Re: Confused in California

David Dirlam (ddirlam who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Fri, 9 Jan 1998 12:05:11 -0800 (PST)

On Thu, 8 Jan 1998, Mike Cole wrote:

> Seems like you agree with Eugene too, Ken. Diane too, I think. The
> discussion is a little bit of a blur!

While lurking here for the days since I finished my book draft, I
have enjoyed this discussion of best/efficient practices. It occurred to
me that a dynamic perspective might help to clarify some of the issues.
Great teachers are certainly right to be suspicious of efficiency, since
those who advocate it are often concerned with fast growth. But fast
growth, from cancers to populations, can be dangerous. What happens is
that the growing things overshoot the resources that sustain them and then
go extinct. In education the growing things are often new skills
(including thought skills). Learning a skill quickly by rote satisfies
the test monitors, but the good teachers know that such skills do not
exist to any useful extent in practice. Keep doing this year after year
and the students don't learn a variety of skills; they learn just the one
skill (a not particularly useful one out of school) of how to memorize
material and recall it a few days later.
Dynamic analysis has also taught me to look for competitive
practices. We rarely have just one practice to use in a situation.
Furthermore, the more we adapt to particular types of life challenges, the
more practices we acquire. Often, circumstances force us to do things
quickly and we revert to our primitive practices to solve the problem.
Sometimes, there are two approaches and we want to preserve both. An
example from my research on developmental journal articles is that as a
field matures, interdisciplinary research is nearly driven out of journals
by the competitive success of disciplinary work, but the former is so fast
growing that it endures as an alternative, albeit minority practice. In
this case, no one wants to say which practice is best, but they want to
preserve both. This may explain some of the reluctance of people to
identify "best practices."
But there is another case where we DO want to get rid of some
practices. It turns out, for example, that some authors get away without
describing their research settings. Often these are prolific authors and
the editors miss the omitted descriptions because they are familiar with
the author's work. Furthermore, the omission gives an illusion of
generality (the attitude might be characterized as "this phenomenon is so
general that the setting does not need to be described"). This approach is
analogous to the pompous legislature who tries to tell teachers that they
all have to use such-and-such method, regardless of the setting. But
notice, that this attitude is one we want to get rid of. There are BAD
practices, and it is one. The "bad" practices are often the first thing
that someone would do in a situation -- I call them "default practices."
Part of the problem is that these are the ones that novices (including
legislators) understand best. It can surely be a valuable contribution to
identify to these novices what practices they should be replaced with.
In general, dynamic systems thinking applied to teaching practices
suggests that we can (1) identify teaching practices, (2) identify those
that really should be replaced, and (3) tell the circumstances when others
are useful. I take Mike's comments to mean that these would be useful
things to do.