Verification, which I discussed briefly in my last post, is essentially the student’s own proof of his understanding. Insisting that student’s verify their own statements is psychologically of great importance because it keeps the focus of classroom work on sense-making, which is a great challenge. The best way to make students think that schooling is ridiculous is to require them to parrot information that makes no sense to them. This is hardly a new insight. The original intention of progressive education was to counter just such mindless recitation so prominent in traditional schooling of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is also at the heart of the reforms urged by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics over the past 20 years, as well as the Whole-Language Movement of the 1980’s and 90’s.
While the underlying motivations of these reform movements were quite sensible, the way they their ideas have been developed and implemented has often failed to help improve student performance and understanding. Many progressive educators often lost sight of the original goal to connect experience to words and came to treat raw experience as superior to words. This attitude, of course, destroys the possibility of education because It is only words that allow experience to be organized in such a way as to be learned from in the first place. The whole-language movement failed because it fundamentally misunderstood the relevant experiences necessary for good reading. Whole-Language provided students with no systematic means of verification, as I indicated in my last post with my comment about my son’s reading experience in kindergarten. And while there are many good things in the NCTM reforms of the last decades and there is quite a bit of potential in them, it is unclear if they have as yet given the typical classroom teacher a better set of tools to help develop student understanding.
While verification is a very important element of instruction, it is not wholly synonymous in and of itself with learning. The other key element is practice, practice not only to mastery but to fluency. There is a large and growing body of evidence that exceptional accomplishment from sports, to chess, to music, to academic excellence is the result of putting in the hours, much more the product of nurture than nature. The importance of fluency can hardly be overstated, and it is, unfortunately, another area that many progressive educators and their constructivist progeny have not understood properly. For once a person can perform a task automatically, that skill becomes a tool that can be combined in new ways with other performances to solve problems and assimilate new information. This is the fascinating and incredibly powerful idea of generativity discussed by the people Morningside Academy and derived in part from the animal laboratory work of Robert Epstein and his colleagues.
In my next post, I’ll take these very general, theoretical observations and discuss how they apply specifically to developing understanding in reading and math.
