“A liberal education is at the heart of civil society, and at the heart of a liberal education is the act of teaching.”
“The American Teacher” in Harper’s (1980)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
This week’s Text is a lesson plan, one of many, that I worked up to use with Lawrence Treat’s series of kid’s books, Crime and Puzzlement. I came across these materials in two books last year, to wit George Hillocks Jr.’s otherwise unremarkable Teaching Argument Writing Grades 6-12: Supporting Claims with Relevant Evidence and Clear Reasoning (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2017), but also in two separate papers contained in Keith J. Holyoak and Robert G. Morrison’s (eds.) The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). All three of these texts extolled the Crime and Puzzlement books as exemplary instructional material for teaching students to assess, analyze, and synthesize evidence in support of an argument and contention.
I ordered the first volume, broke it up and scanned texts for several of the “cases,” and tried them out in my classroom. My freshman English students jumped right into these, and clearly enjoyed them. So I knew I had to build a unit to rationalize the use of this material in my classroom.
Now, about four months later, that unit is nearing completion, and I have 72 lessons in the unit. This week’s Text offers you the first lesson plan in the Crime and Puzzlement Unit Plan. To teach this lesson, you’ll need this worksheet on the case entitled Boudoir. To “solve” the “case,” you’ll need the answer key. Depending on how you begin your class period and its duration, you may want to start the lesson with a do-now exercise, which for this lesson is this Cultural Literacy worksheet on Marie Antoinette’s probably apocryphal statement “Let them eat cake.”
Unfortunately, the Crime and Puzzlement books (there are three in total) appear to remain in copyright, so I don’t think I can ethically or legally post many of these lesson plans. If you choose to contrive your own material based on these books, I can post the unit plan (it’s not quite ready as of this writing) for you; it will contain the standards met, a lengthy, discursive justification for using these methods and materials, and other supporting documentation.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“A concept is that which is understood by a term, particularly a predicate. To possess a concept is to be able to deploy a term expressing it in making judgements: the ability connects with such things as recognizing when the term applied, and being able to tell the consequences of its application. The term “idea” was formerly used in the same way, but is avoided because of its associations with subjective and mental imagery, which may be irrelevant to the possession of a concept. In the semantics of Frege, a concept is the reference of a predicate, and cannot be referred to by as subjective term.”
Excerpted from: Blackburn, Simon. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
“A society that is concerned about the strength and wisdom of its culture pays careful attention to its adolescents.”
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
A couple of years ago, in a “professional development” (a term I use both loosely and charitably when referring to the role it plays–or doesn’t–in the institution in which I serve) session, a colleague presented a workshop on the concept of the flipped classroom. I confess that my initial reaction was incredulity followed closely by hostility. After all, this person basically confessed (in my view) to turning over direct instruction in his classroom to a series of internet videos. To make matters worse, he presented no research to buttress his assertions about this style of teaching, save a promotional squib featuring a couple of young teachers (or actors playing young teachers) acting like fools as they extolled the virtues of the flipped classroom. I assumed this was the advertisement from the vendor supplying the material; whatever it was, it was far from the kind of research validation I personally would need to see to consider adopting this method in my own classroom.
More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that during the latest round (over the past couple of weeks) of high-stakes state testing here in New York, while I was proctoring math tests, several students complained that they didn’t understand the material because the flipped classroom didn’t help them to learn it, let alone master it. A couple were particularly disgruntled by their experience with the flipped classroom.
About eighteen months after the presentation I attended on this, while reading Jerome Rekart’s The Cognitive Classroom (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), I came upon this passage, which again aroused my skepticism about this method of instruction:
We know that even with intensive daily exposure to video instruction in language, infants fail to maintain phonemic awareness (i.e. ability to differentiate between the sounds that are particular to a specific language) of the learned language, unlike infants who received face-to-face instruction (Kuhl, Tsao, & Liu, 2003).
Whether such studies have any bearing on older children or adult learning remains to be determined. If similar results are seen with other subjects and age groups, as they have been with the acquisition of English in early childhood, it will seriously squelch the current fervor over ‘flipped classrooms,’ with their reliance of video delivery of lecture material (Sparks, 2011).
The Sparks citation refers to this article, from Education Week, by Sarah D. Sparks. Ms. Sparks ably covers the pros and cons of the flipped classroom approach. Unfortunately, what emerges is a lot of uncertainty about the method in general, and in particular whether it is effective for all students.
As it turns out, there is a plethora of research on the flipped classroom. Even a search on ERIC (Education Research Information Services) limited to peer-reviewed articles with their full text available on that website turns up dozens of articles on the effectiveness of “flipping” a classroom. And a search of the Internet using the term “problems with flipped classrooms” also turns up page after page or articles on flipped classrooms, some of them balanced analyses like this article from Mary Beth Hertz at Edutopia; some are skeptical, as is Robert Talbert’s blog post from The Chronicle of Higher Education. Many, however, are corrosively critical, like this article from Professor Jonathan Rees of Colorado State University.
As both a teacher and a blogger, I really have no horse in this race. Because I serve students who struggle, this method of instruction would be flatly inappropriate for my classroom. What concerns me is the unquestioning acceptance of a pedagogical method that clearly shows mixed results; moreover, I have never much cared for the magpie-like fascination among some teachers and educational administrators for every shiny new thing that comes along. Many of these programmatic curricula are untested, and simply don’t stand up to tried and true instructional methods. But, again, they’re new! They’re shiny! They are–to use a word much beloved by the credulous–innovative!
We owe our students and their parents (the property tax payers who underwrite our salaries, incidentally) better than this. If we want to be treated like professionals, we must actually conduct ourselves as professionals. That means we don’t just uncritically accept every pedagogical fad that comes down the pike. We must review the research, consider methods of application of new pedagogical strategies, and finally and most importantly, consider the needs of our students.
If we fail to do so, there is a nice solid noun to describe what we’re doing: malpractice.
“The one exclusive sign of thorough knowledge is the power of teaching.”
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“(1605) A treatise on philosophy by Francis Bacon. Considered an excellent example of Renaissance thought, it extols the pursuit of learning and critically surveys the existing state of knowledge. Bacon later wrote a greatly expanded version, De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientarium (1623), to form the first part of his projected Instauratio Magna.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Process of developing abstract rules of mental concepts based on sensory experience. Concept formation figures prominently in cognitive development and was a subject of great importance to J. Piaget, who argued that learning entails an understanding of a phenomenon’s characteristics and how they are logically linked. N. Chomsky has argued that certain cognitive structures (such as basic grammatical rules) are innate in human beings. Both men held that, as a concept emerges, it becomes subject to testing: a child’s concept of “bird,” for example, will be tested against specific instances of birds. The human capacity for play contributes importantly to this process by allowing for consideration of a wide range of possibilities.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
“To me the sole hope of human salvation lied in teaching.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
Several years ago, one of the assistant principals in this school loaned me a couple of books by the great professor of education, David Labaree. I read both The Trouble with Ed Schools (that link takes you to a review of the book by the esteemed sociologist Nathan Glazer) and How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning; I thought both were excellent.
As I go through old folders in the Text Terminal archives, I found a note reminding me to post this article on the five-paragraph essay by Professor Labaree. It meets his usual standard of excellence in his publications, and has much to say, I think, about the obsession with the five-paragraph essay.
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