Teaching facts or teaching to think?
Thanks to a Tweet by Darren, I found this article on GUBU. It’s a great write up of Darren’s “Distributed Teaching and Learning” implementation, which essentially assigns a different student to be the Scribe each day and record the learning for the day. I won’t go into the whole method, you can read the article for that, but I did want to share a quote from it.
What I love about this method is that it engages students without dumbing down or pandering to their short attention spans. The biggest problem I see today is not poor spelling but shallow thinking. There is no fair way to assess students other than through uniform exams like the Junior and Leaving Certificates. But it’s impossible to design exams without encouraging even the most able students to churn out text book information without actually learning how to think for themselves. An “A” student might well be able to spell perfectly but couldn’t think independently to save their lives.
In the comments of the blog post, somebody shares that they were trying to help their daughter memorize all the counties in Leinster.
“This is stoopid daddy,” my little cherub opined. “If I ever need to know what the counties are in Lengster (sic), I’ll just Google it.”
First of all, I had no idea where Leinster was. So I Googled it. I found out that one of four provinces of Ireland, and its capital is Dublin. All I need to know right now. The father was struggling to explain why his daughter needed to memorize the counties in Leinster, and eventually came up with “What if you were a grown-up in your car and you were lost? THEN you’d need to know where all the counties in Lengster are, wouldn’t you?”
Assuming she didn’t have a GPS, hadn’t printed a mpa, didn’t want to ask someone for directions or didn’t have a cell phone on her, then yes she’d need to know where they were. Sounds pretty silly doesn’t it?
It gets right back to what Sarah was saying. I’ll take someone who can think critically and problem solve over someone who has facts memorized any day. If I’ve learned anything from Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader, it’s that the things we’ve forced our 5th graders to memorize are largely irrelevant. Sorry, but I don’t think it’s embarrassing not to know who the first president to be impeached was. Or whether polar bears eat penguins. Those are facts, and for the most part they come easy. Concepts, critical thinking skills, the scientific method, those are things they’ll carry with them for life.
I’m not saying that facts aren’t worth teaching. But right now most of curriculum seems to revolve around things we can easily test, such as whether they’ve memorized that list of counties. But Darren left a great comment in response to that.
A more authentic task might be to research how the counties acquired their names and write a historical fiction piece on one or more of them. This embeds a research component in the assignment and helps to make the learning sticky. Once kids know the stories behind the names of the counties they are more likely to remember them … and be able to tell you a whole lot more about the world they live in.
Are you teaching facts, or teaching students to think?
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[...] More on teaching kids to think – AKA CS concepts for looking things up I talked about the need to teach thinking skills the other day. Yesterday I read Steve Dembo talking about much the same thing – teaching facts or teaching thinking. I’d like to add something else to that mix. One of my long time favorite sayings is that “life is an open-book test.” I do believe that to be true. If it is though then the critical skill becomes knowing how to find things in the book. And perhaps knowing what books to look in. Steve talks about students using Google to find things out. Internet search engines are a great tool but my experience is that most people, including most students, do not know how to use them well. You should hear to things my wife the librarian tells me that students can’t find anything about on the Internet on their own. I am also amazed at some of the searches in my referrer logs that show what searches brought people to my blogs or web site. Those searches show a lack of understanding of some thing that computers do well – Boolean algebra. Search engines support AND, OR and NOT syntax. One can use + for AND and – for NOT and whether or not people realize it a lot of default searches involve OR. Some event support other advanced options like NEAR. We really should be teaching students how to use search engines well. In the old days, you remember them – we used books made of paper – we taught students to alphabetize and how to use that knowledge to look things up in indexes. And if you think about it a bit we taught them how to do a Boolean search as well. Remember that? It is still an important skill today. We do need to expand on it a bit though. While I am bringing computer science/programming concepts into other areas let’s not forget how much more valuable spreadsheets are if students understand decision structures (IF, VLookup, etc). Let’s help kids get the most value out of their tools by teaching them how to use them in a thoughtful planned way. And if they discover that computer science is more relevant and useful than they thought along the way that works for me too. Please vote! var bt_counter_type=1; var bt_project_id=1181; Technorati tags: education, computer applications, computational+Thinking Published Thursday, May 03, 2007 12:47 AM by AlfredTh Filed under: teaching, education [...]
[...] This article over at Teach42 speaks to the problem of providing up-to-date information for the students of the 21st Century. I think Steve hits it pretty well when he says [...]
susan
5/4/2007
I found some great fiction book reviews. You can also see those reviews in Historical fiction
Simoni
5/5/2007
I completely agree with you that our current assessments do a poor job of determining the future success of our students. My students are currently engaged in an interdisciplinary unit based on my immigration standards. I am hopeful that the students will retain the critical thinking and research skills that we are teacing them. For a more detailed look at this project, read this post: http://simonisays.blogspot.com/2007/04/coming-to-america.html
Angus
5/7/2007
The title “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader” is misleading. It’s a TRIVIA quiz. What would you prefer a doctor who memorized the appendectomy procedure, or the one who has experience, skill, and the ability to creatively and critically solve problems as they arise during surgery?
Education is MUCH more than memorization of facts.
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