[‘nother one from the “old drafts” archive. It was inspired by a post on Bridging Differences, but it’s on a topic I feel strongly about, so here it is even though no longer relevant to anything being discussed there.]
For years (centuries, actually) education has done a pendulum swing from one end of a spectrum to the other. On the one hand, thinking, process, ideas, concepts, creativity. On the other, basic skills, content, memorization, automaticity, discipline. Below, I shall refer to these as “reform” and “traditional” respectively. (The pendulum seems to be stuck to the latter side these days, but that’s a post for another day.) What we need is to think “both/and” instead of “exclusive or”. (The problem with that is time–but I’ll leave that alone for the sake of getting this finished and posted.) I’ll speak with math as my background subject, with the developments of the past century or so in mind.
“Reform” or “progressive” curricula and methodology tend to do well with introducing concepts and having students think (or at least not suppressing their thinking, which frankly much of traditional schooling does very successfully by the end of second grade for many students, at least in math.) “Traditional” schooling tends to do well with memorization and drilling skills to automaticity. Neither does well with the full spectrum of learning, which is what’s needed. You need factual-level knowledge to think with, and you need it to be at your fingertips, on automatic recall. On the other hand, it does you no good to have it if you can’t think with or about it once retrieved. We seriously need to get past thinking of this in terms of a dichotomy, just bite the bullet and accept that both are needed, and get on to figuring out how to do the full spectrum within the time we have. (Now I’m back to time again, so once again I’ll set it aside. . . )
Both extremes of the pendulum swing have their foolishness and ineffective methods. For traditional ed, it’s rote memorization of decontextualized, meaningless information. For “reform” methods, it’s empty, contentless, “fun” or “creative” activities. In math, that usually means empty work with manipulatives, or empty “discovery” activities. This is an issue of professional development for teachers, either during their pre-credential years or as inservice. The problem here is that teachers were mostly all educated traditionally–lots of memorization (those dates, or who wrote what and what’s in Act III, or the sacred math facts) and very little in the way of putting it all together and doing something with it. Especially in math this is true. Teachers are virtually by definition drawn from the pool of people who got good at this–at memorizing, at regurgitating facts (or memorized procedures, in math) on timed tests of recall. If you’re not good at this, you don’t make it through high school, let alone college. And we know that teachers (humans) tend to teach they way they were taught. (They also tend to teach, especially when they start out, as though all their students were like them–e.g., if they like to write, and journaling helps them think, then by gum all students should journal–but this is another topic for another day.)
So when a teacher is introduced to other methods, s/he can get hung up on the surface features of the new methods. In math, they think it’s about the manipulatives, or about having kids work together, or about open-ended tasks. These are the visible features–but they are not the point. The point of such methods has to do with having well-defined learning objectives and developing activities that actively engage students and both elicit and further their thinking and development of concepts and skills. However, thinking is invisible. Heck, concepts are invisible. Manipulatives, kids working together–those are visible. If a teacher has not had sufficient professional development of the right kind, s/he may end up teaching using pointless projects, or using manipulatives in a rote procedural way, etc., thinking s/he is using the best, most up-to-date “reform” methods. Of course, a truly bad teacher in the sense that s/he is lazy, just in it for the paycheck–and they exist, though in smaller numbers than popularly supposed–may use pointless projects as time-fillers, but most such activities are the result of well-intentioned teachers who, as a result of their own education, approach teaching procedurally and see only the surface features of the activities and can’t tell the difference between a productive and a pointless activity.
There are people who don’t want kids, especially the children of the poor, taught to think, but I doubt any of them are reading this blog. The rest of us I think can agree that people need to learn to think, that that’s partly what education is about, that you don’t think in a vacuum, but about something, and that you need basic facts and other knowledge in order to think. If enough people would agree to this, then perhaps we could get on with figuring out how to include the full spectrum, and how to educate teachers so that they can all do it.
Addofio 
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