Making most teachers superb artisans in their classroom craft and individualizing instruction for 30-plus students have eluded policymakers, academics, and practitioners for well over a century. With the publication of Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College and the prototype “School of One” in New York City, progressive dreams of better teaching and personalized learning once again confront the realities of public schooling in the U.S.
First, Teach Like a Champion. A former Teach for America alumnus, Lemov studied and video-taped TFAers and veteran teachers in largely poor and minority schools who were successful in managing their classes and raising students’ test scores. He distilled what he learned from hundreds of teachers he observed into 49 techniques–he is explicit about the word “techniques,” making clear that teaching is a craft that can be learned and that these tools are associated with teacher success in urban schools.
Now, “School of One.” It is a one million dollar pilot after-school math program aimed at low-income minority middle school students that individualizes learning in 6th and 7th grade math by using virtual tutors, live teachers, and 1:1 laptops. As the program description says:
“[E]ach student receives a unique daily schedule based on his or her academic strengths and needs. As a result, students within the same school or even the same classroom can receive profoundly different instruction as each student’s schedule is tailored to the skills they need and the ways they best learn. Teachers acquire data about student achievement each day and then adapt their live instructional lessons accordingly.”
Started by a former TFAer, “School of One” depends upon the power of New York City Department of Education computers to use a complex algorithm for profiling each student’s strengths and weaknesses in math, matching the appropriate lesson to each student, and sending it immediately to the student, one-to-one tutor, and teacher. The pilot will become a full-fledged middle school program in September 2010.
While progressive teacher education professors and K-3 teachers may wince at most of the teacher-directed techniques Doug Lemov champions, many new and veteran teachers in urban schools watch the videos and read the text carefully for clues to improving their daily lessons. While progressive-minded academics and teachers may shrink at the technological command-and-control that the district office’s “algorithm” has in tailoring each math lesson to a particular student or the downsized role that teachers play in such a program, certain students (and parents) relish the individual attention they receive.
What contemporary progressive-minded teachers and administrators who continue to cope with the standards-based accountability and testing movement have to remember is that the deep well from which early 20th century progressives drank not only included John Dewey but also Edward Thorndike, an early behaviorist psychologist and expert in testing.
If one wing of these early progressives were pedagogical pioneers advocating project-based learning, student-centered activities, and daily links to the world outside of the classroom, another wing of the same movement were efficiency-minded, “administrative progressives,” who admired the then corporate leaders of large organizations committed to both efficiency and effectiveness–Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, General Motors. Thorndike at Columbia University’s Teachers College, Ellwood P. Cubberley at Stanford and other academics, borrowing heavily from business leaders, counted and measured everything in schools and classrooms under the flag of “scientific management.” They wanted to make teachers efficient in delivering lessons to 40-plus students sitting behind bolted-down desks with the newest technologies of the time–testing, film, radio. They created checklists for principals to evaluate teachers and monitor their buildings; checklists for superintendents to gauge district performance including where every penny was spent.
A century ago, this efficiency-minded wing of the progressive movement overwhelmed the pedagogical progressives. Thorndike trumped Dewey. And they are back again in Teach Like a Champion and the “School of One.” This time around they wear the clothes of educational entrepreneurs. They tout scientific studies, lust for cutting minutes off tasks, and recruit MBAs to manage districts and schools.
So there are no more culture wars between progressives and traditionalists–that is a media-hyped concoction. What exists now is a re-emergence of the efficiency-minded “administrative progressives” from a century ago who, as entrepreneurs, now challenge the educational establishment to become competitive and more market-like. If there is a “war” it is between two century-old wings of educational progressives–it is a family fight.
* I thank Arthur Evenchik for suggesting that I take another look at progressives vs. traditionalists in light of Teach Like a Champion. Of course, he is not responsible for my interpretations.