Contributed Commentary on
Volume 4 Number 8: Stone Developmentalism: An Obscure but Pervasive Restriction on Educational Improvement

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26 April 1996

Rick Garlikov

DEMS042@UABDPO.DPO.UAB.EDU

While I believe Prof. Stone's analysis correctly characterizes and chastises the views and (often mistaken) pedagogical philosophical understanding of some teachers and school districts with which I am familiar, I think it (1) does not sufficiently explain or take into account the rationales, and philosophical points, of other people for some of the approaches he refers to as "developmental", (2) does not fully appreciate some of the objections to experimentally demonstrated teaching methods, and (3) relies in crucial places on an ambiguity or vagueness in what it means for a teaching/learning method to be "natural" --a concept he argues is central to "developmentalist" philosophy. While that concept may be central, it seems to me that his objection to its involvement in pedagogical philosophy depends effectively only on one sense of what it means to learn something "naturally", and not on a different, more important sense. While I do appreciate Prof. Stone's distinction between "educationally appropriate" instruction and "developmentally appropriate" instruction, I think more needs to be said about what that means. I also believe that his paper makes some extremely important points and is substantially correct about the way many teachers and administrators conceive of what they are doing. This response is meant more as a supplement than an attack. My chief concern in writing this is that the good aspects of some of the approaches Prof. Stone considers "developmental" not be thrown out with those elements he effectively argues are bad.

First, as I have written repeatedly on AERA-C and EDPOLYAN, *I* believe it is wrong not to teach students in some way far more actively than just letting them discover things on their own as they happen to come to them. Pat Clifford used an expression I liked when she asks of teachers who let students work things out on their own whether they are doing anything "other than hosting the event". As I have put it, it would likely take students collectively 5000 years if they had to discover on their own what civilization has discovered collectively in the last 5000 years. Surely the point of "teaching" is to somehow more efficiently pass on to others the learning that is otherwise painfully slow to come about. The issue is what the most effective, and best, means of doing that is -- where what is "best" may involve elements other than mere effectiveness. So none of what I write below is meant in any way to imply or say that I think children should not be actively taught things they may not come to on their own. And while I believe it is helpful for students to be ready to learn what you are teaching, I believe an important element of teaching is purposefully "making" or getting them ready.

Second, I did not come to my ideas about education by training in education schools, so none of the (methods) books Prof. Stone mentions as being potentially influencing had any effect on me DIRECTLY. The possible exception is Dewey, some of which I have read; but I read Dewey after most of my educational ideas were already formed, and tended to either agree or disagree rather than, I think, simply being influenced or inculcated. As Prof. Stone says, however, there is no way to tell how much indirect influence Dewey or others before me may have had on my thinking.

Third, MY criticism of schools is not "their continuing failure to equip students with the academic and workplace skills needed in an era of increasing economic competition." My personal view is that there are far more efficient ways of doing this than school, and that the purpose of school is to give students a broader range of knowledge and skills than whatever the workplace may likely demand, so that they can do well in life as well as work, and so that they themselves can bring about important changes in society and the workplace rather than just being able to adjust to those changes. Plus, I take the view that learning things is a great thing, often just because they are interesting to learn -- whether they have any known application at the time or not. Too much of great importance has been discovered just because people followed "idle" curiosity or interests instead of spending their time learning what was already known to be useful, to make school just be a place where information that is known to be applicable at the work place is taught.

In those places where schools do not teach well enough to adequately prepare students for the workplace, that signifies a problem on my view only because that should be a minimal outcome of the sort of education I seek for students. But the problem may not be solely that of the schools' in those cases, or at least not of the teachers in those schools. It may be a larger social problem, even in affluent suburban school districts.

Prof. Stone says that developmentalism is a "doctrine that pervades teacher education and one that disposes the teaching profession to favor certain practices and to ignore others regardless of empirically demonstrated merit." My understanding from reading, discussion, and from personal experience is that teachers (like anyone else) are disposed to favor specific practices with which they are familiar and comfortable -- frequently teaching as they have been taught, rather than teaching as they have been taught to teach in ed schools -- and that any practice which differs from what they are comfortable with is difficult to get them to accept on the basis of ANY kind of theory, whether overt or underlying. I have even found that you can demonstrate a method to teachers which is consistent with any philosophy of education they may have and still NOT get them to adopt that method in their own teaching. I did one lesson with a third grade classroom one time that worked out so much better than any teachers thought possible (and even better than I thought likely) that the teacher's mouth literally dropped open as kids were answering questions and making inferences that all the teachers and administrators had said was impossible for them to do. Yet the teacher's understanding of what had happened was not about the method, but about how good *I* was. NOTHING I could do or say convinced her she could do the same thing using the method.

Further, it took many of the theories, such as whole-language, a lot of "promotion and selling" to win acceptance at all; so I am not quite ready to accept that teachers have some underlying disposition to accept the approaches Prof. Stone refers to as developmentalist (in what might be facetiously referred to some sort of conspiracy theory of developmentalism in education). I think salesmanship, whether based on merit or not, is perhaps more important than (underlying) philosophy or demonstrated effectiveness.

With regard to (1) above --there being grounds besides "natural development" for advocating methods other than those research has shown effective:

I am familiar with the rationales of some math constructivists and some whole language advocates. I have read Constance Kamii (who worked with Piaget) and frequently discussed her writing with her, and I have read some of the Goodman's works on whole-language. Their claims are that just knowing algorithms in the case of math, and just being able to PRONOUNCE words out loud is not the same thing as understanding or doing math, or as reading. They are not making claims about what is natural, but about the ultimate ineffectiveness of certain kinds of direct instruction that have SEEMED to work, but which they argue have failed, or at least failed large numbers of students. I won't go into the validity of their evidence here, but the point is their argument is quite different from anything about what is natural.

Now Dr. Kamii in some cases does seem to make the further claim that children CANNOT learn certain things before certain ages; but at other times she backs off from that and says that the direct methods often used in schools DO NOT teach children, even though children can be trained to perform certain tasks that make them look like they are doing math. She and I differ quite frequently about what children have learned and what they understand, and how to tell. But that is a very different matter from her having some sort of disposition toward what is "natural". And we both agree that direct methods of teaching math traditionally do not help kids understand it, though we have different evidence for that conclusion.

As to reading, even the "Hooked on Phonics" adds showing kids pronouncing big words makes it fairly clear that they are not reading with any comprehension. And many elementary school teachers can point to cases where students can pronounce even familiar words from a page of print without having any understanding of what they mean in the context of "decoding them from print". I have constructed such a phonetic example for adults, where the person reading it out loud does not know what he is reading, but anyone listening to him will understand it perfectly. Further, although SOME practitioners think teaching via whole language means they are not supposed to teach any sound-symbol correspondence, the whole language approach as I have read about it and heard it advocated, DOES espouse the teaching of sound- symbol correspondence as necessary but not sufficient for teaching reading. But moreover, even teaching sound-symbol correspondence is done in a way different from mere drill. There is a difference between practice and drill in teaching anything, and I will get to that in a moment.

The references to "natural learning" that I have seen in Whole Language tracts have been merely to point out that it is possible to learn to read without certain kinds of drill and "instruction" just as we learn to talk without drill and "instruction" (other than the kinds of things parents do sort of "naturally" in "teaching" kids to talk or teaching them particular words). I don't remember reading anything that argued teaching reading in this way was better because it was natural, just that it was possible. The "better" had to do with other sorts of claims.

(2) Objections to experimentally demonstrated teaching methods: Prof. Stone says "The object of experimental research is to demonstrate the impact of an independent variable as an agent of change." This gives rise to two different kinds of problems for a practitioner, one of which Stone thinks is irrelevant, but which I want to try to give more force. The first problem is that there is much published which seems quite clearly to be flawed research, or interpretations of research, in that it does not isolate an independent variable and show its effect. Recently on AERA-C Barak Rosenshine, himself, raised the issue of why the evidence for direct instruction, etc. was ignored by so many people. He pointed to research and claims about the Saxon direct instruction teaching in math. As the discussion progressed, someone posted a sample lesson from a Saxon math textbook. The lesson included a number of questions after the text or explanatory part. It seemed quite clear to me that the nature of the questions was extremely important for fostering understanding and for any application other than mere memory in closely similar circumstances. (And my argument is that you can only memorize so much math; and if that is the way you learn it, you will be much more limited in your math ability than if you understand it AND can do much automatically from practice.) I told Barak that I would be very surprised if Saxon math books WITHOUT the questions could yield anywhere near the same test results the Saxon math books as they are WITH the questions did. But THAT experiment has not been done. The point is that "direct instruction" is not an isolated independent variable in whatever studies were done on the Saxon method. So that even if the Saxon method is a good method for teaching math (which it seems to be, according to Barak), that does not show "direct instruction" is what is the key element for math instruction or for the Saxon method. The problem in general is that in any complex situation such as a classroom, it is very difficult to isolate variables and test them with controls, even if one does this through various meta-analyses simply statistically.

Second, I assume Prof. Stone would not advocate use of drugs or electric shock therapy if these were shown by research to drastically increase learning. What is sought in schools is effective teaching that is also not Draconian in some way. The argument against some forms of drill (and drill alone) is that it IS Draconian, not physically as drugs or electrical shock would be, but in other important ways, primarily in its killing all interest in the subject so that whatever is gained in the short run by making kids drill is lost in the long run by their never wanting to take any more math, or read any more books, than they have to in order to get a grade. It is not that drill is conceived of as bad because it is unnatural, but that it is conceived of as bad because it is ultimately counterproductive to learning though it may help kids who work in stores count change back better.

I would argue that drill in things which are unimportant (e.g., learning state capitals in alphabetical order of states) is bad because it takes time away from learning more useful things (even if they also are memorized) and because it makes kids lose interest in school, since it is a place where "stupid stuff", or stuff to be done in stupid ways, is arbitrarily assigned for no good reason. Further, as I said, drill is different from practice; and there are lots of ways to give practice without doing mere drill. For example playing "21" or Blackjack gives plenty of crucial adding/subtracting practice. Playing team "War" with cards, where pairs of opponents turn over pairs of cards, and the higher pair sum wins the opponent's cards, gives addition practice.

*IF* you can make the practice fun, is that not better than making drill tedious --if you achieve the same learning. Not better because it is more effective in the short run, but because it may be more effective in the long run for students' schooling in general, and is more humane. I am not against memorization, nor am I against drill. The argument is over the specifics and the outcomes with regard to a reasonable span of time. If you teach kids to read, but make them hate to read, what of value have you accomplished? If you teach kids lower level math skills in such a way that they hit the wall in algebra, what of value have you accomplished? Research that is important is research that will take into account these longer term issues, not just tell which methods help 3rd graders add or subtract the fastest and most accurately. This is not an issue about "development"; it is an issue about what gives the best results, where results are not narrowly construed.

Now there will be disagreement about WHICH things need to be learned automatically, but that is a different issue. E.g., Bernice Wolfson and I used to argue about the point of teaching multiplication tables. I say it is crucial so that you can have more chance at recognizing potential common denominators when working with fractions, and more chance at solving algebra problems that require factoring, etc. If you cannot readily see these things, you may not even think of the right method for solving a problem, let alone not be able to do the actual calculations very well. She had her own ways of doing multiplication and had never learned the multiplication tables. But she did not go on to higher level math, and she admittedly took forever to multiply in her head or on paper. She thought that was sufficient; I thought it deficient, and that she had perhaps missed a lot of neat stuff because of her inability to automatically recognize combinations involving multiples.

(3) What "natural" teaching methods are:

There is an ambiguity here that is important. In the medical example Stone gives ("The artificial creation of immunities through the use of 'unnatural' and invasive vaccination is an historic example."), such vaccines are only unnatural in that they may not occur in nature (in the amounts needed for vaccinating everyone -- since cowpox virus did exist in nature), but they work by using the body's quite natural response to invasive molecules. So, although polio vaccine is "unnatural", the way it works is not.

When Stone says "Led by Dewey...the mainstream teaching profession has held that such 'intrinsic' or naturally occurring interest will express itself provided that the student is confronted with a sufficiently meaningful or relevant or lifelike problem" Stone seems to think that this precludes all sorts of what he refers to as "purposeful actions of teachers and parents". I don't see this. I don't see that if I get kids to play "21" that is somehow different in terms of purposeful action on my part from trying to make them do worksheets for a grade. One might even make a game out of the worksheets. The point is not whether the teacher is doing anything invasive or unnatural or purposeful, but whether whatever the teacher is doing is more likely to induce learning. If you can INDUCE learning to occur naturally, that is quite different from waiting for learning to occur naturally.

Now, SOME teachers do nothing (but "host the event") when they teach, but surely that is not what Dewey meant for teachers to do. Am I being less instructive or less purposeful or more "natural" when I tell a kid "if you play in the street and get hit by a car, it will squash you in the same way you squash a bug with your shoe; and you will be just as dead as the bug" and the kid UNDERSTANDS that, than if I say "I'll spank you if you go near the street to play." I say the former may be much more effective with some kids at some times; and it is not less purposeful or more intervening than the latter. And it is consistent with what Dewey was describing. Likewise, here is a statistics question that might work better to help teach statistics. I have been trying to work out ways to get kids to see that one must take into account not only probabilities, but the value of outcomes, when assessing choices. For example, should you play a game where you get to choose a box to open if there are 100 boxes to choose from, $1000 in each of 99 of the boxes, but a bomb that will be fatally detonated in one of the boxes? If kids say, "yes because those are good odds", I lower the amount of money in each box, which does not change the odds, but which starts to make them reconsider, and get the point. My stats question derives from different variations on this game: Is there any difference between having 100 kids who think this is a good game to play each choose a box (all at the same time, so that all the boxes are spoken for), and having 100 kids play the game separately? Why or why not? If they play simultaneously one kid will for sure get killed, which seems like it makes the game not a good game for any of them, since they will be guaranteed to lose a friend, if not their own life. But if they play individually (with different sets of boxes, replacing the chosen box each time), maybe no one will get killed, and maybe two or eight or 100 of them will be killed. Yet the game may still seem like a good risk to some kids to play on this basis. IS THERE a statistical difference between the two ways of playing the game? If so, what? And if not, why does it seem okay to play it one way to a kid but not another way? This is the sort of thing I consider to be a purposeful interventionist, proactive sort of teaching question, but one which is consistent with Dewey and which would perhaps lead to students learning about statistical analysis better. Yes? No? It is not a "natural" question, but one which I think is of the sort that works "naturally" to get kids more interested and thinking about statistics issues and more readily receptive to learning them, however else they are taught.

The notion of what is natural, developmentally appropriate, interventionist, or "constructivist" is not clear. I have presented NCTM with a socratic method that I say gets kids to understand "place-value" in math, and they say it is nothing but a prescription for teaching; and they reject it. I say it takes thought and skill and art and understanding to use the method properly; they say it doesn't. I say it shows kids understand place- value; they say kids only give the answers I am prompting. I say those answers can't be prompted without the kids' understanding.

The point is that there is no clear cut distinction between what is natural and what is purposeful intervention in the way that either constructivists or Stone seem to think. And sometimes it is not clear what is intrinsic or extrinsic. If my students just don't like me, than they may not respond interestedly to my above stat problem; if they do, they may. There is an element of the extrinsic in making something interesting perhaps.

Isn't the real issue trying to avoid the Draconian or the harmful, and also finding what is most effective in a way that does not have some kind of harmful "side-effects"? What is the point of trying to argue whether a method is teacher directed or not? Surely that is irrelevant. But on the other hand, my experience indicates to me that if you can get students to see the point of a procedure or exercise, or if you can make it interesting in some way (or not kill interest in it), then whatever other sort of instruction you need to use to help or get them to learn it, will work better. I just don't see any of this as an either/or sort of thing for most subjects.

In quoting Armstrong, Stone says with disapproval that "many teachers have come to believe teaching is more art than science". There are important "art" aspects to teaching. One of these is figuring out what kids already know that might help them learn new concepts better. One of these is figuring out what kids do know or just seem to know, or don't know/understand at all AFTER you have "taught" them. There is, after all, an art to communication in general. And one of the art aspects of education is figuring out what you need to try to get the significance of what you are teaching through to students. And one is being able to make something interesting to students.

I write all this because I can't imagine that mere drill and mere lecturing and merely holding the threat of a grade over a kid's head (or promising a reward) is the best way to teach much even though it makes some short term gains in some cases; but on the other hand, I think what Prof. Stone writes is true about too many teachers. And, like him, I don't think merely being there to try to wait for readiness or that right teachable moment is the best way to teach anyone anything. I think teachers need to be able to recognize and create teachable moments and then know what to do with them when they have them.

One pet peeve: the holding of Benjamin Spock responsible for the permissive society. What Spock advocated in Baby and Child Care was that babies did not need to be on a rigid feeding schedule whereby they were given a certain amount of formula every four hours even when not hungry and denied food when they displayed signs of hunger just because it happened to be three hours or three hours and a half. Spock recommended firm discipline where it was needed, but did not think (as I do not) that discipline for the mere sake of rigidity or arbitrary or average scheduling was warranted. Surely recommending more flexible feeding times has not undone our society.

Finally, I believe it is not age development that generally creates readiness, but development through meaningful exposure or experience. I suspect that if you can expose kids to things earlier in ways that are meaningful to them, you can teach kids a lot more than most people suspect without "pressuring" them, and without thereby being "unnatural" in the sense of cramming it down their throats.