Stupidification (n): 1. A deadly illness in which perfectly good ideas and processes are killed as a result of thoughtless interpretation and implementation. 2. The reducing of intricate issues and processes to simplistic, rigid, and mandated policies, in the impatient quest for quick fixes to complex problems.
No, it’s not a real definition, but it’s one sorely needed in education, don’t you think?
Over the course of my 40 years in education I have seen one great idea, process, approach, or program completely stupidified in witless mandates. It’s like a bad game of Telephone: what often starts out as a sensible notion ends up down the line as nonsense. The sensible idea of tests of achievement that are valid, reliable, and efficient gave us the monster of test prep as the de facto curriculum. The need for equipping isolated teachers with helpful materials gave rise to 500-page textbooks and the absurd view held by too many that a teacher’s job is to “cover” what’s in it.
This is not a new phenomenon. Long ago, John Dewey’s insightful guidance in How We Think was turned into a rigid step-by-step method of “thinking.” Noteworthy was that Dewey termed it reflective thinking but most writers after Dewey dropped the adjective. Much of the worst of the critical thinking literature is based on this kind of reductionism: a simplistic focus on logical reasoning and logical fallacies, and a mini-course in logic – though Dewey endlessly argued against reducing his method to learning logic or steps.
Similarly, Madeline Hunter developed a perfectly sensible way of describing lessons, their structure, and a design process in support of it – only to have it bastardized and stuffed down the throats of teachers by thoughtless administrators. I often saw fast-moving and stern supervisors walking in and out of classrooms, with their clipboards of Hunter-esque checklists looking for the precise ‘anticipatory set’ that was mapped out and standardized at the district office with God knows what rationale.
Now, we see the same thing with Standards: in many schools you have to post the Standard being “learned” in today’s lesson on the board. With my own eyes and ears, I have even heard teachers asking students to repeat after them: What Standard are we working on today, boys and girls? Standard 6.3.a.1. I am not making this up. This is like the cargo-cult people in the South Pacific described by Richard Feynman.
Alas, I have seen my own work made similarly rigid and simplistic. In many schools doing teachers must post the Essential Question for the current lesson on the board– despite the fact that we specifically recommend against EQs for lessons and that the whole idea is to help students internalize the question so as to ask it independently moving forward.
Looking back and forward on the theme of thoughtlessness. I bring all this up now because in looking back over last year’s posts as part of my first annual stock-taking of this blog, I saw that thoughtlessness in education was a regular feature. Whether it was decrying the fixation on filling in boxes on “the” template, clarifying what genuine formative assessment and pacing really are (vs. dumb one-shot interim tests now routinely done under this banner in many districts), explaining the difference between transfer and prompted learning, cautioning against confusing feedback with evaluation or advice, or lambasting the witless use of Value-Added Models in teacher evaluation, many of my posts were variants on the lament.
Looming on the horizon are predictable stupidifications of a few current worthwhile ideas related to the Common Core Standards:
- Conflating standards with a curriculum framework (explicitly warned against in the Common Core materials, but already happening)
- Confusing valid alignment to standards with a thoughtless check off mentality where we find a way to keep doing favored activities and lessons if they seem in any way related to the Standard.
- Mimicking the format of the standardized test in local assessments instead of its rigor
- Assuming that without changing local grading that external standards will somehow be met
- Ignoring the basic premise of Mastery Learning: assuming that somehow all or most students will meet standards even if everyone has the same fixed amount of time in which to meet them.
Hints for avoiding stupidification moving forward. The key to avoiding thoughtless policies and mindless acceptance of them is to ask questions: your mentor is Socrates (or Feynman) and your touchstone is the child in the Emperor’s New Clothes. The key question is: Why? Because when practice becomes unmoored from purpose, rigidity sets in. Consider the following set of questions as a stupidification antidote:
- Why are we implementing this practice or policy? If that’s the reason or purpose for the practice, how might we alter the practice or policy to better achieve our goals?
- Must this practice be mandated? Or need it only be recommended as one way among many to achieve the goal? Example: the point of posting the Standard or EQ is to help students know where the lesson is going; that should be the mandate, if anything. There are many ways other than posting the Standard or EQ to achieve it: a hand-out with goals and rubrics for the unit, the placing of goals on assignment sheets, even constant verbal reminders, etc.
- Is this practice and/or policy improving things? If not, how might we improve practice and/or policy? (The goal is not compliance but results).
Please post any stupidifications you have been subject to in your school or district in reply.
16 Responses
Here’s a stupidification I ran across TODAY: Only specific people (the certifiers of those people shall remain nameless) were allowed to run a book club in a school. The person organizing the book club did not know this and was forced to cancel it.
Curriculum units with standards already tagged on the assessments for “alignment” so teachers never have to read or understand the actual standard, thus ensuring the assessment will not be “aligned”
I agree that having the students name and number the CCSS Content Standard they are learning does not help in their understanding of the concepts inherent in the standard. However, I do see the value of teachers and students being aware of the 8 Standards for Mathematical Practice and recognizing when a particular Practice Standard is being used. Being cognizant of them is the first step in helping students make them a regular habit as they approach math problems.
I’d prefer to see some more specific examples of what you’re talking about in reference to the Common Core. It seems to me that in ELA the standards come pre-stupified. I suspect a lot of the problems are a result of bad design of the standards.
Unlike Tom H., I like the ELA standards, especially in that they specifically define grade-level skill variants of each anchor standard. This clear progression of the developing complexity of a skill or understanding paints a picture of a student over time, and helps teachers see progress and plan for differentiation by readiness.
Sometimes that structure works but it is too rigid to actually apply consistently. They constantly have to stretch and twist to fit things into those anchor standards or distort the meaning of the anchors, and applying the full set at multiple grade levels across four types of texts makes these standards incredibly verbose for their relatively narrow scope.
The post reminds me of the language of “learning targets” a fine idea for helping students see clearly what they need to do in oder to know if they have reached the learning destination (goal). But I have seen some descriptions that are SO SPECIFIC with several steps for students that I fear their eyes will glaze.
Inclusion. Whole Language. Phonics. Anything to do with Special Education…. Brain-based learning…
I’m struck by the line “looking back over last year’s posts as part of my first annual stock-taking of this blog, I saw that thoughtlessness in education was a regular feature”.
It makes me think of all the activity books and textbooks that are redesigned and sold as new to “hit the Common Core.” There is obviously a market for these materials.
If teachers/administrators are relying on these “new” materials to teach Common Core, one of two things is true:
1. They want to let companies/others do the thinking for them, or
2. They fear that the things they create will not be good enough.
I tend to think the second is more prevalent than the first. I haven’t used textbooks in over 10 years – my colleagues and I create everything. I didn’t have the confidence to do that myself until I was in a school culture that encouraged and expected innovation.
And even so, my colleagues and I got stuff wrong. We adopted UbD and abused the EQs and EUs as you described. It took years for us to develop and align useful common assessments. We went from objectives that were too vague to objectives that were too specific and back again.
More and more, I believe that PD in curriculum/instruction/assessment need to operate much like the workshop model of reading and writing operates. A knowledgeable school leader should give a continuous series of mini-lessons. Teachers practice in their class and get peer/coach feedback. Even the most talented teachers in the world need opportunities to build capacity for increasingly effective teaching.
I found myself nodding vigorously the entire time I was reading this. How about the stupidification that is expecting students who have already failed a math course when they had an actual teacher to master and understand said course on a computer? Or writing lesson plans that include the standard, the open and close for the lesson (I.e “Today you will learn to calculate the slope between two points. You’ll know you get it if you can find the slope between two points”) and the real kicker – the district improvement goal addressed by the lesson (for which there is only one goal that even remotely applies), so you just end up copying and pasting “1A” over and over again.
Having been a WASC coordinator twice I’ve had to camp with the enemy far too often. Stupidification happens because:
1. Everything we do must be systematic- no single child or teacher can’t do that thing that is the flavor of the school year or else we are being unfair to the kids who aren’t getting that treatment.
2. Admins and State observers don’t have time to actually sit in your class for a whole period or gosh the same period for two consecutive days. So they need a checklist. This checklist is not for the kids. It is to cover their own behinds from their bosses above.
3. If an Admin can implement a new flavor of the year then they can add to their professional resume. Without newly implemented programs their resumes look very sparse indeed.
The Common Core, of course, offers lots of new opportunities for stupidification. My current favorite is the endless breaking down of the standards into “learning objectives” (a process paralleled in many school districts). One company boasts that they’ve “simplified” the Common Core by breaking it into 1540 objectives. A second company tops that, with 1800. Simpler? Maybe. Stupider? Undoubtedly.
Why are so few people challenging the idea that breaking complex ideas and performances into their (alleged) component parts, then teaching the parts, won’t yield students who can deal with complexity? If a (make believe) music standard called for students to be able to play a set of piano pieces well with regard to rhythm, accuracy, volume, and phrasing, we would simply break that down. Can the student play with the appropriate rhythm? Check. Can she hit the notes accurately? Check. Can she play with all of the key elements simultaneously, to produce beautiful music for an audience? Oh– the learning objectives never ask anyone to put those pieces together in rich performances.
If we’re going to take full advantage of the CCSS, we’ll need to resist the temptation to simplify/stupdify them by turning them into checklists of basic knowledge and skill and teaching and testing against those checklists. Otherwise, we’re likely to hear the same call and response that we heard in that Mississippi classroom: teacher question: What objective are we learning? Students in unison: 1347!
Years ago I was a mentor to student teachers from PSU. Having received my teaching credential from University of California, Riverside, I was was versed in Madeline Hunter’s work. The student teacher supervisor and I had conversations about why here students were so opposed to Hunter’s “canned” lesson plans.
I offered to present at seminar. I structured the whole presentation using Madeline Hunters 7 steps and the student teachers were highly engaged. At the end, I told them to analyze the presentation using Hunter’s model.
I hope that many of them realized that incorporating concepts requires that one not stupify but modify.
At last a voice of reason among educators who believe differentiation is fundamental to student learning and yet adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to teachers’ instruction. Well said, in this case, is better than well done. Will anyone listen to you in Washington?
Washington is not the problem…okay, wait…Washington is the problem, but Washington is us. Stuff happens in Washington because we are who we are. I’m completely aware that this is not a helpful comment, but I am K-12 administrative staff…what would you expect? I mean, really.
Having been a special education teacher for over 10 years I have found that federal or district leaders have to come up with new ideas or buzz words to make it look like they are doing their jobs. They never come into a regular classrooms and actually try to put their ideas into practice to see if the buzz words/ideas work. This is an example of Stupidification because the only reason we keep implementing new ideas and concepts is so
Administrators, Federal or State observers just come up with these new ideas to save their jobs and to add to their professional resumes. Without newly implemented programs their resumes look very sparse indeed.
I do believe that education has to change and evolve to keep up with the 21st Century standards, but I also think that teachers should have more input on these new ideas.