Bridging the Progressive-Traditional Divide in Education Reform

A Unifying Vision for Teaching, Learning, and System Level Supports

James Nehring, Stacy Szczesiul, Megin Charner-Laird

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429755798
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book brings together a variety of connected voices which consider potential ways forward for school reform. By demonstrating how the 'subject-centered' and 'student-centered' models of education can, and have been working together in various contexts, the text sets out a compelling case for an emerging movement that unites ideologies and pedagogical traditions which have traditionally been considered to be at odds with one another.

In drawing from historical sources, the full range of contemporary research, and a series of investigations led by the authors, this book documents the deep back-story of school reform, and explains the powerful and largely unacknowledged consensus on what constitutes excellence in teaching and learning.

This book will be of great interest to researchers, academics, and postgraduate students in the fields of school reform and educational leadership. It will also appeal to graduate students, researchers and postgraduates in the fields of history of education, educational leadership, teaching and learning, and curriculum studies.

Part I
A Unifying Vision for Teaching and Learning

1
Exemplary Teaching and the Unacknowledged Consensus

What skills do you need to be a successful adult? It turns out there are roughly 25, if you review the relevant literature.¹ Which of these skills do schools regularly teach? Just three. That’s what we found in nine of the highest-rated secondary schools in Massachusetts.²

Although we’ve known for decades, based on research, that classrooms tend to focus on lower-level cognitive skills—application, recall, and analysis—we were shocked to find in a series of studies in public secondary schools, that this pattern remains so strong, even in schools considered among the very best. But we also discovered that a significant minority of excellent teachers taught nearly the full range of skills and that their classes spanned subjects, grade levels, and academic tracks. We believe the system can learn a great deal from what these teachers do in their classrooms every day.

We also believe, based on themes from the literature framing our studies, that there is strong agreement in policy, research, and pedagogy backing what these teachers do—but the agreement is largely unrecognized. The more we read, the clearer it became. First, we examined large-scale research studies and policy reports, and found they affirmed the practices we observed. Then we looked at two great pedagogical lineages, commonly called “traditional” and “progressive,” and found elements of both in the daily practice of the teachers, demonstrating that a centuries-old rivalry is entirely unnecessary. We also saw these same teachers enacting emerging pedagogies that promote positive identity formation, often with students representing groups historically marginalized.

It turns out there is a powerful, unacknowledged consensus about what constitutes good teaching. We wondered why it’s not reaching into schools and creating a new norm for public education. To answer this question, we looked at the history of teacher practice, key education policies in the United States, and the socio-political forces that have shaped them. We also asked what can be done, within the education sector, at all levels, to counter negative forces and advance this powerful, widely-endorsed vision.

Bridging the Progressive-Traditional Divide makes the case that many actors across the fields of research, practice, and, to a growing extent, policy, are working in parallel, sometimes unaware of each other’s efforts. Independently, they are building the basis of a new consensus that dissolves old ideological battle lines and may reduce historic inequities. We intend to propel this vision toward a broad social movement by telling its largely untold story and recommending actions in policy and practice.

What Great Teachers Do

In 2009, two of this book’s authors (Nehring and Szczesiul) began a collaboration with several education researchers from the United Kingdom and Israel-Palestine. We were interested in policy literature from provincial and national systems, including our own, that claimed to advance a broad range of skills required for a global economy and a culturally diverse society, frequently called “21st century.” We were interested because the same systems relied heavily on large-scale tests to measure learning, even though an abundance of research showed that such tests tended to limit what gets taught in schools, particularly schools serving disadvantaged communities where test pressure bears down hard. How ironic, we reflected, that education systems incentivized a very limited approach to teaching, while advocating for very expansive “21st century skills.” Because test scores were the main accountability metric, all those broader and deeper skills, though vaunted in the promotional literature, appeared, from the research, to be largely absent in practice.

A study began to take shape. What if we could find schools serving high needs communities that not only performed well on the state exams but also showed evidence of teaching those deeper and broader capabilities? If such outlier schools existed, they could teach us all a great deal. What resulted was a series of five investigations over a period of eight years involving 24 secondary schools in the United States and the United Kingdom.³ We interviewed teachers, principals, and students, sat in on professional meetings, visited classes, and collected instructional documents. A total of 420 teachers, students, and administrators participated directly in the set of studies.⁴ Altogether, the five investigations produced a wealth of information about teaching and schools.

Our first challenge was to clarify the murky “21st century skills” construct. By sheer luck, that massive task had recently been accomplished for us by an august research organization. In 2010, the National Research Council (NRC) was getting started with a new project that held the potential to re-shape education policy. Recent decades had witnessed a growing chorus of interest groups and academics lamenting the inability of new employees to engage in crucial work-related tasks such as collaboration, problem solving, and communication. They lamented, also, the increasing failure of employees to show personal qualities such as persistence, time management, reflection, and self-awareness. In reports and studies, these skills and attributes were given various names, such as “next generation skills,” “college and career readiness,” “the new basics,” “critical thinking,” and “21st century skills.” There seemed to be some common themes, but no clarity. The NRC set out to define the ideas behind such terms, clarify what existing research could tell us about them, and, by extension, potentially set a new agenda for public education.⁵ The NRC team began by teasing apart the ideas behind various overlapping terms. Under the guidance of program officer Margaret Hilton, the steering committee began an extensive consultation with experts and a review of literature in psychology and economics. The effort came to fruition in 2012 with the publication of a substantial volume co-edited by James Pellegrino and Margaret Hilton, Education for Work and Life: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century.⁶

The report took a broad view arguing for a public education focused on preparation for work, citizenship, parenting, and personal fulfillment. It fostered a sense of urgency by invoking the need for workers with more sophisticated skills required by a technology-driven workplace, and the pressing need to solve environmental and social problems. They identified three broad categories of competency required for an education up to the challenge: cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal. The report described them as follows:

• The Cognitive Domain includes three clusters of competencies: cognitive processes and strategies; knowledge; and creativity. These clusters include competencies such as critical thinking, information literacy, reasoning and argumentation, and innovation.
• The Intrapersonal Domain includes three clusters of competencies: intellectual openness; work ethic and conscientiousness; and positive core self-evaluation. These clusters include competencies such as flexibility, initiative, appreciation for diversity, and metacognition (the ability to reflect on one’s own learning and make adjustments accordingly).
• The Interpersonal Domain includes two clusters of competencies: team-work and collaboration; and leadership. These clusters include competencies such as communication, collaboration, responsibility, and conflict resolution.⁷

In addition to “competencies,” the NRC report emphasized the importance of transfer, “the process through which an individual becomes capable of taking what was learned in one situation and applying it to new situations” (p. 5).⁸ Consistent with research on transfer, the report acknowledged that the teaching of domain-specific knowledge (i.e., “subjects”) is necessary to anchor competencies. That is to say, it is not effective to teach students to think critically without providing something to think critically about. Instruction must build disciplinary knowledge while also building competency across all three domains—cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal. The message was clear: teach “the basics” interwoven with “21st century skills” in order to achieve what the National Research Council called “deeper learning.”

We now had clarity about what we should look for. The next challenge was how to measure it. There are currently no reliable and readily accessible metrics for some of the skills included in the NRC taxonomy, such as collaboration and teamwork, conflict resolution, responsibility, and flexibility. How could we ever document the degree to which students were learning these skills and make comparisons across classrooms and schools? We couldn’t. But what we could do was measure the instructional demand for these skills. A line of scholarship going back to Walter Doyle in the 1980s has investigated the nature of knowledge and skills required by instructional tasks.⁹ While we could not measure whether students were learning various complex skills, we could measure whether the tasks to which students were directed required them. And we knew from work done by Richard Elmore that the tasks required of students powerfully shape their learning, summarized in Elmore’s compact phrase, Task predicts performance: “What determines what students know and are able to do is not what the curriculum says they are supposed to do, or even what the teacher thinks he or she is asking students to do. What predicts performance is what students are actually doing. The single biggest observational discipline… is to look on top of the desk, rather than at the teacher in front of the room.”¹⁰ Instructional demand would become our proxy for student learning.

Taxonomy in hand, we set out to find which of these skills get taught in schools. We decided to look at secondary schools serving high-need communities in our home state, Massachusetts, focusing, in particular, on those that reliably produced comparatively high scores on state tests. According to system measures, which put a laser-like focus on test outcomes, these would be the best schools. And because Massachusetts regularly ranks high in national and international comparisons, these schools would be—according to the system—the best of the best.

As a first step, we invited all teachers in nine high-performing schools to submit instructional materials from a single week. We received 155 instructional items (classroom worksheets, homework assignments, project descriptions, rubrics, quizzes, tests, and so on) from 73 classrooms. Analyzing the nearly 2,000 instructional tasks embedded in these materials, we found that recall-and-application topped the list, with analysis a distant third and only occasional demands for evaluation and creative thinking—altogether a grim finding. The picture became more disturbing when we looked at the interpersonal and intrapersonal domains—at skills like communication and trust building, or adaptability and self-regulation—where task demand for a student in any of these top-performing schools was either rare or wholly absent from a full week of classroom instruction.

To better understand the dynamics behind these concerning patterns, we decided to take a deeper dive, with a second study in which we looked more closely at three schools that appeared to have a pronounced focus on deeper learning. We observed 22 classrooms, interviewed school leaders, and spoke with teachers in focus groups. Classroom observations, which were audio recorded and meticulously scrutinized, revealed more of the same—that is, for most classes, an instructional focus on recall, application, and, occasionally, analysis, with every other skill listed in our taxonomy either rarely addressed or wholly absent. Why, we asked, did schools that talked a good line about 21st century skills continue to not teach them?

In focus groups, teachers often referred to higher-level thinking, critical thinking, or 21st century skills; in class, they often said to students, “I’m pushing you here,” “I’m demanding more now.” There was clearly plenty of talk about academic demand, but what was the nature of the demand in classrooms? To that end, we looked closely at tasks assigned to students. Comparing all classes where greater intellectual demand appeared to be on the mind of the teacher, we found that it took three forms, which we called “more stuff,” “more steps,” and “deeper learning.” Only one of these, as the names imply, fostered learning of skills across our taxonomy.

More Stuff

In some classes, teachers presented students with complex content. However, the tasks assigned to students did not require complex thought. Although the content was complex, the tasks were simple, mostly requiring no deeper skills than recall or application. This was apparent, for example, in an Advanced Placement U.S. government class for 11th and 12th graders. On the day we observed, the teacher was reviewing material from a textbook chapter. The lesson consisted mainly of the teacher stating terms, asking students recall-level questions about definitions and asking questions that called on students to apply the terms. To be successful in this class, students needed to be familiar with a number of terms, such as ‘demographics,’ ‘party identification,’ ‘Democrat,’ ‘Republican,’ ‘blue state,’ ‘red state,’ and ‘purple state.’ They also had to be able to apply the terms to simple problems—for example, naming factors that predicted a person’s party affiliation. Although the required vocabulary appeared to grow daily and was quite extensive, no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Non-Honors English
• PART I A Unifying Vision for Teaching and Learning
• PART II Why Don’t All Teachers Teach This Way?
• PART III System Support
• Final Thoughts: Excellence Is a Discipline
• Bibliography
• Index