System Overview
Introduction:
Based on firsthand investigations through reform efforts initiated in the laboratory of public schools and colleges, over nearly six decades, I find the level of discourse about the problems and solutions for today’s public schools most troubling. There is no inclusive evaluative framework that can clearly define the nature and problems of education, or define the parameters for change that will make a sustained difference. This is at the heart of our problems in finding solutions that can save our democratic way of life in this country. What follows is a brief analysis of categories of underlying assumptions and beliefs, when applied to the evaluation of our educational systems results in a much different operation. The treatment that follows will hopefully raise the level of discourse to a point deserving of our attention.
Remaking Our Schools for the Twenty-First Century – A Blueprint for Change/Improvement in our Educational Systems by Robert L. Arnold, Professor of Education, Emeritus
The role of theories in the change processes of our public educational systems
A theory is a statement of our individual beliefs and assumptions. Our theories or lack thereof define our interpretation of the meanings we place on our experience. Theory defines the facts as we perceive them, including those that pertain to education. We act on our theories whether or not they can be supported by evidence.
Theories can be based on reputable research and study, they can be based on little or no evidence, and they can ignore previously verified research and insight. A theory that is verified in our personal experiences and found consistent with the experiences of others who have studied the matter in depth is considered appropriate. Appropriate theories are strengthened when supported by other theories of similar stature.
An inappropriate theory is one that does not reflect adequately a verifiable view of reality. These theories yield inappropriate, distorted or limited facts that often challenge the value of appropriate theory. For example, everyone has a theory of the uniqueness of every individual –our individual beliefs and assumptions. In this case, our theory is verified in our personal experiences and in the experiences of many scholars who have studied these matters in depth.
Yet, a theory of learning and intellectual growth adopted by today’s decision makers in education defines changes and growth in individuals as simply statistical improvement in the scores recorded on a one-size-fits-all standardized test. This position is the result of flawed, limited or inappropriate theory about learning and change. In today’s educational arena, inappropriate theory is being used extensively by those in authority to support their biased version of facts.
Much of the resistance to change in our public educational systems and the lackluster record of failed schools stems from an extreme conventional wisdom (accepted by many members of the lay public and regrettably by many if not most of our educators) which assumes that theories are just untested ideas and have little value in the examination of the processes and problems of schooling. Taking another extreme position, persons in authority currently claim to be operating on legitimate theories, “data driven” even when they are shown to be contrary to established facts.
Conventional wisdom and a distorted reality has allowed, if not caused, educators, laymen and decision makers to routinely dismiss the insights of numerous authorities who have studied and written extensively about individuals, their growth and development both alone and in groups. When asked, many will steadfastly claim that theory is useless in solving the problems of education and others will claim inappropriate theories are indeed valid.
Unless the lay public knows the difference between appropriate and inappropriate theories, and understands appropriate theories that provide a comprehensive view of the school, they will likely go along with the limited positions of authorities. Acceptance of conventional wisdom and inappropriate theory has led schools to conduct instruction in a manner that ignores the verified findings of experts in the fields of communication, human development, individual behavior, group processes, learning and "genetic epistemology."
Recognizing the shortcomings and problems in our public educational systems is seriously hampered by a lack of sound/appropriate underlying theory that can identify reliable ‘facts.” Unfortunately, confounding any efforts to correct this situation is the public’s conventional wisdom that is a by-product of the very school system we are trying to understand. Unlocking its hardened categories and eliminating its rigid adherence to conventions is a formidable task.
If this were not difficult enough to correct, add the existence of a strong and relentless pursuit of profits envisioned by corporate entities for business in the vast educational market. Corporate interests have been successful to date in spreading their version of facts since the public knows and accepts so few appropriate theories applicable in the educational enterprise that corporate-sponsored marketing strategies have easily prevailed.
Remaking Our Schools for the Twenty-First Century © 2013 by Robert L. Arnold attempts to explain appropriate theories for public use in improving the public schools. It is a book to be studied, contemplated and most importantly internalized, making possible significant progress in designing sustained improvements in the conduct of education in this country.
There are at least six clusters of interrelated theories explained and utilized in this book, applied to an in-depth study of what is happening in education today, and importantly, what could be happening if only there was widespread understanding of and commitment to verifiable assumptions and beliefs – appropriate theories. These six clusters of theories define the facts about schooling far differently than those of current decision making authorities.
In the first cluster are the interrelated theories of human behavior, human growth and development, including learning. These theories were developed by scholars from different parts of the world and at different points in time. Their messages, however, are un-mistakably consistent about biologically-based and experientially-influenced developmental realities. The absolute uniqueness of each individual has centrality in these many “appropriate” theories authored by such scholars as: Jean Piaget, Viktor Lowenfeld, Lawrence Kohlberg, John Dewey, Benjamin Bloom, Eric Erikson, Abraham Maslow, Lawrence Kubie, Howard Gardner, William Glasser, Lev Vygotsky, Albert Bandura, Jerome Bruner, Robert Gagne’ and many others.
The second cluster contains theories of communication between and within humans, and communication within groups of individuals, especially those groups engaged in team development within compatible organizational structures. Many of these theories evolved from the efforts of those who participated in the National Training Laboratories that originated in Bethel, Maine in the late nineteen forties, under the direction of Kurt Lewin and Leland Bradford. Other familiar names associated with these efforts are: Goodwin Watson, Carl Rogers, Warren Bennis, Kenneth Benne, Ronald Lippitt, Chris Argyris and many others.
Sound, appropriate theory in the field of group dynamics, especially group/team development, holds a key to the transformation/change and improvement in our formal educational institutions that now harbor extreme competitiveness and social disorder. This system must be changed into one that promotes cooperation and individual productiveness, consistent with established group development theories.
The third cluster features a central theory developed by Philip Phenix in the nineteen sixties, and reinforced by a plethora of supporting literature that deals with the origins and nature of knowledge and knowing from an articulated epistemology. The subject matter theories developed by the Federal commissions of the nineteen sixties, particularly in the areas of mathematics education and biological sciences, along with the enlightened discovery/inquiry approach in the disciplines of history and geography created by this author and Charles Lahey, have extended the credibility of Phenix’s theory of six realms of meaning. Each realm is found to contain creative/constructive methodologies and structures that encompass all academic disciplines.
The work of Phenix is broadened with the contribution of Jean Piaget whose theory of knowledge and knowing is epigenetic – it covers the nature of knowledge and knowing from early childhood to all later stages of development. This cluster of theories addresses the need for re-defining subjects of the school from isolated bits of information to be consumed by individual students within arbitrarily organized groups, to an experience-based organization that utilizes sustained creative construction and communication of meanings using the legitimate processes of organized yet creative ways of knowing and communicating.
The fourth cluster deals with systems and systems theory applied comprehensively to the nature, organization, rationale, and function of the existing school system and that of an effective school system and school curriculum. Bela Banathy, Charles Reigeluth and Jeannette Olson deserve much attention as modern conveyors of systems design “A New Educational Technology.” These authors owe much to the work of such persons post World War II as: Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Anatol Rapport, Kenneth Boulding, William Ross Ashby, Margaret Mead and others. Systems theory and systems design provide a systemic and reputable substitute for the current “school system” as an organization for raising up our generations of youth to become mature adults. We have learned to live with an antiquated and ineffective system based on invalid assumptions and beliefs about individual development and behavior, including learning. Modern systems theory is the hope of the future in education to replace our antiquated and ineffective delivery systems.
The fifth cluster includes a new theory of assessment, recordkeeping, evaluation, and reporting designed to modify and eventually supplant the need for standardization and standardized testing. Central to this cluster is the Constructive Assessment, Recordkeeping and Evaluation System (CARES) developed and field tested by this author. This theory places each unique individual learner in control of his or her record of growth and development that will serve personal needs in ways beneficial to all learners, his or her employers, researchers, parents and many others. This system utilizes modern communications technology in ways that enhance learning and preserves a record of accomplishment that will follow each learner.
The sixth cluster deals with teacher education. It has long since transcended debate that teachers play a key role in the learning of our youth and our adults. A theory of the effective teaching/learning transactions owes much of its clarification to Leland Bradford within the larger systemic model for modern, twenty-first century schools. Prior and subsequent theories can be integrated into this comprehensive model – The Teaching/Learning Transaction. A new in-depth approach to teacher education will evolve from the applications of this and other appropriate and essential theories.
Remaking Our Schools is the product of sixty years of experience by this author within our systems of education beginning at home, continuing in the elementary and secondary school, into teacher education, graduate school and culminating in numerous reform efforts across this land. Each time a resistance to change and suggested improvements were encountered, a search into the origins of that resistance was sought and a conceivable change-strategy was formulated. “Remaking Our Schools” is the product of those efforts.
The Introduction to Remaking Our Schools for the Twenty-First Century summarizes an essential theory of communication that identifies the difficulties of gaining acceptance of proposals that deviate from the status quo and provides direction for overcoming obstacles to learning and change.
Chapter one places our change processes in an historical context. The philosophical rifts between a child-centered and subject-centered school experience has prevented most credible changes from being sustained; pendulum swings have existed between these incompatible positions reflected in the rhetoric of change, if not in the actual attempts at change, observable throughout the last century and the beginning of this twenty-first century.
When and if learners utilize the creative processes of coming to know, of creating knowledge, that are found in the academic disciplines, this can bridge the gap between the subject-centered concerns for conveying to students a fixed amount of pre-defined subject matter and the child development concerns for honoring individual perception and creativity. A child development view of individuality is incompatible with a fixed, imposed common core content-orientation.
Engaging learners at their level of development in legitimate disciplinary processes as practiced by specialists in all fields of inquiry and communication can become an essential ingredient in sustained processes of change. This proposition is supported in this chapter by a brief glimpse into the personal experiences of this author that shaped the philosophy and theory of change expressed in this treatise.
No proposal for change and improvement in the way we educate our youth will be sustained without addressing the need to assess and evaluate outcomes achieved by individual learners. Here, “The Constructive Assessment, Recordkeeping and Evaluation System” (CARES) is presented as a workable, field-tested alternative to the present systems of assessment and evaluation used in our schools and advocated by most decision-makers.
The current approaches through standardization of learning activities, coupled with the use of standardized tests of outcomes reduces acceptable levels of learning to the recall of isolated bits of pre-defined content; it simply ignores the realities of individual development and behavior and has the potential for destroying the creative and critical thinking capabilities of all but a few learners. Chapter two addresses the dimensions of a new and comprehensive assessment and evaluation system that utilizes modern electronic technologies in support of individualized and collective learning opportunities for all levels of learning.
Since the existing assessment and evaluation paradigms are so entrenched in the psyches of decision-makers and the lay public, it will take a powerful argument to displace that orientation. Utilization of systems theory, which has a profound legitimacy in the scientific and engineering world of today, has a real potential for displacing the standardization orientation that is being promoted by those in charge.
Chapter three contains a summary of numerous developmental and learning theories that can be validated in our personal experiences and in the extensive experiences of authors including Jean Piaget, Viktor Lowenfeld, Lev Vygotsky, Lawrence Kohlberg, Robert Gagne Lawrence Kubie and many others. Without internalization of these theories, the educational community and the lay public will not fully understand what is happening or not happening in our schools. Nor will they appreciate the extent to which ignoring these propositions has led to and will continue to lead to the creation of educational practices that severely limit the possibilities for healthy individual and collective development in our society.
Since learning can best be facilitated with consensus building therapeutic communication, it is imperative that an understanding of group dynamics, especially group development is understood and practiced. There is rich literature on this topic that expresses theories revealing the major problems in the way our schools are currently organized and conducted.
For example, schools are organized around groups that are no more than collections of individuals where individuality is compromised and subordinated within an effort to impose pre-defined content – a core curriculum. Reliable theories of group dynamics discussed in Chapter four provide a far different set of facts about how instruction should be conducted in our schools.
Chapter five describes what a system of education might look like if the principles of learning and development, group processes and compatible organizational structures, along with a re-orientation in our ways of constructing knowledge are honored, for individuals alone and in groups. This chapter addresses the need to revise the way the school system is organized and run and a constitutionally-based democratic structure and process for governance is featured to replace the authoritarian structures that govern most of our public schools today.
Without a revised teacher education component in the proposed systemic model, very little will likely be changed in the system or sustained beyond short excursions into new and isolated territory. Current teacher education programs are utterly absurd when considering the need for developing expertise in the theory and practice of sound principles of individual development and learning, group dynamics and a re-defined theory of knowledge and knowing.
Chapter six outlines a skeleton plan for teacher education that is designed to establish a genuine teaching profession. This chapter features a masterful article written in the late 1950’s by Leland Bradford that identifies many of the dimensions of making a professional educator. It provides a profound example of what it takes to be a truly facilitative professional. Implementation of this model is only likely to happen when the total system is re-constructed or re-designed from the bottom up as outlined in the chapters of this treatise.
Chapter seven contains an explanation of three manageable components of the change process considered essential in achieving lasting and legitimate change in our educational programs. Leadership in the change process must pay particular attention to these three components of change. Newly defined national policies important to the conduct of constructive education must be formulated and implemented.
Chapter eight suggests a procedure (“A Solutions Generator”) to aid the readers in examining the internal workings of their local school districts, revealing the systemic inconsistencies that likely exist. This will stimulate a beginning dialogue for bringing about change and improvement at the local level.
There are three Appendices referred to in the text. One outlines what a professional educator needs to know and be able to do, the second contains an example of workshop activity for bringing about change, and the third is a published article that describes in detail the existence of significant forces that often prevent change from occurring.
Theories are necessary to determine what's wrong with education and what can be done about correcting the problems. The example below will illustrate the truth of this statement.
Here is a well known theory of learning that was developed by Robert Gagne' many years ago. It has stood the test of time. It is not perfect, but it is a theory that contains many easily validated assumptions and beliefs that are supported in our own experiences and in those of others. Once you understand this theory and apply it to the existing conventional school you will be able to analyze what is or is not happening there. Then you will be able to intelligently speculate on what changes would be required to be consistent with this validated theory of learning.
Gagne's theory is described as eclectic (it contains elements from both behaviorist and developmental theories). It describes a process that is cumulative, meaning each level of learning is dependent upon the development of prior levels - each level builds upon the prior levels. It is inclusive - that is, it contains many dimensions of learning from simple to complex mental activity.
The first level is called stimulus/response learning. This is a recognition that all learning is based on experience (a stimulus) and the first extraction of meaning from that experience is an automatic response, either a motor or an audible response. Later responses are initiated by the learner. Retention of the simple meanings attached to a generally unfettered stimulus/response type experience will be accomplished when and if the experience is encountered enough times.
When an experience is repeated sufficiently, the next more complex level called simple associations will emerge. A simple association is an automatically recognized link between experiences. These associations are eventually combined into motor chains and later into verbal chains. This means the learner at this level of learning will act with a response to experience, physically, or verbalize the associated content in language. Still, this level of learning is limited to simple prior associations.
The next more sophisticated level that builds upon the prior levels is called multiple discrimination. This means learners are able to differentiate (separate out) multiple, more detailed elements from their experiences, whereas prior associations expressed in language chains contained fewer details or fewer discriminations.
Multiple discrimination leads to concept formation - mental images that contain prior discriminations and more. Concepts (mental images) can and will be retained for later use and applied to situations that involve logic and logical solutions to problems. Concepts are connected with other concepts, logically.
Concepts with continued experience eventually merge into simple rules. Simple rules are a recognition of the regularities with which certain concepts are found together. Simple rules connect concepts of objects, events and processes. Acquiring these simple rules give learners a greater sense of confidence in their ability to recognize and solve problems due to greater inclusiveness that is under their control.
These simple rules eventually become more sophisticated laws and articulated principles with even wider transfer value when applied to finding solutions to problems.
Principles and laws indicate that learners are able to see more of the whole chessboard and the bearing of one set of ideas on another.
Mature problem solving abilities result from having acquired mastery levels appropriate to each of the emerging prior levels of learning.
When Gagne's learning theory is applied to the analysis of existing evidences of learning in the conventional school, it is obvious learners function most often at the lowest levels of Gagne's theory. Learners are seldom asked to produce evidence of problem solving skills and in fact are not often provided the opportunity to develop the prerequisite levels of learning needed to acquire mastery at the problem solving level. Standardized tests do not include problem solving skills, since that implies a unique construction is created by each individual. That does not lend itself to a one-size-fits-all philosophy.
It is obvious that passing from a brief, superficial exposure to one topic, followed by another in rapid succession, fostered under the departmentalized and compartmentalized structures of the conventional school, does not allow sufficient time for the learner to internalize the content of much if any of the content presented in the classroom environment.
A sustained group experience is required that features meaningful interaction with fellow learners and adult facilitators engaged in hands on, reality-based decision making needed to achieve mature problem solving skills.
To fully understand the significance of this statement, one must understand another theory, a theory of group development. Theories of group dynamics that have been fully validated over time will provide additional insight as to the serious deficiencies found in the conventional school - the departmentalized, compartmentalized and isolated instructional procedures in teaching the general education curriculum. These instructional structures are found throughout the middle and secondary school, and even in so-called self-contained classrooms.
When examining the entire conventional school system from a theory-based perspective the nature of the problems of education are revealed along with the possible solutions that will remain a mystery without appropriate theories.
These interrelated categories contain the basic concepts, if applied to the analysis of the current school system and proposed solutions, will lead to sustained and improved structures and practices. While the concepts included in these categories will change as new insights are discovered, they must always endure a rigorous examination. We need to develop a willingness to change when the evidence for change is most convincing.
When studying the contents of these categories one needs to reflect each statement against the realities of the school and all its stakeholders.
1. Personal orientations and personality development:
Salient concepts:
a. Each person’s orientation to the world in which life is occurring results from personal experiences that are accumulated over time and distilled in the form of uniquely held attitudes, values and beliefs. These attitudes, values and beliefs guide everyday behavior and shape the contents of our hopes and dreams.
b. Personal orientations can be rigid and inflexible, or more flexible and open- ended, due primarily to the nature of the residue of past experience that is stored at an unconscious level. These orientations are, whether rigid or open-ended, projected onto the everyday activities as they are engaged in the world with its objects, processes and people. These orientations give form to the meanings evolved from those activities; meanings that conform to the pre-dispositions acquired from life’s experiences.
c. The world in its universe is a booming, buzzing reality that will be engaged most productively by those with more flexible personal orientations. They are more apt to be open to experiences with a dynamic and changing world.
d. Inflexible personality structures result in neurotic (rigid) distortions of the creative process. (A concept developed by the psychiatric community exemplified by Dr.Lawrence Kubie MD.) These inflexible personal orientations severely restrict the input from experience, thus in large measure result in varying degrees of being out of touch with reality.
e. Overly restrictive, regimented experiences in schools can and do contribute to the development of inflexible personality structures characterized by a growing resistance to change.
f. Studies of the personality structures of hundreds of beginning candidates for teaching indicate that approximately ten percent exhibit predominately open, flexible personality characteristics; the other ninety percent exhibit varying levels of rigidity. Changing these rigid behaviors requires directed interventions in order to dislodge and transform the unconscious response patterns that characterize these orientations.
g. Getting in touch with oneself is a necessary ingredient in achieving a transformation of those personality characteristics that get in the way of personal productivity and enjoyment. Empathic sharing of these characteristics encourages the fostering of a social order based on an appreciation of the perceived uniqueness of each differing person.
h. Maximized learning is the result of a largely internal process which is dependent upon a flexible personality that can maximize opportunities for releasing creativity. Applications of creativity evolve from simple exposure to experience acted upon progressively to a point of gaining effective problem solving skills.
Implications:
a. Obviously, teachers and other school officials, laymen and so-called experts exhibit personality characteristics that either accept change as a universal reality or find change to be disruptive and therefore something to be avoided.
b. Since these personality characteristics have their origins in the stored unconscious and are manifested in response patterns that have been developed over time, they are only modified with the cooperation and direct actions by each person exhibiting them.
c. Current discourse about change in education is generally based on behavior modification paradigms that consider attitudes and values as modifiable through externally imposed punishment and reward procedures.
d. While behavior modification techniques will in certain situations modify external and observable behavior, the likelihood that these appearances will be internalized is remote at best. When imposed upon the more flexible, healthy personalities, behavior modification strategies create dissonance.
e. Fundamental consideration must be given to the development of healthy, flexible personalities in all people, but especially in those in this helping profession known as teaching.
f. The act of “teaching” must embrace the concept of a teaching/ learning transactional strategies (Leland Bradford) that can only be perpetuated from a more open personal orientation.
g. Good teachers have flexible personalities that will rebel against the imposition of narrowly defined procedures and structures like the common core curriculum and standardized testing.
h. Given the tendency to treat personality as off limits in teacher preparation, existing educational programs are as superficial as the current educational discourse in the media.
i. A healthy personality exhibits the following achievable characteristics: (A. Maslow/E. Shostrom) (1) Lives predominately in the present rather than predominately in the past or in the imagined future, (2) Is predominately inner directed, and self-supportive rather than overly-dependent on others, (3) Is flexible in the application of values, (4) Sensitive to own needs and feelings and those of others, (5) Free to express feelings behaviorally, (6) Exhibits a high degree of self worth, (7) Accepts self in spite of weaknesses, (8) Maintains a vision of humankind as essentially good, (9) Sees opposites of life as meaningfully related, (10) Accepts personal feelings of anger or aggression and works to resolve the origins of those behaviors, (11) Capable of exhibiting warm interpersonal relationships, (12) Accepts the values of self-actualizing people with tolerance for ambiguity.
j. Any teacher education program, and likewise any educational enterprise, that does not recognize and act upon the fundamental importance of personality and fails to take the necessary steps to assist each person in acquiring healthy personal orientations cannot be considered adequate in making improvements in our educational systems.
k. There are well established procedures for engaging individuals in the analysis and transformation of restrictive personal orientations, and the behaviors that follow from those orientations. These procedures must be employed in the preparation of teacher/facilitators for our schools and universities.
2.Individual human development and behavior including learning:
Salient concepts:
a. The first and irrefutable fact is that no two people are identical, not their genetics, not their experience nor what they have done with their experience.
b. Human development is multidimensional. It has an intellectual, physical, social, emotional, spiritual or wonderment dimension; all of equal importance.
c. Individual development progresses through an invariant sequence unless driven off course by outside forces that impose developmentally inappropriate experiences such as those administered by well-meaning but ignorant educators, or prevented from occurring by conditions from within such as physical or psychological impediments to learning.
d. Each dimension of human development is genetically programmed to progress from one level of capability to a more sophisticated level especially during the early years of life. These developmental dimensions are ordered by one’s unique genetic code and experiential background. There comes a point in each person’s life cycle when physical and other developmental dimensions subside and even regress while other dimensions become predominate.
e. Ignoring the uniqueness of each individual and the special nature of his or her developmental sequence is a formula that creates many personal psycho/social problems.
f. Schools that are organized around age levels and grade levels ignore the uniqueness of individual development. Ignoring individual differences invites alienation of learners and a false identification of perceived superiority in some over others.
g. There are well-established conceptualizations of individual development and behavior, including learning, that can and must become an integral part of the foundation for decision-making about the nature and effectiveness of education.
h. Some authoritative formulations can be found in the works of Alfred N. Whitehead, Jean Piaget, Eric Erickson, Viktor Lowenfeld, Lawrence Kubie MD, Lev Vygotsky, John Dewey, Lawrence Kohlberg, John Gardner, Albert Bandura and Robert Gagne to mention only a few.
i. Consideration of the emergence of the intellectual capabilities for logic, as formulated by Rousseau and Piaget, is of particular importance in the early experiences of formal education. When principles relating to the development of logic are violated, this is a direct contributor to the initiation of self-doubt, alienation and reduced creative productivity.
j. Learning is initiated with experience that spans a range from direct and purposeful, to exposure to abstract symbols. (Dale) Initial experiential data are elaborated into simple associations and later into multiple discriminations and concepts, regardless of their sources. Concepts become the basis for the formulation of simple rules and the eventual development of principles and laws that enable the emergence of problem solving capabilities. (Gagne)
k. Contrasting a description of the processes of learning as defined by Robert Gagne, with the currently held assumptions and beliefs about learning that are stated explicitly or implicitly as a process of remembering specific bits of information to be reproduced on a multiple choice achievement test, one must conclude the predominate faith in standardization is a misplaced and misdirected faith.
l. Similarly, ignoring the complex interrelationships of learning within the social and economic context and the other dimensions of development is troublesome since their influence on learning is so pronounced. Adequate recognition of their importance in the present discourse about the problems of education and what to do about them is missing.
Implications:
a. How can a one-size-fits-all standardized testing program be considered an accurate and useful assessment/measurement technique when it defies the basic and most important reality that no two people are identical?
b. Likewise, how can any serious thinker believe that a standardized offering of pre-canned conclusions, a standardized core curriculum, can represent the heart of educational reform when it violates nearly everything we know and can validate about the nature and development of individual human intellectual capacities?
c. Only by blindly accepting the results of a one-size-fits-all assessment technique, employed to legitimize erroneous assumptions and beliefs, can one rationalize the appropriateness of a pre-defined standardized core curriculum and its instructional program.
d. So-called research that bases its conclusions on incremental changes in test scores must be understood in a context that severely diminishes its importance as legitimate support for particular approaches to reform.
3.Communication and group processes including group /team development:
Salient concepts:
a. Humans are social beings who depend on effective communication with oneself and with one’s friends, relatives and associates for the achievement and maintenance of an intellectually productive, healthy personal orientation with life.
b. The first and most fundamental reality about communication between two or more human beings is that the meanings transferred through verbal and non-verbal communications are never identical in the mind of each participant.
c. The second reality is that we humans cannot not communicate. Whether we want to or not, we communicate through our behavior both verbal and non-verbal. How that behavior is interpreted by others is dependent upon their internal orientations. Interpretations of personal meanings in all cases are dependent upon the application of existing pre-developed, biased internal structures.
d. The interpretation of any communication is governed by the unique intellectual structures held by each participant.
e. Messages are assimilated into pre-organized structures; these structures impose their particular bias on the message and shape or mold it to fit a pre-determined orientation. Thus, the message sent is never the identical message received. Acceptance of a correspondence of thought is achieved through repeated exchanges, yet its final conclusions are never, never identical. (Think about this in the context of classroom instruction.)
f. Acceptable validation of the true meanings in the communication between the senders and the receivers are sought by continuing the exchanges that lead to a mutual acceptance of the similarities of meanings held by each participant.
g. There are at least six intermediary conditions that can impede or encourage validation of the exchanges between communicants. These are: (1) The quality of the social context in which the communication takes place; this can be hostile or accepting, supportive or variously destructive, (2) The motivation for pursuing the communication, related to one’s energy level, health status and need, (3) The level of maturation reached by each participant that exists at the time of the communication which allows or impedes messages. A child, for instance, who is at the level of pre-operations, with pre-logical capabilities will not engage a logical argument in terms relevant in that instance. Instead the pre-logical youngster will be free to define the messages in any way that occurs to him or her, a characteristic of the behavior of a youngster at this level of functioning, (4) The level, type, quality and quantity of experience exhibited by each participant; a variable with importance that cannot be overstated. Often labeled “readiness” for learning and communicating, this requirement must be taken seriously and granted the time necessary for ensuring a reasonable match between the underlying meanings of the messages given and the messages received.
h. The purpose to be achieved with group development is improved communication among all its participants leading to personal and collective productivity.
i. Group development proceeds along a predictable sequence when the conditions for growth are maintained. This sequence is seldom fully developed in our conventional schools, possibly due to a general lack of knowledge about group development processes and interventions, but more likely due to a reluctance to provide the necessary ingredients for a sustained evolution of the classroom group from immaturity to maturity.
j. The sequence for group/team development is as follows:
(1) A level of dependency is dominant when a collection of individuals are gathered together for the first time. A state of dependency is prevalent since the group has not clarified its purposes and procedures and every participant is left to wonder what is going to happen. It is important to note that a dependency can be maintained when the appointed leader arbitrarily establishes the purposes and procedures of the group and the consequences for deviating from the imposed directions.
(2) Provided with the opportunity for an airing of each individual’s perceived needs and aspirations, the next level of growth emerges called independence. At this level, each individual is allowed and encouraged to voice personal perceptions in an environment of mutual appreciation, trust and acceptance. The level of independence is seldom actualized in the conventional school setting in large part out of a misinterpretation of the meaning and value of a required freedom to exchange real felt needs and aspirations in each and every individual within the group. This level is interpreted by the conventional decision makers as a breakdown in discipline that is feared to lead to chaos that might reflect negatively upon their reputations.
(3) Without continuous sharing of individual orientations and perceptions, in spite of their possible conflictive nature, the next level in the development of a mature group will not happen.
(4) A mature group is characterized by what is called consensual validation wherein communication is most effective and rewarding; where individual and collective problem solving is central to the group’s deliberations. This level is maintained when the participants sense an importance in facilitating their personal and collective productivity and creativity. Constant vigilance is required that allows and encourages expressions of personal views and the exchanges that lead to rectifying the differences in points of view.
k. Participation in a mature group that maintains consensual validation results in maximized personal and collective development, increased productivity, appreciation for diversity, tolerance for ambiguity, and results in effective and constructive problem solving abilities.
Implications:
a. Group/team development cannot occur in a segmented, departmentalized setting organized to move students from one short stay with a topic, followed by a movement to another short stay with a different topic. The time required for sorting out the subtleties of personal meanings is not available, and the opportunity to confront the personal orientations getting in the way of maturity does not occur.
b. Personal satisfaction with the processes of communication is seldom experienced in a departmentalized, compartmentalized instructional setting.
c. Achieving group maturity is not possible within an authoritarian, hierarchical organization since sharing honest feelings in an open setting is either tacitly or openly prohibited.
d. Most public schools are organized as authoritarian structures, in spite of having elected school boards. School boards assign authority to a CEO who maintains near ultimate power over the system.
e. In an authoritarian organization there is usually someone at the top. Members of the authoritarian hierarchy each respond to an authoritarian leader higher up on the power ladder.
f. Teachers are participants with only limited authority when they collectively organize in resistance to superior authority.
g. Change strategies that are initiated within an authoritarian structure are imposed from the top down. Since the power rests with those in administrative positions, underlings, (teachers, janitors and grounds keepers) will be obliged to maintain ways that mask their true feelings, one that satisfies the power structure by giving the appearance of conformity.
h. Until there is a complete restructuring of this hierarchical administrative organization, sustained changes that are based on consensus with all participants is nearly impossible. One suggested model for change is found in our constitutional form of governance that guides decision making at both the state and national levels.
4.Ways of coming to know:
Salient concepts:
a. The ever present chasm between approaches in education on the one hand that feature an emphasis on the dispensing of information within pre-defined procedures, and on the other hand an orientation toward the unique and individualized creative processes of learning has been exacerbated by the current discourse about solving the problems of education. Current reform efforts from the very top down emphasize an instructional model that reflects the dispensing orientation.
b. How can one reconcile the inadequacies of the basic assumptions that undergird this orientation when they are based on half-truths promoted in isolation from one another?
c. If learning in its ideal form is indeed a creative process, it is clearly incompatible with a position that learning best occurs when instruction is structured so as to present to learners of any age the conclusions of others who have been defined as experts, and determine outcomes as essentially remembering what was included in instruction about these conclusions. It is not that no learning takes place in these situations, but the issues with the approach revolve around the limitations of learning and the long term effects of such learning on the health and productivity of each individual.
d. It is obvious that individuals need to learn about a multitude of matters and learning is an individualized process that is more or less effective. A proposition to bridge the chasm between the two positions (child centered vs subject centered education) is a major key to achieving educational reform that we can believe in.
e. Philip Phenix wrote an important treatise on this topic published in the early 1960’s. This treatise resulted from an extensive investigation into the nature and procedures of the typical subjects/disciplines of our schools and colleges. Graduate students at Teachers College Columbia University interviewed representatives of various disciplines across the full spectrum of offerings representative of what the subject centered people believed to represent important academic information. The title of Phenix’s treatise is Realms of Meaning – A Philosophy of Curriculum for General Education. Take note that this treatise focuses on general education that deals with information and skills that all learners must find useful in their everyday lives.
f. There are six interrelated “realms of meaning” in Phenix’s treatise:
(1) Empirics which includes all sciences including the social sciences, (2) Symbolics which includes mathematics and other languages, (3) Aesthetics which includes all the arts, (4) Ethics which includes moral issues, (5) Synnoetics or Self-knowledge, and (6) Synoptics which includes history, geography and cultural anthropology.
g. Within each category or “realm of meaning” are similar ways of approaching and formulating meaning, each with distinguishable procedures for creative construction and communication of meanings. These approaches to learning and communication are considered the most productive and constructive approaches available today. Our libraries are full of the products of these constructive approaches, the results of efforts in making sense out of this booming, buzzing universe in which we live and those universes beyond in the outer reaches of space.
h. Participation in these constructive approaches to gaining insight and meaning, using the methods and materials of those disciplines, potentially bridges the gap between the child centered, creative orientation and the subject centered information and skills orientation. Bridging this gap is a fundamental requirement in sustained educational reform.
i. This kind of change would require different roles for the facilitators of learning, different packaging of the materials and equipment for facilitating learning, different organizational structures for our schools and universities. And above all, different assessment, evaluation and recordkeeping procedures, that which would authentically validate the products of learning in all realms of meaning by all students, regardless of their differences.
j. In this paradigm, those who have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of meanings in their preferred realm will be needed to provide experiences that introduce to upcoming learners their discovered ways of coming to know and ways of communicating the results of their efforts. Their conventional roles would shift at the initial stages of learning from a dispensing position to one of providing guidance in helping young learners learn how to learn.
These experiences would initially include hands-on activities with a minimum of outer directed behavior so as to encourage an orientation of discovery. The tendency to define the conclusions to be retained at these initial stages of learning must be avoided, to allow the individual learners the time to struggle with their own thoughts and feelings and begin to structure their worlds to enhance the meanings derived from experience.
k. Once a beginning structure for meaning in each sampled discipline is developed, the likelihood of a genuine motivation to learn will evolve, marked by an excitement surrounding the processes of exchange of discoveries and the acceptance of the possibilities and opportunities presented by continual changes in personal conclusions and personal orientations.
l. The curriculum of the school would become what Whitehead described as “Life in all its Manifestations” with an emphasis on discovery of relationships between one set of ideas and another.
J. Readiness for receiving messages concerning the conclusions of those who are practicing their disciplines is dependent upon a personalized experience in the development of the fundamental structures of the discipline from which the messages are formulated. Evolving a sense of these structures will take time and particularized approaches to learning using methods and materials compatible with those of the disciplines but at the same time sensitive to the developmental differences in individuals.
k. At the point in the educational processes when a sense of structure is achieved, messages can be constructively received by individual learners, regardless of the medium in which they are presented, during the large group lecture, the programs of media or the information displayed on the internet. All these sources of information can serve the learners whose experiences have prepared them to assimilate the messages into pre-constructed patterns of meaning.
Implications:
a. Changing the curriculum of the school in the ways suggested here will require intensive reconstruction of time-honored customs that are lodged in the vague memories of those who attended school. Some of those memories are perceived to have been positive and some are perceived to have been the cause of personal disasters. Both of these positions are understandable and must be analyzed for what they can teach us about needed changes in our educational processes.
b. The need to package materials and equipment required of the pursuit of meaning in any discipline will disrupt the publishing monopoly controlled by huge corporate interests; it will require a concerted focus in the development of raw, primary sources of information that heretofore would not provide sufficient profits, especially for limited local consumption. Without this primary information, the construction of authentic meaning using the methods and materials of disciplines will not go forth.
c. Counteracting the tendency for experts in their field of inquiry to impose their conclusions on young learners, will require a convincing argument about the need to allow early learners to formulate their own structures using the developmentally appropriate methods and materials of the disciplines. Once these structures are developed, assimilation of meanings/conclusions generated by experts will readily occur. Skills development would occur in the relevant context of inquiry. Isolated, repetitive instruction in the earlier years, through the parsing of language and mathematical symbols would be avoided.
d. Developmental considerations, especially as pertaining to the emergence of the abilities for logical analysis, must be adequately understood to prevent the development of unrealistic expectations for learners. To fully deal with the structures and products of disciplines it requires developmental capacities for hypothetical deduction and abstract reasoning and logic. These abilities do not exist in the early years of life. They gradually develop as the learner proceeds to evolve under the influence of a unique genetic code, conditioned by exposure to experience with varied contextual results.
Those in the earlier phases of development must be provided appropriate experiences that will allow their unique constructions in ways that match their emerging intellectual capabilities. Failure to recognize these developing capacities, leads to detrimental procedures that have a lasting negative effect on the productivity in each learner’s life.
e. Assessment and evaluation of learning outcomes will be required to reflect the emerging intellectual structures engaged by learners at various levels of development. A one–size-fits-all assessment will not work.
f. An effective assessment and evaluation procedure will require a learner- maintained record keeping component that keeps track of each learner’s evolving experiences needed to construct an integration of discoveries at later times. This component will need to utilize the full range of modern and evolving electronic technologies and provide the organized information necessary for the construction and re-construction of meanings that occur over time for each individual involved in a personalized search for meaning.
5.The nature and function of educational systems:
Salient concepts:
a. The following description illustrates the interrelated systemic components that must be considered in the examination of the present systems of education and the proposed solutions to identified problems:
b. The first component of the systemic model - philosophical, theoretical assumptions and beliefs - includes four foundation categories: (1) Personal orientations and personality development, (2) Individual development and behavior including learning, (3) Communication and group processes, including group/team development, and (4) Ways of coming to know.
c. The second component includes the matters of school finance along with the administrative organization and decision-making and accountability procedures. While this component is only one of ten, each having significance in a functional system, it has been a dominate force in the existing authoritarian administrative structure. This has to be replaced by a democratically based system with built in safeguards that would prevent it from being subverted by individuals and groups seeking power and control.
d. The third component includes the goals and objectives for the system and for each learner. In the present system, this component contains narrowly conceived statements that rest on assumptions about the consumption of pre-defined subject matter with heavy emphasis on low level cognition and a scarcity of affective concerns.
e. The fourth component includes the curriculum and instructional/learning transactional strategies. The present system features an instructional paradigm with a pre-defined and limited curriculum along with a companion standardized testing assessment plan. The student is the consumer of information dispensed by a teacher in a departmentalized setting.
f. The fifth component includes the assessment, evaluation and recordkeeping and reporting procedures. The assessment plan of the conventional system is restricted to what can be measured on written examinations, evaluated using arbitrary criteria and reported in letter or numeral grades. This system ignores the developmental differences in learners.
g. The sixth component includes the facilities and utilization patterns. The present elaborate campuses are generated out of the need for space in which instruction can be held. Modern communication technologies create a need for a much different location for learning.
h. The seventh component includes the type and extent of community involvement. Schools are social institutions that are an integral part of the community in which they exist. Community centers are in keeping with this reality.
i. The eighth component includes the support services required to facilitate the management or eradication of impediments to learning. Specializations in a variety of professions are now available, facilitated by the connectivity of modern electronic communication technologies.
j. The ninth component includes pre-service and in-service demonstration and training sites. College campus schools as training laboratories for teachers have all but gone and replaced by a loosely structured involvement of local schools. Such a plan is totally inadequate and must be replaced by demonstration sites that are real schools dedicated to the development of competent educators.
k. The tenth component includes information management and the uses of technology. Technology used by learners outside of school far outstrips the uses of technology in the typical conventional school. Full utilization of modern technologies is imperative.
Implications:
a. Educational change strategies that alter single items within any of the ten components of any educational system without consideration for the potential impact on all the other components are seriously counterproductive.
b. What is required is not unlike an environmental impact study required of any plans for change in the variables within our world. In schools this would require a systemic impact study before any changes are made in any of the components of the system.
c. Criteria for addressing the number two through the tenth components must consistently reflect the theoretical assumptions and beliefs of component number one.
d. A different set of assumptions and beliefs (theories) will result in a different set of conclusions.
e. If the theoretical assumptions and beliefs in component number one, as outlined in this treatise, are validated in personal experiences and in the experiences of those who have studied these matters in depth, then a consistent application of those components in the evaluation of what is happening or not happening in the other nine will reveal with greater certainty what should be changed.
6.How are we doing?
Salient concepts:
a. There is no commonly shared set of underlying assumptions and beliefs that is based on the scholarly literature about the role of personality characteristics in the preparation of a teacher/facilitator of learning or about the development of characteristics that complement the facilitation of learning in a formal educational setting.
b. There is no commonly shared set of underlying assumptions and beliefs that is based on the scholarly descriptions of the nature of human development and behavior that is validated in our own experiences and in the experiences of those who have studied these matters in depth.
c. There is little evidence that schools, colleges and universities have consistently applied the results of a shared set of assumptions and beliefs about communication, group dynamics and group/team development that is found within the scholarly literature about these subjects.
d. There is a steadfast insistence among subject matter advocates that the selected information gleaned from the conclusions of experts can and must be passed on to upcoming generations in a standardized core curriculum and the results of this process can and must be assessed and evaluated with standardized tests. Furthermore, it is erroneously believed that consumption and accurate regurgitation of this information is sufficient evidence of the learning that will somehow get utilized in intelligent decision making at some later point in time.
e. There is a steadfast belief among the subject matter advocates that young learners must learn to read and do mathematics primarily to decipher the wisdom of the experts when and if that wisdom becomes useful and relevant, instead of being a response to the personal needs of inquisitive learners.
f. There is an intuitive sense among experienced teachers, those who exhibit a healthy orientation to life, that individuals are capable and in need of utilizing their personal creative abilities in the acquisition of important information about the contributions of others, especially those scholars who have spent a lifetime making sense out of their own experiences.
g. There is a belief among the child centered advocates that children are capable of creating knowledge if given the opportunity, and that knowledge can contain an enlightened version of the conclusions of others.
h. The conflicts between these two perceived opposing points of view has plagued the processes of improvement in the educational systems of our conventional education and will continue its affects as long as there is not a manageable alternative proposed that responds to the central concerns of each side of the controversy.
i. Considering the academic disciplines as ways of coming to know, as creative processes that can be translated for learners without violating the realities of developmental human behavior and growth, can and must become part of a significant breakthrough for sustainable educational reforms.
Implications:
a. Since there is no shared set of assumptions and beliefs about the four foundation categories: (1) Personal orientations and personality development, (2) Individual development and behavior including learning, (3) Communication and group processes including group/team development, and (4) Ways of coming to know, the analyses of the problems and solutions in conventional education are piecemeal and narrowly focused. An orientation to systemic realities is missing in the present discourse.
b. The second component includes the matters of finance along with the administrative organization and decision-making and accountability procedures. Conventional administrative organizations consist of a top heavy, authoritarian structure where authority rests in the hands of persons remote from the affairs of learning with students. These persons often exhibit deficient understanding of the fundamental requirements for learning and development. This administrative structure treats democratic concepts as words to be recited rather than processes to be engaged.
c. The third component includes the goals and objectives for the system and for each learner. The goals and objectives relating to the achievement of competency are often just words that sound good but exist within an intellectual void as regarding established dimensions of human growth and development.
d. The fourth component includes the curriculum and instructional/learning transactional strategies. When considering the concept of the uniqueness of every human being and the need for the exercise of internal intellectual processes that lead to the integration of meanings about life, the standard procedures for instruction fall miserably short. The pursuit of personal meaning, enhanced with the achievement of a mature group/team, will re-define teaching as a transactional process engaged by both the learners and their adult facilitators.
e. The fifth component includes the assessment, evaluation, recordkeeping and reporting procedures. This component above all others in the current context directs and shapes the entire educational program. Current practices do not reflect an understanding of the literature from the works of scholars who have studied the nature of human nature.
f. The sixth component includes the facilities and utilization patterns. In this day of electronic communications technologies, there is a diminished need for edifices to house a captured audience for the purpose of instruction. Learning can occur anywhere and can be integrated into a recordkeeping system that will assist each learner in remembering and organizing personal and public constructions of meaning, available for public enhancement.
g. The seventh component includes the type and extent of community involvement. In a democratically organized operational framework all stakeholders of the school would have a significant role in developing and maintaining an effective, growth producing educational experience. In an authoritarian structure like what presently exists this type of involvement is prohibited.
h. The eighth component includes the support services required to facilitate the management or eradication of impediments to learning. This area has undergone the most effective change primarily due to improved communication technologies that link various specialties in the community with the school.
i. The ninth component includes pre-service and in-service demonstration and training sites. Without major changes in the preparation of teachers, none of the required changes in the schools can occur. Since colleges are given this responsibility and they are remote from the problems of schooling and often out of touch with the realities of that setting, dramatic change is immediately required.
j. The tenth component includes information management and the uses of technology. The uses of innovations in communications technologies must find its way into all dimensions of the school just as it has found its way into the lives of all our citizens.
7.The following major components of a systems-oriented school would be created and maintained when the foregoing concepts are put to use:
a. An individualized, computer-based (student constructed and maintained) record of learning with assessment techniques that honor different learning styles, interests, individual capacities, unique experiences with life, and evaluation criteria that allow for individual differences while maintaining the commonly shared goal of mastery of systems.
b. A diagnostic orientation directed to reduce impediments to learning for all individuals, regardless of age, race, emotional, social, physical or intellectual capacity, with an acceptance of the values and ethical standards for dealing positively with diversity, pluralism and inclusion.
c. Teaching/learning transactional strategies that feature independent and collective planning for learning, facilitated through supportive group processes and the implementation of plans where individuals and groups are held accountable for accomplishing agreed-upon goals.
d. A competence-based curriculum that focuses on “life in all its manifestations” (Whitehead) with a balanced, student-constructed integration of the arts, sciences, mathematics and other languages, history/geography/cultural anthropology, ethics and career development.
e. A goal that centers upon the most socially useful learning in the modern world, learning how to learn, utilizing the methods and materials of all disciplines, in all “realms of meaning” (Phenix), fostering an openness to experience, incorporation into oneself of the processes and acceptance of change and the skills needed to organize and communicate one’s thoughts and feelings.
f. Information management systems and appropriate uses of modern technology, configured to maximize learning and developmental maturation.
g. A support system for learners that involves highly skilled professional educator/facilitators, informed parents, trained leadership, community input, selected outside professional resource agencies, higher education faculty and students, and volunteer retired experts from a variety of specialties.
h. A written, continuously updated and validated foundational statement for education that contains assumptions and beliefs about how individuals learn, grow and develop, alone and in groups; that will guide and sustain decision-making by all the stakeholders, including parents, students and professional staff.
i. A governance system modeled after our constitutional form of government to guarantee checks, balances and meaningful/orderly input from all stakeholders, distributes responsibility, authority and accountability to many members of a participative school community. There would be an instructional branch that includes all persons directly involved in learning, an administrative branch that includes school financing, public relations and accounting procedures and a quality assurance branch with responsibilities for maintaining and monitoring the implementation of a written and continuously updated constitution and by-laws complete with a written set of assumptions and beliefs based on the work of reputable scholars.
j. A health and fitness program for all learners, staff and other stakeholders.
k. Facilities and learning environments designed to respond to the needs of a reality-based curriculum and active learners in this age of electronic communications and expanded learning opportunities encountered twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week throughout one’s lifetime.
l. A research oriented laboratory for beginning and veteran teacher/facilitators and an intellectually challenging, cost-effective environment for professional staff, parents, students and volunteers.
8.How can change be initiated?
a. There are three parts of a comprehensive strategy for initiating the development of the kind of educational system needed for the preparation of our citizens in this country, in response to a need for survival in the face of the challenges of the 21st century:
(1) The first part is the installation of an assessment, evaluation, recordkeeping and reporting system that matches the assumptions and beliefs outlined in the four foundational categories described in this treatise, ( A constructive assessment, recordkeeping, evaluation and reporting system has been field tested and is ready for implementation.),
(2) Development and implementation of a strategy for collecting and organizing for dissemination the raw data necessary to support in-depth studies of local communities that have been ignored due to a diminished profitability for publishing to a limited market
(3) Instituting a wide scale effort to re-educate the American public about the need for a validated and shared set of assumptions and beliefs that will guide intelligent decision-making in the structuring and conduct of our schools and universities.
b. A conscientious application of the systemic framework outlined in this treatise will reveal the shortcomings, the strengths and the changes needed; it will show that we are in trouble due to the revealed shortcomings that are not now within the repertoire of the American public. Lacking this background, over 80% of that public thinks their schools are doing just fine and fail to see there is a serious problem. To change these attitudes and formulate a strategy that will re-invigorate that public to engage in a genuine pursuit of reasonable changes is a formidable task.
c. I have attempted to initiate that dialogue with this website - remakingourschoolsforthe21stcentury.com, with the publishing of a volume that addresses some of the background for a substantive dialogue, Remaking Our Schools for the Twenty-First Century – A Blueprint for Change/Improvement in our Educational Systems. I’m eagerly awaiting others to join in this crusade.
d. E-mail me with your comments at: [email protected]
Robert L. Arnold
Professor of Education, Emeritus
Introduction:
Based on firsthand investigations through reform efforts initiated in the laboratory of public schools and colleges, over nearly six decades, I find the level of discourse about the problems and solutions for today’s public schools most troubling. There is no inclusive evaluative framework that can clearly define the nature and problems of education, or define the parameters for change that will make a sustained difference. This is at the heart of our problems in finding solutions that can save our democratic way of life in this country. What follows is a brief analysis of categories of underlying assumptions and beliefs, when applied to the evaluation of our educational systems results in a much different operation. The treatment that follows will hopefully raise the level of discourse to a point deserving of our attention.
Remaking Our Schools for the Twenty-First Century – A Blueprint for Change/Improvement in our Educational Systems by Robert L. Arnold, Professor of Education, Emeritus
The role of theories in the change processes of our public educational systems
A theory is a statement of our individual beliefs and assumptions. Our theories or lack thereof define our interpretation of the meanings we place on our experience. Theory defines the facts as we perceive them, including those that pertain to education. We act on our theories whether or not they can be supported by evidence.
Theories can be based on reputable research and study, they can be based on little or no evidence, and they can ignore previously verified research and insight. A theory that is verified in our personal experiences and found consistent with the experiences of others who have studied the matter in depth is considered appropriate. Appropriate theories are strengthened when supported by other theories of similar stature.
An inappropriate theory is one that does not reflect adequately a verifiable view of reality. These theories yield inappropriate, distorted or limited facts that often challenge the value of appropriate theory. For example, everyone has a theory of the uniqueness of every individual –our individual beliefs and assumptions. In this case, our theory is verified in our personal experiences and in the experiences of many scholars who have studied these matters in depth.
Yet, a theory of learning and intellectual growth adopted by today’s decision makers in education defines changes and growth in individuals as simply statistical improvement in the scores recorded on a one-size-fits-all standardized test. This position is the result of flawed, limited or inappropriate theory about learning and change. In today’s educational arena, inappropriate theory is being used extensively by those in authority to support their biased version of facts.
Much of the resistance to change in our public educational systems and the lackluster record of failed schools stems from an extreme conventional wisdom (accepted by many members of the lay public and regrettably by many if not most of our educators) which assumes that theories are just untested ideas and have little value in the examination of the processes and problems of schooling. Taking another extreme position, persons in authority currently claim to be operating on legitimate theories, “data driven” even when they are shown to be contrary to established facts.
Conventional wisdom and a distorted reality has allowed, if not caused, educators, laymen and decision makers to routinely dismiss the insights of numerous authorities who have studied and written extensively about individuals, their growth and development both alone and in groups. When asked, many will steadfastly claim that theory is useless in solving the problems of education and others will claim inappropriate theories are indeed valid.
Unless the lay public knows the difference between appropriate and inappropriate theories, and understands appropriate theories that provide a comprehensive view of the school, they will likely go along with the limited positions of authorities. Acceptance of conventional wisdom and inappropriate theory has led schools to conduct instruction in a manner that ignores the verified findings of experts in the fields of communication, human development, individual behavior, group processes, learning and "genetic epistemology."
Recognizing the shortcomings and problems in our public educational systems is seriously hampered by a lack of sound/appropriate underlying theory that can identify reliable ‘facts.” Unfortunately, confounding any efforts to correct this situation is the public’s conventional wisdom that is a by-product of the very school system we are trying to understand. Unlocking its hardened categories and eliminating its rigid adherence to conventions is a formidable task.
If this were not difficult enough to correct, add the existence of a strong and relentless pursuit of profits envisioned by corporate entities for business in the vast educational market. Corporate interests have been successful to date in spreading their version of facts since the public knows and accepts so few appropriate theories applicable in the educational enterprise that corporate-sponsored marketing strategies have easily prevailed.
Remaking Our Schools for the Twenty-First Century © 2013 by Robert L. Arnold attempts to explain appropriate theories for public use in improving the public schools. It is a book to be studied, contemplated and most importantly internalized, making possible significant progress in designing sustained improvements in the conduct of education in this country.
There are at least six clusters of interrelated theories explained and utilized in this book, applied to an in-depth study of what is happening in education today, and importantly, what could be happening if only there was widespread understanding of and commitment to verifiable assumptions and beliefs – appropriate theories. These six clusters of theories define the facts about schooling far differently than those of current decision making authorities.
In the first cluster are the interrelated theories of human behavior, human growth and development, including learning. These theories were developed by scholars from different parts of the world and at different points in time. Their messages, however, are un-mistakably consistent about biologically-based and experientially-influenced developmental realities. The absolute uniqueness of each individual has centrality in these many “appropriate” theories authored by such scholars as: Jean Piaget, Viktor Lowenfeld, Lawrence Kohlberg, John Dewey, Benjamin Bloom, Eric Erikson, Abraham Maslow, Lawrence Kubie, Howard Gardner, William Glasser, Lev Vygotsky, Albert Bandura, Jerome Bruner, Robert Gagne’ and many others.
The second cluster contains theories of communication between and within humans, and communication within groups of individuals, especially those groups engaged in team development within compatible organizational structures. Many of these theories evolved from the efforts of those who participated in the National Training Laboratories that originated in Bethel, Maine in the late nineteen forties, under the direction of Kurt Lewin and Leland Bradford. Other familiar names associated with these efforts are: Goodwin Watson, Carl Rogers, Warren Bennis, Kenneth Benne, Ronald Lippitt, Chris Argyris and many others.
Sound, appropriate theory in the field of group dynamics, especially group/team development, holds a key to the transformation/change and improvement in our formal educational institutions that now harbor extreme competitiveness and social disorder. This system must be changed into one that promotes cooperation and individual productiveness, consistent with established group development theories.
The third cluster features a central theory developed by Philip Phenix in the nineteen sixties, and reinforced by a plethora of supporting literature that deals with the origins and nature of knowledge and knowing from an articulated epistemology. The subject matter theories developed by the Federal commissions of the nineteen sixties, particularly in the areas of mathematics education and biological sciences, along with the enlightened discovery/inquiry approach in the disciplines of history and geography created by this author and Charles Lahey, have extended the credibility of Phenix’s theory of six realms of meaning. Each realm is found to contain creative/constructive methodologies and structures that encompass all academic disciplines.
The work of Phenix is broadened with the contribution of Jean Piaget whose theory of knowledge and knowing is epigenetic – it covers the nature of knowledge and knowing from early childhood to all later stages of development. This cluster of theories addresses the need for re-defining subjects of the school from isolated bits of information to be consumed by individual students within arbitrarily organized groups, to an experience-based organization that utilizes sustained creative construction and communication of meanings using the legitimate processes of organized yet creative ways of knowing and communicating.
The fourth cluster deals with systems and systems theory applied comprehensively to the nature, organization, rationale, and function of the existing school system and that of an effective school system and school curriculum. Bela Banathy, Charles Reigeluth and Jeannette Olson deserve much attention as modern conveyors of systems design “A New Educational Technology.” These authors owe much to the work of such persons post World War II as: Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Anatol Rapport, Kenneth Boulding, William Ross Ashby, Margaret Mead and others. Systems theory and systems design provide a systemic and reputable substitute for the current “school system” as an organization for raising up our generations of youth to become mature adults. We have learned to live with an antiquated and ineffective system based on invalid assumptions and beliefs about individual development and behavior, including learning. Modern systems theory is the hope of the future in education to replace our antiquated and ineffective delivery systems.
The fifth cluster includes a new theory of assessment, recordkeeping, evaluation, and reporting designed to modify and eventually supplant the need for standardization and standardized testing. Central to this cluster is the Constructive Assessment, Recordkeeping and Evaluation System (CARES) developed and field tested by this author. This theory places each unique individual learner in control of his or her record of growth and development that will serve personal needs in ways beneficial to all learners, his or her employers, researchers, parents and many others. This system utilizes modern communications technology in ways that enhance learning and preserves a record of accomplishment that will follow each learner.
The sixth cluster deals with teacher education. It has long since transcended debate that teachers play a key role in the learning of our youth and our adults. A theory of the effective teaching/learning transactions owes much of its clarification to Leland Bradford within the larger systemic model for modern, twenty-first century schools. Prior and subsequent theories can be integrated into this comprehensive model – The Teaching/Learning Transaction. A new in-depth approach to teacher education will evolve from the applications of this and other appropriate and essential theories.
Remaking Our Schools is the product of sixty years of experience by this author within our systems of education beginning at home, continuing in the elementary and secondary school, into teacher education, graduate school and culminating in numerous reform efforts across this land. Each time a resistance to change and suggested improvements were encountered, a search into the origins of that resistance was sought and a conceivable change-strategy was formulated. “Remaking Our Schools” is the product of those efforts.
The Introduction to Remaking Our Schools for the Twenty-First Century summarizes an essential theory of communication that identifies the difficulties of gaining acceptance of proposals that deviate from the status quo and provides direction for overcoming obstacles to learning and change.
Chapter one places our change processes in an historical context. The philosophical rifts between a child-centered and subject-centered school experience has prevented most credible changes from being sustained; pendulum swings have existed between these incompatible positions reflected in the rhetoric of change, if not in the actual attempts at change, observable throughout the last century and the beginning of this twenty-first century.
When and if learners utilize the creative processes of coming to know, of creating knowledge, that are found in the academic disciplines, this can bridge the gap between the subject-centered concerns for conveying to students a fixed amount of pre-defined subject matter and the child development concerns for honoring individual perception and creativity. A child development view of individuality is incompatible with a fixed, imposed common core content-orientation.
Engaging learners at their level of development in legitimate disciplinary processes as practiced by specialists in all fields of inquiry and communication can become an essential ingredient in sustained processes of change. This proposition is supported in this chapter by a brief glimpse into the personal experiences of this author that shaped the philosophy and theory of change expressed in this treatise.
No proposal for change and improvement in the way we educate our youth will be sustained without addressing the need to assess and evaluate outcomes achieved by individual learners. Here, “The Constructive Assessment, Recordkeeping and Evaluation System” (CARES) is presented as a workable, field-tested alternative to the present systems of assessment and evaluation used in our schools and advocated by most decision-makers.
The current approaches through standardization of learning activities, coupled with the use of standardized tests of outcomes reduces acceptable levels of learning to the recall of isolated bits of pre-defined content; it simply ignores the realities of individual development and behavior and has the potential for destroying the creative and critical thinking capabilities of all but a few learners. Chapter two addresses the dimensions of a new and comprehensive assessment and evaluation system that utilizes modern electronic technologies in support of individualized and collective learning opportunities for all levels of learning.
Since the existing assessment and evaluation paradigms are so entrenched in the psyches of decision-makers and the lay public, it will take a powerful argument to displace that orientation. Utilization of systems theory, which has a profound legitimacy in the scientific and engineering world of today, has a real potential for displacing the standardization orientation that is being promoted by those in charge.
Chapter three contains a summary of numerous developmental and learning theories that can be validated in our personal experiences and in the extensive experiences of authors including Jean Piaget, Viktor Lowenfeld, Lev Vygotsky, Lawrence Kohlberg, Robert Gagne Lawrence Kubie and many others. Without internalization of these theories, the educational community and the lay public will not fully understand what is happening or not happening in our schools. Nor will they appreciate the extent to which ignoring these propositions has led to and will continue to lead to the creation of educational practices that severely limit the possibilities for healthy individual and collective development in our society.
Since learning can best be facilitated with consensus building therapeutic communication, it is imperative that an understanding of group dynamics, especially group development is understood and practiced. There is rich literature on this topic that expresses theories revealing the major problems in the way our schools are currently organized and conducted.
For example, schools are organized around groups that are no more than collections of individuals where individuality is compromised and subordinated within an effort to impose pre-defined content – a core curriculum. Reliable theories of group dynamics discussed in Chapter four provide a far different set of facts about how instruction should be conducted in our schools.
Chapter five describes what a system of education might look like if the principles of learning and development, group processes and compatible organizational structures, along with a re-orientation in our ways of constructing knowledge are honored, for individuals alone and in groups. This chapter addresses the need to revise the way the school system is organized and run and a constitutionally-based democratic structure and process for governance is featured to replace the authoritarian structures that govern most of our public schools today.
Without a revised teacher education component in the proposed systemic model, very little will likely be changed in the system or sustained beyond short excursions into new and isolated territory. Current teacher education programs are utterly absurd when considering the need for developing expertise in the theory and practice of sound principles of individual development and learning, group dynamics and a re-defined theory of knowledge and knowing.
Chapter six outlines a skeleton plan for teacher education that is designed to establish a genuine teaching profession. This chapter features a masterful article written in the late 1950’s by Leland Bradford that identifies many of the dimensions of making a professional educator. It provides a profound example of what it takes to be a truly facilitative professional. Implementation of this model is only likely to happen when the total system is re-constructed or re-designed from the bottom up as outlined in the chapters of this treatise.
Chapter seven contains an explanation of three manageable components of the change process considered essential in achieving lasting and legitimate change in our educational programs. Leadership in the change process must pay particular attention to these three components of change. Newly defined national policies important to the conduct of constructive education must be formulated and implemented.
Chapter eight suggests a procedure (“A Solutions Generator”) to aid the readers in examining the internal workings of their local school districts, revealing the systemic inconsistencies that likely exist. This will stimulate a beginning dialogue for bringing about change and improvement at the local level.
There are three Appendices referred to in the text. One outlines what a professional educator needs to know and be able to do, the second contains an example of workshop activity for bringing about change, and the third is a published article that describes in detail the existence of significant forces that often prevent change from occurring.
Theories are necessary to determine what's wrong with education and what can be done about correcting the problems. The example below will illustrate the truth of this statement.
Here is a well known theory of learning that was developed by Robert Gagne' many years ago. It has stood the test of time. It is not perfect, but it is a theory that contains many easily validated assumptions and beliefs that are supported in our own experiences and in those of others. Once you understand this theory and apply it to the existing conventional school you will be able to analyze what is or is not happening there. Then you will be able to intelligently speculate on what changes would be required to be consistent with this validated theory of learning.
Gagne's theory is described as eclectic (it contains elements from both behaviorist and developmental theories). It describes a process that is cumulative, meaning each level of learning is dependent upon the development of prior levels - each level builds upon the prior levels. It is inclusive - that is, it contains many dimensions of learning from simple to complex mental activity.
The first level is called stimulus/response learning. This is a recognition that all learning is based on experience (a stimulus) and the first extraction of meaning from that experience is an automatic response, either a motor or an audible response. Later responses are initiated by the learner. Retention of the simple meanings attached to a generally unfettered stimulus/response type experience will be accomplished when and if the experience is encountered enough times.
When an experience is repeated sufficiently, the next more complex level called simple associations will emerge. A simple association is an automatically recognized link between experiences. These associations are eventually combined into motor chains and later into verbal chains. This means the learner at this level of learning will act with a response to experience, physically, or verbalize the associated content in language. Still, this level of learning is limited to simple prior associations.
The next more sophisticated level that builds upon the prior levels is called multiple discrimination. This means learners are able to differentiate (separate out) multiple, more detailed elements from their experiences, whereas prior associations expressed in language chains contained fewer details or fewer discriminations.
Multiple discrimination leads to concept formation - mental images that contain prior discriminations and more. Concepts (mental images) can and will be retained for later use and applied to situations that involve logic and logical solutions to problems. Concepts are connected with other concepts, logically.
Concepts with continued experience eventually merge into simple rules. Simple rules are a recognition of the regularities with which certain concepts are found together. Simple rules connect concepts of objects, events and processes. Acquiring these simple rules give learners a greater sense of confidence in their ability to recognize and solve problems due to greater inclusiveness that is under their control.
These simple rules eventually become more sophisticated laws and articulated principles with even wider transfer value when applied to finding solutions to problems.
Principles and laws indicate that learners are able to see more of the whole chessboard and the bearing of one set of ideas on another.
Mature problem solving abilities result from having acquired mastery levels appropriate to each of the emerging prior levels of learning.
When Gagne's learning theory is applied to the analysis of existing evidences of learning in the conventional school, it is obvious learners function most often at the lowest levels of Gagne's theory. Learners are seldom asked to produce evidence of problem solving skills and in fact are not often provided the opportunity to develop the prerequisite levels of learning needed to acquire mastery at the problem solving level. Standardized tests do not include problem solving skills, since that implies a unique construction is created by each individual. That does not lend itself to a one-size-fits-all philosophy.
It is obvious that passing from a brief, superficial exposure to one topic, followed by another in rapid succession, fostered under the departmentalized and compartmentalized structures of the conventional school, does not allow sufficient time for the learner to internalize the content of much if any of the content presented in the classroom environment.
A sustained group experience is required that features meaningful interaction with fellow learners and adult facilitators engaged in hands on, reality-based decision making needed to achieve mature problem solving skills.
To fully understand the significance of this statement, one must understand another theory, a theory of group development. Theories of group dynamics that have been fully validated over time will provide additional insight as to the serious deficiencies found in the conventional school - the departmentalized, compartmentalized and isolated instructional procedures in teaching the general education curriculum. These instructional structures are found throughout the middle and secondary school, and even in so-called self-contained classrooms.
When examining the entire conventional school system from a theory-based perspective the nature of the problems of education are revealed along with the possible solutions that will remain a mystery without appropriate theories.
These interrelated categories contain the basic concepts, if applied to the analysis of the current school system and proposed solutions, will lead to sustained and improved structures and practices. While the concepts included in these categories will change as new insights are discovered, they must always endure a rigorous examination. We need to develop a willingness to change when the evidence for change is most convincing.
When studying the contents of these categories one needs to reflect each statement against the realities of the school and all its stakeholders.
1. Personal orientations and personality development:
Salient concepts:
a. Each person’s orientation to the world in which life is occurring results from personal experiences that are accumulated over time and distilled in the form of uniquely held attitudes, values and beliefs. These attitudes, values and beliefs guide everyday behavior and shape the contents of our hopes and dreams.
b. Personal orientations can be rigid and inflexible, or more flexible and open- ended, due primarily to the nature of the residue of past experience that is stored at an unconscious level. These orientations are, whether rigid or open-ended, projected onto the everyday activities as they are engaged in the world with its objects, processes and people. These orientations give form to the meanings evolved from those activities; meanings that conform to the pre-dispositions acquired from life’s experiences.
c. The world in its universe is a booming, buzzing reality that will be engaged most productively by those with more flexible personal orientations. They are more apt to be open to experiences with a dynamic and changing world.
d. Inflexible personality structures result in neurotic (rigid) distortions of the creative process. (A concept developed by the psychiatric community exemplified by Dr.Lawrence Kubie MD.) These inflexible personal orientations severely restrict the input from experience, thus in large measure result in varying degrees of being out of touch with reality.
e. Overly restrictive, regimented experiences in schools can and do contribute to the development of inflexible personality structures characterized by a growing resistance to change.
f. Studies of the personality structures of hundreds of beginning candidates for teaching indicate that approximately ten percent exhibit predominately open, flexible personality characteristics; the other ninety percent exhibit varying levels of rigidity. Changing these rigid behaviors requires directed interventions in order to dislodge and transform the unconscious response patterns that characterize these orientations.
g. Getting in touch with oneself is a necessary ingredient in achieving a transformation of those personality characteristics that get in the way of personal productivity and enjoyment. Empathic sharing of these characteristics encourages the fostering of a social order based on an appreciation of the perceived uniqueness of each differing person.
h. Maximized learning is the result of a largely internal process which is dependent upon a flexible personality that can maximize opportunities for releasing creativity. Applications of creativity evolve from simple exposure to experience acted upon progressively to a point of gaining effective problem solving skills.
Implications:
a. Obviously, teachers and other school officials, laymen and so-called experts exhibit personality characteristics that either accept change as a universal reality or find change to be disruptive and therefore something to be avoided.
b. Since these personality characteristics have their origins in the stored unconscious and are manifested in response patterns that have been developed over time, they are only modified with the cooperation and direct actions by each person exhibiting them.
c. Current discourse about change in education is generally based on behavior modification paradigms that consider attitudes and values as modifiable through externally imposed punishment and reward procedures.
d. While behavior modification techniques will in certain situations modify external and observable behavior, the likelihood that these appearances will be internalized is remote at best. When imposed upon the more flexible, healthy personalities, behavior modification strategies create dissonance.
e. Fundamental consideration must be given to the development of healthy, flexible personalities in all people, but especially in those in this helping profession known as teaching.
f. The act of “teaching” must embrace the concept of a teaching/ learning transactional strategies (Leland Bradford) that can only be perpetuated from a more open personal orientation.
g. Good teachers have flexible personalities that will rebel against the imposition of narrowly defined procedures and structures like the common core curriculum and standardized testing.
h. Given the tendency to treat personality as off limits in teacher preparation, existing educational programs are as superficial as the current educational discourse in the media.
i. A healthy personality exhibits the following achievable characteristics: (A. Maslow/E. Shostrom) (1) Lives predominately in the present rather than predominately in the past or in the imagined future, (2) Is predominately inner directed, and self-supportive rather than overly-dependent on others, (3) Is flexible in the application of values, (4) Sensitive to own needs and feelings and those of others, (5) Free to express feelings behaviorally, (6) Exhibits a high degree of self worth, (7) Accepts self in spite of weaknesses, (8) Maintains a vision of humankind as essentially good, (9) Sees opposites of life as meaningfully related, (10) Accepts personal feelings of anger or aggression and works to resolve the origins of those behaviors, (11) Capable of exhibiting warm interpersonal relationships, (12) Accepts the values of self-actualizing people with tolerance for ambiguity.
j. Any teacher education program, and likewise any educational enterprise, that does not recognize and act upon the fundamental importance of personality and fails to take the necessary steps to assist each person in acquiring healthy personal orientations cannot be considered adequate in making improvements in our educational systems.
k. There are well established procedures for engaging individuals in the analysis and transformation of restrictive personal orientations, and the behaviors that follow from those orientations. These procedures must be employed in the preparation of teacher/facilitators for our schools and universities.
2.Individual human development and behavior including learning:
Salient concepts:
a. The first and irrefutable fact is that no two people are identical, not their genetics, not their experience nor what they have done with their experience.
b. Human development is multidimensional. It has an intellectual, physical, social, emotional, spiritual or wonderment dimension; all of equal importance.
c. Individual development progresses through an invariant sequence unless driven off course by outside forces that impose developmentally inappropriate experiences such as those administered by well-meaning but ignorant educators, or prevented from occurring by conditions from within such as physical or psychological impediments to learning.
d. Each dimension of human development is genetically programmed to progress from one level of capability to a more sophisticated level especially during the early years of life. These developmental dimensions are ordered by one’s unique genetic code and experiential background. There comes a point in each person’s life cycle when physical and other developmental dimensions subside and even regress while other dimensions become predominate.
e. Ignoring the uniqueness of each individual and the special nature of his or her developmental sequence is a formula that creates many personal psycho/social problems.
f. Schools that are organized around age levels and grade levels ignore the uniqueness of individual development. Ignoring individual differences invites alienation of learners and a false identification of perceived superiority in some over others.
g. There are well-established conceptualizations of individual development and behavior, including learning, that can and must become an integral part of the foundation for decision-making about the nature and effectiveness of education.
h. Some authoritative formulations can be found in the works of Alfred N. Whitehead, Jean Piaget, Eric Erickson, Viktor Lowenfeld, Lawrence Kubie MD, Lev Vygotsky, John Dewey, Lawrence Kohlberg, John Gardner, Albert Bandura and Robert Gagne to mention only a few.
i. Consideration of the emergence of the intellectual capabilities for logic, as formulated by Rousseau and Piaget, is of particular importance in the early experiences of formal education. When principles relating to the development of logic are violated, this is a direct contributor to the initiation of self-doubt, alienation and reduced creative productivity.
j. Learning is initiated with experience that spans a range from direct and purposeful, to exposure to abstract symbols. (Dale) Initial experiential data are elaborated into simple associations and later into multiple discriminations and concepts, regardless of their sources. Concepts become the basis for the formulation of simple rules and the eventual development of principles and laws that enable the emergence of problem solving capabilities. (Gagne)
k. Contrasting a description of the processes of learning as defined by Robert Gagne, with the currently held assumptions and beliefs about learning that are stated explicitly or implicitly as a process of remembering specific bits of information to be reproduced on a multiple choice achievement test, one must conclude the predominate faith in standardization is a misplaced and misdirected faith.
l. Similarly, ignoring the complex interrelationships of learning within the social and economic context and the other dimensions of development is troublesome since their influence on learning is so pronounced. Adequate recognition of their importance in the present discourse about the problems of education and what to do about them is missing.
Implications:
a. How can a one-size-fits-all standardized testing program be considered an accurate and useful assessment/measurement technique when it defies the basic and most important reality that no two people are identical?
b. Likewise, how can any serious thinker believe that a standardized offering of pre-canned conclusions, a standardized core curriculum, can represent the heart of educational reform when it violates nearly everything we know and can validate about the nature and development of individual human intellectual capacities?
c. Only by blindly accepting the results of a one-size-fits-all assessment technique, employed to legitimize erroneous assumptions and beliefs, can one rationalize the appropriateness of a pre-defined standardized core curriculum and its instructional program.
d. So-called research that bases its conclusions on incremental changes in test scores must be understood in a context that severely diminishes its importance as legitimate support for particular approaches to reform.
3.Communication and group processes including group /team development:
Salient concepts:
a. Humans are social beings who depend on effective communication with oneself and with one’s friends, relatives and associates for the achievement and maintenance of an intellectually productive, healthy personal orientation with life.
b. The first and most fundamental reality about communication between two or more human beings is that the meanings transferred through verbal and non-verbal communications are never identical in the mind of each participant.
c. The second reality is that we humans cannot not communicate. Whether we want to or not, we communicate through our behavior both verbal and non-verbal. How that behavior is interpreted by others is dependent upon their internal orientations. Interpretations of personal meanings in all cases are dependent upon the application of existing pre-developed, biased internal structures.
d. The interpretation of any communication is governed by the unique intellectual structures held by each participant.
e. Messages are assimilated into pre-organized structures; these structures impose their particular bias on the message and shape or mold it to fit a pre-determined orientation. Thus, the message sent is never the identical message received. Acceptance of a correspondence of thought is achieved through repeated exchanges, yet its final conclusions are never, never identical. (Think about this in the context of classroom instruction.)
f. Acceptable validation of the true meanings in the communication between the senders and the receivers are sought by continuing the exchanges that lead to a mutual acceptance of the similarities of meanings held by each participant.
g. There are at least six intermediary conditions that can impede or encourage validation of the exchanges between communicants. These are: (1) The quality of the social context in which the communication takes place; this can be hostile or accepting, supportive or variously destructive, (2) The motivation for pursuing the communication, related to one’s energy level, health status and need, (3) The level of maturation reached by each participant that exists at the time of the communication which allows or impedes messages. A child, for instance, who is at the level of pre-operations, with pre-logical capabilities will not engage a logical argument in terms relevant in that instance. Instead the pre-logical youngster will be free to define the messages in any way that occurs to him or her, a characteristic of the behavior of a youngster at this level of functioning, (4) The level, type, quality and quantity of experience exhibited by each participant; a variable with importance that cannot be overstated. Often labeled “readiness” for learning and communicating, this requirement must be taken seriously and granted the time necessary for ensuring a reasonable match between the underlying meanings of the messages given and the messages received.
h. The purpose to be achieved with group development is improved communication among all its participants leading to personal and collective productivity.
i. Group development proceeds along a predictable sequence when the conditions for growth are maintained. This sequence is seldom fully developed in our conventional schools, possibly due to a general lack of knowledge about group development processes and interventions, but more likely due to a reluctance to provide the necessary ingredients for a sustained evolution of the classroom group from immaturity to maturity.
j. The sequence for group/team development is as follows:
(1) A level of dependency is dominant when a collection of individuals are gathered together for the first time. A state of dependency is prevalent since the group has not clarified its purposes and procedures and every participant is left to wonder what is going to happen. It is important to note that a dependency can be maintained when the appointed leader arbitrarily establishes the purposes and procedures of the group and the consequences for deviating from the imposed directions.
(2) Provided with the opportunity for an airing of each individual’s perceived needs and aspirations, the next level of growth emerges called independence. At this level, each individual is allowed and encouraged to voice personal perceptions in an environment of mutual appreciation, trust and acceptance. The level of independence is seldom actualized in the conventional school setting in large part out of a misinterpretation of the meaning and value of a required freedom to exchange real felt needs and aspirations in each and every individual within the group. This level is interpreted by the conventional decision makers as a breakdown in discipline that is feared to lead to chaos that might reflect negatively upon their reputations.
(3) Without continuous sharing of individual orientations and perceptions, in spite of their possible conflictive nature, the next level in the development of a mature group will not happen.
(4) A mature group is characterized by what is called consensual validation wherein communication is most effective and rewarding; where individual and collective problem solving is central to the group’s deliberations. This level is maintained when the participants sense an importance in facilitating their personal and collective productivity and creativity. Constant vigilance is required that allows and encourages expressions of personal views and the exchanges that lead to rectifying the differences in points of view.
k. Participation in a mature group that maintains consensual validation results in maximized personal and collective development, increased productivity, appreciation for diversity, tolerance for ambiguity, and results in effective and constructive problem solving abilities.
Implications:
a. Group/team development cannot occur in a segmented, departmentalized setting organized to move students from one short stay with a topic, followed by a movement to another short stay with a different topic. The time required for sorting out the subtleties of personal meanings is not available, and the opportunity to confront the personal orientations getting in the way of maturity does not occur.
b. Personal satisfaction with the processes of communication is seldom experienced in a departmentalized, compartmentalized instructional setting.
c. Achieving group maturity is not possible within an authoritarian, hierarchical organization since sharing honest feelings in an open setting is either tacitly or openly prohibited.
d. Most public schools are organized as authoritarian structures, in spite of having elected school boards. School boards assign authority to a CEO who maintains near ultimate power over the system.
e. In an authoritarian organization there is usually someone at the top. Members of the authoritarian hierarchy each respond to an authoritarian leader higher up on the power ladder.
f. Teachers are participants with only limited authority when they collectively organize in resistance to superior authority.
g. Change strategies that are initiated within an authoritarian structure are imposed from the top down. Since the power rests with those in administrative positions, underlings, (teachers, janitors and grounds keepers) will be obliged to maintain ways that mask their true feelings, one that satisfies the power structure by giving the appearance of conformity.
h. Until there is a complete restructuring of this hierarchical administrative organization, sustained changes that are based on consensus with all participants is nearly impossible. One suggested model for change is found in our constitutional form of governance that guides decision making at both the state and national levels.
4.Ways of coming to know:
Salient concepts:
a. The ever present chasm between approaches in education on the one hand that feature an emphasis on the dispensing of information within pre-defined procedures, and on the other hand an orientation toward the unique and individualized creative processes of learning has been exacerbated by the current discourse about solving the problems of education. Current reform efforts from the very top down emphasize an instructional model that reflects the dispensing orientation.
b. How can one reconcile the inadequacies of the basic assumptions that undergird this orientation when they are based on half-truths promoted in isolation from one another?
c. If learning in its ideal form is indeed a creative process, it is clearly incompatible with a position that learning best occurs when instruction is structured so as to present to learners of any age the conclusions of others who have been defined as experts, and determine outcomes as essentially remembering what was included in instruction about these conclusions. It is not that no learning takes place in these situations, but the issues with the approach revolve around the limitations of learning and the long term effects of such learning on the health and productivity of each individual.
d. It is obvious that individuals need to learn about a multitude of matters and learning is an individualized process that is more or less effective. A proposition to bridge the chasm between the two positions (child centered vs subject centered education) is a major key to achieving educational reform that we can believe in.
e. Philip Phenix wrote an important treatise on this topic published in the early 1960’s. This treatise resulted from an extensive investigation into the nature and procedures of the typical subjects/disciplines of our schools and colleges. Graduate students at Teachers College Columbia University interviewed representatives of various disciplines across the full spectrum of offerings representative of what the subject centered people believed to represent important academic information. The title of Phenix’s treatise is Realms of Meaning – A Philosophy of Curriculum for General Education. Take note that this treatise focuses on general education that deals with information and skills that all learners must find useful in their everyday lives.
f. There are six interrelated “realms of meaning” in Phenix’s treatise:
(1) Empirics which includes all sciences including the social sciences, (2) Symbolics which includes mathematics and other languages, (3) Aesthetics which includes all the arts, (4) Ethics which includes moral issues, (5) Synnoetics or Self-knowledge, and (6) Synoptics which includes history, geography and cultural anthropology.
g. Within each category or “realm of meaning” are similar ways of approaching and formulating meaning, each with distinguishable procedures for creative construction and communication of meanings. These approaches to learning and communication are considered the most productive and constructive approaches available today. Our libraries are full of the products of these constructive approaches, the results of efforts in making sense out of this booming, buzzing universe in which we live and those universes beyond in the outer reaches of space.
h. Participation in these constructive approaches to gaining insight and meaning, using the methods and materials of those disciplines, potentially bridges the gap between the child centered, creative orientation and the subject centered information and skills orientation. Bridging this gap is a fundamental requirement in sustained educational reform.
i. This kind of change would require different roles for the facilitators of learning, different packaging of the materials and equipment for facilitating learning, different organizational structures for our schools and universities. And above all, different assessment, evaluation and recordkeeping procedures, that which would authentically validate the products of learning in all realms of meaning by all students, regardless of their differences.
j. In this paradigm, those who have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of meanings in their preferred realm will be needed to provide experiences that introduce to upcoming learners their discovered ways of coming to know and ways of communicating the results of their efforts. Their conventional roles would shift at the initial stages of learning from a dispensing position to one of providing guidance in helping young learners learn how to learn.
These experiences would initially include hands-on activities with a minimum of outer directed behavior so as to encourage an orientation of discovery. The tendency to define the conclusions to be retained at these initial stages of learning must be avoided, to allow the individual learners the time to struggle with their own thoughts and feelings and begin to structure their worlds to enhance the meanings derived from experience.
k. Once a beginning structure for meaning in each sampled discipline is developed, the likelihood of a genuine motivation to learn will evolve, marked by an excitement surrounding the processes of exchange of discoveries and the acceptance of the possibilities and opportunities presented by continual changes in personal conclusions and personal orientations.
l. The curriculum of the school would become what Whitehead described as “Life in all its Manifestations” with an emphasis on discovery of relationships between one set of ideas and another.
J. Readiness for receiving messages concerning the conclusions of those who are practicing their disciplines is dependent upon a personalized experience in the development of the fundamental structures of the discipline from which the messages are formulated. Evolving a sense of these structures will take time and particularized approaches to learning using methods and materials compatible with those of the disciplines but at the same time sensitive to the developmental differences in individuals.
k. At the point in the educational processes when a sense of structure is achieved, messages can be constructively received by individual learners, regardless of the medium in which they are presented, during the large group lecture, the programs of media or the information displayed on the internet. All these sources of information can serve the learners whose experiences have prepared them to assimilate the messages into pre-constructed patterns of meaning.
Implications:
a. Changing the curriculum of the school in the ways suggested here will require intensive reconstruction of time-honored customs that are lodged in the vague memories of those who attended school. Some of those memories are perceived to have been positive and some are perceived to have been the cause of personal disasters. Both of these positions are understandable and must be analyzed for what they can teach us about needed changes in our educational processes.
b. The need to package materials and equipment required of the pursuit of meaning in any discipline will disrupt the publishing monopoly controlled by huge corporate interests; it will require a concerted focus in the development of raw, primary sources of information that heretofore would not provide sufficient profits, especially for limited local consumption. Without this primary information, the construction of authentic meaning using the methods and materials of disciplines will not go forth.
c. Counteracting the tendency for experts in their field of inquiry to impose their conclusions on young learners, will require a convincing argument about the need to allow early learners to formulate their own structures using the developmentally appropriate methods and materials of the disciplines. Once these structures are developed, assimilation of meanings/conclusions generated by experts will readily occur. Skills development would occur in the relevant context of inquiry. Isolated, repetitive instruction in the earlier years, through the parsing of language and mathematical symbols would be avoided.
d. Developmental considerations, especially as pertaining to the emergence of the abilities for logical analysis, must be adequately understood to prevent the development of unrealistic expectations for learners. To fully deal with the structures and products of disciplines it requires developmental capacities for hypothetical deduction and abstract reasoning and logic. These abilities do not exist in the early years of life. They gradually develop as the learner proceeds to evolve under the influence of a unique genetic code, conditioned by exposure to experience with varied contextual results.
Those in the earlier phases of development must be provided appropriate experiences that will allow their unique constructions in ways that match their emerging intellectual capabilities. Failure to recognize these developing capacities, leads to detrimental procedures that have a lasting negative effect on the productivity in each learner’s life.
e. Assessment and evaluation of learning outcomes will be required to reflect the emerging intellectual structures engaged by learners at various levels of development. A one–size-fits-all assessment will not work.
f. An effective assessment and evaluation procedure will require a learner- maintained record keeping component that keeps track of each learner’s evolving experiences needed to construct an integration of discoveries at later times. This component will need to utilize the full range of modern and evolving electronic technologies and provide the organized information necessary for the construction and re-construction of meanings that occur over time for each individual involved in a personalized search for meaning.
5.The nature and function of educational systems:
Salient concepts:
a. The following description illustrates the interrelated systemic components that must be considered in the examination of the present systems of education and the proposed solutions to identified problems:
b. The first component of the systemic model - philosophical, theoretical assumptions and beliefs - includes four foundation categories: (1) Personal orientations and personality development, (2) Individual development and behavior including learning, (3) Communication and group processes, including group/team development, and (4) Ways of coming to know.
c. The second component includes the matters of school finance along with the administrative organization and decision-making and accountability procedures. While this component is only one of ten, each having significance in a functional system, it has been a dominate force in the existing authoritarian administrative structure. This has to be replaced by a democratically based system with built in safeguards that would prevent it from being subverted by individuals and groups seeking power and control.
d. The third component includes the goals and objectives for the system and for each learner. In the present system, this component contains narrowly conceived statements that rest on assumptions about the consumption of pre-defined subject matter with heavy emphasis on low level cognition and a scarcity of affective concerns.
e. The fourth component includes the curriculum and instructional/learning transactional strategies. The present system features an instructional paradigm with a pre-defined and limited curriculum along with a companion standardized testing assessment plan. The student is the consumer of information dispensed by a teacher in a departmentalized setting.
f. The fifth component includes the assessment, evaluation and recordkeeping and reporting procedures. The assessment plan of the conventional system is restricted to what can be measured on written examinations, evaluated using arbitrary criteria and reported in letter or numeral grades. This system ignores the developmental differences in learners.
g. The sixth component includes the facilities and utilization patterns. The present elaborate campuses are generated out of the need for space in which instruction can be held. Modern communication technologies create a need for a much different location for learning.
h. The seventh component includes the type and extent of community involvement. Schools are social institutions that are an integral part of the community in which they exist. Community centers are in keeping with this reality.
i. The eighth component includes the support services required to facilitate the management or eradication of impediments to learning. Specializations in a variety of professions are now available, facilitated by the connectivity of modern electronic communication technologies.
j. The ninth component includes pre-service and in-service demonstration and training sites. College campus schools as training laboratories for teachers have all but gone and replaced by a loosely structured involvement of local schools. Such a plan is totally inadequate and must be replaced by demonstration sites that are real schools dedicated to the development of competent educators.
k. The tenth component includes information management and the uses of technology. Technology used by learners outside of school far outstrips the uses of technology in the typical conventional school. Full utilization of modern technologies is imperative.
Implications:
a. Educational change strategies that alter single items within any of the ten components of any educational system without consideration for the potential impact on all the other components are seriously counterproductive.
b. What is required is not unlike an environmental impact study required of any plans for change in the variables within our world. In schools this would require a systemic impact study before any changes are made in any of the components of the system.
c. Criteria for addressing the number two through the tenth components must consistently reflect the theoretical assumptions and beliefs of component number one.
d. A different set of assumptions and beliefs (theories) will result in a different set of conclusions.
e. If the theoretical assumptions and beliefs in component number one, as outlined in this treatise, are validated in personal experiences and in the experiences of those who have studied these matters in depth, then a consistent application of those components in the evaluation of what is happening or not happening in the other nine will reveal with greater certainty what should be changed.
6.How are we doing?
Salient concepts:
a. There is no commonly shared set of underlying assumptions and beliefs that is based on the scholarly literature about the role of personality characteristics in the preparation of a teacher/facilitator of learning or about the development of characteristics that complement the facilitation of learning in a formal educational setting.
b. There is no commonly shared set of underlying assumptions and beliefs that is based on the scholarly descriptions of the nature of human development and behavior that is validated in our own experiences and in the experiences of those who have studied these matters in depth.
c. There is little evidence that schools, colleges and universities have consistently applied the results of a shared set of assumptions and beliefs about communication, group dynamics and group/team development that is found within the scholarly literature about these subjects.
d. There is a steadfast insistence among subject matter advocates that the selected information gleaned from the conclusions of experts can and must be passed on to upcoming generations in a standardized core curriculum and the results of this process can and must be assessed and evaluated with standardized tests. Furthermore, it is erroneously believed that consumption and accurate regurgitation of this information is sufficient evidence of the learning that will somehow get utilized in intelligent decision making at some later point in time.
e. There is a steadfast belief among the subject matter advocates that young learners must learn to read and do mathematics primarily to decipher the wisdom of the experts when and if that wisdom becomes useful and relevant, instead of being a response to the personal needs of inquisitive learners.
f. There is an intuitive sense among experienced teachers, those who exhibit a healthy orientation to life, that individuals are capable and in need of utilizing their personal creative abilities in the acquisition of important information about the contributions of others, especially those scholars who have spent a lifetime making sense out of their own experiences.
g. There is a belief among the child centered advocates that children are capable of creating knowledge if given the opportunity, and that knowledge can contain an enlightened version of the conclusions of others.
h. The conflicts between these two perceived opposing points of view has plagued the processes of improvement in the educational systems of our conventional education and will continue its affects as long as there is not a manageable alternative proposed that responds to the central concerns of each side of the controversy.
i. Considering the academic disciplines as ways of coming to know, as creative processes that can be translated for learners without violating the realities of developmental human behavior and growth, can and must become part of a significant breakthrough for sustainable educational reforms.
Implications:
a. Since there is no shared set of assumptions and beliefs about the four foundation categories: (1) Personal orientations and personality development, (2) Individual development and behavior including learning, (3) Communication and group processes including group/team development, and (4) Ways of coming to know, the analyses of the problems and solutions in conventional education are piecemeal and narrowly focused. An orientation to systemic realities is missing in the present discourse.
b. The second component includes the matters of finance along with the administrative organization and decision-making and accountability procedures. Conventional administrative organizations consist of a top heavy, authoritarian structure where authority rests in the hands of persons remote from the affairs of learning with students. These persons often exhibit deficient understanding of the fundamental requirements for learning and development. This administrative structure treats democratic concepts as words to be recited rather than processes to be engaged.
c. The third component includes the goals and objectives for the system and for each learner. The goals and objectives relating to the achievement of competency are often just words that sound good but exist within an intellectual void as regarding established dimensions of human growth and development.
d. The fourth component includes the curriculum and instructional/learning transactional strategies. When considering the concept of the uniqueness of every human being and the need for the exercise of internal intellectual processes that lead to the integration of meanings about life, the standard procedures for instruction fall miserably short. The pursuit of personal meaning, enhanced with the achievement of a mature group/team, will re-define teaching as a transactional process engaged by both the learners and their adult facilitators.
e. The fifth component includes the assessment, evaluation, recordkeeping and reporting procedures. This component above all others in the current context directs and shapes the entire educational program. Current practices do not reflect an understanding of the literature from the works of scholars who have studied the nature of human nature.
f. The sixth component includes the facilities and utilization patterns. In this day of electronic communications technologies, there is a diminished need for edifices to house a captured audience for the purpose of instruction. Learning can occur anywhere and can be integrated into a recordkeeping system that will assist each learner in remembering and organizing personal and public constructions of meaning, available for public enhancement.
g. The seventh component includes the type and extent of community involvement. In a democratically organized operational framework all stakeholders of the school would have a significant role in developing and maintaining an effective, growth producing educational experience. In an authoritarian structure like what presently exists this type of involvement is prohibited.
h. The eighth component includes the support services required to facilitate the management or eradication of impediments to learning. This area has undergone the most effective change primarily due to improved communication technologies that link various specialties in the community with the school.
i. The ninth component includes pre-service and in-service demonstration and training sites. Without major changes in the preparation of teachers, none of the required changes in the schools can occur. Since colleges are given this responsibility and they are remote from the problems of schooling and often out of touch with the realities of that setting, dramatic change is immediately required.
j. The tenth component includes information management and the uses of technology. The uses of innovations in communications technologies must find its way into all dimensions of the school just as it has found its way into the lives of all our citizens.
7.The following major components of a systems-oriented school would be created and maintained when the foregoing concepts are put to use:
a. An individualized, computer-based (student constructed and maintained) record of learning with assessment techniques that honor different learning styles, interests, individual capacities, unique experiences with life, and evaluation criteria that allow for individual differences while maintaining the commonly shared goal of mastery of systems.
b. A diagnostic orientation directed to reduce impediments to learning for all individuals, regardless of age, race, emotional, social, physical or intellectual capacity, with an acceptance of the values and ethical standards for dealing positively with diversity, pluralism and inclusion.
c. Teaching/learning transactional strategies that feature independent and collective planning for learning, facilitated through supportive group processes and the implementation of plans where individuals and groups are held accountable for accomplishing agreed-upon goals.
d. A competence-based curriculum that focuses on “life in all its manifestations” (Whitehead) with a balanced, student-constructed integration of the arts, sciences, mathematics and other languages, history/geography/cultural anthropology, ethics and career development.
e. A goal that centers upon the most socially useful learning in the modern world, learning how to learn, utilizing the methods and materials of all disciplines, in all “realms of meaning” (Phenix), fostering an openness to experience, incorporation into oneself of the processes and acceptance of change and the skills needed to organize and communicate one’s thoughts and feelings.
f. Information management systems and appropriate uses of modern technology, configured to maximize learning and developmental maturation.
g. A support system for learners that involves highly skilled professional educator/facilitators, informed parents, trained leadership, community input, selected outside professional resource agencies, higher education faculty and students, and volunteer retired experts from a variety of specialties.
h. A written, continuously updated and validated foundational statement for education that contains assumptions and beliefs about how individuals learn, grow and develop, alone and in groups; that will guide and sustain decision-making by all the stakeholders, including parents, students and professional staff.
i. A governance system modeled after our constitutional form of government to guarantee checks, balances and meaningful/orderly input from all stakeholders, distributes responsibility, authority and accountability to many members of a participative school community. There would be an instructional branch that includes all persons directly involved in learning, an administrative branch that includes school financing, public relations and accounting procedures and a quality assurance branch with responsibilities for maintaining and monitoring the implementation of a written and continuously updated constitution and by-laws complete with a written set of assumptions and beliefs based on the work of reputable scholars.
j. A health and fitness program for all learners, staff and other stakeholders.
k. Facilities and learning environments designed to respond to the needs of a reality-based curriculum and active learners in this age of electronic communications and expanded learning opportunities encountered twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week throughout one’s lifetime.
l. A research oriented laboratory for beginning and veteran teacher/facilitators and an intellectually challenging, cost-effective environment for professional staff, parents, students and volunteers.
8.How can change be initiated?
a. There are three parts of a comprehensive strategy for initiating the development of the kind of educational system needed for the preparation of our citizens in this country, in response to a need for survival in the face of the challenges of the 21st century:
(1) The first part is the installation of an assessment, evaluation, recordkeeping and reporting system that matches the assumptions and beliefs outlined in the four foundational categories described in this treatise, ( A constructive assessment, recordkeeping, evaluation and reporting system has been field tested and is ready for implementation.),
(2) Development and implementation of a strategy for collecting and organizing for dissemination the raw data necessary to support in-depth studies of local communities that have been ignored due to a diminished profitability for publishing to a limited market
(3) Instituting a wide scale effort to re-educate the American public about the need for a validated and shared set of assumptions and beliefs that will guide intelligent decision-making in the structuring and conduct of our schools and universities.
b. A conscientious application of the systemic framework outlined in this treatise will reveal the shortcomings, the strengths and the changes needed; it will show that we are in trouble due to the revealed shortcomings that are not now within the repertoire of the American public. Lacking this background, over 80% of that public thinks their schools are doing just fine and fail to see there is a serious problem. To change these attitudes and formulate a strategy that will re-invigorate that public to engage in a genuine pursuit of reasonable changes is a formidable task.
c. I have attempted to initiate that dialogue with this website - remakingourschoolsforthe21stcentury.com, with the publishing of a volume that addresses some of the background for a substantive dialogue, Remaking Our Schools for the Twenty-First Century – A Blueprint for Change/Improvement in our Educational Systems. I’m eagerly awaiting others to join in this crusade.
d. E-mail me with your comments at: [email protected]
Robert L. Arnold
Professor of Education, Emeritus