Education Week - March 20,2019 - 20

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What Both Traditional and Innovative Schools Get Wrong

By David Nurenberg
wo kinds of schools tend to hire
my services as a consultant:
traditional schools taking tentative steps towards projectand competency-based learning, and special pilot programs
that need to justify their value
to the state, prospective parents, or others to whom they are accountable.
Each type of school is attempting to address
the core problem of the typical "factory model,"
teacher-centered classroom that privileges
memorization and recall. Such classrooms
usually fail to engage young people in learning higher-order skills like critical thinking,
analysis, and problem-solving.
Traditional schools tend to face what I've
dubbed "the Penguin Problem," in honor of
a veteran teacher whom I once tried to help
enhance a research project she had taught for
decades.
What was the greater purpose of the project?
"For the students to learn about penguins,"
she told me.
Penguins are admittedly pretty cool. But
since several minutes with Wikipedia can
reveal anything students would ever want
to know about them, what larger topics or
themes could we plug into the project? Animal
life cycles? Food webs? Humanity's impact on
other species?
"They need to know about penguins," she
maintained, pointing to the relevant learning
standard.
Certainly, critical thinking and problemsolving require that students possess some
base of factual knowledge. But facts can seem
meaningless unless they are somehow contextualized.
Yet, too many traditional education models
seem built specifically to prevent connections
to other topics, subjects, and students' own
lived experiences. Even a simple field trip
like a walk around the neighborhood (to teach
cartography by mapping familiar places, for
instance) requires overcoming tremendous
scheduling and permission hurdles.
Some teachers find the idea of crossing

Instead of
reproducing the
work of Wikipedia,
students reproduce
the work of a 3D
printer."

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subject-area borders even more challenging than
crossing a busy intersection ("We can't include
any math concepts. It's designated English/language arts time!"). I've consulted with some wonderful educators who are bravely moving from
the role of director to facilitator of learning, employing cooperative and personalized structures
to engage all of their students. But I hear these
teachers loud and clear when they say it's a tall
order with 30 students and 45-minute class periods. I take them seriously when they tell me they
lack time to have students learn math or science
through actual experimentation, because they
have 20 more standards to "cover" that month.
(Read: Write on the whiteboard, give a quick lesson and a quiz, then move on.)
Those are traditional schooling's challenges:
Each individual class is its own small iceberg, and
it's too hard to connect to the other icebergs floating out there. The Penguin Problem.
On the other end of the spectrum, I've worked
with educators at pilot, innovative, and private
schools and programs that are frequently willing
to rethink age-grouping or eliminate classrooms
in favor of design studios or outdoor explorations.
In their zeal to shield themselves from the corrupting influences of tradition, however, educators
at such schools too often throw out best practices
with the bathwater.
One teacher I worked with struggled for a whole
year to figure out ways to get her chaotic class
on-task. We spent hours discussing strategies like
setting clear expectations, developing classroom
norms and procedures, and enlisting disruptive
students in generative classroom roles. It was
classroom management 101, and she wished she'd
had it from the outset.
Even more concerning is when I see students
pursue creative projects that produce products,
but no clear learning. I recall a student proudly
showing me a gorgeous red-tailed hawk wire-andcloth sculpture she had worked on for weeks.
What had she learned about red-tailed hawks-
their biology, their behavior, their role in the ecosystem?
"They're awesome."
What had she learned about design?
"It was really hard to make and took a lot of
time."
Despite its presentation as "documentation of

learning," this sculpture seemed to be merely a
documentation of effort.
Innovative schools can seem allergic to the
idea of "learning standards," as if to mention
their name would be to summon the drudgery of
lecture and fill-in-the-bubble tests. The irony is
that the Red-Tailed Hawk Problem is, in its own
way, just one more version of the factory model:
Instead of reproducing the work of Wikipedia,
students reproduce the work of a 3D printer.
What needs to happen is a mating between the
penguin and the red-tailed hawk.
Leaders of traditional schools need to rethink
"coverage models" and allow teachers to sacrifice some particular content in order to help
students learn overarching concepts and skills
deeply. They need to be brave enough to make
significant structural changes. They cannot just
ask their teachers to start using project-based
learning, without lengthening block times, for
instance.
Pilot, charter, and private schools have a responsibility to prove they can actually educate,
as well as engage, young people. They should
provide their staff professional development
in core teacher competencies, including lesson
planning, assessment, and classroom management. Teachers should at least be conversant in
time-tested traditions for creating well-functioning learning environments before breaking with
them.
Students need teachers who will not circumscribe their learning according to inflexible curriculum timetables, but who will also not just
let them run loose without helping them progress towards defined learning goals-and, when
necessary, hold them to those goals and demand
excellence.
Without these sorts of structures, our most
innovative schools risk forever remaining boutique options, as opposed to workable visions of
what education could and should look like: not
penguin, not hawk, but some third kind of bird,
that could both endure and soar. n
DAVID NURENBERG is an associate professor of education
at Lesley University's Graduate School of Education
in Cambridge, Mass., and an education consultant.
He has taught in Massachusetts public high schools
for almost two decades.

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Education Week - March 20,2019

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