All Our Students Thinking

"Thinking cannot be formulated as a lesson objective--as something to teach, learn, and evaluate on Thursday morning," Nel Noddings argues in her article "All Our Students Thinking."

Noddings believes that any subject can be taught in intellectually stimulating and challenging ways. Opportunities to think are underwritten by pedagogy that is open-ended, encourages critical thought, and finds organic connections to other subjects and to real-world applications.

To advocate thoughtful teaching and learning, Noddings adds that teachers must also be encouraged to think critically about what and how they are encouraged to teach. "If teachers want students to think, they must think about what they themselves are doing." How important is Noddings's statement to your personal teaching philosophy?

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[James E. Mac Shane]

EEducation on an Evolutionary Cusp

By James Mac Shane

When looking at the educational spectrum that exists today a commonality is the search for improvement of the system itself. The practical solutions are looking at the existing education systems and trying to find scientific and experiential solutions for all students’ intellectual development. Several of the contemporary generally agreed upon solutions are individualization, or differentiation, a list of therapeutic objectives, smaller class sizes, and all year class schedules.

The science of human natural development is presenting an understanding that natural human potential is generally greater than what the education system is achieving. The generally accepted practical solution is searching for ways to improve the existing system. There is little questioning of the system itself. Presently there is little if any debate on what alternative education for human’s there is accept for changes within the existing system. It is not all bad it has brought humanity to where we are today and individuals who have been successful in the system are generally in charge.

First, I will present a historical perspective that can clarify the human evolutionary perspective that points to the cusp of education that we are reaching. Our formal education system began its evolutionary development out of the naturally developed informal pre-historic survival educational system about six thousand years ago. This happened thru the evolution of pictographs that lead to socially agreed upon art symbols that eventually lead to alphabets and written language. This presented an opportunity for a more accurate and lasting historic record and a level of communication and problem solving that was unavailable in prior human development. Educationally this was the second evolutionary change because it was a raise for human consciousness potential.

In the pre-historic period human memory oral communications were enhanced thru the Arts, dance, drama (story telling), and the visual arts (graphic and sculptural). Because of the nature of the performing arts their value continued as it historically had and evolved. The only physically lasting records we have of that period of human development are the physical remnants that archeologists have discovered of physical skeletons and visual art and sculpture, including pottery.

That is the evolutionary base for human development that I am calling the agrarian survival pedagogy. It has been developing over the past six thousand years and has brought us to where we are today. At that evolutionary point in human history the formal education system evolved to serve the agrarian survival needs of societies with an average human life span of thirty to thirty-five years where human physical energy was the main survival commodity.

When human physical energy is the primary survival commodity intellectual energy was seen as needed only from those individuals with the highest natural level of intellectual ability. The formal educational system in order to serve this need evolved as an elimination process for selecting those individuals with naturally high intelligence thru testing, grading. Adult philosophical and political ideals that had no relationship to the natural human learning process is another historic base that has had significant influence in the development of external education. A historic fallacy came into play when children of the political and or economically in power were able to send their children into the formal education system no matter what their natural intellectual level may have been.

Then in 1830 the U.S. instituted universal compulsory education and assimilated the historic exclusionary agrarian survival pedagogy. Ever since then we have been trying to make the exclusionary system into an inclusive system. Two other significant elements at that time lead to significant human development came with scientific understandings and technology. This was the beginning of the human evolutionary change.

Science and technology are the base for a perspective of a human evolutionary change that has been taking place over the past one hundred-seventy five years. The developments in these two areas have been changing human survival needs from the historic agrarian physical survival needs to intellectual survival needs that science and technology produce. In the nineteenth century it was the development of mechanical energy, in the twentieth century electronic energy was dominant and in the twenty-first century it is photonic energy.

The natural intellectual survival needs that science and technology require are a significant base need that educators are becoming aware of and are trying to solve educationally. The generally agreed upon goal is the creation of a learning environment that will as positively as possible facilitate the natural human learning process. There is no significant agreement on what that would be other than somehow improving the existing system.

In the natural evolutionary time line the kind of change that is being required has always taken significant generations to occur. Humanity has already been involved in this evolutionary change for nine to ten generations. Even if we were able to implement the appropriate educational changes today it will still take several generations for significant development to take place. It will take an education system that will overcome the natural consequences of the externally motivated exclusionary education system that has been our formal education base for six thousand years. It also needs to be understood that the informal education system, at the survival level, is even more deeply ingrained in externally motivated control of children.

Survival itself is the most natural learning process for all life in the universe. Learning at the survival level is an unavoidable life long process. Survival is the reflection of the choices made in the learning process. Humanity has taken this natural process to the highest level that we are aware of in the universe at this time in history. Human education is fundamentally about survival choices not learning.

The required educational change will take place thru objective scientific understanding of this internally motivated survival process. There are several natural obstacles that need to be overcome. First the need is to develop scientific objective observations of the natural learning that comes in the environment itself. This objectivity needs to understand the importance of dualities and their importance in human understanding and development.
Examples of dualities are relativity, time and space and physical and psychological, what I am and who I am.

Another important understanding is natural development process of self-creation. This is a process that starts at birth and is a life long process. There are the stages of childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age and there are development stages within each of these developments. Educators and psychologists are becoming aware that there are important developmental periods within each of these stages that need to be understood especially the early childhood period. This is because it is the most important base of the self-creation process.

In order for an internally motivated education system to overcome the external motivations dominance a new level of respect is required. A simple vocabulary clarification that all humans are created equal will aid the needed value. We are all as whole as we have ever been weather we are three minutes, three years, thirty three, or ninety three years old. We are all an accumulation of all of our positive and negative choices at any given time and that wholeness needs to be understood and respected.

An interesting parallel related to our present practices of external and internal motivated education are the 100 years of development of Sigmund Freud’s Psychology and Maria Montessori’s educational perspective on human education.

Psychology is an exterior motivated search for internal motivated survival choices. Those survival choices have a significant element of influences related to the individual’s pre-adolescent development period.

The Montessori educational method is a designed environment with the goal of providing positive natural learning choices. The choices are a result of objective scientific observations of children’s natural learning development needs that facilitate the child’s conscious choices in the most positive observable manner.

The base for the life long self-creation process takes place from birth to early adolescence. There are four stages or critical masses of development that take place in the birth to 8 ½ to 10 year life span.

The first stage is the birth to 2 to three year old period. It is survival at its purest natural level. The child natural development begins surviving at a pure unconscious level and reaches the critical mass for the beginning of consciousness and independent choice. This is the scientific reason for formal education to introduce and facilitate consciousness. At this point that the child’s positive and negative survival choices are directly related to their learning experience. At the survival level during this stage, to the child, it does not matter whether the choice is positive or negative it only matters that I have survived.

During this period of human development for the child the difference between internal and externally motivated learning are the same. The consciousness of the process that educators need is that internal motivation is the most honest response to the individual child’s experience. This is the process that needs to be scientifically observed and understood.

This leads to another natural problem that adults have with understanding pre-adolescent development. The critical mass of unconsciousness that occurs at 2 ½ to 3 years of age is the beginning of consciousness and development of all rational powers including recall. It is during this period that memory is developing and our adult projections about what happened to us when were becoming is significantly limited. Educators introduce spotty grade level therapeutic solutions for specific educational problems rather than total developmental understandings.

This lack of understanding allows educators to implement system wide changes that cannot naturally change the negative experiences of student’s individual histories. It takes more than adult rational good intentions. A classic retrospective example of this can be seen in introduction of New Math in the 60’s.

If New Math had been introduced in Kindergarten and evolved up the grades it would have had a totally different outcome. What happened naturally lead to teacher and student frustrations related more to their previous experience with math. The teachers went back to there personal reasonable experience in teaching math and the mix lead to failure and we went back to teaching logistics, how to get answers, rather than math.

If you have spent much time with 2 to 5 year old children a primary natural motivation is, “I want to do it myself”. Adults external perspective projects what we think or want that to mean for the child. What is needed is scientific understanding of what that means.

ducation on an Evolutionary Cusp

[LATeach]

In the introduction to this blog is the statement, "Noddings believes that any subject can be taught in intellectually stimulating and challenging ways." This statement is equally as important to my teaching philosophy as her statement, "If teachers want students to think, they must think about what they themselves are doing."
My seventh and eighth grade students often come to me with the absolute belief that most of school is boring and so meaningless, so disconnected from their world that there is no point in working at it. They are not reading at grade-level and seldom read or write outside of a school setting. They WILL challenge me with rude questions. Why are we doing this? Why do we need to know this? Why should I care? Bless those rude questioners, because they give me an important teachable moment. These questions show me that students are paying some attention, they have some curiosity, and they can be reached with the right answer. So I MUST have a good answer. I need to think, think, think, consider, plan, and question what I choose to do and have students do in the classroom. One student will answer those 'rude' questions with, "You be quiet, Miss is teaching." I thank the student for coming to my defense and then stop to thank the 'rude' questioner and to explain that questions are a most important part of learning. I explain that if I am ever unable to explain why I am asking students to do something or why I am doing something - then we will stop doing it. I expect my students to question, to be intellectually challenged everyday and stimulated intellectually everyday. Why would anyone expect students to learn a topic if it wasn't stimulating and challenging - and why would a teacher teach any topic if he or she didn't think it was stimulating and challenging. And I have to do it with such stimulating topics as pronouns and complex sentences. It is always do-able! Always!

[mary]

Noddings notes the importance of motivation. It is interesting that many teachers have not taken courses that teach about extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. How are teachers supposed to implement what they are unfamiliar or not knowledgeable about? Perhaps it is time to require our pre-service teachers to learn about motivation and then they will be able to apply the principles and concepts related to motivation in their respective classrooms.