House of Tomorrow: Targeting
Behavior Change Requires Move Away from Declarative Knowledge
If you hang out in the dungeons and attics of the Transformation
Blueprints like I do, one of the omnipresent confessions that is crucial,
but not making it into the public domain YET, is that classroom activities and experiences are now
“aims-based” or “goal-directed,” not “subject-matter based.” History, math,
literature, or science course names still get used, but it hides the new
broader purposes of social change. They have ceased to be, unfortunately,
ends in themselves. The very phrase “standards-based” over the last two
decades is also intended to hide what is indisputedly a shift to a personal
behavior emphasis that is still too obscured.
This post is designed to remedy that and build on the facts
and declarations laid out in the recently finished APUSH trilogy as well
as particularly Chapter 7 of my book–“What if Common Core Actually Limits
What Everyone Can Know or Do While Targeting Feelings, Beliefs, and Values
Instead?” The Question that Grows in Pertinence on a Daily Basis. Often
times the best way to illustrate what is being required in education is to
consult a professor in another area, who is unlikely to mask his statements
about what is intended. Do you remember the London School of Economics
where that troubling Fabian Stained Glass window has now found a new home? As
a symbol of reverence, not infamy, unfortunately.
Back in 1994, LSE’s then Director, sociologist Anthony
Giddens, kindly explained the role of History to political radicals in a
book called Beyond Left and Right. It matters because not enough of us
appreciate that the Fall of the Berlin Wall, death of Mao, or dissolution
of the USSR, never altered the widespread desire for History to be progressing
somewhere. If facts get in the way, education becomes the preferred tool to
get the process headed in the desired direction again. Tell me this quote is
not behind the spirit of the activities I spelled out in the previous
posts: “For socialists, the past is not comforting; it is valued at most
because it has provided the means whereby we can actively move on to grasp and
appropriate the future.”
If you make K-12 education about altering and creating
desired feelings, values, beliefs, perceptions, and behaviors (performances
or learning are the preferred K-12 euphemisms obscuring this reality), education
can supposedly create the conditions for the House of Tomorrow. When I write posts explaining the NEA CARE Guide created
with the Southern Poverty Law Center to use in the Common Core classroom or
the Aspen Institute’s RETOC-Racial Equity Theory of Change, tie those intentions
to highlight race, class, and ethnicity to create feelings of grievance
or guilt to Giddens telling us that Marxism’s allure for so many is and was
the “metaphysical idea that history, in its more consequential and revolutionary
moments, is made by the oppressed.”
If that quote seems a bit too ‘metaphysical’ for anyone’s
taste, let’s simply make real-world problem solving the focus of K-12 education,
and see if the classroom over time doesn’t create a consciousness precisely
as Uncle Karl would have wanted. In 2013 the Journal of Teacher Education
for Sustainability published a helpful confession from Erin Redman
complaining that traditional education and declarative knowledge like
facts, lectures, and textbooks were too “value-free, didactic” and “one-way
methods of communication” (instead of the now glorified classroom ‘Dialogue”
among ‘Equals’). Education in the 21st Century is supposed to be about
long-term behavior change from an unconscious basis at the level of each individual.
Those Aims or Goals require “require real-world,
experiential and problem-based learning.”
Thanks for the honesty even if it is tucked away. Keep in
mind the calm assertion that “Behavioural scholars have, however, clearly
established that the linear, information-deficit approach [aka Transmission
of Knowledge of the Best that has Been Thought or Done by the Sages of the
Past] to education is insufficient
in promoting behaviour change.” Since we have been concentrating on what
these Aims and Goals do to history coursework, let’s end with the recommendation
that this Normative view of the purpose of curriculum results in a suggestion
for “shifting away from scientific facts as the primary discourse in sustainability.”
That ‘s why it’s so important to emphasize feelings and the
Whole Child.
It is why Procedural Knowledge gets so hyped now
in the form of the Skills Deficit. That is the needed action-related process
knowledge and how-to skills useful for real-world transformations. Effectiveness
Knowledge now gets hyped because Beliefs
about the Need for transformations
in the present to alter the future are very much influenced by “perceived consequences
associated with different behaviours as well as beliefs about who is
responsible for given outcomes.” That’s the Aim that really finds factual knowledge to be an obstacle since
it might prevent viewing the assigned Villains as culpable or notice that
local politicians will blow even more money if given ever more planning power.
But then I am no teenager and we have already concluded I
would be on the first shipment to Perception Re-education Camps to extinguish
Factual Knowledge as an Impediment to Fundamental Change. The typical
adolescent will be easy prey though for classrooms built around: “One of the
central ways for enhancing effectiveness knowledge is by focusing
on problems that are locally relevant and at a scale with which students feel empowered to act, while also
examining the positive impact of individual and collective change.”
Lack of much factual knowledge, unless the parents have stepped in or the
child is the rare fluent, voracious reader, means that a capacity or willingness
to conceive of any negative impact
is unlikely happen in most classrooms anymore.
Finally, “social knowledge (i.e. norms) encompasses
subjective and local knowledge including the motives, intentions and
actions of other people. In order to enhance
social knowledge, it is critical that sustainable behaviours are positioned
as the normal and the desired way to act.” Objective, norm-referenced tests
of knowledge have to go away quietly in this sought scenario for the future
since they center on Declarative Knowledge. Radicals always needed alternative
assessments to examine whether the desired behavior and attitude changes
were occurring and what strategies and concepts are used when there is no
correct answer and not enough information is given. Today’s Rigorous
Assessments merely build on what was known as the New Standards Reference Examination in the 90s Created again by the Mother of both Higher
Order Thinking Skills as well as the related term Rigor, Professor Lauren
Resnick.
We should simply view them correctly as Cultural Activity
Research on our kids with our tax dollars. Remember the ISCAR 2011 Conference
in Rome, Italy? It’s all about Aims-Based Education too. Transformational
Aims with Political and Social Purposes. Just like the Common Core or 21st
Century Learning or Competency-Based Instruction now. It’s all about Behavior
Change if we climb down to the dungeons or up to the attics or just trace back
to the footnotes in the typical Aspen Institute Report.
Those interested in fundamental transformations in
the political and social spheres that is the Progressive View of the Role
of History now need the tool of K-12 education, if not preschool as well, to
reach those same Aims and Goals. It’s why so many education graduate
degrees today openly trumpet their grounding in Change Agent Theories. To
make students the mass carriers of new cultural memes and behaviors without
most parents or the typical taxpayer even being aware of the shift. That’s
the purpose of all the Orwellian language that has me climbing down, then
up, and flipping back to those footnotes again and again.
I may have to understand all this at a very nerdy level
just bursting with facts and wordy declarations of intent to once again try
out notorious theories in the real world, but that is not the level where
most people live. When I explain what is intended in order to get real traction
in the real world, I always have to find ways to bring these intentions into
the everyday lives of my readers. Unfortunately, though, I am not the only
one who understands that crucial point.
In fact, the shift away from Declarative Knowledge to
granting parity to subjective ways of knowing and interpreting, along
with that targeting of Procedural, Effectiveness, and Social Knowledge
we have just talked about, is all about meeting people and students at the
level of knowledge that “guides conduct in everyday life.” Just the arena,
in other words, if long-term behavior change is the admitted (if only quietly
shared among insiders), new Goal or Aim of K-12 education.
Behavior Change Architects intent on Political and
Social Transformations to kick History Back into Gear on the Planned Pathway
of Change would need to appreciate each person’s “subjective experience
of reality.” To get at the perception of reality held by the “common-sense
of the ordinary members of society.”
That’s what alternative ‘high-quality’ assessments like
the NSRE above got at and what the Common Core and formative assessments
get at now. It’s what adaptive software gets at as well.
Then we have performance standards under their variety
of masking names like College and Career Ready or Next Generation Learning
to capture and then remediate over time behaviors, values, and attitudes
that are not desirable for transitioning to the Planned Pathway for
History.
Not to mention what all the social and emotional programs
being sold as Character Education or Bullying Prevention or Positive
Behaviors for the Whole Child do.
Am I finally reaching the everyday recognition of what
is coming at all of us?
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