Blindspot Podcast - Education in America with Robert Pondiscio

Source:
www.spreaker.com/user/reardon...
Today’s episode is co-hosted by my colleague, Sloan fellow and education expert Joe Ballou.
Our guest today is Robert Pondiscio, on the line from New York.
Robert Pondiscio is senior fellow and vice president for external affairs at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He is also a senior advisor to Democracy Prep Public Schools, a network of high-performing charter schools based in Harlem, New York. He writes and speaks extensively on education and education-reform issues, with an emphasis on literacy, curriculum, teaching, and urban education. After twenty years in journalism, including senior positions at TIME and BusinessWeek, Robert became a fifth-grade teacher at a struggling South Bronx public school in 2002. He subsequently served as vice president for the Core Knowledge Foundation.

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Students do not receive adequate teaching of English, and this contributes to their lack of comprehension. They are not taught the structure of the language-the rules of grammar, syntax, and how to write a proper sentence-Churchill said that it is all in the sentence. They are allowed to do silent reading from whatever book they choose; in this way the teacher does not know what vocabulary the students are exposed to, are they thinking of plot and author perspectives when they are reading or are they evaluating the use of rhetorical devices that the author uses; in short ,are they doing analytical reading? The answer is no ;analytical reading must be deliberately taught using good quality books.Knowledge is also built up by having good content for each subject. Also you want teachers to teach things that they themselves were never taught, and which may be completely new to them.
I always chafe when I hear people talk about active learning, since my mode of learning is-study before I go to classes, note what seems difficult, so I can focus on it or pose questions for elucidation during the lecture, and study again for deep learning where I will try to make connections to prior knowledge, and in that way fortify the new knowledge. Some times active learning can be bad for students; take the situation where something has just been taught, so there is just initial understanding, and the instructor only gives one representation of the topic, but presents a question in class that needs a greater depth of understanding than a first pass would give. Immediately you lose confidence, because you have not developed a solid schema for the content, and you feel as if the topic is difficult. But the problem is that; you needed more representations, and you needed time to study it before you were introduced to questions that require flexible thinking. I teach myself, and I realize that there are many things that people who teach others do not know or may not be aware of. I was recently explaining something to my daughter, who studied accounting, and has had her first real accounting job, and is finding it difficult with transferring her knowledge because her instructions used the simplest example of a business organisation to teach accounting. I advised her that she should pay attention to the transactions, all transactions would be recorded using double entry, but treatments may differ. I told her that her thinking should be more flexible, and then googled cognitive flexibility, and there I found the research of Rand Spiro on cognitive flexibility and advanced learning. Moral: there are things of which teachers need to be cognizant when giving instructions-instructions should be sufficient to give the depth of knowledge to support flexible thinking.
No teacher should be allowed to determine what should be taught; this is analogous to a description one jurist gave to case law- it is like a foot, everyone has a different foot size, so it makes for randomness. That is why there is still the need for textbooks for guidance. In addition, E.D Hirsch advanced a good reason for a national curriculum-the peripatetic nature of some life styles. It is hard when a student moves from one jurisdiction to another, and must start all over.