Are you saying we need understanding of foundational skills, then we can explore questions that require critical thinking and have no definitive “right/wrong” answers? If so I agree. As a teacher who recently left teaching 4th grade in the public schools. In my experience, I saw schools emphasizing inquiry before basic skills mastery. By basic skills I mean fluent reading, math facts, and other widely agreed upon knowledge. This winds up creating a frustrating situation where the powers that be want kids to do inquiry with no basic skills. It’s like telling someone how to build a house when they do not know how to use a hammer and drill. My point? In the lower grades (K-4) the ratio of foundational skills learning to inquiry should start somewhere around 4 to 1 and increase incrementally. Then by 5th grade you should be able to do about 50-50 foundational skills to inquiry lessons. The upper grades (6-12) is where inquiry can be a much larger chunk of education. What we see now are upper grade teachers having to go back and reteach basic knowledge that was not properly mastered, because lower grade teachers are told to put too much emphasis on inquiry at the expense of foundational skills mastery. Neuroscience shows the brain needs different types of learning as it develops. Right now, the system is pushing a type of learning in the lower grades that most of their brains are not ready to tackle. Then when they are older and ready to tackle inquiry, they lack the prerequisite knowledge to do so effectively. In my opinion, this is when people are ripe for faulty political ideas and movements (on either side). Adults who lack the tools of basic knowledge do not have the tools to build a house of logical reasoning through inquiry. Instead they fall for faulty logic, charlatans, and political rhetoric of self-serving politicians.
There's a false binary here that I think is important to push back on between inquiry teaching OR foundational knowledge. Yes, inquiry teaching, done poorly, often lacks knowledge in a way that's problematic for many reasons but inquiry teaching done well includes those foundational skills you mention and/or significant content and knowledge. My assertion is that we need to do inquiry teaching well, moving away from pedagogy that sacrifices those kinds of opportunities, which will build those learnings and help develop the inquiry skills that would help us better navigate our polarized landscape.
And my assertion is that we need to do foundational teaching well, because we are not, and THAT is the single biggest issue facing academic achievement today. To your point, the strawman argument need not be used here, about how it must be one or the other. Good instruction requires both. My point is quite clear: the first step in good instruction is not being taken, and no amount of inquiry will fix that. In fact, what researchers, and educators, much smarter than either you or I have already determined, "the best" form of teaching, is actually a bit of inquiry (20%) mixed with a whole bunch of direct instruction (80%)...something that is currently being switched in most elementary classrooms. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/education/our-insights/how-to-improve-student-educational-outcomes-new-insights-from-data-analytics Furthermore, inquiry learning is much, much harder to implement than more direct methods systemwide. And doing poorly, which it's currently being done, is a disaster. Just use the method that's more successful, and stop blaming the teachers.
Foundational teaching can, and should, be done with inquiry. You'll get no argument from me about many of your assertions but leaning into a culture of achievement over one of teaching and learning is leaving our students, turned adults, less capable of navigating our polarization well.
I was going to write a comment then read yours and you have said it for me, thank you. The way a child learns, and thinks, is much different than an adult, and we haven’t had “rigid” curriculum guidelines for decades. We are seeing more and more kids progressing through school that don’t know basic arithmetic, or how to read. Fix this first, and do it via mastery and tons of practice. It is the ONLY way forward
I work with schools around the world and I've seen curriculum that is very rigid in some places and places where the curriculum is wide open. Regardless, this isn't mostly a curriculum issue but an approach in pedagogy. I'm currently reading the latest two books by Paul Kirschner (noted in your link) for an upcoming podcast discussion with him and it is important not to conflate inquiry teaching and PBL with discovery learning which they often do. Inquiry teaching when done well includes loads of direct/explicit instruction and structure.
point me one nation that has done well on the international stage which employs inquiry based instruction? Because all I see at the top, are those countries who have been using a lot of explicit instruction incorporated in their curriculum standards for the past 20-30 years. https://factsmaps.com/pisa-2018-worldwide-ranking-average-score-of-mathematics-science-reading/ Those, that did, and now aren't (like my country, Canada), are experiencing a huge decline and even larger gaps between the haves and have nots https://www.cdhowe.org/sites/default/files/2021-12/Commentary_576.pdf. For those successful nations, look a little deeper, and what you will find, is a whole ton of direct instruction being employed at the primary level, so that kids are more easily and readily able to then move into inquiry based instruction.
And it doesn't matter how you try and name it, whether it be inquiry, or discovery, or 21st century, etc. If the methodology being used isn't explicit at the elementary level, it's inferior. So please do not lecture me about not conflating one with the other. I've heard it all before, and the results bear out how it's NOT working. So instead of going on about how teachers are getting it all wrong, maybe focus on what is missing in our kids' learning environment first, so teachers and ed schools can start to get it right.
I basically agree with this. However, I am bothered that it still seems to present inquiry vs. knowledge as an either/or choice rather than as conjoined. Here's an example I was just reading about. There are plans apparently to introduce a pitch clock to speed up baseball games. Very good topic for heated "inquiry," right? Except that ONLY if you know a heck of a lot of detail about baseball, pitching, the distance to the mound, the typical speed of pitches, the reasons pitchers and batters delay, etc. etc. Without a good deal of content knowledge, there is no way you can engage in anything remotely like the "rich inquiry" this rightly endorses.
Another somewhat problem I have with this is the implication that the conservative solution to ideological manipulation in schools is to simply stress knowledge learning. Yes, many conservatives do stress that, but it is simply wrong to suggest that is all they stress. And it is equally wrong to imply that the left favors inquiry over knowledge. The left that is ascendant now, via DEI etc. is in fact opposed to inquiry every bit as much as some traditionalist who want the kids to memorize the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere. It should have been more clearly stated here that the advocates of the 1619 project, for instance, absolutely do NOT want an even-handed debate about 1619 vs. 1776. They do not want their Privilege Pyramids questioned and debated, they want them accepted and imposed on all. They do not want the challenging give and take this article rightly supports. They want passive acceptance.
My intention is indeed to advocate for a pedagogical approach that conjoins those things, perhaps that's more clear in the pieces I linked to which unpack the teaching practices with more depth. I also didn't intend to imply that conservatives think knowledge is the solution to ideological manipulation although one of the other people replying to this piece seems to be making something similar to that argument. Nor do I think the ideological left you refer to is healthily open to criticism and inquiry. In fact I find illiberalism on both left and right to be an increasing danger.
No worries, it's difficult to clarify every loose end and because I've written more directly about those things in the linked articles I didn't expound here.
Are you saying we need understanding of foundational skills, then we can explore questions that require critical thinking and have no definitive “right/wrong” answers? If so I agree. As a teacher who recently left teaching 4th grade in the public schools. In my experience, I saw schools emphasizing inquiry before basic skills mastery. By basic skills I mean fluent reading, math facts, and other widely agreed upon knowledge. This winds up creating a frustrating situation where the powers that be want kids to do inquiry with no basic skills. It’s like telling someone how to build a house when they do not know how to use a hammer and drill. My point? In the lower grades (K-4) the ratio of foundational skills learning to inquiry should start somewhere around 4 to 1 and increase incrementally. Then by 5th grade you should be able to do about 50-50 foundational skills to inquiry lessons. The upper grades (6-12) is where inquiry can be a much larger chunk of education. What we see now are upper grade teachers having to go back and reteach basic knowledge that was not properly mastered, because lower grade teachers are told to put too much emphasis on inquiry at the expense of foundational skills mastery. Neuroscience shows the brain needs different types of learning as it develops. Right now, the system is pushing a type of learning in the lower grades that most of their brains are not ready to tackle. Then when they are older and ready to tackle inquiry, they lack the prerequisite knowledge to do so effectively. In my opinion, this is when people are ripe for faulty political ideas and movements (on either side). Adults who lack the tools of basic knowledge do not have the tools to build a house of logical reasoning through inquiry. Instead they fall for faulty logic, charlatans, and political rhetoric of self-serving politicians.
Thanks for reading my opinion…
logical.lady1776@gmail.com
There's a false binary here that I think is important to push back on between inquiry teaching OR foundational knowledge. Yes, inquiry teaching, done poorly, often lacks knowledge in a way that's problematic for many reasons but inquiry teaching done well includes those foundational skills you mention and/or significant content and knowledge. My assertion is that we need to do inquiry teaching well, moving away from pedagogy that sacrifices those kinds of opportunities, which will build those learnings and help develop the inquiry skills that would help us better navigate our polarized landscape.
And my assertion is that we need to do foundational teaching well, because we are not, and THAT is the single biggest issue facing academic achievement today. To your point, the strawman argument need not be used here, about how it must be one or the other. Good instruction requires both. My point is quite clear: the first step in good instruction is not being taken, and no amount of inquiry will fix that. In fact, what researchers, and educators, much smarter than either you or I have already determined, "the best" form of teaching, is actually a bit of inquiry (20%) mixed with a whole bunch of direct instruction (80%)...something that is currently being switched in most elementary classrooms. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/education/our-insights/how-to-improve-student-educational-outcomes-new-insights-from-data-analytics Furthermore, inquiry learning is much, much harder to implement than more direct methods systemwide. And doing poorly, which it's currently being done, is a disaster. Just use the method that's more successful, and stop blaming the teachers.
Foundational teaching can, and should, be done with inquiry. You'll get no argument from me about many of your assertions but leaning into a culture of achievement over one of teaching and learning is leaving our students, turned adults, less capable of navigating our polarization well.
I was going to write a comment then read yours and you have said it for me, thank you. The way a child learns, and thinks, is much different than an adult, and we haven’t had “rigid” curriculum guidelines for decades. We are seeing more and more kids progressing through school that don’t know basic arithmetic, or how to read. Fix this first, and do it via mastery and tons of practice. It is the ONLY way forward
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1207/s15326985ep4102_1
I work with schools around the world and I've seen curriculum that is very rigid in some places and places where the curriculum is wide open. Regardless, this isn't mostly a curriculum issue but an approach in pedagogy. I'm currently reading the latest two books by Paul Kirschner (noted in your link) for an upcoming podcast discussion with him and it is important not to conflate inquiry teaching and PBL with discovery learning which they often do. Inquiry teaching when done well includes loads of direct/explicit instruction and structure.
point me one nation that has done well on the international stage which employs inquiry based instruction? Because all I see at the top, are those countries who have been using a lot of explicit instruction incorporated in their curriculum standards for the past 20-30 years. https://factsmaps.com/pisa-2018-worldwide-ranking-average-score-of-mathematics-science-reading/ Those, that did, and now aren't (like my country, Canada), are experiencing a huge decline and even larger gaps between the haves and have nots https://www.cdhowe.org/sites/default/files/2021-12/Commentary_576.pdf. For those successful nations, look a little deeper, and what you will find, is a whole ton of direct instruction being employed at the primary level, so that kids are more easily and readily able to then move into inquiry based instruction.
And it doesn't matter how you try and name it, whether it be inquiry, or discovery, or 21st century, etc. If the methodology being used isn't explicit at the elementary level, it's inferior. So please do not lecture me about not conflating one with the other. I've heard it all before, and the results bear out how it's NOT working. So instead of going on about how teachers are getting it all wrong, maybe focus on what is missing in our kids' learning environment first, so teachers and ed schools can start to get it right.
BTW when you're talking to Paul please say hello to him for me. Paul was one of the first who congratulated my friend and co-founder of WISE Math, Anna Stokke, for getting her report so very right when it came out in 2015. She made the 80/20 prediction years before the OECD did https://www.cdhowe.org/sites/default/files/attachments/research_papers/mixed/commentary_427.pdf.
I'm not lecturing you, I'm providing direct/explicit instruction. ;)
I basically agree with this. However, I am bothered that it still seems to present inquiry vs. knowledge as an either/or choice rather than as conjoined. Here's an example I was just reading about. There are plans apparently to introduce a pitch clock to speed up baseball games. Very good topic for heated "inquiry," right? Except that ONLY if you know a heck of a lot of detail about baseball, pitching, the distance to the mound, the typical speed of pitches, the reasons pitchers and batters delay, etc. etc. Without a good deal of content knowledge, there is no way you can engage in anything remotely like the "rich inquiry" this rightly endorses.
Another somewhat problem I have with this is the implication that the conservative solution to ideological manipulation in schools is to simply stress knowledge learning. Yes, many conservatives do stress that, but it is simply wrong to suggest that is all they stress. And it is equally wrong to imply that the left favors inquiry over knowledge. The left that is ascendant now, via DEI etc. is in fact opposed to inquiry every bit as much as some traditionalist who want the kids to memorize the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere. It should have been more clearly stated here that the advocates of the 1619 project, for instance, absolutely do NOT want an even-handed debate about 1619 vs. 1776. They do not want their Privilege Pyramids questioned and debated, they want them accepted and imposed on all. They do not want the challenging give and take this article rightly supports. They want passive acceptance.
My intention is indeed to advocate for a pedagogical approach that conjoins those things, perhaps that's more clear in the pieces I linked to which unpack the teaching practices with more depth. I also didn't intend to imply that conservatives think knowledge is the solution to ideological manipulation although one of the other people replying to this piece seems to be making something similar to that argument. Nor do I think the ideological left you refer to is healthily open to criticism and inquiry. In fact I find illiberalism on both left and right to be an increasing danger.
Thanks for clarifying on all this. I actually suspected you did feel this way. It just wasn't all that clear to me from the article.
No worries, it's difficult to clarify every loose end and because I've written more directly about those things in the linked articles I didn't expound here.