Has Learning Been Forgotten in Rush to Reform?
The revelation recently that a large proportion of LAUSD students scored below average in a standardized test of basic skills prompted all the typical responses, including the tired litany of possible solutions. Reorganize the school district, change the governance, increase the number of days in the school year, chimed frustrated parents and educators.
Meanwhile, proponents of such well-intended reform efforts as LEARN in the Los Angeles Unified School District and the $53-million Los Angeles Annenberg Metropolitan Project (LAAMP) for all Los Angeles County schools promised that their approaches would provide the necessary fix.
But should we feel confident that schools will get better with any currently proposed reform effort? As an educational psychologist, I’m certainly not confident.
Insufficient attention has been given to the most important factor influencing school performance--the quality of teaching and learning in classrooms. Until we realize that some reform activities have little impact on improving teaching and learning, we will continue to be disappointed by test scores and other objective measures of students’ ability to compete in the world.
Barry Zimmerman, an educational psychologist at City College of New York, has looked at the failures of past reform movements in education and found that students too often play a reactive role in these processes. “Learning,” he concluded, “is not something that happens to students; it is something that happens by students.” That is, it is not changes in the curriculum, facilities and governance that make a difference in school learning, it is what students themselves do to improve their own learning.
Too much classroom instruction is based on outdated modes of transmitting information. Students passively listen to teachers, take notes, complete rote homework exercises, memorize the material and give it back on tests. Many educational researchers now realize that students can do a great deal to promote their own learning through the use of different learning and motivational strategies. New models of instruction place as much value on teaching students how to learn as telling them what to learn.
Successful students know how to take effective notes, how to read textbooks, plan their use of time, control their own attention and motivation, restructure their study environments, seek help when necessary and devise study plans to prepare for examinations. These students realize that to be successful, they must take charge of their own learning.
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Think about the array of tools a plumber brings to each job. If he arrived with only a few wrenches or pliers, he wouldn’t be able to get many jobs completed. Just as there are different tools for different jobs, there are different learning skills for different academic tasks. Learners need a large number of “tools” to make schoolwork easier and increase their probability of success.
Many students who have difficulty learning in school attribute their problem to a lack of ability, when their actual problem is that they have never been taught how to learn. Some students use one or two major learning skills for all tasks in all courses. These students often don’t have the necessary tools to learn the material they encounter in required courses.
We will continue to fail in our attempts to reform schools unless we consider ways to directly improve the quality of learning in classrooms. Students should be asked to set individual goals, formulate plans to attain them and be taught how to become more independent learners. Reform activities such as school governance, accountability and assessment, professional development of teachers, parental involvement and improvement in school facilities must be viewed as supportive, not primary, activities. If we fail to improve learning, nothing else matters.
