Common Core dumb down – part 2

Why Constructivism and Direct Instruction will Damage Your Child’s Brain – Part 2

Posted on October 8, 2014 Written by Oak Norton, utahnsagainstcommoncore.com

In the Schools Today

2004 was my piv­otal year. My old­est was in 3^rd grade and I dis­cov­ered that Alpine School Dis­trict was no longer teach­ing the times tables or long divi­sion to chil­dren and hadn’t for at least 3 straight years. What in the world was happening?

Alpine and sev­eral other dis­tricts had part­nered with BYU’s McKay School of Edu­ca­tion under the lead­er­ship of John Good­lad in 1983, form­ing a Pub­lic School Part­ner­ship, and they were push­ing an edu­ca­tional phi­los­o­phy called con­struc­tivism. The basis of this the­ory is that knowl­edge is socially con­structed, or in other words, a demo­c­ra­tic approach to knowl­edge and morals. This moral rel­a­tivism is at the heart of con­struc­tivism. Another notion is that when knowl­edge is con­structed, it is retained bet­ter. That can be true, but it also means a tremen­dous loss of foun­da­tional knowl­edge that could have been obtained by some­one with an effi­cient algo­rithm. Con­struc­tivism is heavy on group work, deem­pha­siz­ing the indi­vid­ual and empha­siz­ing the col­lec­tive efforts of stu­dents who come up with “strate­gies” to approach prob­lems. It is also called inquiry-based learn­ing for the approach that stu­dents should inquire to learn. The process is also deemed more impor­tant than the result so stu­dents might get no right answers on an exam but still score high on the test for show­ing a lot of work.

Con­struc­tivists have a philo­soph­i­cal dif­fer­ence in oppo­si­tion to Direct Instruc­tion meth­ods of teach­ing which comes out of the stimulus/ response sys­tem of behav­ioral psy­chol­o­gists like B.F. Skin­ner. At the extreme, the Direct Instruc­tion method of teach­ing can tend to not pro­duce long term reten­tion because it’s geared more toward telling a stu­dent exactly what must be learned, and then regur­gi­tat­ing it.

Sev­eral years ago when I was pon­der­ing the lunacy pro­moted by Good­lad and embraced by seem­ingly intel­li­gent adults in Alpine School District’s lead­er­ship, I came across Project Follow-Through. This was the largest edu­ca­tion study ever per­formed. A bil­lion dol­lars spent track­ing about 170,000 stu­dents over decades of time to deter­mine which edu­ca­tional model was most effec­tive in teach­ing chil­dren. The results were stun­ningly clear. Con­struc­tivist math ori­ented pro­grams like Inves­ti­ga­tions, Con­nected, and Inter­ac­tive math used by Alpine School Dis­trict were utter fail­ures. Any­one with a shred of com­mon sense knew that intu­itively, but it was nice to see it con­firmed in a gov­ern­ment funded study. Direct Instruc­tion crushed the com­pe­ti­tion. Nat­u­rally, shar­ing this with the ASD school board and admin­is­tra­tion had no effect to course cor­rect their direc­tion and do what was best for the chil­dren in the dis­trict because they were steeped in John Goodlad’s phi­los­o­phy and reg­u­larly taught with him at his annual NNER con­fer­ences. Our super­in­ten­dent even served on Goodlad’s NNER exec­u­tive committee.

What I didn’t real­ize when I jumped into the math fight was that although these results were a stun­ning indict­ment of con­struc­tivism, they were also miss­ing some­thing impor­tant about Direct Instruction.

Source: http://agenda21news.com/2014/10/constructivism-direct-instruction-will-damage-childs-brain-part-2/#more-2949