Think about how children learn how to speak. Long before they are able to make meaningful sounds, they are thrust into an environment rich with language. They acquire the ability to communicate over time, by people speaking lovingly to them. They learn from the context of the messages and by doing it themselves and getting feedback on their output. This kind of learning is called "contingency-shaped" behavior or, more informally, learning by doing. Once a human being learns the mother tongue, the struggle to acquire it is long forgotten. It's as easy as breathing. Scientists have discovered that there is a window of time, during childhood, when language acquisition is most effortless. Teachers have noted the transformation of a foreign child who knows no English into a fluent, accent-free-English-speaker can be a matter of months.
Learning a foreign language in school is approached differently. The student is given rules of grammar and syntax. The purpose of the rules is to create a link between the foreign language and the native tongue. Students are given exceptions to the rules -- idioms and idiosyncrasies -- and long lists of words to develop a vocabulary. This method of learning is "rule-shaped" behavior. But rules are not enough. Mastery can only occur when the rules are internalized and the learner is immersed in a contingency-rich environment. Rules are a short cut to get you to the point where contingencies can take over.The job of education is to impart the skills and knowledge deemed necessary to thrive in society. So educators have put their heads together to come up with lists of behaviors that educated students are expected to exhibit. These are the Core Educational Standards that are supposed to serve as guidelines for curricula. They are not intended to be curricula and this is stated quite clearly ".... these standards will establish what students need to learn, but they will not dictate how teachers should teach. Instead, schools and teachers will decide how best to help students reach the standard." It is now time for fear to set in. Instead of focusing on teaching skills and content to students, teachers now direct their concerns to meeting the standards as written in these documents.
Enter the textbook publishers. They say to teachers and administrators: "Never fear. We've got those standards covered in our books. Use our books as scripts and you've done your job." Years ago a textbook company came to me and asked me to write for them. Naturally I was interested because they paid so well. They sent me an outline and asked me to write to the outline putting my "witty spin" on the language. Where did they get the outline from? The standards, of course. I took one look at the sequence of ideas that required me to fill in the blanks and told them I had to pass on the project. "But why?" they asked. "Because I don't think that way," I responded. I tried to explain how it worked. They could give their outline to Shakespeare and he might write something that they might want to publish but they wouldn't get Shakespeare. I don't think they got it.
Merrily I wrote along, book after book, ignoring the standards. I never had to refer to them to make certain my books met them. Why? Because I long ago internalized the science standards when I learned the science content that made me a certified secondary school teacher of biology, chemistry and physics. Because, in the process of writing for trade book publishers and winning awards, I internalized the English language standards. My books are exemplars of the standards at their highest and that's why they've been excerpted on the assessment tests. (I have a file of permissions to prove this.) I live immersed in the contingencies that have made me a fluent master of language. My books are not written from a laundry list of skills listed in the Core Education Standards documents (my fun titles -- Science Experiment You Can Eat, What's the Big Idea?, We Dare You! -- belie the richness of science content) so educators are fearful that they don't fulfill them. Yet they are precisely what the authors of the standards intended.
I addressed this problem with my fellow award-winning nonfiction authors who contribute to the group blog "Interesting Nonfiction for Kids" (I.N.K.). If you think our books look so enticing that they can't possibly be meeting the standards, we'll do you the service of analyzing them ourselves and let you know exactly what standards they satisfy. In many ways it's a lot easier for us to read the standards, boring as they are, and use them to analyze our books long after they were written than it is for us to write boring books. (I long ago figured that if I was bored when I wrote something, my readers would be equally bored when reading it. I'm driven by fear of boredom.) We put this analysis in our database, which you can access free on our Web site www.inkthinktank.com. It will introduce you to an interdisciplinary feast of extraordinary writing that students will want to read on subjects you're required to teach.
Twentieth century standards were designed to produce factory workers, who were compliant, got along with others, could follow simple directions, and expected work to be dull. Student reading material and practices in the classroom followed suit. But the game has changed. My colleague, literacy expert Angela Maiers told me: "Twenty-first century skills need to produce confident, bold, disciplined, creative writers who convey information across the disciplines with competence and flare! That is what you do every day"
Leave a comment