October 9, 2005


Providence Journal

Edwatch by Julia Steiny: Get over passive learning

Knotty Oak Middle School in Coventry, a high-performing school according to several measures, buzzes with active learning. Kids do not slump over their desks, sit glassy-eyed until the period is over, or try to hide their totally off-task note-passing.

Knotty Oak's classrooms are noticeably noisier and busier than the conventional classroom of well-controlled children. While far too many middle schools are primarily about command and control, Knotty Oak is about engagement, about getting every single kid, somehow, connected to the learning at hand.

Understand first that the distinction between passive and active learning is the specific dividing line between the old ideas of how to teach -- which worked adequately for only about one-third of the learners -- and the growing understanding of what it means and what it takes to engage literally all learners.

English Department Chairwoman Constance Tundis tutored me in the thinking behind active learning. "Remember what they told you when you didn't understand the text?" She's referring to my own antiquated education. "They told you to read it again. So you did. You read it over, and maybe over again and still you'd go to school and wait for the teacher to tell you what the book said." If the information didn't deposit easily and directly into the student's head from the book, the teacher took a crack at doing the depositing.

Tundis continues: "Instead, we teach strategies that anyone can use to unpack any text. Creating good readers is creating good learners. We use the text to learn the strategies. Many good readers don't recognize the strategies because to them they're automatic. But we're noticing that as soon as you bump up the academic difficulty, with a harder science book, for example, even the good readers need ways they can unpack it on their own."

In recent years, educators have been scrambling to ramp up their students' reading levels. Reading experts galore have published books on the subject, but their techniques are essentially the same: give kids a bunch of ways to approach a text.

For example, teach them to visualize what the material is telling them, when possible, to see in their heads the setting of a novel's story, the landscape of the country they are studying in social studies or the physical change of a chemical reaction. Teach them to infer, to hunt down information from which they can draw their own conclusions. Give the strategy a name -- infer, visualize -- so when they're stuck, they can summon up their strategic tools and tackle the text on their own.

So a teacher might approach Tom Sawyer or a science unit on matter by first asking what the kids already know about it. They call this "accessing prior knowledge." Knowledge builds on related knowledge. Brain scientists tell us that new information seeks out and attaches to existing, related patterns (already established neuropathways) onto which the new knowledge can be stored. New learning needs a foundation where it can build solidly and be remembered.

Kids are by nature inexperienced. Most don't have any background that would help them make sense of Tom Sawyer. Tundis says, "The 2005 Coventry kids probably can't picture in their mind a steamboat or what Hannibal, Mo., looked like. So I might show them pictures of the deep South, perhaps some clips from Gone with the Wind We'd talk about slavery." Then as the class starts to read the book itself, they'll have a foundation with which to connect the book's details.

As the cliché goes: kids learn to read from grades one through three, after which they read to learn. So secondary content teachers were never taught how to help kids read. Reading skills were assumed. Now literally every teacher in the building needs to help kids read. But even as the content gets harder as the student moves up the grade levels, the strategies are actually the same from elementary on into graduate school.

Tundis explains, "I like to compare it with baseball. T-ball is the same as the major leagues. You still have to hit the ball, run the bases and win the game. But the distance between the bases change; the ball comes at you a whole lot faster and the further you move up, the caliber of competition gets stiffer. But it's the same game.

"I think the new (Grade Level Expectations) do a really nice job of showing that readers do the same thing year after year, but with more complexity at each step.'

Knotty Oak is also the happy home of some of the best practices that help schools become active-learning communities, including advisories, teaming and keeping the seventh- and eighth-grade teachers and kids together in a practice called "looping." But most blissfully, the teachers have ample common planning time. For fiscal reasons, the daily planning time of 60 minutes was cut to every other day, which the teachers mourn. But really, 60 minutes every other day is luxurious in a typical public school.

During planning, teachers make sure they are teaching the same strategies. Initially, the middle school movement encouraged teacher teams to "integrate instruction" by relating their content to a theme, like the rain forest, the Constitution or diversity. Social Studies Department head Mike Bettez scoffs, "That was the old days when everyone was doing a whale theme, which turned everything into fluff."

Tundis says, "Mike is always getting his kids to look at essential questions. So he might be focusing on determining what's important -- in a historical text or period -- and helping the kids figure out what probably is or is not essential information. So in my English class, I'll emphasize predicting. Math will work on estimating. Science will focus on hypothesizing. Ultimately they are all the same brain function.

"At the end of the day, we tie together the new Grade Level Expectations and the old standards by concentrating on the verb, the strategy and not the content or information. The verb is what you're going to do with the information. The MCAS (Massachusetts's state exams) is about content, while the NECAP (Rhode Island's new exams) is about skills, strategies and critical thinking. I don't care if a kid remembers the date of some war so much as: does he have good skills when it comes to unpacking and using the information. Our common planning time focuses on instructional strategies. We work on keeping the rigor high, but we're huge on kids making connections.

"Learning is messy. I tell my kids: I want to see wood burning. I want to see five crossouts because that means you're thinking five times more deeply. It's all about asking questions and not looking for answers. If they know what to attack, what to look for, how to connect, they'll find the right answers."

Teachers like Tundis and Bettez make you feel that the future of education could be quite promising after all. Imagine what this school will be like as the staff feels increasingly more expert at overcoming the passive learning of their own pasts, and in many cases, their own training. Imagine what we could have learned if we hadn't been glazing over so much of the time.


Julia Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board; she now consults and writes for a number of education, government and private enterprises. She welcomes your questions and comments on education. She can be reached by e-mail at juliasteiny [at] cox.net