From her blog Artichoke released a tunnel of goats into the edu-blog o’ verse, and now I’m off trying to round them up so that we can sort the lost children from the beasts.
I need to digress here briefly to comment on the apparent limitless supply of fantastic characters that appear in Artichoke’s blog. In the last month she has hosted crowds of invisible ducks, alcohol fueled cricket fans, birds swimming south, and retired TV celebrity talking horses. Even SpongeBob and Mr. Krabs have made an appearance. I think these characters spice up her thought-provoking blog by adding a measure of comic counterpoint to the mind-bending questions she asks, so I was happy that she brought Hans Solo, Luke Sky Walker, and a giant Tauntaun along with her to leave a comment yesterday on a disjointed post I wrote about ice fog and my students’ new web publishing project. With remarkable economy of effort, she left Hans and Luke here in Borderland hunkered down in the beast’s intestinal cavity. I suppose George Lucas is done with them now, so here they will remain until they are summoned elsewhere – if they survive this hellish cold.
The goats that Artichoke employed were running loose in a tunnel into which some children had been lost. The imagery led me to think about how similar teaching is to herding goats, who are as likely to go anywhere except where you want them to go if given the chance. Artichoke questioned the uncritical application of inquiry approaches to classroom learning, and recommended that teachers introduce relational and extended abstract thinking challenges into inquiry tasks. She left a link to an article called Using the SOLO Taxonomy that I found useful for answering a problem I’ve been pondering for about 9 years. The article provides a framework for teaching to levels of thinking that are appropriate to a student’s specific background and needs. The SOLO taxonomy defines levels of learning competence for students. With Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development in mind, maybe I can use this model to find challenges that are just right for my students.
I spent the first dozen years of my teaching career working with predominantly white middle-class kids from families where a college education was normal. Feeling restless during the early 1990′s I transferred to a school in our town’s downtown area. The jump was far from merely geographical and it has caused me to question everything I believed about myself as a teacher. Previously, my students averaged in the 80th percentile on norm referenced tests. Those who didn’t do well in class were labeled and remediated, but I didn’t feel too much responsibility for their educational limitations. I naively gauged my effectiveness by the successes of all those kids who did well.
The change of teaching venue brought me up short because the classrooms I came to work in had a high percentage of those kids who struggled. The community is warm and supportive, and there is a shared sense of mission among the teaching staff as we work to nurture and heal, as well as teach. It’s been one of the most challenging and enriching environments I’ve ever stumbled into. I confront problems with conventional approaches to classroom practice every moment of every day. There are no easy answers. The tension between authority and freedom is both ethical and practical. Trying to “get the job done” is always tempered by the thought, “and that job is?” because I have to wonder what I’m educating these kids to be and do. So I find myself some days with blood on my hands, thinking about the societal mess I have to clean up.
And that’s another reason to write this all down.
I’ll never forget a moment of sudden insight during the first year working in my current school. I sat on the floor with a group of about 9 six-year-olds in an author’s circle, helping one of them to read his story. He said something like, “On Sunday I was at my grandma’s house and there was fighting and then the cops came.” I thought, “Awww crap! How do we respond to this?” I didn’t even know this kid who was from another teacher’s class. I was new there, remember. But I shouldn’t have worried. Without missing a beat, one of the little boys sitting in the circle said, “I hate it when that happens.” And then two more said, “Yeah.” We had a great little chat about times when adults are unpleasant, and what kids do to stay out of the way. I immediately felt a wave of compassion and recognition of a world view I’d never been shown. It had been under my nose all along, but I’d never been admitted as a member. I can’t leave now.
My efforts to extend the thinking of these students to more abstract levels have persistently been frustrated by their confusion and lack of initiative to seek new opportunities to learn. I used to joke that we didn’t need to work on “higher level thinking” because we first needed to develop the lower level variety. From the SOLO taxonomy I gleaned this: “…teach at just one level higher than the student, and not more than that.” Of course I knew this, but the taxonomy gives me definitions and crtieria for determining what those levels look like. For those kids who are at the prestructural level and hard to differentiate from goats, I can attempt to get them to “use one obvious piece of information.” While for those students who can do that, I will help them relate and connect ideas. Thinking beyond that level involves making generalizations and applying them to abstract principles.
Now I ask whether, for the longest time blinded by my ambition to help students transcend, perhaps I’ve been trying to move them further than they realistically can go at the moment.
Teaching really is a lot like goat herding. What I learned from my one humiliating experience with goats is that when you get them up to the gate, you can’t crowd them or they’ll bolt and run around you back out to the pasture. Hang back and bide your time. Be ready to move laterally to block any that get “ideas” about breaking loose from the herd. Eventually a few will walk through the gate and the rest will simply follow. But that gate has to look like the place to go.
9 Comments
hi doug
i wonder about the goat analogy. are we really trying to get them all through the same gate at the same time or are we in fact presenting them with a series of gates that get harder to navigate the further down the track / tunnel we go. inevitably, some will get left behind whilst others will charge on past the final gate, looking for further gates and challenges.
one of the things i ponder is where does the goat herd go? do they lead from the front calling the herd to follow, striving for excellence? or do they walk at the rear pushing the stragglers in the hope that the entire herd will at least make it to some imagined minimum milestone in the journey, acknowedging that the front runners will look after themselves? or even maybe doing the middle thing – running backwards and forwards from front to back, perhaps confusing everyone but at least keeping the herd together with a relatively small spread?
on a different point, i am always amazed at the resilience of children. you’re “awwww crap” moment seems to be becoming a more frequent occurence in schools and yet despite the hardships these kids obviously endure, they continue to turn up and with a little TLC continue to do their best.
have a great day
botts
You’re correct, botts, to question the goat herder analogy – especially the ‘gates’ part of it. I, too, wonder about destinations, and who gets to choose. As far as the goat herd’s position, I look to the I Ching and hexagram #17, Following:
In order to obtain a following one must first know how to adapt oneself. If a man would rule he must first learn to serve.
I’m most comfortable with a wide latitude for movement, because like I said, you can’t depend on goats to do what you want them to. And then again they may do something unexpected that has unanticipated merit.
Doug, I have a memory that is similar to yours when I was teaching in the country town of Port Augusta. I had a class of Grade 4′s of disadvantaged backgrounds including a fair percentage of indigeneous Australian Aboriginal kids. One little boy had his morning talk which went along the lines of “Good morning girls and boys. Last night my uncle hung himself and Mum was upset and gave me and my cousin ten bucks to catch a taxi to go home because she was at the pub. Any questions or comments?” Now until that moment, Aboriginal suicide rates had been something I’d only read about in the newspaper, but it became a reality for this wide eyed teacher at that very moment. And it drew a typical response from the kids. A hand goes up. “Where did you uncle hang himself?” And the boy, matter-of-factly stands there and says, “In Copley.” (small outback town). Talk about altering your world view. Thanks for the post.
Graham, it hurts to hear that story. The pain that is taken for granted by so many of our students is mind boggling for me. I appreciate your sharing the experience because I believe that it does us all good to step back from the official agenda and consider the personal connections we make and enable in the classroom.
As I like joining dots, I’ll mention a couple of things that I’m learning here.
1) “A teacher should try to start with where the student is.” (Horace’s Compromise, Ted Sizer, p112 hardback edition). This also connects to Doug’s ponderings on curriculum, as Sizer has some rude things to say about teaching according to traditionally divided “subjects” and 50-minute periods, and I think that is relevant to his exhortation here. It has to do with creating meaningful assignments, because the student (Sizer is talking about high school) needs to know that what is being taught is either useful now or will be in the future.
2) Dennis Littky put Sizer’s exhortation into practice, actually before he’d met Sizer, particularly at Thayer School in NH, as described in Doc. He also emphasized the importance of the environment (which includes timetables and curricula). The first thing when he took over at the school was talk to all the students to find out where they were at, and to try to discover their interests.
3) Littky and Washor formed the Big Picture Company, and their catchphrase is “one student at a time”.
Wow, sorry Doug, I had no idea that my trackback would be that big. No need to go to my blog to read my post now……
No problem, Graham. Anybody with good things to say about me can have as much space as they want. Thanks for your comment. Your posts don’t pile up in my Bloglines account either.
Doug, I live in northern Australia and I enjoy your blog. I love the gate metaphor. It made me think about my own teaching practice, and the need to be clear about what that gate looks like.
Ellie, thanks for your contribution to the discussion. You and botts have me thinking about those gates. I think I may not be done with talking about gates and goats. Metaphors are powerful thinking tools.
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[...] As I read more and start thinking about the year ahead, I find that the blogs engaging my brain are quite different from my original Top Five list. Leigh Blackall would still be there as his posts really challenge – even though he is based in a different sector of Aussie education to me, his thoughts are always relevant. I certainly admire his “say it as I see it” style and wish I could inject more of that into my own blogging. But the two blogs that keep hitting my relevance button are NZ’s own Artichoke and Doug Noon’s Borderland. Part of my role here at my school is the implementation of a Problem Based Learning program. I consider myself to be one of those creative types who can set up meaningful and engaging learning experienes but documenting along the way and really assessing what the children have learnt. So this year my partner in crime, our teacher-librarian, have resolved to get the model right with time set aside to plan with teachers, following closely the PBL model we have chosen, allowing students enough time to solve the problem and tying it all together with a meaningful assessment of the solutions and the skills and standards displayed along the way. So, in timely blogosphere fashion, Artichoke’s post about inquiry learning really got me questioning about the effectiveness of my previous PBL units and what I could possibly do now in the initial stages to get it right. I don’t really want any of the classes I’ll be working with to be lost in a tunnel of goats. Artichoke points out: Inquiry learning is an attempt to get students involved in Chris’ “work that matters” or “work that cuts it”. So what would meet that criteria? Is a problem that gets kids to design a pamphlet or website warning citizens of Adelaide what to do if a bushfire/tsunami/earthquake struck going to “cut it” or is it roleplay beyond the maturity of a primary school aged student? Or does the problem have to focus on what our students could realistically have some influence on – how could we support a refugee child starting at our school? Maybe both ideas are valid. But Artichoke has already done some of the research hackwork for me and summarised a solid consideration to take on board when we meet to discuss and design: It was only when the problem oriented learning activity required students to compare and contrast quite different cases; to look for similarities and differences across dissimilar and apparently unrelated problems that students showed transfer of knowledge and dramatic learning gains resulting from the activity. One post back on Artichoke’s blog, I find a potential starting point for our middle school students. How about a re-mix of the final paragraph? I might start with explorations of Search Engines. And reckon Blogbar the free search engine bar you can include in your own blog or website will be useful in that it is going to allow students (remix insert) to easily play with, and compare a range of major search engines [Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves, Exalead], and major blog search engines like Technorati, Google Blog Search, Yahoo! Blog Search, IceRocket, Blogpulse, Feedster, and Del.icio.us.] And I think I might follow up with explorations of The Question. The question could be something along the lines of, “Which search engine easily and efficiently produces the most accurate and meaningful results?” From this question stems many other subsidiary Jamie McKenzie style questions that can be covered either explicitly or by investigation and students are (hopefully) gaining relevant and necessary information literacy skills by exploring the way that information is delivered to them. However our first cohort of students for this term’s PBL program are much younger (Years 2 – 4 / 8 & 9 year olds) so the planning and thinking has to be different and provide much more support. So where am I going with all of this? I’m not too sure but fast forward to Borderland where Doug has extracted his own useful take on Artichoke’s observations. Artichoke questioned the uncritical application of inquiry approaches to classroom learning, and recommended that teachers introduce relational and extended abstract thinking challenges into inquiry tasks. She left a link to an article called Using the SOLO Taxonomy that I found useful for answering a problem I’ve been pondering for about 9 years. The article provides a framework for teaching to levels of thinking that are appropriate to a student’s specific background and needs. The SOLO taxonomy defines levels of learning competence for students. With Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development in mind, maybe I can use this model to find challenges that are just right for my students. [...]
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