What I write about in my "free" time, or, the revolution is coming

I have no idea what goes on in my head when I don’t understand something.

From Curriculum: Creating the Metacurriculum

In the five articles we read for this mod, no one turn of a phrase created a more succinct image than this. Imagine the speaker as a cartoon character, sitting in front of a text—any text—with the ubiquitous dialogue balloon over her heard and nothing in it but black scribbles. Every student has felt this kind of mental paralysis at one time or another. The content causing the trouble could be anything: fractions, Shakespeare, inert gases, the Rule Against Perpetuities. The challenge for students and their teachers becomes how to step back away from the discontent and decide how to approach the material in a fresh way, a workable way. Metacognition and its ally, metacurriculum, offer learners and their guiders tools to create spaces where thinking about thinking can be explored, discussed, and implemented. My position is that any subject can and should be “metacurriculum-ed” to meet the needs of diverse learners in a progressive school culture. The issues we need to frame in order to accomplish “metacurriculum-ing” include how to rebrand core content, how and what students would benefit, and how to sell it to a very demanding yet change-fearing public.

In “Curriculum: Creating the Metacurriculum” Perkins notes that Schoenfeld’s study on problem management yielded interesting results. Mathematics students who can self-analyze with such prompts as, ”Am I making progress with this approach?” or “How can I check my answer?” are better inquirers and users of mathematical principles. In “Teaching Intelligence,” Perkins also quotes Binet on the subject of self-analysis, noting that students need “mental orthopedics” in order to learn how to learn. Perkins wraps up the trifecta with a solid observation in “Content: Toward a Pedagogy of Understanding” that such understanding is not “either you get it or you don’t”; this approach is narrow, old-fashioned and wholly unworkable in today’s school culture. One way to move students away from this closed-ended world of being good at a subject (or not) is to rebrand the way we in effect market the discipline. Mathematics, rather than being a rote course of study that covers principles and formulae, transforms into a course on problem solving that utilizes mathematical principles to illuminate larger metacognitive concepts. No student likes to think of himself as a “bad problem solver,” yet this same student might too willingly put himself in the category of being “bad at math.” Take math out of the prime slot and shift the emphasis to, as Perkins describes, thinking about options, what has been tried, what worked, what didn’t and why, what is always right (Pythagorean theorem) and why that matters in the larger scope. Schools could use numerancy as a medium for conveying the larger metacognitive processes that extant mathematics curricula purports to illuminate but clearly fails to do, given the state of mathematics scores in many districts. The proposition is radical, certainly; it would change not only the way mathematics is taught but how mathematics teachers are taught to teach it. The end result, however, could be a whole new class of students who, because they can solve problems, can complete complex mathematical proofs with low frustration and high achievement. More importantly, these same students, because math was just media, could walk their problem solving skills out the classroom door and transfer them to social studies, science….or, just maybe, real life.

Could any student benefit from this remarketed, freshened up version of the American school curriculum? I posit yes. In “Teaching Thinking and Problem Solving,” Bransford, et. al. compartmentalize the IDEAL approach (identify, define, explore, act and look & learn) to problem solving. This method is so straightforward that it could be communicated even to kindergartners, who, having survived toddlerhood with all its developmental lurchings, could be led to understand it. Children are natural explorers; whether in struggling with bringing the abstraction of language down to the concrete (child holds up unfamiliar object and asks, “What is this?”) or in examining natural phenomena (“when the sun goes to sleep, the moon is awake”) children want to make sense of their environment. This is true even of children with differentiated learning needs, who also crave structure and order but may require an alternative route to create this kind of meaning for themselves. If the notion of problem-solving as paramount is highlighted in early childhood education, the results of the investment will begin to pay dividends almost immediately. Rather than suffering from the disconnect so many students experience on encountering higher-order skill based courses in middle school, children would be able to bring with them their intellectual suitcase of problem-solving techniques and expand on them to meet the new demands that the curricula imposes upon them. Again, the idea of redesigning early childhood programs to emphasize not preacademic skills but pre-LIFE skills (ideally, through play, which is how children learn best) is taking the train in the complete opposite direction of where we are going now (how many times have we heard, “kindergarten is the new first grade?”). However, for many children, particularly those on the autistic spectrum, teaching preacademic skills are for naught if they can’t expand their problem solving techniques in simple, everyday play situations. Would a play-based, problem-solving preschool without the esoteric trappings of, say, the Montessori method “go” in today’s climate? The bigger question is, why couldn’t it?

This brings up the last point in this exploration of metacurriculum, and that is the hard sell. Perkins and Grotzer rightly note in “Teaching Intelligence “ that instruction can help people to think better . . . such effects would not have the broad generality or the persistence of IQ.” If all we are concerned about as a culture is the quantifiable, then yes, my suggestions about revolutionizing curricula are but academic musings. But if we want, as we purport to want, children who can grow into adults who can solve problems, fix things, figure things out, get the job done, then isn’t teaching the process of solving, fixing, figuring, and getting really key? Don’t then the petty disputes between the disciplines become collateral to the bigger issue: producing great thinkers? A student who can think greatly—bigly—widely about many subjects can self-select the one she wants to uncover more deeply. Because she is a great thinker, she chooses more wisely, with better forethought, perhaps more enjoyment, and ultimately, with more long-term success. Making the paying public believe that exploding the curricula we now have isn’t academic terrorism is indeed a hard sell. Quantifiably, however, the data we get back from so many school districts is uniformly discouraging. Perhaps imploding what we have would actually be an opportunity to build an oasis in an existing intellectual desert.