Janet Whitla on the Evolution of EDC's ThinkingSections of this article:The Importance of Healthy Development IntroductionIn 1965, David Hawkins headed into a fifth grade classroom to begin teaching and field-testing an Elementary Science Study (ESS) unit on pendulums. The unit began with a two-hour period in which students explored the pendulums on their own, with little guidance. As it turned out, those two hours proved so successful—and so fascinating for Hawkins—that he let the explorations run for several weeks. Hawkins watched with pleasure as students devised pendulum experiments using various strings, weights, and conditions—including an underwater pendulum of their own creation. Eventually, Hawkins and his EDC partners stepped in to offer guidance and to structure some follow-up experiments. But it was that initial period of unguided exploration that captured his imagination and spurred him to write an essay titled "Messing About"1:
The legacy of "messing about" can be seen in countless EDC projects over the years. But there is an equally clear history of EDC researchers questioning the value of too much "unguided exploratory work." In 1997, for example, Karen Worth and her colleagues in the Center for Science Education drew a clear distinction between "messing about" and "inquiry-based teaching" in the book Foundations: The Challenge and Promise of K-8 Science Education Reform2:
Worth writes from the vantage point of a researcher who has seen a lot of attempts at "messing about" fall quite short of Hawkins' pendulum experiments. While she was heavily influenced by many of his ideas about good science education, she believes that Hawkins and his colleagues overlooked some key classroom realities. "Hawkins, Morrison, and Zacharias3 were my conscience when I was working on the Insights [K-12 science] curriculum," says Worth. "They created a piece of the vision that we all still hold—and I hope we stayed true to their vision of child-centered learning. "The trouble with ESS, however, was that it created an idealized version of the classroom," Worth continues. "It assumed a teacher adept at child-centered learning—and a teacher willing to tolerate lots of mess. It also assumed a classroom without standards, without high-stakes tests, and without all the pressures for accountability that we face today." Worth adds that ESS faced a very different set of political pressures than we deal with today: "In the sixties, the emphasis was on developing a new generation of scientists to compete with the Russians and Sputnik; today, we're focusing more on all students and on the value of science education for citizenship." The evolution from EDC's curriculum work in the sixties to EDC today is a story of both continuity and critique. From its earliest days, EDC championed a vision of an active learner provided with excellent materials, guidance, and the autonomy to pursue important questions within a discipline. That vision still remains at the center of EDC's work—in projects addressing adult learners as well as children—but our focus and our research have broadened considerably. While Hawkins spent weeks observing the interactions of children and pendulums, his counterparts today are equally likely to be studying district decisionmaking, parental involvement, technology infrastructure, or health issues affecting students' ability to learn. "The best thing that has happened to education reform in the past several decades is the focus on systemic issues, on district-wide reform," says Judith Opert Sandler, director of the Center for Science Education. "EDC and our funders used to focus on curriculum as the place to make change in schools. Teaching and learning are still at the center of our work, but we no longer see curriculum as the main vehicle for change—particularly in the resource-poor urban and rural schools we work with. We focus on getting the leadership of these districts to understand the value of high-quality science education, and, just as important, we help them develop the requisite human and financial supports to build and sustain their programs." In addition to paying increasing attention to the whole-district environment, EDC also takes a more holistic view of the learner. Janet Whitla, EDC President (1981–2006), says that our growing emphasis on the health and developmental needs of the learner is the "most profound change" she has seen in her more than 25 years at EDC. In a recent interview with Dan Tobin, director of communications at EDC, Whitla reflected on EDC's evolution from a curriculum development laboratory to a global organization focused on learning and human development across the lifespan. Parallel CurriculaDan Tobin: In your afterword to the book The Diagnostic Teacher, you use the phrase "teacher-proof curriculum" to describe some of the early EDC projects. What did you mean by that—and how have we changed the ways in which we work with teachers? Janet Whitla: Your question reminds me of my early days here. I can remember a large EDC meeting when I was just a young sprite, a research assistant, and the director of the social studies program was talking about the need to prepare teachers to teach MACOS [Man: A Course of Study]. Peter Dow said something like, "Well, we can retrain the teachers." And I thought Jerrold Zacharias, who was sitting across the aisle, was going to fall off his chair. He said, "Retrain the teachers? That sounds like you're retreading old tires!" Then he added, "We don't use that kind of language here." The idea of teacher-proof curriculum was a very short-lived one. It came up because people—mostly from the outside—looked at our lesson plans and said, "This looks like a teacher-proof curriculum." But that was not a phrase anyone here felt comfortable with. And perhaps it helped move us toward the idea of a parallel curriculum for teachers, which means that if you're going to introduce entirely new subject matter—such as anthropology into the elementary school classroom—or multi-disciplinary ways to examine issues, then you also have to provide teachers with an adequate education in the methodology of those disciplines. Now we take that a step further, and we co-construct curricula with teachers. DT: There is a perception I hear about EDC's history that suggests that the "founding fathers" were more comfortable in the ivory tower than in the classroom. JW: Actually, every EDC program was endlessly tested in the real-life classroom, starting with PSSC Physics. Still, the very fact that academics were leading the early EDC teams gave the impression—and there was certainly truth to it—that the ideas of the academy were prevailing. The academicians were immersed in cutting-edge knowledge about experimentation, pedagogy, source materials. They were trying to break new ground. Everything they did—their way of talking, their extensive use of source materials and very erudite research—was unfamiliar in schools of that day. And it's true that they often didn't have a good grasp on what teaching was really like in a typical elementary school. For some teachers who worked with them, it was the most exciting intervention that had ever occurred; other teachers felt that the professors were trying to take over the classroom in the public school. Content and PedagogyDT: And their expertise wasn't just in physics, but also in pedagogy—in the way the material was taught? JW: Yes, in the sense that they wanted students to have access to original source material. They wanted to move beyond the textbook—which is one writer's view of reality—and present students with five different firsthand opinions. And then they would ask, "What do you make of this?" That was the kind of learning that only students in elite colleges tended to have access to. They wanted to bring that kind of learning to all kids. These "founding fathers" (and they were all men) really believed that you could bring the very best practices and materials to everyone if you translated them into language that students and teachers could work with. And in fact that's where the role of the practitioner was so important in the early EDC work. Very early on, we developed the concept of what we called the "working party," which was a group made up of academics, scholars, and researchers, combined with teachers and artists and people with a diversity of skills. Their goal was to determine the best way to reach young people with this body of information, knowledge, and methodology. DT: So they recognized the need to merge content and pedagogy. In the book Foundations, our science center staff lament the fact that a lot of education debates seem to assume that pedagogy and content are always in conflict. They see that as a false dichotomy. JW: I've always loved that Brunerian4 statement that "curriculum is the endeavor par excellence where the line between materials and methods grows necessarily indistinct." In other words, each discipline has certain methodologies that best help to explore it. And so, pedagogy is inevitably linked to whatever it is you're studying. Unfortunately, many educators persist in pursuing the dichotomy—rather than trying to find the integration of the two. There seem to be people on one side calling for meta-level thinking, and on the other side, there are people calling for teaching a set of facts—while ignoring that facts without a methodological framing don't add up to much, and vice versa. DT: It seems people prefer to engage in the debate rather than move forward. If you put forward something new in pedagogy or method, people say you don't care about content—and vice versa. JW: Exactly. It leaves you with the vision of two ineffective teachers. You either have a teacher standing up in front of the classroom and lecturing, with kids simply memorizing and taking notes. Or, you have a teacher who is a kind of "hale fellow, well met." He or she puts the kids in groups and lets them play with any ideas they want to play with, and there is no rigor and no framing. In the public debate, people tend to lose sight of the whole purpose of education—which is to combine the rigor of the intellectual life with the pleasure of knowing how you think and act within a discipline. Core Concepts in a DisciplineDT: Another consistent thread in EDC's history is the emphasis on critical concepts. Bruner talked about teaching students the "structure" of whatever discipline they are studying. The staff of our Center for Mathematics Education today use the phrases "habits of mind" and "teaching to the big ideas." There is a tendency in schools to elevate little ideas over the key concepts. JW: Yes, but the problem isn't so much that we elevate the little ideas. It's that we have an indiscriminate pool of ideas, and we don't provide enough guidance to students about what's really important. Details are critical, but you have to be able to select from the overwhelming wealth of details and know which ones are important to a particular line of inquiry. In Man: A Course of Study, for example, the organizing question was, "What makes human beings human?" That was the question we kept coming back to, in order to help students see the larger meaning of the cultures we were studying. DT: In many respects, it seems that our vision of top-quality teaching and learning has stayed fairly consistent over the years. JW: I think there's been one profoundly important change in the way EDC thinks about teaching and learning. The early leaders of EDC did not pay much attention to the social, emotional, developmental, and health-related needs of learners—from young children through older learners. Now we know that if young people are not provided with the basic building blocks of healthy development, then those deficits are going to limit what's possible in a given learning situation. The Importance of Healthy DevelopmentDT: When did those issues take hold at EDC? What was the turning point? JW: The first program that paid explicit attention to many of the variables that affect learning was Exploring Childhood. We looked at children living in families of various backgrounds. And we worked to help teachers better understand and prepare for how those various influences would affect the classroom. In the sixties, we also began to look more and more at issues of poverty and other risk factors as our work expanded, and we began to work overseas. Clearly, the opportunities for learning in the developing world are affected by poverty and the lack of resources and infrastructure for supporting children's development. In this country, too, we began to work more closely with community agencies. You couldn't help but see what was happening to individuals in the community as a result of the risk factors they encountered in their daily lives, through poverty or neglect. All of these issues, of course, reflected changes in society. In the fifties, no one viewed education as a holistic methodology for raising young people and providing ongoing experiences that helped people's life chances. It was a different view. So, EDC changed as the society changed. I like to feel that we've always been on the progressive edge of seeing new opportunities for enhancing human development and human potential. But I can't say that we were ever outside the norms of our culture. DT: Was this broadening approach also a result of recognizing that our vision of learning wasn't always applicable to or effective in every setting? JW: I think so. We just had to face the fact that for all of our efforts and the efforts of kindred spirits around the country, education wasn't improving as quickly as it should. So, what was wrong? DT: Would you say there has been a shift at EDC, away from curriculum as the focal point for changing schools? JW: Certainly, in the sense that almost all of EDC's early work was developing curriculum, and now it's maybe 30 percent of our work at most. Even our school reform projects, which give a lot of attention to teachers' selection of good materials and to essential questions—such as ATLAS—even those programs take a comprehensive approach to the child's development. They organize mental health teams, parents, community involvement teams, teacher study group teams, etc. In that sense, we've come to view curriculum as a piece of the total system for educating the child, but a vitally important piece. I guess another way in which EDC has changed is that we are not so ideological in believing there is one way to improve education. I think people here believe that if you get the right vision of where you want to head, you can start in many different places and end up with good education. "Messing About"DT: In a 1967 essay, David Hawkins wrote about ESS and about the value of letting students spend a good deal of time "messing about" in science. It sounded wonderful, but I couldn't imagine that degree of student autonomy working in today's educational climate. JW: But perhaps it wasn't truly wonderful for all students. When evaluators looked at the science curricula of the sixties in terms of students' ability to express what they had learned, ESS did not fare that well. Others may not agree with me, but I think that was because ESS was too ideological. If you just have kids play with pendulums or pond water, but you never get them to put any language to what they are seeing or to reflect on why it has a meaning, some students won't learn very much. The brightest students were able to connect the experience with more abstract ideas. In some cases, students would go home and discuss the activity with their parents, and the parents would take on the teacher's work of placing the activity in a larger context. So, we have had to take those findings seriously. One of the main lessons is not to take any educational approach to an extreme. DT: I wonder if we've become better listeners over time. Or have we just accumulated more wisdom to draw on—after all these years of testing and refinement? JW: That goes to the point I was just making. Accumulating wisdom per se doesn't necessarily lead to change unless you're also listening and observing well. There's multiple causation for everything in life. DT: Looking back, one of the things that strikes me is the way in which we consistently put our core values—our ideologies—to the test in the classroom or community or institution. We don't abandon our values when the research indicates things aren't working, but we do go back and revise our methods. JW: I think we're so much better at that than we used to be. I think part of it, too, is the longevity of the staff. People used to come to work at EDC for a year or two and then be gone. And that's all changed completely. People now have the chance to accrue a great deal of experience—and wisdom. 1The ESS Reader (1970), Education Development Center, Inc., p. 38. 2Foundations: The Challenge and Promise of K-8 Science Education Reform (1997) is the product of a collaboration between the National Science Foundation and EDC's Center for Science Education. 3Eminent MIT physics professors Jerrold Zacharias and Philip Morrison played critical roles in the development of EDC and, more generally, in the course of science education reform in the '60s and '70s. Zacharias directed PSSC Physics and is generally considered the founder of EDC; Morrison worked with Zacharias on PSSC Physics and with Hawkins on ESS. 4Jerome Bruner, one of the pioneers of cognitive psychology, directed EDC's Man: A Course of Study project. Bruner is the auther of Toward a Theory of Instruction and other seminal works in the fields of education and psychology. |
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The legacy of "Messing About" can be seen in countless EDC projects.
"Inquiry-based teaching is . . . highly structured teaching." —David Hawkins
"The trouble with ESS was that it created an idealized version of the classroom." —Karen Worth, Center for Science Education
"We no longer see curriculum as the main vehicle for change—particularly in resource-poor urban and rural schools." —Judith Opert Sandler, Center for Science Education
"Retrain the teachers? That sounds like you're retreading old tires!"
"Every EDC program was endlessly tested in the real-life classroom, starting with PSSC Physics."
"Very early on, we developed the concept of what we called the "working party."
"In the sixties, we also began to look more and more at issues of poverty and other risk factors as our work expanded."
"One of the main lessons [we've learned] is not to take any educational approach to an extreme."
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