Re: [xmca] Direct Instruction: observations at Djarragun college, Cape York, Australia

[Helen Harper <helen.harper@bigpond.com>]

Thanks Bill for your thought-provoking comments about Direct Instruction in Indigenous schools in Australia.

I'm certainly not dismissing DI out of hand yet, because it may well serve children well in the long term. But I feel cautious. Aside from all the usual reservations about the kind of scripting in DI lessons, and the nature of the knowledge itself that's being presented through the lessons, as David suggests, there's a couple of other comments I'd like to throw in here.

One relates to the question of 'scale up', particularly as it relates to the specific context of northern Australia. At the moment DI is operating in only a handful of schools. When it was first introduced, quite a few teachers left because they didn't want to do it, and the teachers who signed on subsequently did so knowing what they were in for. What happens when you take the program more broadly to schools where teachers have not signed on specifically to teach that program? In the Northern Territory (which is a separate educational jurisdiction from Queensland, where the DI schools are located) there is a huge reluctance on the part of the education administration to tell teachers how to teach, particularly in the bush. I don't think that's a good thing, but it's part of the teaching culture here, and it's no doubt in part related to the challenge of just ensuring that there are warm and vertical bodies in front of classes. My point is that if we want to look at disseminating and consolidating any kind of teaching practice, we are going to have to tackle the whole cultural system in which teachers operate - we can't simply insist that people take on a whole bunch of new practices without also adjusting the broad context in which they work.

Come to think of it, I can't think of any examples in bush/Indigenous education where a pedagogical intervention has actually been 'scaled up' successfully. If anyone else knows of example I'd be very interested. 

Related to all of this is the question of the teacher expertise, particularly the expertise that is required to teach kids who don't come from literate backgrounds. Bill wrote:
>> Given that we have a society in which the highly skilled mathematicians and
>> physicists are more likely to end up programming economic models for
>> Goldmann Sachs than teaching in primary school then Direct Instruction is
>> the best bet since it doesn't require deep thinking teachers for it to
>> work.


Having spent several years working in a program to train teachers to teach literacy in bush schools in what I believe is a methodical and principled way (and encouraging them to think while they're doing it), I'm pretty familiar with where Bill is coming from here and I have some empathy for this line of reasoning. Nonetheless, I'm uneasy about where it takes us.

I think what makes me uneasy is this: I would be aghast if my own children were subjected to DI. We don't imagine this kind of pedagogy as suitable for middle class children with the cultural capital to engage in literate conversations in school. Which begs the question already raised by David: what does DI ultimately actually teach? Is the substance of what they learn in DI truly comparable with what my middle class sons are learning along with all their middle class peers? Does DI give children the cultural capital to allow them to participate in literate conversations, to think as a literate person thinks? At what point do kids with DI instruction get to participate in the 'real' conversations? 

Granted, if standardised measures are anything to go by, many children in remote schools are currently learning next to nothing, so maybe DI is better than nothing. (The national testing program in Australia is a crude measure and problematic for many reasons, but it least it gives us a picture of the difference between the literacy levels of remote Indigenous kids and everyone else: while more than 90% of kids read at a 'benchmark' level for their age throughout Australia, for Indigenous kids in the Northern Territory it's less than 40%, and for remote Indigenous kids it's 25%.   http://www.nap.edu.au/Test_Results/National_reports/index.html )

On the other hand, if schooling does not prepare children to take part in a broader dialogue as full members of the society that privileges the kind of literacy that middle class children develop at school, then what's the point? Might be better just to go fishing.

It's my observation that in many parts of northern Australia, people have never actually signed up to participate in the broader society, (and it must be said that the invitation to participate from the mainstream has been lukewarm at best). People resist in many ways; not bothering to engage with our earnest exhortations to make sure their kids attend school is one symptom of this. 

Helen

On 09/05/2012, at 7:35 PM, Bill Kerr wrote:

> hi David,
> 
> I agree that the definitive justification for DI must be developed from DI
> itself and my generalist remarks about motivations and turning away are
> inadequate.
> 
> When I observed at Djarragun college I didn't actually speak to any DI
> experts. I merely observed practitioners and chatted to them after lesson
> for a few minutes since they were busy and off to their next lesson, etc.
> 
> I can't significantly improve on my response to your critique at this
> stage. However, I believe a more adequate response internal to the dynamics
> of DI could be made.
> 
> Cheers.
> 
> On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 6:03 AM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:
> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Dear Bill:
>> 
>> Actually, I did read all the material you posted--when you posted it. I
>> thought about it for a few days too before trying to reply. Not sure if you
>> actually READ what I wrote, Bill--but perhaps we just disagree about what
>> constitutes READING!
>> 
>> I'm certainly not conceding you anything. I'm also not advocating
>> sophisticated techniques. Like you (and like Marx), I believe teaching is
>> merely another form of labor. But it's not unskilled labor, and what I see
>> on those clips is unskilled labor.
>> 
>> South Korea has fifty million people. Our literacy is second to none--we
>> are the most literate nation on earth. For a while, this was attributed to
>> rote techniques similar to DI, until classroom observations and "problem
>> solving tests" showed that actually Korean classrooms are much further from
>> rote techniques than American ones.
>> 
>> Obama and Duncan like to credit Korean parents, and of course so do the
>> pro-dictatorship parties here, because they hate our (now semi-legal)
>> teachers union and because they think that when you flatter parents they
>> will vote for you.
>> 
>> The "sophistication" of teaching here is not "scaled up". It was
>> accumulated the hard way, and it is diachronic rather than synchronic. Like
>> France and Russia and most civilized nations (but unlike the USA) every
>> teacher is a civil servant and enjoys the pension benefits, holidays, and
>> salaries that come with that. So the average length of service of a teacher
>> in the USA is something like four years or less. The average length of
>> service of a teacher in South Korea is more like four decades.
>> 
>> You write:
>> 
>> "That we, the free learning sophisticated are somewhat repelled by the
>> crudity and authoritarianism of rote and checkout. That feeling operates
>> strongly at our emotional level
>> and so we prefer to "look away" at this crudity that does work and pursue
>> our more sophisticated learning methods. This applied to me, at least."
>> 
>> It didn't't apply to me. I am perfectly unsentimental; my objection to the
>> crudity and authoritarianism of rote and check are based entirely on
>> the mediocrity of the results that I see in the posted data.
>> 
>> "One thing that I notice most people agree on is that all form of talent
>> or genius do require the learner to do a lot of boring repetition. eg.
>> Mozart took 10 years, from 5-15, before he could be regarded as a genius.
>> All athletes do mind numbing boring practice to reach Olympic level, etc. I
>> think in observing DI we are just observing such repetition in crude form."
>> 
>> There is a widely cited statistic that mastery of anything requires about
>> ten thousand hours, plus or minus five thousand. I am not sure about this:
>> it seems more like a definition of what people accept as mastery in a given
>> field rather than the objective statement it pretends to be. But if it is
>> true than it is clear evidence in favor of what we do in Korea (that is,
>> provide teachers the respect and the pay they require to stay on the job
>> for decades) rather than in favor of crash training programmes like DI.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> "How do you propose to scale these sophisticated methods?"
>> 
>> I wasn't talking about a sophisticated method. All we did was to use
>> computer software to examine the actual phonological data that perfectly
>> workaday Korean teachers judgments are based on.
>> 
>> We found them well founded, but only if you accept that they are based on
>> sensitive responsiveness to intra-individual variation and not if you think
>> they are based on some kind of objective standard. It is exactly what you
>> would expect in any highly skilled performance--enormous responsiveness to
>> individual variability.
>> 
>> 
>> You write:
>> 
>> "In DI the students are consumers and they are being force fed education.
>> That is certainly one way to look at it. I just loved it when Chomsky
>> critiqued Skinner even though I didn't understand Chomsky I knew that
>> Skinner was so boring and dehumanising. But that was when I was
>> "progressive" and young and now I'm older and more experienced in the
>> realities of disadvantage."
>> 
>> Not sure to what extent my personal experience is relevant here--I suppose
>> it might be. But I'm afraid you haven't got me at all. I found Chomsky
>> boring and dehumanising. I don't remember much Skinner, but my mother did
>> try to raise me in a Skinner box (I think she just didn't like changing
>> diapers) .I was pretty jaundiced and crusty in my educational views when I
>> was young. Now that I am old, I find myself less experienced than ever.
>> 
>> David Kellogg
>> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> --- On Mon, 5/7/12, Bill Kerr <billkerr@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> From: Bill Kerr <billkerr@gmail.com>
>>> Subject: Re: [xmca] Direct Instruction: observations at Djarragun
>> college,
>>> Cape York, Australia
>>> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>>> Date: Monday, May 7, 2012, 7:27 AM
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>> http://www.beteronderwijsnederland.nl/files/active/0/Kozloff%20e.a.%20DI.pdf
>>> 
>>> This paper appears to provide a comprehensive overview of the theory and
>>> practice of DI and also includes a response to criticisms (27pp)
>>> 
>>> I think that Engelmann is incorrect to criticise other theories of
>>> education so trenchantly but what he has done brilliantly is develop one
>>> practice of basic literacy / maths education with almost fail proof
>> rigour.
>>> Some other theories and practices do work IMO (eg. Papert's
>> constructionism
>>> is one I have worked with for years) but the problem with them in
>> practice
>>> is that they don't scale for all learners because they require fairly
>> high
>>> degrees of teacher expertise.
>>> 
>>> Given that we have a society in which the highly skilled mathematicians
>> and
>>> physicists are more likely to end up programming economic models for
>>> Goldmann Sachs than teaching in primary school then Direct Instruction is
>>> the best bet since it doesn't require deep thinking teachers for it to
>>> work.
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