Curios of the week #61

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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We have been treated to gloriously syrupy autumnal weather in Ballarat this week. The leaves are brown but the sun is out. I have continued with my quest to teach Year 11 Economics — a subject I have found fascinating and strange. I keep wanting to add a counterpoint to the models by suggesting obvious exceptions but I know this does not help the clarity of teaching.

One concept of particular interest is that of ‘utility’ — derived from the work of Jeremy Bentham and the utilitarian philosophers. Utility is an attempt to quantify the pleasure, financial gain or other form of benefit derived from consuming a product and traditionally, consumers are conceived of as acting to maximise utility. Now, imagine trying to measure and quantify utility. How do you measure pleasure? It would be a challenge far beyond that associated with measuring, say, cognitive load. And yet the whole field of traditional economics is built upon this key idea.

This week’s Curios include some gatekeeping, a strong opinion, a new definition of ‘highly interactive’ and much more.

Disciplinary climate of the week

There have been a number of stories this week about a push for Australian classrooms to return to a ‘stricter’ form of discipline. Ben Carroll, Victoria’s Labor education minister, endorsed the call in the Herald Sun. What you won’t pick up from that article is that this seems to have been prompted by the roll-out of guidelines produced by the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO), as reported by Emma Kirk on news.com.au.

Carina Stathis in The Daily Mail focused on the response of parents to the proposal.

“'I think you need to cane the parents, to be honest. That's where it is at for me. Kids are a product of their mum and dad or their parents... discipline starts at home,' one parent told Sunrise.

'They need to be taught to listen and learn to take direction. Just no respect (in the classroom). That's the biggest problem,' another added.”

I think the framing of having desks in rows facing the teacher and children walking in single file in corridors as ‘strict’ is double edged. On the one hand, everyone has a basic understanding of what we are talking about. On the other, this prompts comments about caning parents and the like. There is nothing especially ‘strict’ about schools today that prioritise behaviour if you were to compare them to the disciplinary climate of, say, the 1960s.

You can access AERO’s extensive set of resources here.

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Gatekeeper of the week

In 2010, Dan Meyer, then a maths teacher, recorded a TEDx talk, Math Class Needs a Makeover. In this talk, Meyer argues that maths teachers and textbooks are too helpful and need to provide less guidance. This will develop students’ initiative, help them retain more maths and reduce their reliance on formulas. It’s not clear in the video where he is aware of the long tradition of educational progressivism that, to various degrees, has been making similar arguments for the last century or whether he thinks he has stumbled upon a novel set of ideas. Regardless, his preferred teaching method will be instantly recognisable to maths teachers as a form of inquiry learning.

So, you would think Meyer would be happy to debate teaching methods, given his so publicly stated position at one end of the inquiry versus explicit teaching debate. Apparently not:

This bit of hyperbole seems intended to make us feel silly or ashamed of engaging in such a debate.

Yet, only this week, I was contacted by a teacher in an American school district who uses a form of explicit teaching and yet is being pressured by administrators to jump on board with a new inquiry learning initiative.

It seems to me that the debate is at least as relevant today as it was back in 2010. Maybe Meyer has changed his views since then. If so, I am not aware of him publicly saying so. It is almost as if advocates of inquiry are happy to give it their full-throated endorsement when the conditions seem right but once the climate changes and inquiry is subject to challenge, they want to pretend their is no debate to be had.

New definition of the week

A languages teacher shared a clip on Twitter of a highly interactive bit of explicit teaching where students were echoing the teacher. In response, Barbara Bleiman, an English teaching consultant, decided to redefine what highly interactive means.