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Ninth in a Series, Understanding the Classroom:
Scripted Learning
(Released to the web November 5, 2006) There is a reason that no one has successfully created a complete parenting manual. While the market would certainly be large and the enthusiasm great for a book that could tell parents how to guide their children over every hurdle toward successful growth, it hasn’t been written because it can’t be done. Every child is different intellectually, emotionally, socially and physically and every child is the product at any given moment of an individual set of circumstances in a unique environment. Even combining all the books ever written on some facet of child development would barely approximate the vast possibilities of growth in a child that a parent might witness, encourage or prevent. In truth, while parents often seek the advice of experts and of those who have “done it” before, most parents would not seriously ask for a pre-written script to follow in raising their child anyway. The joy and the challenge of raising children are in discovering for oneself how to feed a unique mind, how to encourage a burgeoning personality, and how to instill confidence in a self-determined future. Of what use would a script be in this endeavor? Yet, when these same children attend school, many parents and teachers alike see no inconsistency in setting up a system where children and educators are following what is practically a script that leaves little or no room for individual differences in learning style, in personality, in experience, or in any of the facets of growth that each of us, alone, can have. This scripted learning is even made out to be a worthy goal by some who fail to understand the basis of human development and even human action. What is this scripted learning, and how is it affecting our students? Scripted learning, as the term is used here, refers to certain instructional techniques, curriculum practices, and expectations by educators and parents which, in sum, result in an environment where teachers and students are essentially going through the motions. Rather than engaging in true discovery and maximizing personal growth, these techniques, practices and expectations induce students toward a minimal level of participation. The educators and other adults promoting these methods are often doing so in the name of fairness, or of a uniform classroom experience across a school or grade, or of establishing or raising standards. A wide variety of factors contribute to scripted learning. State directed standards and school curriculum “aligned” with these standards help eliminate regional and local differences in schools. Just as with the derisive term “Generica” describing the bland sameness of malls and fast food outlets across every American city, these state standards leave less room for curriculum that responds to distinctive local interests and strengths. Nationally marketed textbook programs, complete with daily lessons, unit tests and homework worksheets, help to extend this paradigm. When teachers are asked to follow these programs slavishly, or when they simply cannot offer anything themselves beyond the highly scripted program, the result is a curriculum written by distant committees and which is unresponsive to individual student needs. Making things even worse are instructional techniques and so-called “classroom management” practices which reinforce the mediocrity. In a classroom ruled by programmatic teaching, there is little room for “teachable moments”—the term used to describe those unexpected instances where a word said or a subject introduced leads a teacher and student toward unplanned and fruitful discovery. There is also less likelihood of individual learning styles, personalities or experiences being accommodated or used to good benefit in such a classroom. When all students are expected to be on chapter 4, page 72 and when the teacher must consult the program manual for the next day’s lesson, individual differences become a moot point. In fact, individual differences become an actual problem in this environment. This problem generally leads to expanded programs in “enrichment” or in “intervention” or, in extreme cases, even to blatant tracking of students into pre-determined ruts. Since students quickly become bored with irrelevant, unimaginative or predictable lessons, teachers turn to classroom management techniques to essentially bribe or threaten students into participating. Elaborate token economies—reward systems—are offered as a way to encourage students to pay attention or to fill in the provided blanks. If there is creativity in a programmatic classroom, it is in this area. Teachers go to great lengths to create point systems, prizes, public charts and other mechanisms that goad students with carrots or sticks. Students don’t take long to read between the lines: if these assignments are so wonderful, why are we being payed off to do them? The limited expectations of children by teachers and other adults is another part of scripted learning. As author and psychologist David Elkind put it: “Parents and schools are no longer geared toward child development, they're geared to academic achievement." Instead of concentrating on individual growth and on the experience of each child, educators and parents send a strong message that grades and scores are the measure of success. It may seem like a subtle difference at first glance, but there can be a huge gap between high grades or test scores and genuine advancement in knowledge, in social or emotional growth, or in life experience. When students are shown that a grade or test score is the complete definition of achievement, they will come to embrace a minimum set of expectations that have nothing to do with authentic learning. After all, it isn’t always necessary to truly understand a subject in order to score well on a test. Indeed, textbooks provided to our students today have helpful tips at the end of each chapter or even a dedicated chapter just for test-taking strategies. This set of one-dimensional expectations can easily lead to minimum participation and to darker outcomes such as cheating and plagiarism. As children grow older, they become more cynical about such measures of success and more willing to take extreme measures to meet what they perceive to be meaningless goals. Scripted learning, then, begins to take shape. We are defining a set of experiences based on:
This set of experiences leads to students who embrace a minimum set of expectations and educators and parents who get what they asked for: nothing. The script to this awful play is set. Teachers must only make certain that the pre-written lesson plans are taught on schedule. Students must only commit to memory enough to pass unit tests and to get by on state tests. Administrators and school board members must only make certain that state test scores are in range with other comparable districts. Parents must only make certain that their child has the grades and scores to find acceptance into the right college. What is missing in students, frequently, is genuine learning, maximized personal growth, the development of individual interests and desires, and the aspiration to become a lifelong learner. The antithesis of scripted learning is an environment that encourages and responds to the complexity of individual students. Such an environment includes:
To get to this antithesis of scripted learning—which we’ll call authentic learning—we must configure our schools and classrooms in a way that allows educators to respond to the uniqueness of individual students and that encourages students to understand and celebrate their unique talents. This is not to suggest a free-for-all. As Dr. Carol A. Tomlinson of the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education put it: “What true differentiation first requires is the realization that all learners vary in their readiness, interests, and learning profiles. Jumping off from this point, teachers can set up classrooms where everybody works toward essential understandings and skills, but uses different content, processes, and products to get there…Differentiation calls on us to make big leaps in the way we think about the classroom and the curriculum, it takes a willingness to be a teacher who partners with kids in teaching and learning — who’s more of a facilitator than a dictator. It challenges the sense that the curriculum is just coverage of facts." It isn’t that we cannot have district-wide curricular goals, but only that we allow students an individual path to get to those goals. This requires creative lessons based on the interests and abilities of individual children or groups of children. It requires a dynamic classroom environment in which textbooks may or may not be useful on any given day and in which teachers and students alike feel safe enough to overreach and to learn from mistakes. It requires a school system in which the classrooms of any given grade level may not look the same way on any given day. Uniformity of experience is not the goal, but, rather, the maximizing of individual potential. Authentic learning also requires adults to adopt the intellectual, emotional and social growth of individual children as the standard, instead of grades and test scores. For parents, that is no more difficult than it was before their children came of school age. Before entering school, parents were able to deduce the progress of their child without the aid of state tests and a script and there is no reason they cannot do so after kindergarten. For educators, school leaders and politicians, the leap of faith may be farther, but they must learn to accept the word of the professional classroom teacher and involved parents. Given continuous and worthy staff training and the support of the leadership, classroom teachers can be trusted to make good decisions. Principals and parents can put a stop to bad apples. Authentic learning is an environment in which learning is an individual adventure taking place in a shared classroom with shared curricular goals. The intrinsic value of knowledge and experience is stressed over extrinsic rewards. Measurement of achievement is by the quality of individual growth and development, not a reference point to a minimum standard or grade. Daily lessons are not set in stone, but will vary depending on current events, on group or individual interests, or other factors. Textbooks may be touch points but not the be-all and end-all. Just as there is no manual written for parents, there really cannot be a manual written for teachers. An adult in a classroom reading a virtual script that describes lessons, tests and homework worksheets is not a teacher, but an actor playing a teacher. A student in a scripted classroom is being robbed of true growth and of the give and take that characterizes child development. Only by insisting on the principles of authentic learning can we be certain of encouraging our children to become engaged, self-sufficient students. References: Teaching in Mixed Ability Classrooms Psychology Today: A Nation of Wimps
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