contribute to the development in the children of certain potential relationships to physical and symbolic capital, to authority, and to the process of work” (Anyon, 1980, p.16). I am suspicious of “traditional” schooling methods because, as Anyon points out, they have consistently created a segregated schooling system where certain students have certain abilities and ideas and other students have others. I am also suspicious, however, of simply employing radical, progressive pedagogical strategies without considering the goals. Our educational system exists within an economic system, and the students, parents, and community members surrounding a school cannot simply be discounted when academics try to discern what they believe will help all students. In this way I am caught neither wishing to be in the segregated school system Anyon describes, nor the hectic system Labaree describes, nor some forced progressive schooling system (however “effective” it might be) if it leaves out the wishes and goals of the communities it is supposed to serve. I want to be able to be a part of a kind of education that both honors student goals and opens greater possibilities for those students should those goals ever change, so I am moving forward both looking for ways to better understand what students know and are learning and learning how to bring every resource I can to bear in my classroom, including an inquiry-based approach. In short, I am undertaking a project of examining what works in a traditional, direct-instruction classroom and experimenting in small movements with progressive pedagogy in the hope of finding the most effective balance for my students.
Context:
My classroom is a 1st grade class in a small k-8 public school in South Philadelphia. The students are predominantly black and low-income with only 2 or 3 exceptions in either category. The school’s teachers are all women except for 2 and are predominantly white, though there are multiple teachers of color, mostly black. The school’s culture is largely based on a preference for students to remain seated and listening to lecture style lessons, even in lower elementary grades. The school also has a strong focus on literacy and math instruction due to pressures of PSSA testing; additionally, there is a new civics initiative this year, which takes up most of the remainder of the instructional time, leaving little time for other social studies lessons or science. In short, the school is not unlike many public schools in Philadelphia, and most concerning issue from my perspective is the lack of science instruction and types of learning other than listening to lectures and taking tests.
My cooperating teacher mostly prefers seated listening/ watching instruction, though she is open to allowing structured movement. For example, I was able to take the students outside to explore the changing temperatures they read on thermometers. The cooperating teacher also regrets how little science instruction the students receive, and she fully supports giving the students access to more science lessons. While the classroom is very structured and, from my perspective, resembles an upper elementary classroom more than a 1st grade, my cooperating teacher is open to alternative lessons and allowing me to experiment so long as we can ensure the children are learning.
The students in the classroom are academically diverse. Many are categorized (through testing) as “below level” in literacy, math, or both, and a handful are categorized as “advanced,” with a larger handful “on level.” There is no one predominant learning style with children loving music, drawing, physical manipulation, writing, reading, and discussions as ways to express and access understanding. The students have a variety of interests ranging from sports to princesses to mystical creatures. My cooperating teacher has noted to me many times that the class is comprised, more so than many other classes she has taught in her 12 years teaching, of students who express great care for each other, and I can see this playing out daily in kind words, cooperation, and offers to help.
Methods:
In order to describe learning in a classroom that favors direct instruction and also describe learning with the introduction of small moments of inquiry, I have chosen three main sources of data: an interview about the purpose of education with students, two sample lessons with no strong inquiry focus, and two lessons with elements of student inquiry.
The interviews took place just outside of the classroom with three students individually. The interviews lasted about 5 minutes each, and each student was asked the same questions, listed in the interview protocol. I took notes by hand that I later typed up. The interviews were too short (and too few) to code or quantitatively analyze, but even still they provide some small snapshot student perspectives on schooling and learning.
The sample lessons with no strong inquiry component are the safe superhero lesson and the monarch essays. These lessons were selected because of their connection to my integrative unit on student safety and their two different styles of student output. Their analysis, too, is qualitative rather than quantitative--providing a snapshot of the typical kind of work done in our classroom.
The sample lessons with an inquiry component are the turtle observation and the terrarium/ aquarium observations. It is worth noting that both of these lessons are science based, perhaps making the injection of student inquiry slightly easier. These lessons are also analyzed qualitatively in order to provide a snapshot of what student learning might look like if even small amounts of student inquiry were injected into regular classroom time.
Analysis:
In analyzing my interview notes, I am struck initially more by what did not come up than by what did. Learning or education has never been described in my interview notes or in the classroom by students or the classroom mentor (that I have noted) as including discovery, curiosity, or “inquiry.” Most often I see education described in terms of concrete skills like student 1 described “reading” or “adding.” My CM often notes and student 3 hinted at reading scores or levels as a reliable metric of student achievement, too. The school climate and classroom expectations seem to be trickling down to the students in the form of attitudes about what education is (the principal often discusses college and career readiness, especially in terms of PSSA scores). Another trend appearing in the interviews, in addition to academics as mastery of concrete skills, seems to be school as a place of social relationships and behaviors. All three students noted their relationships with teachers and other students as important in how they think about school’s purpose. One might argue that young children in general think about relationships as central, wherever they are, but it should also be highlighted that this is an attitude and expectation that affects how learning occurs too. There are social norms in school, and further research would be necessary on my part to conclude how the social and behavioral aspects of schooling could play into bringing inquiry-based learning to such a classroom.
It would be too simple and too biased an analysis to say that students do not learn in a direct-instruction environment. As is evident in both the superheros project maps and the essays about monarchs, students exhibit creativity and understanding of the world around them. Students demonstrated an ability to express in written English their current understanding of the world around them, showing an ability to work towards and meet common core assessment anchors. The majority facts about monarchs came from the read aloud I did for them about monarch butterflies the day before, and it is perhaps worth noting that the sample superhero presentation given to them included a hero with super speed (the most common power listed across the class). This is to say that students demonstrated in both of these assignments some level of repeating information given to them, but this repetition of information cannot be discounted as not learning; indeed much of lifelong learning involves repeating information others have previously gathered. No one human has discovered every idea and understanding about the universe independently, but we still consider the understanding of the ideas of others’ as learning. Further, students demonstrated in both assignments an ability to synthesize and repackage information both that they created in their own minds and that they gathered from other sources. This is, at least broadly defined, a form of learning and skill development outlined in How People Learn and other texts about schooling and learning.
In contrast to pure common core aligned skill development and retelling of facts in books and other media, inquiry-based skills and understandings seem harder to objectively measure. Analysis of student achievement can take the form of valuing certain questions over others. Instead of trying to decide which questions are “interesting,” I will note that students, by and large, could successfully participate in my inquiry-inclusive lessons (editorial note: I regret having sent the very excited students home with their turtle observation worksheets before having captured them for analysis). The students, though clearly excited in way that demonstrates their lack of regular experience with hands-on exploration (turtle lesson observation notes), posses the skills necessary to observe and ask questions. Students showed in both lessons an ability to record the world around them accurately with drawings and writing. Further, students demonstrated an ability to ask relevant questions such as “I want to know how will these is eat the algea” (translation: I want to know how the snails will eat the algae (later clarified verbally as how they will eat the algae if it is not visible to human eyes)) about their terrarium/ aquarium systems and “do it bite?” and “does it have bacterias on it?” about the turtle (recorded in personal notes before handing the turtle observation sheets back). All of this is to say that the results of my small attempts at incorporating student inquiry into my lessons show limited but promising results: students can observe and ask relevant questions, but with the expectations and restraints placed upon us in this venture, we did not go much further than this.
Conclusions and Next Steps:
The first conclusion I came to is that students do learn in a broad sense of the term in a direct instruction environment. Students gained skills and ideas they did not previously have, and they expressed their ideas (whether mostly their own or mostly someone else’s) in new, effective ways. Students met common core assessment standards to varying degrees, and the people who take care of them, the people who teach them, and they themselves all describe their activities in school as learning. Questions I still have about a primarily direct instruction classroom moving forward are (1) how students’ new skills and ideas develop over time, (2) if there are ways to increase transfer of knowledge and skills using the same resources, and (3) why direct instruction is so highly privileged in this environment.
When I look at what happened when I added small amounts of inquiry-based instruction, I am encouraged to continue adding inquiry to my lessons as often as possible. While I cannot say I know what the outcome of an inquiry based curriculum would look like in this classroom, I do feel it is worth noting that the students demonstrated an ability to observe carefully, record careful observations with accuracy, and develop relevant questions. Though the students do not have regular practice with these behaviors in their classroom, I imagine that with more practice would come even greater benefits to the students’ learning. I still am not sure how individually answering questions would look in a busy 1st grade classroom, but I am certain the skills of observation, record keeping, and question development would help to lay a foundation. My concerns moving forward with even more inquiry-based learning are so common they are almost cliched: access to resources, conformity to curricular standards, and support of the community. Only with some elements of those three prerequisites in place would I feel comfortable making fundamental changes to the structure of the students’ learning.
I feel concerned whenever I consider progressive methods of instruction (versus more traditional methods) about the respect I always want to convey to families and communities, especially when I do not share so much of their background and upbringing. Ideas about what learning, knowledge, skills, and achievement mean vary immensely among people. Our ideas about school are culturally and individually coded, so every change from the norm I make, I hope to make with a strong awareness of who is being served, respected, valued, and heard. I would never want to make a change, however well intended, that felt disrespectful of or hostile towards the community that has raised, loved, and taught my students before I ever knew their names. As much as I want to communicate respect and value for my students’ communities, I also want to bring every resource I have to the table for them. In this way, however and wherever I teach, I hope to find a balance of home and world that serves my students as best as I humanly can.
I can say with greater certainty than I ever have that finding classroom structures that serve all students seems monumentally difficult (and perhaps impossible without the support of a school, community, educational system, and economic system that values all students, recognizes multiple uses for school, and honors the wishes of students). As an educator, I want to offer my students whatever will help them succeed, as they define that. I cannot ignore that this means exploring progressive educational techniques like inquiry-based learning, but neither can I ignore the standards-based tests that influence society’s conception of success. Whatever I do, I cannot do nothing. Ladson-Billings writes, “We have no trouble recognizing that we have a moral debt to Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, Elie Wiesel, or Mahatma Gandhi. But how do we recognize the moral debt that we owe to entire groups of people? How do we calculate such a debt?” (Ladson-Billings, 2006, p.8). I have no concrete answers for Ladson-Billings’s questions, but I know I must start moving forward, reflecting at every available moment, if any of my classrooms are to help pay back some of that debt.
References:
Anyon, Jean. 1980. Social class and the hidden curriculum of work. Journal of Education, 162(1), 67-92.
Bransford, J. (1999). How people learn brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.
Kazemi, E., & Hintz, A. (2014). Intentional Talk How to Structure and Lead Productive Mathematical Discussions. Portland: Stenhouse.
Labaree, D. F. (1997). Public goods, private goods: The American struggle over educational goals. American Educational Research Journal, 34(1), 39-81.
Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). From the achievement gap to the education debt: Understanding achievement in U.S. schools. Educational Researcher, 35(3), 3-12. http://dx.doi.org/10.3102/0013189X035007003
Levstik, L., & Barton, K. (2005). Doing history: Investigating with children in elementary and middle schools (3rd ed.). Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates.
Tara J. Yosso (2005) Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth, Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69-91, DOI:10.1080/1361332052000341006
Wiggins, G. (1998). Educative assessment: Designing assessments to inform and improve student performance. San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass.
Throughout my time as a student of education (both during my undergraduate studies and my graduate work), I have often seen inquiry-based learning touted as the educational ideal--the way students deserve to learn and be taught (see story of question and beliefs from fall). I have also often found this inquiry-based approach to be in contradiction with standards-based assessments and traditional schooling methods most often identified as the ways to “lift children out of the traps of their failing schools.” I have tried to weigh what I believe learning looks like against what I believe schooling is for, and I have found myself caught in the ever difficult place between theory and practice. In order to best understand where theory might meet practice, rather than delving into all of the literature surrounding the assets of inquiry-based learning (as compared, most often, with direct instruction methods), I have decided to explore why we teach certain students one way and others another way. If we are to accept that some level of inquiry-based learning--if not, great amounts of it--in the classroom is ideal, then we must ask why certain students see less of it, how those students might benefit from more of it, and if our assumptions make as much sense as we thought.
Whenever I ask myself what education means and what education ought to look like, I return to the first book on education I read in entirety, the book I was reading when I first considered teaching as a life path: How People Learn. The greatest takeaway for me from the text has always been the importance of incorporating student background knowledge into instruction. Indeed this idea has shaped my questions about inquiry-based learning and direct instruction throughout my studies. Bransford writes, “A logical extension of the view that new knowledge must be constructed from existing knowledge is that teachers need to pay attention to the incomplete understandings, the false beliefs, and the naive renditions of concepts that learners bring with them to a given subject. Teachers then need to build on these ideas in ways that help each student achieve a more mature understanding. If students’ initial ideas and beliefs are ignored, the understandings that they develop can be very different from what the teacher intends” (Bransford, 1999, p. 10). In some ways, How People Learn can be taken to imply that direct instruction methods may at times be decent methods of furthering student understanding. That is, if students do have misconceptions or incomplete ideas, those missteps must not be ignored with a class trudging through whatever lesson follows sequentially. In classrooms pressured by testing scores and minimal resources, student understanding must still be constructed in a way consistent with reality, even if each new understanding is not found through organic curiosity and play. Even without the luxury of adequate resources allowing for more self-directed exploration, students deserve to know when something they understand is incomplete or incorrect so that they can construct even stronger, deeper understandings moving forward.
I want to be explicit in noting that I do not believe that students from poor, minority, or otherwise marginalized communities come to the classroom with disproportionately more misconceptions than other students. It is, instead, the fact that the standards by which students are measured are aligned with certain background knowledge and instructional techniques that require great amounts of resources that creates a system of disadvantage. Students from all backgrounds bring vast knowledge, experience, and understanding whether the mainstream educational regime recognizes this or not. Yosso writes, “These forms of capital [i.e., aspirational, social, navigational, linguistic, resistant and familial capital] draw on the knowledges Students of Color bring with them from their homes and communities into the classroom. They are not conceptualized for the purpose of finding new ways to co-opt or exploit the strengths of Communities of Color” (Yosso, 2006, p. 82). While Yosso makes no argument here about whether students should have direct, inquiry-based, or other types of learning, she does make a foundational argument for the potential effectiveness of an inquiry-based curriculum for students of color, given the great founts of knowledge they bring with them to the classroom. Yosso also points out that any use of these knowledges and abilities must be for the students rather than for the system more broadly (or, worse, for everyone except the students).
Yosso does not argue here, however, for a certain understanding of a school’s purpose. It often seems to me that when educators and community members discuss whether to employ traditional, direct-instruction techniques or more progressive, inquiry-based ones the underlying discussion is really about the goals of educating our children. In asking how children should learn I believe they are also--if not primarily--asking if our children should learn to be creative, emotionally fulfilled, economically productive, informed citizens, or something else. Labaree writes, “Conflicting goals for education can produce a contradictory and compromised structure for educational institutions that sharply impairs their effectiveness. They can also-through the medium of the consumer-driven mobility goal that plays such a key role in this compromised structure--lead to kind of credentialism that is strikingly counterproductive for both education and society” (Labaree, 1997, p. 73). While it is not the focus of my explorations here, there seems to be a ripple effect occurring when we struggle to define our goals for students: our entire educational system is compromised. Students are told school is for certain things (fulfillment, economic development of the self, to learn how to work hard, to learn survival, and others), but our actions with respect to urban schooling indicate that we believe school serves other purposes (economic development of the community, social reproduction, crime avoidance, and others). It seems exceedingly difficult, then, for educators and those who support them to devise ways to instruct students effectively without a unified, clear understanding of what the goals are and whose goals should take the highest value.
Anyon argues that our ideas of what school’s purpose is differ depending on the student population. She writes, “Differing curricular, pedagogical, and pupil evaluation practices emphasize different cognitive and behavioral skills in each social setting and thus contribute to the development in the children of certain potential relationships to physical and symbolic capital, to authority, and to the process of work” (Anyon, 1980, p.16). I am suspicious of “traditional” schooling methods because, as Anyon points out, they have consistently created a segregated schooling system where certain students have certain abilities and ideas and other students have others. I am also suspicious, however, of simply employing radical, progressive pedagogical strategies without considering the goals. Our educational system exists within an economic system, and the students, parents, and community members surrounding a school cannot simply be discounted when academics try to discern what they believe will help all students. In this way I am caught neither wishing to be in the segregated school system Anyon describes, nor the hectic system Labaree describes, nor some forced progressive schooling system (however “effective” it might be) if it leaves out the wishes and goals of the communities it is supposed to serve. I want to be able to be a part of a kind of education that both honors student goals and opens greater possibilities for those students should those goals ever change, so I am moving forward both looking for ways to better understand what students know and are learning and learning how to bring every resource I can to bear in my classroom, including an inquiry-based approach. In short, I am undertaking a project of examining what works in a traditional, direct-instruction classroom and experimenting in small movements with progressive pedagogy in the hope of finding the most effective balance for my students.
Context:
My classroom is a 1st grade class in a small k-8 public school in South Philadelphia. The students are predominantly black and low-income with only 2 or 3 exceptions in either category. The school’s teachers are all women except for 2 and are predominantly white, though there are multiple teachers of color, mostly black. The school’s culture is largely based on a preference for students to remain seated and listening to lecture style lessons, even in lower elementary grades. The school also has a strong focus on literacy and math instruction due to pressures of PSSA testing; additionally, there is a new civics initiative this year, which takes up most of the remainder of the instructional time, leaving little time for other social studies lessons or science. In short, the school is not unlike many public schools in Philadelphia, and most concerning issue from my perspective is the lack of science instruction and types of learning other than listening to lectures and taking tests.
My cooperating teacher mostly prefers seated listening/ watching instruction, though she is open to allowing structured movement. For example, I was able to take the students outside to explore the changing temperatures they read on thermometers. The cooperating teacher also regrets how little science instruction the students receive, and she fully supports giving the students access to more science lessons. While the classroom is very structured and, from my perspective, resembles an upper elementary classroom more than a 1st grade, my cooperating teacher is open to alternative lessons and allowing me to experiment so long as we can ensure the children are learning.
The students in the classroom are academically diverse. Many are categorized (through testing) as “below level” in literacy, math, or both, and a handful are categorized as “advanced,” with a larger handful “on level.” There is no one predominant learning style with children loving music, drawing, physical manipulation, writing, reading, and discussions as ways to express and access understanding. The students have a variety of interests ranging from sports to princesses to mystical creatures. My cooperating teacher has noted to me many times that the class is comprised, more so than many other classes she has taught in her 12 years teaching, of students who express great care for each other, and I can see this playing out daily in kind words, cooperation, and offers to help.
Methods:
In order to describe learning in a classroom that favors direct instruction and also describe learning with the introduction of small moments of inquiry, I have chosen three main sources of data: an interview about the purpose of education with students, two sample lessons with no strong inquiry focus, and two lessons with elements of student inquiry.
The interviews took place just outside of the classroom with three students individually. The interviews lasted about 5 minutes each, and each student was asked the same questions, listed in the interview protocol. I took notes by hand that I later typed up. The interviews were too short (and too few) to code or quantitatively analyze, but even still they provide some small snapshot student perspectives on schooling and learning.
The sample lessons with no strong inquiry component are the safe superhero lesson and the monarch essays. These lessons were selected because of their connection to my integrative unit on student safety and their two different styles of student output. Their analysis, too, is qualitative rather than quantitative--providing a snapshot of the typical kind of work done in our classroom.
The sample lessons with an inquiry component are the turtle observation and the terrarium/ aquarium observations. It is worth noting that both of these lessons are science based, perhaps making the injection of student inquiry slightly easier. These lessons are also analyzed qualitatively in order to provide a snapshot of what student learning might look like if even small amounts of student inquiry were injected into regular classroom time.
Analysis:
In analyzing my interview notes, I am struck initially more by what did not come up than by what did. Learning or education has never been described in my interview notes or in the classroom by students or the classroom mentor (that I have noted) as including discovery, curiosity, or “inquiry.” Most often I see education described in terms of concrete skills like student 1 described “reading” or “adding.” My CM often notes and student 3 hinted at reading scores or levels as a reliable metric of student achievement, too. The school climate and classroom expectations seem to be trickling down to the students in the form of attitudes about what education is (the principal often discusses college and career readiness, especially in terms of PSSA scores). Another trend appearing in the interviews, in addition to academics as mastery of concrete skills, seems to be school as a place of social relationships and behaviors. All three students noted their relationships with teachers and other students as important in how they think about school’s purpose. One might argue that young children in general think about relationships as central, wherever they are, but it should also be highlighted that this is an attitude and expectation that affects how learning occurs too. There are social norms in school, and further research would be necessary on my part to conclude how the social and behavioral aspects of schooling could play into bringing inquiry-based learning to such a classroom.
It would be too simple and too biased an analysis to say that students do not learn in a direct-instruction environment. As is evident in both the superheros project maps and the essays about monarchs, students exhibit creativity and understanding of the world around them. Students demonstrated an ability to express in written English their current understanding of the world around them, showing an ability to work towards and meet common core assessment anchors. The majority facts about monarchs came from the read aloud I did for them about monarch butterflies the day before, and it is perhaps worth noting that the sample superhero presentation given to them included a hero with super speed (the most common power listed across the class). This is to say that students demonstrated in both of these assignments some level of repeating information given to them, but this repetition of information cannot be discounted as not learning; indeed much of lifelong learning involves repeating information others have previously gathered. No one human has discovered every idea and understanding about the universe independently, but we still consider the understanding of the ideas of others’ as learning. Further, students demonstrated in both assignments an ability to synthesize and repackage information both that they created in their own minds and that they gathered from other sources. This is, at least broadly defined, a form of learning and skill development outlined in How People Learn and other texts about schooling and learning.
In contrast to pure common core aligned skill development and retelling of facts in books and other media, inquiry-based skills and understandings seem harder to objectively measure. Analysis of student achievement can take the form of valuing certain questions over others. Instead of trying to decide which questions are “interesting,” I will note that students, by and large, could successfully participate in my inquiry-inclusive lessons (editorial note: I regret having sent the very excited students home with their turtle observation worksheets before having captured them for analysis). The students, though clearly excited in way that demonstrates their lack of regular experience with hands-on exploration (turtle lesson observation notes), posses the skills necessary to observe and ask questions. Students showed in both lessons an ability to record the world around them accurately with drawings and writing. Further, students demonstrated an ability to ask relevant questions such as “I want to know how will these is eat the algea” (translation: I want to know how the snails will eat the algae (later clarified verbally as how they will eat the algae if it is not visible to human eyes)) about their terrarium/ aquarium systems and “do it bite?” and “does it have bacterias on it?” about the turtle (recorded in personal notes before handing the turtle observation sheets back). All of this is to say that the results of my small attempts at incorporating student inquiry into my lessons show limited but promising results: students can observe and ask relevant questions, but with the expectations and restraints placed upon us in this venture, we did not go much further than this.
Conclusions and Next Steps:
The first conclusion I came to is that students do learn in a broad sense of the term in a direct instruction environment. Students gained skills and ideas they did not previously have, and they expressed their ideas (whether mostly their own or mostly someone else’s) in new, effective ways. Students met common core assessment standards to varying degrees, and the people who take care of them, the people who teach them, and they themselves all describe their activities in school as learning. Questions I still have about a primarily direct instruction classroom moving forward are (1) how students’ new skills and ideas develop over time, (2) if there are ways to increase transfer of knowledge and skills using the same resources, and (3) why direct instruction is so highly privileged in this environment.
When I look at what happened when I added small amounts of inquiry-based instruction, I am encouraged to continue adding inquiry to my lessons as often as possible. While I cannot say I know what the outcome of an inquiry based curriculum would look like in this classroom, I do feel it is worth noting that the students demonstrated an ability to observe carefully, record careful observations with accuracy, and develop relevant questions. Though the students do not have regular practice with these behaviors in their classroom, I imagine that with more practice would come even greater benefits to the students’ learning. I still am not sure how individually answering questions would look in a busy 1st grade classroom, but I am certain the skills of observation, record keeping, and question development would help to lay a foundation. My concerns moving forward with even more inquiry-based learning are so common they are almost cliched: access to resources, conformity to curricular standards, and support of the community. Only with some elements of those three prerequisites in place would I feel comfortable making fundamental changes to the structure of the students’ learning.
I feel concerned whenever I consider progressive methods of instruction (versus more traditional methods) about the respect I always want to convey to families and communities, especially when I do not share so much of their background and upbringing. Ideas about what learning, knowledge, skills, and achievement mean vary immensely among people. Our ideas about school are culturally and individually coded, so every change from the norm I make, I hope to make with a strong awareness of who is being served, respected, valued, and heard. I would never want to make a change, however well intended, that felt disrespectful of or hostile towards the community that has raised, loved, and taught my students before I ever knew their names. As much as I want to communicate respect and value for my students’ communities, I also want to bring every resource I have to the table for them. In this way, however and wherever I teach, I hope to find a balance of home and world that serves my students as best as I humanly can.
I can say with greater certainty than I ever have that finding classroom structures that serve all students seems monumentally difficult (and perhaps impossible without the support of a school, community, educational system, and economic system that values all students, recognizes multiple uses for school, and honors the wishes of students). As an educator, I want to offer my students whatever will help them succeed, as they define that. I cannot ignore that this means exploring progressive educational techniques like inquiry-based learning, but neither can I ignore the standards-based tests that influence society’s conception of success. Whatever I do, I cannot do nothing. Ladson-Billings writes, “We have no trouble recognizing that we have a moral debt to Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, Elie Wiesel, or Mahatma Gandhi. But how do we recognize the moral debt that we owe to entire groups of people? How do we calculate such a debt?” (Ladson-Billings, 2006, p.8). I have no concrete answers for Ladson-Billings’s questions, but I know I must start moving forward, reflecting at every available moment, if any of my classrooms are to help pay back some of that debt.
References:
Anyon, Jean. 1980. Social class and the hidden curriculum of work. Journal of Education, 162(1), 67-92.
Bransford, J. (1999). How people learn brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.
Kazemi, E., & Hintz, A. (2014). Intentional Talk How to Structure and Lead Productive Mathematical Discussions. Portland: Stenhouse.
Labaree, D. F. (1997). Public goods, private goods: The American struggle over educational goals. American Educational Research Journal, 34(1), 39-81.
Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). From the achievement gap to the education debt: Understanding achievement in U.S. schools. Educational Researcher, 35(3), 3-12. http://dx.doi.org/10.3102/0013189X035007003
Levstik, L., & Barton, K. (2005). Doing history: Investigating with children in elementary and middle schools (3rd ed.). Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates.
Tara J. Yosso (2005) Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth, Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69-91, DOI:10.1080/1361332052000341006
Wiggins, G. (1998). Educative assessment: Designing assessments to inform and improve student performance. San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass.