President's Message - Winter 2009

DISCERNMENT AND EDUCATIONAL PRACTICE

Rick Brigham
George Mason University

Why do we educate? A great deal of what should be done in education falls out of the way that we decide that question. My answer for quite a while has been to promote good judgment. I recently heard a group of medical practitioners discussing the same issue, but from a slightly different angle. The question they were examining was roughly: What is the need for all of this medical training when people can just go on the Internet and figure out what they need?

According to the physicians, individuals who believe that they are exhibiting problematic symptoms can enter their list of symptoms into a search engine and reach web pages that describe diseases and conditions that carry those symptoms as well as treatments that might be indicated.

There is no problem with the public taking a more active role in their health care. In fact, said the physicians, it has the potential to be a very positive thing. However, many, many health issues are associated with constellations of minor symptoms - symptoms that appear across a wide variety of dissimilar maladies. A naive listing of symptoms without the clinical judgment to interpret the symptoms leads many people to falsely conclude that they are suffering from a serious illness with which they are unafflicted. In fact, the panel members noted that nearly 70% of beginning medical school students conclude that they are afflicted by an as yet undiagnosed but serious illness after reading of the symptomology - a conclusion that usually proves to be incorrect. Medical training, in addition to amassing a sufficient store of declarative and procedural information to make correct decisions must, in the view of the panel members, be mediated by practitioners who possess the ability to discern evidence of problems from the masses of information that people present about themselves. This type of judgment requires a great deal of clinical practice to develop. Despite the need for medical personnel and resulting pressure to shorten training programs, particularly the clinical experiences, these panelists made a convincing case that the demands of the profession justify the rigor of the training.

As the member of the medical panel discussed the potentials and problems that ready access to a great deal of information provides, I was struck by the similarity of the issues raised by ready access to information and the dissimilarity of the response in the medical profession and our own. Like the medical profession, we now have more people with ready access to information that had, in the past, been the domain of professional learning. Legislators agree that teachers should be highly qualified to engage in their craft. Rather than concluding that their craft is the organization, delivery and evaluation of instruction, however, they appear to have concluded that the craft is knowing content knowledge. As a result, teacher-training programs are truncated in favor of college-level classes in arts and sciences. Courses in methods of instruction and assessment are present but often as a smaller proportion of the training program than other areas of education. The clinical experiences that enable physicians to acquire the judgment or discernment to engage in effective practice are often bypassed in education licensing arrangements established by state departments of education that are under severe pressure to produce more classroom personnel. Such training programs would undermine the status of any other profession, yet they are often presented to the public as correctives to the problems facing education. It is difficult to understand how changes in a training program that would undermine one profession would enhance the status of another . . .

In the age of immediate access to information - information that is often fragmented, incomplete and even wrong - professional training is even more important than ever before. Parents and even other professionals who seek information on the internet about problems that they face with their children or students often present their findings to special education teachers and school personnel, insisting that the suggestions be written in IEPs or incorporated into classroom routines. Teachers and administrators regularly tell me that they go along with these suggestions because they either do not know what else to do or they simply don't know how to help others make better educational judgments.

Classroom personnel trained in the arts and sciences can discern legitimate from less compelling claims on the curriculum. Few attempts to have sciences classes teach that the sun moves about the earth would get very far. In the age of standards-based curricula, what is taught and when it is taught is outside of the influence of most classroom personnel. The standards tell what to teach and most schools have pacing guides that tell the teacher exactly what must be covered in each unit of time. Ironically, as the teacher influence over what is taught diminishes, their content requirements increase and their methods and measures requirements in their training programs diminish. Our attention to discernment in the areas under our influence is, thus diminished, and our profession undermined.

Doubt me? Here is an informal test you can try for yourself. Identify the areas of instructional research for which members of CEC-DR are known and ask special education teachers in the schools what they know about employing those methods in the classroom and how often they do so.  Rather the hearing about the virtues of self-regulated strategy instruction, or mnemonics, or integration of effective instruction with optimal behavior management procedures, you will probably hear about learning styles, self-esteem, or some other poorly supported or discredited approach to instruction. It is unfair to blame the teachers for this sad report. In the absence of clear ideas of what to do, such ineffective ideas are better than nothing and provide the illusion of proactive response to problems in learning and behavior. Better training with more clear focus on effective techniques and well-managed clinical experiences could help decrease the need to rely on foolish and pseudoscientific notions that are often suggested and supported by searches on the Internet or other informal information sources. Increasing the professionalism of our training experiences is likely to increase the ability of professional educators to engage in discernment as they select and implement more supported approaches to classroom instruction.

On the eve of a new federal administration, our chances of reclaiming professional training to focus on effective instruction, measuring our outcomes clearly and managing behaviors efficiently are stronger now than in a great number of years. Communicating the need for increased support for professional training to the administration and legislators as they consider the educational problems facing the nation can be a useful step in the right direction, if we discern the opportunity for action.