Letter from Instructional Jail
At the end of a
past school year, my district’s social studies consultant informed me that
there is only one way to teach U.S. History in Lincoln Public Schools; the
traditional past to present. She wrote,
“There is no published research that supports the teaching of high school
introductory survey courses in history in ‘reverse’ as a successful strategy to
impact student achievement.” I wrote her
back on asking her to produce research and quantitative data that supported her
claims that the traditional way of instruction has an impact on student achievement. She never replied. Is it because there is no data to support her
claims?
I appealed to the district’s curriculum
director. She wrote a letter saying,
“Teaching the curriculum in a different sequence than is prescribed by the
curriculum is not considered an instructional strategy.” She went on to say, “The policy on academic
freedom (Policy 4860) states that instructional staff must teach the assigned
curriculum using district-approved materials and research-based
strategies.” If there are no
“research-based strategies” to support district claims then is Lincoln Public
Schools not in compliance with and is violating its’ own policies? Should the district be required to produce
evidence that a linear-sequential, past to present instructional methodology is
responsible for having an impact on student achievement? Or, is this an instance where the policy
makers are not compelled to follow their own dictates?
I appealed to the
assistant superintendent and she told me that she would consider my request to
“deviate” from the curriculum. She
eventually ruled that I had to comply with the earlier decisions. Interesting that even at this level there is
an apparent disregard of the district’s academic freedom policy. In the district’s academic freedom policy
there are also provisions for, “…a balance of biases, divergent points of view,
and provide an opportunity for exploration by the students into various sides
of the issue(s).” Is not what I did a
“divergent point of view?” Apparently
not, but it was certainly deviant behavior.
I wrote a letter to my representative on the
school board and he suggested I contact the superintendent. I wrote her and she responded asking me to
set a date in the afternoon at 3:30 p.m. or 4:00 p.m. So, what was I doing that caused three
district officials to try to suppress my instructional approach? .
YO-YO is nothing
unique, other than the name. I taught
using a bi-directional approach to the past.
There were no indications from the district office that what I was doing
for years was, in any way, a deviation.
I started with the present and grounded students in what they know about
the “now.” I wanted them to try to
understand the factors that influence the way they think. Parents, spiritual beliefs, friends, media,
and myriad other factors that help determine their sense of reality. Then I took them back to a point in time of
the not so distant past and we moved forward through time until we got to the
present. Essentially, students came to
understand that they are the living effects of past causes. In other words, cause and effect are
reversed. Then we went back to another
point in time and moved forward so students were constantly re-engaging
concepts and events they had previously learned. The process was repeated until we reached the
end of the designated curriculum.
However, the district mandated that the only permissible mode of
instruction was a linear sequential approach starting at the “beginning” and
moving forward to the present. The
assistant superintendent explained in her letter to me that history is a story,
“And stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end.” Resumes are stories too. They are stories of sorts of our professional
lives yet they seem to go in chronological reverse. Wonder why that is?
The original
purpose for my reverse chronology was to help students gain a vested interest
in their education by making history relevant in their lives. They are more interested in what is affecting
them now than what occurred in the distant past. I believe it is a psychology maxim that
posits a necessity to understand the known before moving into the unknown. This was my original intent. Then I began to think about different
learning styles.
I know that we all learn in different
ways. Some of us are right-brained
abstract random. Some of us are
left-brained linear sequential, But, it was at a multicultural conference at
the end of last school year that it hit me.
I was listening to Peggy McIntosh, author of “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” and two of
the participants in the film, “Color of Fear”, a poignant and hard-hitting
documentary about racism. As they were sharing their experiences, I began to
wonder if the learning styles of students of color may be adversely affected by
the euro-centric linear sequential
teaching methodology traditionally used in U.S. History classes. If so, could this hegemonic approach be
perpetuating a cultural and instructional bias in our schools?
During a break, I
introduced myself to them and posed the question. I was rewarded by their consensus of
agreement. McIntosh was especially
adamant about how many American Indian students’ holistic approach to learning
comes in direct conflict with a teaching style that is only linear
sequential. The power of this statement
made me realize that by mandating the traditional linear instructional
strategy, my school district is perhaps, and maybe innocently and naively,
promoting a discriminatory teaching practice that is having an adverse affect
on an untold number of students who learn in diverse ways, and not just
American Indians.
But, I had trouble
with the innocent part. My superiors in
the district are given the task of providing a learning environment conducive
to meeting the educational needs of all students. They are paid handsomely and I expect them to
be consciously aware of the reality that not all students learn the same way
and therefore, in order to meet the educational needs of all students, there
should be learning environments where those needs are being met. And, the instructional strategies should be
“research-based.” There is abundant
research-based data concerning this issue that finds when students who do not
think or learn in a linear fashion are subjected to linear-sequential teaching,
their weaknesses are being promoted over their strengths.
On the other-hand,
maybe the alleged mission statement is simply rhetoric. Perhaps these officials are truly unknowingly
unaware of student learning issues because this is a district that is
predominately white and they can conveniently mandate a Western oriented
curriculum and instructional strategies.
As such, they can simply assume that students of color, who are
over-represented in special education classes and produce the greatest
percentage of dropouts, are the victims of a variety of social maladies. Well, what if one of these social maladies is
an ill-conceived mandate perpetuating a mode of instruction that ignores
diverse learning styles and leaves teachers and students in an instructional
jail?
