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

[Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>]

Bill, Helen, David

There is the issue of *content* and *knowledge acquisition*.
However, the issue of a student having a sense of *experiencing* being
*successful* [another tricky concept] is a factor to consider.

This gets back to notions of *zpd* and *mediation* and *scaffolding*
Children PERCEIVING  being *sucessful*  IS central to their experience in
schools. DI seems to try to  CONTROL this variable [at what cost in
spontaneity and imagination?].

IF MEDIATION and ZPD were central root metaphors &orientations in our
teaching practices there may be no need for DI.

David, is it true that the average teacher in the USA teaches only 4
years?  If this is true I believe in Canada we are more like in Korea. I am
a civil servant and most of the teachers in Vancouver schools have been
teachers for decades.

Larry



On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 6:59 AM, Helen Harper <helen.harper@bigpond.com>wrote:

> 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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