Part III: How Children Leran in the Classroom: Learning Theories
Chapter 5. Behavioral Views of Learning
Chapter 6. Cognitive Views of Learning
Chapter 7. Complex Cognitive Processes
Chapter 8. Sociocognitive and Constructivist Views of Learning
Journal Activity Chapter 5, page 156
1. Why are some students anxious in class?
Why are some students not anxious in class?. Generally, the experience of anxiety is the body or brain's response to stress. Students are anxious in class because they are experiencing stress.
2. Should teachers provide rewards in order for students to learn and behave in class?
Yes, this is an effective teaching practice. Personally, I find it to be distasteful, but it works.
3. Are scheduled quizzes or pop-quizzes more effective to promote studying?
I don't know what the research says on this subject, but I am guessing that while there are benefits of both approaches, effective studying involves a high degree of time management, so scheduled quizzes allow a student to better pace himself. Typically, a high school student is studying five or more courses at a time, and therefore, it may not be reasonable to expect him to study every subject every night. Pop quizzes seem to me to be more appropriate for an educational setting like a boarding school or military academy where studying continues during all waking hours, students have no demands on their time outside of school, and instructors have control over enforcing time devoted to study.
4. Do students learn more when repeatedly praised?
Praise is an effective tool. I believe the pattern that is recommended is frequent praise during the initiation period followed by infrequent praise once the desired behavior is established.
5. Is punishment an effective method to decrease undesirable behaviors?
No. Punishment has little effect on changing behavior with students who lack the skills to implement desired behavior or do not understand what behavior is desired.
6. Discuss issues of diversity in classroom behavior.
Social norms of classroom behavior are learned in school. Some students, either because of unfamiliarity with schooling or disability, may not easily understand the behavior that is expected. Students with disabilities may need to explicit instruction in expected behaviors.
Why are some students not anxious in class?. Generally, the experience of anxiety is the body or brain's response to stress. Students are anxious in class because they are experiencing stress.
2. Should teachers provide rewards in order for students to learn and behave in class?
Yes, this is an effective teaching practice. Personally, I find it to be distasteful, but it works.
3. Are scheduled quizzes or pop-quizzes more effective to promote studying?
I don't know what the research says on this subject, but I am guessing that while there are benefits of both approaches, effective studying involves a high degree of time management, so scheduled quizzes allow a student to better pace himself. Typically, a high school student is studying five or more courses at a time, and therefore, it may not be reasonable to expect him to study every subject every night. Pop quizzes seem to me to be more appropriate for an educational setting like a boarding school or military academy where studying continues during all waking hours, students have no demands on their time outside of school, and instructors have control over enforcing time devoted to study.
4. Do students learn more when repeatedly praised?
Praise is an effective tool. I believe the pattern that is recommended is frequent praise during the initiation period followed by infrequent praise once the desired behavior is established.
5. Is punishment an effective method to decrease undesirable behaviors?
No. Punishment has little effect on changing behavior with students who lack the skills to implement desired behavior or do not understand what behavior is desired.
6. Discuss issues of diversity in classroom behavior.
Social norms of classroom behavior are learned in school. Some students, either because of unfamiliarity with schooling or disability, may not easily understand the behavior that is expected. Students with disabilities may need to explicit instruction in expected behaviors.
Journal Activity Chapter 6, page 194
How do students learn new information?
New information is learned by connecting it into a schema of information the student already knows.
Should teachers use rote learning methods in the classroom?
Yes. Rote learning is highly effective for teaching skills that require a high degree of automaticity and little logic, such as tables that need to be memorized and spoken language.
I think that American schools don’t value rote learning as highly as we used to, because it is a less effective way of teaching and learning that other methods; however, there are some tasks where it can be essential, such as learning verb conjugation in a foreign language. The Chinese seem to rely on it heavily for teaching just about
everything, and I believe there may be a connection between this learning style and creativity. If all students do is repeat knowledge without application, there is little opportunity or likelihood of using that knowledge to create new knowledge. It doesn’t lead you to an “aha” moment.
Still, we all know examples in our own lives of things we learned by rote that seem to stick with us. For example, my brother-in-law went to a military academy that employed what I would consider to be a lot of hazing
rituals, one of which was requiring cadets to memorize long paragraphs of nonsense and to perform them on command whenever asked. He has retained this knowledge for over twenty years in spite of its complete lack of application in the real world. He will recite them for us at family dinners.
What is the role of practice in learning?
Practice is extremely important, especially for developing mastery. The easiest example to consider is
playing a musical instrument. You can’t really learn a song without practicing it. Through practice, you learn the inside of the thing. I am struggling with my proofs in math classes because I don’t feel like I have enough time to
practice them. We will be presented with a proof in the lecture or the textbook, but to really learn it, you need to be able to recreate it. To play a song, you can’t just sort of know the tune. You have to know exactly where to put your fingers.
Why do students sometimes forget what they have learned?
I believe it is our nature tendency to forget information that we don’t use. If after the initial acquisition, knowledge is not used, it is likely to be forgotten, whereas a student is less likely to forget information that is
frequently retrieved. If I try really hard, sometimes I can remember my high school locker combination, for
example.
What is metacognition and why is it important to learning?
I don’t know. I can guess at it. I guess that metacognition affects how we teach our students. If we believe that students think a certain way, we will develop teaching methods intended to target that type of thinking. I have never studied metacognition before, so I don’t know what it is.
New information is learned by connecting it into a schema of information the student already knows.
Should teachers use rote learning methods in the classroom?
Yes. Rote learning is highly effective for teaching skills that require a high degree of automaticity and little logic, such as tables that need to be memorized and spoken language.
I think that American schools don’t value rote learning as highly as we used to, because it is a less effective way of teaching and learning that other methods; however, there are some tasks where it can be essential, such as learning verb conjugation in a foreign language. The Chinese seem to rely on it heavily for teaching just about
everything, and I believe there may be a connection between this learning style and creativity. If all students do is repeat knowledge without application, there is little opportunity or likelihood of using that knowledge to create new knowledge. It doesn’t lead you to an “aha” moment.
Still, we all know examples in our own lives of things we learned by rote that seem to stick with us. For example, my brother-in-law went to a military academy that employed what I would consider to be a lot of hazing
rituals, one of which was requiring cadets to memorize long paragraphs of nonsense and to perform them on command whenever asked. He has retained this knowledge for over twenty years in spite of its complete lack of application in the real world. He will recite them for us at family dinners.
What is the role of practice in learning?
Practice is extremely important, especially for developing mastery. The easiest example to consider is
playing a musical instrument. You can’t really learn a song without practicing it. Through practice, you learn the inside of the thing. I am struggling with my proofs in math classes because I don’t feel like I have enough time to
practice them. We will be presented with a proof in the lecture or the textbook, but to really learn it, you need to be able to recreate it. To play a song, you can’t just sort of know the tune. You have to know exactly where to put your fingers.
Why do students sometimes forget what they have learned?
I believe it is our nature tendency to forget information that we don’t use. If after the initial acquisition, knowledge is not used, it is likely to be forgotten, whereas a student is less likely to forget information that is
frequently retrieved. If I try really hard, sometimes I can remember my high school locker combination, for
example.
What is metacognition and why is it important to learning?
I don’t know. I can guess at it. I guess that metacognition affects how we teach our students. If we believe that students think a certain way, we will develop teaching methods intended to target that type of thinking. I have never studied metacognition before, so I don’t know what it is.
Journal Activity, Chapter 7, page 236
Do you think students should be taught how to think?
I’m studying a lot of mathematics right now, and most of our time in lecture is being taught how to think. Logic is not intuitive. It is not the method of thinking employed in everyday life, so in order to understand logic, one has to be taught to think in a new way.
When I was teaching math to young children, I was influenced by the teachers manuals that accompany the Everyday Mathematics textbooks that emphasize teaching students many different ways of thinking about the same concept or task and then giving students the freedom to adopt whichever method they choose for performing the task. Everybody is a little different, and some ways of thinking are easier for some students, while other students may prefer a different way of thinking about the same thing. We should teach students how to think, but we also can leave room for the students to choose what works for them best. Demanding that students do it your way doesn’t foster learning.
Why are some students resistant to changing their ideas?
First of all, I think that being relatively resistant to changing ideas has a lot to do with an individual’s personality.
I would not say that it is immutable; however, the attitude of one being resistant to change is as resistant to change as one’s personality is resistant to change. It takes a lot of effort to change one’s personality.
Compared to other individuals, I feel that I am an outlier on the spectrum of changing one’s mind.
I actually get a little thrill when I learn something that “blows my mind.” The more I learn, the less
frequently I get to experience having my mind blown. This is one of the aspects of my personality that draws me to teaching. Teaching requires that one carefully observe learners and develop hypotheses about how to best teach them, or to set them up to learn. The process of teaching provides several opportunities every day to prove
myself wrong. Even as I continue to incorporate information from my observations, students continue to do new
things, things I had not anticipated or accounted for.
I think having an open mind requires one to view the universe as open to many possibilities, or as some say, many possible “truths.” It requires one to accept facts that seem to contradict other facts, and so to be constantly reevaluating what one accepts to be true. Many aspects of our modern media culture, because it is driven by
advertising, are geared towards delivering a message and staying on message. This being a presidential
election year, I hear every day candidates being criticized on television or the radio for not being “consistent” or “flip-flopping.” Because our capitalist culture is based on being able to sell consumers your product, you are supposed to make consumers believe something about your product. The last thing you want to do is to undermine your sale by inviting the consumer to question your pitch by communicating that you are open to other versions of reality, that the truth might be something other than what you say. For example, if I say that Gleam
detergent gets clothes whiter than other brands, I don’t want to say, “But,there could be other brands of detergent that get your clothes whiter.” That is to say, “Gleam is good, but Gleam could be bad.” To sell, you
do not undermine your own message. It doesn’t matter whether or not your message is correct.
What matters is that you close the sale.
Now let us think about a consumer who buys Gleam.
He may discover under close inspection that Gleam did not get his clothes whiter than the brand he had previously been using. In order to accept this truth, this consumer must accept that the truth he previously accepted, that Gleam gets clothes whiter than other brands, is false. This creates internal
conflict. If Gleam does not work better, than he feels foolish, so he may choose not to accept this fact, in
order to avoid feeling foolish and continue to use Gleam. Alternately, he may go back to using his old detergent and deny that he ever believed the false claim, making some excuse, such as, “They were out of my
usual brand.” Or, the shame of having accepted the false claim may be so great that in order to avoid it, he
will continue to use Gleam. In order to accept that Gleam’s marketing slogans that he had previously accepted
to be true, are indeed false, the consumer must face the internal conflict of having been tricked, or the shame of perhaps being gullible. In order to have an open mind, to be receptive to new observations that seem to contradict previously held beliefs, a person needs to be able to accept that often we humans, collectively and individually, are stupid and foolish, often we are wrong, we are not infallible, no one is infallible
Some people like to think that they are infallible, that they know everything. We all know those people. Many people, even though they accept their own infallibility, they choose to believe that there exists a person or persons who really do know everything, including knowledge of the future. I see this most often in
attitudes that people hold towards medical doctors. People fear their own mortality. It brings some people comfort to believe that someone else, a doctor, can save them from death, from disease, from the corruption of their own body. Of course, sometimes this is true…over the short term. A person could be dying and receive life-saving treatment from a doctor; however, this is not what happens all of the time.
Sometimes doctors make mistakes.
Doctors are not infallible, yet when doctors make mistakes, or they don’t know how to save a patient, or they exhibit less-than-godlike powers, people in this country sue the doctors because they feel that they have been wronged. The reason they feel they have been wronged is that, since they believe doctors are infallible, the only thing that makes sense to them is that their family member died because the doctor must have wanted him to die. Since the doctor gods are omnipotent, if you die, it follows that the doctor gods are evil. They choose this belief over another possible way of looking at the situation, that their family member died because he was human and humans are born to die, we all will die and no one can stop it, because this perspective is frightening. It
means that at any given second of any given day, you could die. You are powerless in the face of death. Forces more powerful than you or any other human will consume you. It is your destiny.
That you will die is just about the only thing you can know for certain through observable, scientific facts. Death is the one thing that most everyone wants to avoid. In order to deal with daily life where we are able to
gather food, clothing, and shelter, we can’t be consumed with anxiety about our impeding death, so we ignore it.
This huge fact that is looming, ever-present before us, our impeding death, we ignore it. It is this
capacity to ignore the fact right in front of our face that humans have developed in order to survive as a species. It is this capacity that we employ to ignore other things that are bad, that frighten us, that make us worry.
Typically, if a student is resistant to learning, to adopting a new idea, that student is not thinking that if they accept this new idea that their status quo of maintaining a desired standard of living is challenged, unless that student has a severe anxiety disorder. But, it depends upon how you define, “something really bad will happen
like you’re gonna die.” It could be something bad relatively small in scale compared to death.
When new knowledge or a new way of doing things or thinking about things challenges a student’s core beliefs about himself and the world he lives in, we can expect him to be resistant to that challenge.
When we challenge a person’s beliefs about himself, we are in a sense telling that person that we have the power to define him other than how he defines himself. The tendency is to conserve power. By dismissing
the new thinking as invalid, the individual retains the power to continue to define himself without outside interference. When we challenge a student’s core beliefs about the universe, about the way things work, whether it is to challenge his ideas about society or about the cosmos, in order to accept that his beliefs are not entirely correct, he must accept that he doesn’t understand how the world works. If he doesn’t understand how the world works, he is powerless to affect it or to prevent it from affecting him. He is under the control of the forces of nature and society, and he doesn’t understand the rules; therefore, he is powerless to overcome them.
This initial anxiety and feeling of powerlessness is sufficiently unpleasant to lead many students choose to reject the new way of thinking in order to preserve their core beliefs.
Being taught something means that someone else knows something you don’t. That makes some people
feel stupid. When other people around you know how to do something you don’t, it can make you feel like a
loser, weak, less than other people. One evening when my son was three years old, the whole family was sitting
in the living room reading, everyone but him. He was sitting looking at a book and then suddenly burst into tears. He said, “Everybody can read but me.
Why can’t I read?”
It seemed that he had believed that since all of his life he had observed us reading, had never seen us struggling to read, reading was something that we could just do, like we were born knowing how to do it, and that there must be something wrong with him because he couldn’t do the things we could do. Although I attempted to assure him that he would learn to read, that most three-year-olds are not sufficiently skillful to read a book independently, that acquisition of the skill of reading is an ongoing achievement by which the reader becomes progressively masterful, he really didn’t believe me. He did not believe that he possessed the ability to learn to read, because he had tried to read his book and had failed.
Thus, learning provides an opportunity for failure.
If I try to do something new and I fail, my self-esteem suffers. If I do not attempt to learn something new, my self-esteem as a competent person is preserved. Hence, I do not want to try to learn something new if I do not believe that I will be successful.
It is therefore helpful to students to be surrounded by people who love them and value them. Even
if a student has a nurturing, affirming homelife, if she is given negative messages about her worth at school, school becomes a place where she is a loser. If she believes she is a loser, she is not likely to believe that she will succeed in school.
In the practical sense, we are charged with creating an atmosphere where all students are valued.
Federal law enables this atmosphere by prohibiting certain types of discrimination, such as discrimination based on race or disability. However, federal law does not prohibit most forms of discrimination. It is perfectly legal and in many social circles, perfectly acceptable to discriminate against a child because she has a funny first name, because she is dirty and smells bad, because her father is in jail, or for no reason at all.
Whereas it is illegal to say, “You can’t learn because you are Asian,” to a student, there is nothing stopping a teacher from daily reinforcing the idea to a child that she is incapable of learning other than the teacher’s desire to
help children learn and the knowledge that fostering the idea that our students are successful learners is vital to their success in school.
Homeschooling and Sociocognitive Learning, Introduction
This journal entry is a reflection on the homeschool culture I found myself in for the six years I homeschooled my children and the intuitive awareness of sociocognitive learning processes within that culture. I have found the perception among homeschool parents that schools are a negative environment for sociocognitive learning to widely motivate parents to keep children back from traditional schools, sometimes even as their explicit primary motivation. Part I of this essay focuses on parents’ negative perceptions of the sociocognitive learning environment within traditional schools. Part II will look at some examples of sociocognitive learning in the homeschool environment.
Lists of the reasons parents choose to homeschool include religious beliefs, health reasons, superior academic advantages, and personal happiness. These are reasons stated by parents when asked why they choose to homeschool. Of course, some of the primary motivators of homeschooling families may be far outside the reach of schools, in the case for example of military families who frequently must move around the country who seek to mitigate disruption of learning; however, I posit that even within these families, there is an overall negative view of the sociocognitive learning environment within schools that plays at least a factor in the decision to homeschool. When parents draw up lists of the pros and cons of schooling, it is my belief that aspects of the sociocognitive environment nearly always fall into the cons column.
Parents’ concerns about how the social environment of schools affects learning have been historically ignored by policymakers especially since the Civil Rights movement, and parents who criticize the school social environment tend to be wholly dismissed by the guiding principles of public schools as nothing more than un-American elitism or even bigotry. The existing crisis of race and class segregation in American schools today is evidence that when the concerns of parents with regard to social issues are dismissed by authorities and not addressed by school culture, parents will respond by pulling students from the schools. When parents cannot effect positive change within the schools their children attend or they feel that school culture is antagonistic of to the health and growth of their children, parents will “vote with their feet” and leave. Reflecting upon the implications of so-called white flight, which today I would argue is driven more by the quest for “good schools” than race, although race continues to play a major factor, American school culture today recognizes that parents who are not satisfied with schools may choose to abandon them, so we create noise that parents must be brought into the school as partners in education. But do school districts truly desire parents as partners? We see parents being recruited as “helpers” in schools, where they are invited to participate as workers in such capacities as providing supplementary instruction or in the traditional roles of boosters, fundraisers, and “homeroom parents” who plan cupcake parties. However, public school communities where parents are invited to participate as real partners, especially in terms of drafting new policy that might threaten the way we traditionally go about the business of education, are sufficiently rare that the few existing examples are written up in journals. Our role in schools as educators continues to be to supplicate parents by merely keeping them at bay, to keep parent grumbling down to a minimum so we can keep doing as we have always done. In spite of all of the evidence of large-scale parent and public dissatisfaction with schooling, we still view parents and the public as forces that threaten the optimum functioning of our institutions. We think like monarchs, that parents will always ask for more than is good for them, and effective pacification of public demands on our schools are best dealt with through better marketing, or “circus,” than through democracy.
I don’t understand why schools behave this way any more than I understand why nations should submit to monarchy. However, I do hear parents’ criticism and the demands the public is making, and many of these fall under the category of sociocognitive learning. Parents have extreme negative perceptions of the social interaction of children within our schools. I believe that these criticisms are valid in the context of teaching and learning. They must be addressed by our schools within this decade if the tide of parent and public resentment is to be turned; however, as the American school culture is largely intractable, I do not expect our schools to effect to bring about sweeping changes to address these criticisms, and we can expect public criticism and even overt hostility of the schools to continue to grow.
Lists of the reasons parents choose to homeschool include religious beliefs, health reasons, superior academic advantages, and personal happiness. These are reasons stated by parents when asked why they choose to homeschool. Of course, some of the primary motivators of homeschooling families may be far outside the reach of schools, in the case for example of military families who frequently must move around the country who seek to mitigate disruption of learning; however, I posit that even within these families, there is an overall negative view of the sociocognitive learning environment within schools that plays at least a factor in the decision to homeschool. When parents draw up lists of the pros and cons of schooling, it is my belief that aspects of the sociocognitive environment nearly always fall into the cons column.
Parents’ concerns about how the social environment of schools affects learning have been historically ignored by policymakers especially since the Civil Rights movement, and parents who criticize the school social environment tend to be wholly dismissed by the guiding principles of public schools as nothing more than un-American elitism or even bigotry. The existing crisis of race and class segregation in American schools today is evidence that when the concerns of parents with regard to social issues are dismissed by authorities and not addressed by school culture, parents will respond by pulling students from the schools. When parents cannot effect positive change within the schools their children attend or they feel that school culture is antagonistic of to the health and growth of their children, parents will “vote with their feet” and leave. Reflecting upon the implications of so-called white flight, which today I would argue is driven more by the quest for “good schools” than race, although race continues to play a major factor, American school culture today recognizes that parents who are not satisfied with schools may choose to abandon them, so we create noise that parents must be brought into the school as partners in education. But do school districts truly desire parents as partners? We see parents being recruited as “helpers” in schools, where they are invited to participate as workers in such capacities as providing supplementary instruction or in the traditional roles of boosters, fundraisers, and “homeroom parents” who plan cupcake parties. However, public school communities where parents are invited to participate as real partners, especially in terms of drafting new policy that might threaten the way we traditionally go about the business of education, are sufficiently rare that the few existing examples are written up in journals. Our role in schools as educators continues to be to supplicate parents by merely keeping them at bay, to keep parent grumbling down to a minimum so we can keep doing as we have always done. In spite of all of the evidence of large-scale parent and public dissatisfaction with schooling, we still view parents and the public as forces that threaten the optimum functioning of our institutions. We think like monarchs, that parents will always ask for more than is good for them, and effective pacification of public demands on our schools are best dealt with through better marketing, or “circus,” than through democracy.
I don’t understand why schools behave this way any more than I understand why nations should submit to monarchy. However, I do hear parents’ criticism and the demands the public is making, and many of these fall under the category of sociocognitive learning. Parents have extreme negative perceptions of the social interaction of children within our schools. I believe that these criticisms are valid in the context of teaching and learning. They must be addressed by our schools within this decade if the tide of parent and public resentment is to be turned; however, as the American school culture is largely intractable, I do not expect our schools to effect to bring about sweeping changes to address these criticisms, and we can expect public criticism and even overt hostility of the schools to continue to grow.
Part I: Bullying & Bad Habits.
Bullying is a fact that all of us recognize, and none of us seem to have a real solution for, beyond changing everything else we think and believe about the world. Bullying culture in children is, in my opinion, a reflection of broader American cultural values of competition over cooperation, including the proper role of force and intimidation to get what you want. The public's reaction and response to the bullying crisis seems likewise consistent with American values. The parents who complain are the ones whose kids' wind up at the bottom of the food chain. When was the last time you saw a high school student's parent on television crying about how popular her bullying daughter is? No. Most parents seem to be saying, I don't want my child to be bullied, rather than any broader criticism with school culture overall that promotes bullying. There seem to be four attitudes parents and students can adopt towards bullying. These are:
Not concerned about bullying, not concerned about overall school culture;
Concerned about bullying, not concerned about school culture;
Opposed to school culture, accept that bullying will take place;
Opposed to school culture, not accepting of bullying.
Parents who oppose overall school culture are the most likely to remove a child, regardless of their children's participation in the bullying culture, because they perceive they are powerless to affect the culture; whereas those parents whose children are victimized may not have an overall perception of a problem beyond their own child's victimization, and their decision to remain in the school will be influenced largely by their sensitivity to the child's individual circumstance. These parents seek from school staff immediate, concrete action to curb the bullying of their own offspring rather than changes to the way schools traditionally operate. These parents who seek only to protect their child will be more likely to be appeased by school staff who agree to immediate, concrete efforts towards corrective action. Parents with strong opposition to school culture may be completely off the radar when it comes to school planning, because these are the parents who turn away from schools very early in their children's lives. If school boards see them or hear from them at all, it is when they politically mobilize to oppose school levies.
Another sociocognitive objection parents frequently experience is what I have chosen to call "bad habits," from the notion that parents have that their children will pick up the "bad habits" modeled by other students. These parents frequently fly under our critical radar because when parents do complain, it tends to be in an off-handed remark rather than something they feel the school should address through policy. These parents tend to make decisions about school leaving while their children are at the lower elementary level. It explains why parents who do not have much orientation towards academic learning seek to send their children to "good schools." Often, parents' perception of "good schools" has little or nothing to do with academic rankings. Like parents of bullying victims, they don't want their kids to be "losers." They don't want their children to pick up criminal behaviors, rebellious attitudes, knowledge of drug abuse, or they seek to reproduce in their children a certain mode of thinking, such as a middle-class outlook on the world, and they feel that the culture of a particular school will affect their child's behavior and attitude. Parents seek to reproduce their own behaviors and attitudes within their offspring. Class and race both frequently play a role in this type of objection parents may take towards what their children are learning from school culture. Here we see cases where white parents may decide to remove children from an urban school setting when the children adopt preferences for speech or for example, musical tastes, that reflect a minority culture, as well minority parents who may be very interested in the "official" curriculum of the school, such as academics or athletics, and choose a lesser-performing school because of the presence of minority students there, because they seek to reproduce their ethnic or racial identity.
Of course, the questions about race segregation have been long answered by federal law. Class issues do however remain relevant and salient as Ohio's multiple Supreme Court rulings regarding unequal education remain unaddressed. Our state is divided into districts of "good schools" and chronically failing districts. Research about older versions of the state standardized tests showed student scores correlating with mean household income. So we really don't have "good schools" or "bad schools." Mostly, we have schools where families of higher means send their children and schools populated by students whose parents have very little choice but to send their children there because they are living in poverty. Since teachers across the state are required to meet some of the most stringent certification in the United States, and many not-so-good schools are spending more money per pupil than in districts that have "good schools," the only difference between the schools are the students themselves and the perceptive of the schools' performance in the eye of the general public. This is the status quo that has been maintained throughout my lifetime in Ohio so far, based on the general public bias that the more means a family has, the more they will seek to place their in schools populated with the children of persons of similar socioeconomic status or of the socioeconomic status which they wish for their children to attain aspire to.
Of course, exclusive private schools have long existed in Ohio, whether they exclude students with high tuition prices or entrance exams or by philosophical goals, since as religion. What is new in Ohio is the number of alternatives to traditional public schooling that are now available throughout the state to most families such that even families of very limited means can more easily choose not to participate in schooling at all. When I was homeschooling with my children, we spent quite a large amount of money on books and materials, technology, and supplemental instruction, similar to what I would expect to pay in tuition and fees for private schooling. The biggest cost to our household was the number of hours I was engaged in working with the children, as opposed to being in the paid workforce. It was the same for other homeschool families with whom we associated. This was not an endeavor which we expected to undertake cheaply. What I was saying to my public school district is that the value of the product that they offered my family was so low and my attitudes towards how well they did their job was so negative that I would rather stay home and do it myself. That's pretty extreme, and it is far greater of a cost than the majority of families are willing to privately undertake. Most families are not willing or able to pay twice for the same product, once for public schooling through taxes and again to privately educate their children. In this sense, we can view homeschooling as a product similar to traditional privately chartered schools in Ohio.
And you are always going to have people like me, who for one reason or another, do not support what local public schools are doing, and that isn't necessarily a problem for the public school, just so long as those people remain in an extreme minority. The photograph I chose from the New York Times of the family of three children whose parents were radical anarchists who bummed around Europe and Mexico typify the extreme minority of the general public who school principals and superintendents are probably not going to be able to please, because they demand a service that the school probably cannot provide and may not even be reasonable to provide. If we think of public schools like car dealerships, and the traditional public school is a Chevy dealership, what i am looking to buy is more like a Triumph motorcycle. Maybe some of my homeschool friends were looking for a international Harvester. The threat to a Chevy dealership doesn't come from the loss of support from people like us. We are on the fringe. The threat to a Chevy dealership comes from Ford Motor Company.
The real threat to public schools is that public will no longer want to fund them, that people won't want to buy Chevys. In the current climate of long-standing economic downtown and the perception of high taxation, revenues to public schools are down and the public is not in the mood to approve new taxes of any kind, but it seems the public attitude towards public schools in Ohio has turned markedly downward in recent years. This is the climate in which the issue of bullying comes into the public mind.
Bullying is a new type of criticism of public schooling for Ohioans because it does not seem to discriminate along class or race lines. In other words, bullying is not a phenomena that parents can avoid buy moving to a "better" school district. The cases of teen suicides at Mentor High School have been seared into public consciousness. What makes bullying such a threatening issue to the preservation of public schooling in Ohio is that it is salient with political liberals, the traditional allies of public schooling. Over the past twenty years, Ohioans have seemed generally to accept that large areas of the state could be abandoned, for example, the entire Cleveland Public Schools system, and our sense of an acceptable standard of living for society could be maintained. The middle class rationalized that its own status quo could be maintained by ensuring their own offspring's access to the "good" schools. If other families desired "good" schools for their own children, they could move to a "better" area themselves. Whereas I understand this idea doesn't work for towards the best interest of the commonwealth, as an individual, it does not seem terribly unreasonable if I am poor and live in Youngstown City, that if I want a "better" school for my children that I should move to Poland. It's as easy to be poor in Canfield as it is in Campbell; which is to say it's not. Being poor sucks wherever you are. So the public has generally accepted it to be okay to abandon certain school districts, so long as there continue to be some districts that are maintained at a higher standard.
We have a society that is aging so that for half of our lives, we can expect to neither be engaged in schooling or raising school-age children. In the past, households living in desireable areas sought to support public schooling in order to maintain their investment in real estate, i.e. their home. The rationale was that potential buyers of the property would be seeking to purchase a home in an area with "good" schools, so as went the school district's success, so went the real estate market. With the aging of the population and smaller family sizes, that is becoming less and less the case. For a population less engaged in the business of childhood, expensive school taxes to support being attached to their property is becoming less and less desireable. For families without young children, low taxes are highly desireable. The public is turning its back on the public schools because public schooling is an economic cost not associated with a relevant good for a growing majority of households.
Enter into metaphor of the Chevy dealership, the Ford dealership that has opened up shop across the street: the charter schools, school vouchers, for-profit schools, or internet schooling, which are perceived as providing an acceptable substitute good. Now the public wants to know why it should keep paying for the massive expense of supporting large city school districts, especially when schools are portrayed on television and the media as nothing more than prisons, where students are subjected to routine abuse, and they don't learn how to read, write, or do arithmetic. And the public isn't paying for it any more than we have to. Levies are consistently voted down. Competing interests, like health care, policing, and roads, prevent support for schools getting a larger proportion of a shrinking state budget. I believe public support for Senate Bill 5 demonstrated how little public support there is for schooling when the entire state seemed to turn againts public school teachers, some of the notoriously least-paid professionals working today, and say, "We want to pay you even less." If that isn't a loud and clear message that message to the public schools that the work they are doing is valued very little by the majority of the public, I don't know what is.
Parents are leaving traditional public schools and opting for other forms of publicly-funded education that seem to avoid the harsh public criticism traditional public schools receive. State Impact reports that over the past decade, enrollment in charter schools has more than tripled and four of Ohio school districts, Dayton, Youngstown, Cleveland, and Toledo rank as the top ten places in the United States from which charter students originate. There are fifty-four new charter schools that plan to open in Ohio in the fall of 2012. Most of them will be managed by for-profit agencies. Most of them will employ non-certified teachers for submarket wages. Why these leeches on the lifeblood of the commonwealth avoid public contempt I can only understand as a lack of knowledge on the part of the public as to how they are funded, who is paying for them. Besides charter schools, traditional private schools, such as some of the schools operated by the Diocese of Youngstown, accept EdChoice vouchers, which pays up to $5000 per student from the state burse. Also reported by State Impact is the fact that Ohio has more students enrolled full-time in publicly-funded e-schools than any other state in the US other than Arizona, and more e-schools serving grades K-12 are expected to come online after 2013.
Bullying is the salient issue for public schools today not because it affects learning. It is because bullying is an issue that parents seem no longer willing to accept. Parents want bullying stopped, and parents are the only political allies schools can count on to rally to the support of schools. Parents need schools for their children. When parents stop supporting a school district, they leave. They move away, or they send their children to private schools, or they pull their children from schooling altogether, opting for an e-school. When I hear myself say, "We have to do something or we will lose our public schools," it sounds so extreme that I want to laugh at myself. Then I remind myself of the reality... in Cleveland, where an entire generation (or two) have grown up with a dysfunctional or nonfunctional school system, where the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported April 24, 2012 that more students drop out of Cleveland schools than go on to post-secondary education.
If you go to Little Rock, Arkansas, you will what happens to public schools that lose the support of the public. There are hundreds of private schools for parents who can afford them to choose from, and then there is a second-tier of public schools in buildings with broken windows and nonfunctional HVAC systems in a climate with some of the most oppressive humidity and barometric pressure that you can experience anywhere on planet earth. Here you can see the most publicized result in American history of exactly how and to what extent the public can turn its back on a public school system when the public perceives that they do not want their children associating in ways that the school passively allows. The public who pays school taxes in Little Rock cares about the fate of the students in those public schools about as much as the Nazi party cared about the fate of Jewish children in the Warsaw ghetto. That is what we have in Cleveland. But how much of Ohio will become Cleveland-ized? To what extent will the middle class pull its support for public schools, and what will that mean for the fate of Ohio? When parents who are dissatisfied with public schooling walk away, how far will they go? Will parents be satisfied with the alternatives that are offered to traditional public schools, or will they leave Ohio?
That is what interests me about the case of the Poland School District, where school funding has been one of the biggest issues in that community for the past several years. Poland is considered to have "good schools," and to justify my observation of that public perception, I will point to the district's nonparticipation in open enrollment. The few districts in Ohio who do not have open enrollment all possess the quality of having more parents who desire to send their children to be educated there than they have space for; therefore, the public perceives the quality of education received in Poland schools to be high. Yet the voters in Poland do not seem to want to pass levies the school board requested to increase their property taxes to keep the schools operating at the same level since the district lost $2 million in state funding. Instead, they opted to vote the levy down and lose twelve permanent teaching positions within the district. Voters seemed okay with losing an entire school from the district to budget cuts. It is common sense to me that the district cannot continue to bleed money, and they will not be able to provide the same level of educational service to the public indefinitely without funding. When the public seems unwilling to support even our best public schools, the ones publicly judged to be "good," that receive the designation Excellent with Distinction, is that not a bellwether that things to come are already here?
Not concerned about bullying, not concerned about overall school culture;
Concerned about bullying, not concerned about school culture;
Opposed to school culture, accept that bullying will take place;
Opposed to school culture, not accepting of bullying.
Parents who oppose overall school culture are the most likely to remove a child, regardless of their children's participation in the bullying culture, because they perceive they are powerless to affect the culture; whereas those parents whose children are victimized may not have an overall perception of a problem beyond their own child's victimization, and their decision to remain in the school will be influenced largely by their sensitivity to the child's individual circumstance. These parents seek from school staff immediate, concrete action to curb the bullying of their own offspring rather than changes to the way schools traditionally operate. These parents who seek only to protect their child will be more likely to be appeased by school staff who agree to immediate, concrete efforts towards corrective action. Parents with strong opposition to school culture may be completely off the radar when it comes to school planning, because these are the parents who turn away from schools very early in their children's lives. If school boards see them or hear from them at all, it is when they politically mobilize to oppose school levies.
Another sociocognitive objection parents frequently experience is what I have chosen to call "bad habits," from the notion that parents have that their children will pick up the "bad habits" modeled by other students. These parents frequently fly under our critical radar because when parents do complain, it tends to be in an off-handed remark rather than something they feel the school should address through policy. These parents tend to make decisions about school leaving while their children are at the lower elementary level. It explains why parents who do not have much orientation towards academic learning seek to send their children to "good schools." Often, parents' perception of "good schools" has little or nothing to do with academic rankings. Like parents of bullying victims, they don't want their kids to be "losers." They don't want their children to pick up criminal behaviors, rebellious attitudes, knowledge of drug abuse, or they seek to reproduce in their children a certain mode of thinking, such as a middle-class outlook on the world, and they feel that the culture of a particular school will affect their child's behavior and attitude. Parents seek to reproduce their own behaviors and attitudes within their offspring. Class and race both frequently play a role in this type of objection parents may take towards what their children are learning from school culture. Here we see cases where white parents may decide to remove children from an urban school setting when the children adopt preferences for speech or for example, musical tastes, that reflect a minority culture, as well minority parents who may be very interested in the "official" curriculum of the school, such as academics or athletics, and choose a lesser-performing school because of the presence of minority students there, because they seek to reproduce their ethnic or racial identity.
Of course, the questions about race segregation have been long answered by federal law. Class issues do however remain relevant and salient as Ohio's multiple Supreme Court rulings regarding unequal education remain unaddressed. Our state is divided into districts of "good schools" and chronically failing districts. Research about older versions of the state standardized tests showed student scores correlating with mean household income. So we really don't have "good schools" or "bad schools." Mostly, we have schools where families of higher means send their children and schools populated by students whose parents have very little choice but to send their children there because they are living in poverty. Since teachers across the state are required to meet some of the most stringent certification in the United States, and many not-so-good schools are spending more money per pupil than in districts that have "good schools," the only difference between the schools are the students themselves and the perceptive of the schools' performance in the eye of the general public. This is the status quo that has been maintained throughout my lifetime in Ohio so far, based on the general public bias that the more means a family has, the more they will seek to place their in schools populated with the children of persons of similar socioeconomic status or of the socioeconomic status which they wish for their children to attain aspire to.
Of course, exclusive private schools have long existed in Ohio, whether they exclude students with high tuition prices or entrance exams or by philosophical goals, since as religion. What is new in Ohio is the number of alternatives to traditional public schooling that are now available throughout the state to most families such that even families of very limited means can more easily choose not to participate in schooling at all. When I was homeschooling with my children, we spent quite a large amount of money on books and materials, technology, and supplemental instruction, similar to what I would expect to pay in tuition and fees for private schooling. The biggest cost to our household was the number of hours I was engaged in working with the children, as opposed to being in the paid workforce. It was the same for other homeschool families with whom we associated. This was not an endeavor which we expected to undertake cheaply. What I was saying to my public school district is that the value of the product that they offered my family was so low and my attitudes towards how well they did their job was so negative that I would rather stay home and do it myself. That's pretty extreme, and it is far greater of a cost than the majority of families are willing to privately undertake. Most families are not willing or able to pay twice for the same product, once for public schooling through taxes and again to privately educate their children. In this sense, we can view homeschooling as a product similar to traditional privately chartered schools in Ohio.
And you are always going to have people like me, who for one reason or another, do not support what local public schools are doing, and that isn't necessarily a problem for the public school, just so long as those people remain in an extreme minority. The photograph I chose from the New York Times of the family of three children whose parents were radical anarchists who bummed around Europe and Mexico typify the extreme minority of the general public who school principals and superintendents are probably not going to be able to please, because they demand a service that the school probably cannot provide and may not even be reasonable to provide. If we think of public schools like car dealerships, and the traditional public school is a Chevy dealership, what i am looking to buy is more like a Triumph motorcycle. Maybe some of my homeschool friends were looking for a international Harvester. The threat to a Chevy dealership doesn't come from the loss of support from people like us. We are on the fringe. The threat to a Chevy dealership comes from Ford Motor Company.
The real threat to public schools is that public will no longer want to fund them, that people won't want to buy Chevys. In the current climate of long-standing economic downtown and the perception of high taxation, revenues to public schools are down and the public is not in the mood to approve new taxes of any kind, but it seems the public attitude towards public schools in Ohio has turned markedly downward in recent years. This is the climate in which the issue of bullying comes into the public mind.
Bullying is a new type of criticism of public schooling for Ohioans because it does not seem to discriminate along class or race lines. In other words, bullying is not a phenomena that parents can avoid buy moving to a "better" school district. The cases of teen suicides at Mentor High School have been seared into public consciousness. What makes bullying such a threatening issue to the preservation of public schooling in Ohio is that it is salient with political liberals, the traditional allies of public schooling. Over the past twenty years, Ohioans have seemed generally to accept that large areas of the state could be abandoned, for example, the entire Cleveland Public Schools system, and our sense of an acceptable standard of living for society could be maintained. The middle class rationalized that its own status quo could be maintained by ensuring their own offspring's access to the "good" schools. If other families desired "good" schools for their own children, they could move to a "better" area themselves. Whereas I understand this idea doesn't work for towards the best interest of the commonwealth, as an individual, it does not seem terribly unreasonable if I am poor and live in Youngstown City, that if I want a "better" school for my children that I should move to Poland. It's as easy to be poor in Canfield as it is in Campbell; which is to say it's not. Being poor sucks wherever you are. So the public has generally accepted it to be okay to abandon certain school districts, so long as there continue to be some districts that are maintained at a higher standard.
We have a society that is aging so that for half of our lives, we can expect to neither be engaged in schooling or raising school-age children. In the past, households living in desireable areas sought to support public schooling in order to maintain their investment in real estate, i.e. their home. The rationale was that potential buyers of the property would be seeking to purchase a home in an area with "good" schools, so as went the school district's success, so went the real estate market. With the aging of the population and smaller family sizes, that is becoming less and less the case. For a population less engaged in the business of childhood, expensive school taxes to support being attached to their property is becoming less and less desireable. For families without young children, low taxes are highly desireable. The public is turning its back on the public schools because public schooling is an economic cost not associated with a relevant good for a growing majority of households.
Enter into metaphor of the Chevy dealership, the Ford dealership that has opened up shop across the street: the charter schools, school vouchers, for-profit schools, or internet schooling, which are perceived as providing an acceptable substitute good. Now the public wants to know why it should keep paying for the massive expense of supporting large city school districts, especially when schools are portrayed on television and the media as nothing more than prisons, where students are subjected to routine abuse, and they don't learn how to read, write, or do arithmetic. And the public isn't paying for it any more than we have to. Levies are consistently voted down. Competing interests, like health care, policing, and roads, prevent support for schools getting a larger proportion of a shrinking state budget. I believe public support for Senate Bill 5 demonstrated how little public support there is for schooling when the entire state seemed to turn againts public school teachers, some of the notoriously least-paid professionals working today, and say, "We want to pay you even less." If that isn't a loud and clear message that message to the public schools that the work they are doing is valued very little by the majority of the public, I don't know what is.
Parents are leaving traditional public schools and opting for other forms of publicly-funded education that seem to avoid the harsh public criticism traditional public schools receive. State Impact reports that over the past decade, enrollment in charter schools has more than tripled and four of Ohio school districts, Dayton, Youngstown, Cleveland, and Toledo rank as the top ten places in the United States from which charter students originate. There are fifty-four new charter schools that plan to open in Ohio in the fall of 2012. Most of them will be managed by for-profit agencies. Most of them will employ non-certified teachers for submarket wages. Why these leeches on the lifeblood of the commonwealth avoid public contempt I can only understand as a lack of knowledge on the part of the public as to how they are funded, who is paying for them. Besides charter schools, traditional private schools, such as some of the schools operated by the Diocese of Youngstown, accept EdChoice vouchers, which pays up to $5000 per student from the state burse. Also reported by State Impact is the fact that Ohio has more students enrolled full-time in publicly-funded e-schools than any other state in the US other than Arizona, and more e-schools serving grades K-12 are expected to come online after 2013.
Bullying is the salient issue for public schools today not because it affects learning. It is because bullying is an issue that parents seem no longer willing to accept. Parents want bullying stopped, and parents are the only political allies schools can count on to rally to the support of schools. Parents need schools for their children. When parents stop supporting a school district, they leave. They move away, or they send their children to private schools, or they pull their children from schooling altogether, opting for an e-school. When I hear myself say, "We have to do something or we will lose our public schools," it sounds so extreme that I want to laugh at myself. Then I remind myself of the reality... in Cleveland, where an entire generation (or two) have grown up with a dysfunctional or nonfunctional school system, where the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported April 24, 2012 that more students drop out of Cleveland schools than go on to post-secondary education.
If you go to Little Rock, Arkansas, you will what happens to public schools that lose the support of the public. There are hundreds of private schools for parents who can afford them to choose from, and then there is a second-tier of public schools in buildings with broken windows and nonfunctional HVAC systems in a climate with some of the most oppressive humidity and barometric pressure that you can experience anywhere on planet earth. Here you can see the most publicized result in American history of exactly how and to what extent the public can turn its back on a public school system when the public perceives that they do not want their children associating in ways that the school passively allows. The public who pays school taxes in Little Rock cares about the fate of the students in those public schools about as much as the Nazi party cared about the fate of Jewish children in the Warsaw ghetto. That is what we have in Cleveland. But how much of Ohio will become Cleveland-ized? To what extent will the middle class pull its support for public schools, and what will that mean for the fate of Ohio? When parents who are dissatisfied with public schooling walk away, how far will they go? Will parents be satisfied with the alternatives that are offered to traditional public schools, or will they leave Ohio?
That is what interests me about the case of the Poland School District, where school funding has been one of the biggest issues in that community for the past several years. Poland is considered to have "good schools," and to justify my observation of that public perception, I will point to the district's nonparticipation in open enrollment. The few districts in Ohio who do not have open enrollment all possess the quality of having more parents who desire to send their children to be educated there than they have space for; therefore, the public perceives the quality of education received in Poland schools to be high. Yet the voters in Poland do not seem to want to pass levies the school board requested to increase their property taxes to keep the schools operating at the same level since the district lost $2 million in state funding. Instead, they opted to vote the levy down and lose twelve permanent teaching positions within the district. Voters seemed okay with losing an entire school from the district to budget cuts. It is common sense to me that the district cannot continue to bleed money, and they will not be able to provide the same level of educational service to the public indefinitely without funding. When the public seems unwilling to support even our best public schools, the ones publicly judged to be "good," that receive the designation Excellent with Distinction, is that not a bellwether that things to come are already here?
Part II : Some examples of sociocognitive learning in the homeschool environment.
click image for the original publication from which it was taken, Mid County Homeschool Co-op
In my experience, I do not believe that any alternative schooling arrangement exists that provides better opportunities for learning in groups than the traditional school, except perhaps an orphanage school, a boarding school, a juvenile prison school, or if you live on a commune. Learning in groups doesn't just "happen." Like Moreno describes throughout Chapter 8, learning in groups needs to be planned and coordinated to be very effective. To undertake this endeavor requires a great degree of classroom management and "ground rules" commonly agreed upon by all of the participants, and if you've ever tried to put a group of homeschooling parents together, you will know that it is a great accomplishment to get them to agree to anything at all. However, group learning does happen in homeschooling. I will try to describe the ways that seem to be the most relevant for students who do not attend school.
1. Learning with your similar ability brothers and sisters.
Many families have children about or around the same age or ability level, and some parents find it convenient to teach the same lessons to that group of children together, differentiating instruction by ability. This happens more often than one would presume. The planning involved seems to be easier than keeping children focused separately on separate tasks. I have noticed subjects that lend themselves towards projects or performance seem to be very popular with parents to organize as groups, like music, drama, and science. Subject matter that lends itself easily into play is also a popular and frequent choice for homeschooling families. An example that comes to mind is physical education. Unless you only have one child in your family, are you really going to have each child do p.e. alone? This subject matters also tends to be popular in co-ops.
2. Homeschool Co-operatives
Our family participated in a number of co-operatives with other families, usually organized on some kind of theme. Preschool co-ops are very popular, since you are doing discovery-based learning, allowing the children an opportunity to play and explore. We did a p.e. co-op at the YMCA so we could put together a large group of kids for activities like softball and kickball, and this also served to cover the expense of reserving equipment like the indoor swimming pool, which would not be affordable for each individual family alone. Another co-op where we participated in classes offered an Expo at the end of the school year where families or individual students would present projects, sort of like a science fair, and there would be musical and dramatic performances. Many of the skits that were performed involved some or all of the children from a particular family performing together. Some of the families in that group got together on Friday afternoons for bowling, although we didn't have organized teams, just kids informally bowling together.
Organizing co-operatives is so much work for, in my opinion, a marginally better education than if your family just kept to yourselves. Unlike a traditional school where students are compelled to attend, everyone participating is there voluntarily, and for the most part, for students to attend, an adult caregiver or at the very least, someone with a driver's license and a car, has to organize their life so that they can bring the students. All co-ops struggle with attendance. Some co-ops will develop rules for attendance; however, this doesn't effectively address the issue. If a family has someone who is sick, that often means no one from that family will be able to come today, and in some cases, that could mean up to seven kids not showing up, when it's a larger family. What this means for planning co-operative classes is that your lesson plans needs to be adaptable to a varying, unpredictable number of students, and it is unlikely that lessons spanning multiple days will be successfully executed. Whatever you learn needs to be executed in one session, including instruction or review of knowledge a student may need as a baseline to get something out of the experience. What I find is that after a certain grade level, it becomes more and more challenging to create a co-operative learning experience because higher-level learning requires more attention to mastery of baseline material and you simply do not have the structure within a homeschool co-op to keep it organized over a longer period of time, such as an entire school year, with the exception perhaps of a co-op that meets daily, where students attend like they would another school, a co-op that functions as a traditional school run by parents, and those are very rare. By my estimation, there are no more than a dozen such schools operating in the United States, because they require a very high level of consistent funding to maintain, similar to a traditional school.
The other two problems I have identified that prevent more group learning through the co-op method are the same problems that school teachers face: classroom management and student motivation. Since you don't have these kids every day, and the parents take turns teaching, there are no basic routines in place like you would normally have in a classroom to help things move along smoothly, like routines for passing around materials or going to the toilet. When I taught a middle-school aged class, I am pretty sure my lessons were a complete failure because the students did not have the skills I expected them to in order to participate, with the exception of one girl who had several years experience at a public school. Even the best-prepared students really did not know how to do things like participate in a formal group discussion. They did not seem to understand how to know when it was their turn to talk or that they should. All of these ideas I bring with me into a homeschool environment are skills I acquired from going to school every day for several years. Of course, kids who have never gone to school have no idea how to organize themselves to delegate individual tasks among group members. Those are skills that need to be taught on an on-going basis in traditional schools every school year in every class, so of course, when you have a group of students who have never been to school, it is a daunting challenge to teach these skills to students you have only the most tenuous of relationships with.
I have noticed among almost every age level of kids that the kids seem to view co-op as a prime opportunity for cutting up with other kids, goofing off, and getting away with it because their mom is down the hall, so their motivation to apply themselves to something other than goofing off is competing with the sheer joy of showing off to friends. It will shock you how badly behaved the same kids who are always so polite and well-mannered in other settings, will behave when you put them in that classroom an give them exactly one chance a week for two hours to act like a clown for an audience for an audience of their peers. It seems to me that if I'm a kid and I'm in school, I can spread my antics out over the course of the week because I know I'm coming back to school every day, Monday through Friday, until next summer; whereas, with homeschool kids, they have only a brief window of opportunity to exhibit every attention-seeking behavior and that is during this one shot you get at a lesson.
These are great limitations to group learning in a co-op environment. The most successful co-op activities are the ones that are the least structured, discovery-based, and offer lots of opportunities for just plain goofing off. For example, one of my friends has been describing to me how her homeschool co-op organizes lots of trips to the beach. She sends me photographs of the dead animals the kids seem to enjoy collecting and identifying. They are learning in such a way that if an individual student gets bored and wants to go swimming, that doesn't disrupt what any other student happens to be doing at the moment.
1. Learning with your similar ability brothers and sisters.
Many families have children about or around the same age or ability level, and some parents find it convenient to teach the same lessons to that group of children together, differentiating instruction by ability. This happens more often than one would presume. The planning involved seems to be easier than keeping children focused separately on separate tasks. I have noticed subjects that lend themselves towards projects or performance seem to be very popular with parents to organize as groups, like music, drama, and science. Subject matter that lends itself easily into play is also a popular and frequent choice for homeschooling families. An example that comes to mind is physical education. Unless you only have one child in your family, are you really going to have each child do p.e. alone? This subject matters also tends to be popular in co-ops.
2. Homeschool Co-operatives
Our family participated in a number of co-operatives with other families, usually organized on some kind of theme. Preschool co-ops are very popular, since you are doing discovery-based learning, allowing the children an opportunity to play and explore. We did a p.e. co-op at the YMCA so we could put together a large group of kids for activities like softball and kickball, and this also served to cover the expense of reserving equipment like the indoor swimming pool, which would not be affordable for each individual family alone. Another co-op where we participated in classes offered an Expo at the end of the school year where families or individual students would present projects, sort of like a science fair, and there would be musical and dramatic performances. Many of the skits that were performed involved some or all of the children from a particular family performing together. Some of the families in that group got together on Friday afternoons for bowling, although we didn't have organized teams, just kids informally bowling together.
Organizing co-operatives is so much work for, in my opinion, a marginally better education than if your family just kept to yourselves. Unlike a traditional school where students are compelled to attend, everyone participating is there voluntarily, and for the most part, for students to attend, an adult caregiver or at the very least, someone with a driver's license and a car, has to organize their life so that they can bring the students. All co-ops struggle with attendance. Some co-ops will develop rules for attendance; however, this doesn't effectively address the issue. If a family has someone who is sick, that often means no one from that family will be able to come today, and in some cases, that could mean up to seven kids not showing up, when it's a larger family. What this means for planning co-operative classes is that your lesson plans needs to be adaptable to a varying, unpredictable number of students, and it is unlikely that lessons spanning multiple days will be successfully executed. Whatever you learn needs to be executed in one session, including instruction or review of knowledge a student may need as a baseline to get something out of the experience. What I find is that after a certain grade level, it becomes more and more challenging to create a co-operative learning experience because higher-level learning requires more attention to mastery of baseline material and you simply do not have the structure within a homeschool co-op to keep it organized over a longer period of time, such as an entire school year, with the exception perhaps of a co-op that meets daily, where students attend like they would another school, a co-op that functions as a traditional school run by parents, and those are very rare. By my estimation, there are no more than a dozen such schools operating in the United States, because they require a very high level of consistent funding to maintain, similar to a traditional school.
The other two problems I have identified that prevent more group learning through the co-op method are the same problems that school teachers face: classroom management and student motivation. Since you don't have these kids every day, and the parents take turns teaching, there are no basic routines in place like you would normally have in a classroom to help things move along smoothly, like routines for passing around materials or going to the toilet. When I taught a middle-school aged class, I am pretty sure my lessons were a complete failure because the students did not have the skills I expected them to in order to participate, with the exception of one girl who had several years experience at a public school. Even the best-prepared students really did not know how to do things like participate in a formal group discussion. They did not seem to understand how to know when it was their turn to talk or that they should. All of these ideas I bring with me into a homeschool environment are skills I acquired from going to school every day for several years. Of course, kids who have never gone to school have no idea how to organize themselves to delegate individual tasks among group members. Those are skills that need to be taught on an on-going basis in traditional schools every school year in every class, so of course, when you have a group of students who have never been to school, it is a daunting challenge to teach these skills to students you have only the most tenuous of relationships with.
I have noticed among almost every age level of kids that the kids seem to view co-op as a prime opportunity for cutting up with other kids, goofing off, and getting away with it because their mom is down the hall, so their motivation to apply themselves to something other than goofing off is competing with the sheer joy of showing off to friends. It will shock you how badly behaved the same kids who are always so polite and well-mannered in other settings, will behave when you put them in that classroom an give them exactly one chance a week for two hours to act like a clown for an audience for an audience of their peers. It seems to me that if I'm a kid and I'm in school, I can spread my antics out over the course of the week because I know I'm coming back to school every day, Monday through Friday, until next summer; whereas, with homeschool kids, they have only a brief window of opportunity to exhibit every attention-seeking behavior and that is during this one shot you get at a lesson.
These are great limitations to group learning in a co-op environment. The most successful co-op activities are the ones that are the least structured, discovery-based, and offer lots of opportunities for just plain goofing off. For example, one of my friends has been describing to me how her homeschool co-op organizes lots of trips to the beach. She sends me photographs of the dead animals the kids seem to enjoy collecting and identifying. They are learning in such a way that if an individual student gets bored and wants to go swimming, that doesn't disrupt what any other student happens to be doing at the moment.
So it seems that successful co-op experiences tend towards what Moreno places under the heading Informal Learning Experiences.
3. Informal Learning Experiences
Homeschool kids do lots and lots and lots of informal learning experiences. Lots of field trips. Lots of trips to the art museum. Lots of trips to the zoo. If there are "classes" or group tours offered, homeschool families sign up for them.
3. Informal Learning Experiences
Homeschool kids do lots and lots and lots of informal learning experiences. Lots of field trips. Lots of trips to the art museum. Lots of trips to the zoo. If there are "classes" or group tours offered, homeschool families sign up for them.
4. Tutoring
Within a family, brothers and sisters will be occasionally or frequently called upon to "help" brothers or sisters learn something. Parents may even use this as a behavioral management tool, as in "if he is helping his brother with his flashcards, he will not be pulling his sister's hair." Depending upon relationships in the family, brothers and sisters may take it upon themselves to teach a sibling. For example, I have a friend who loves to talk about how he son, who was a late reader, learned to read because his older sister thought that he ought to. My daughter loved to read books with her preschool brother and teach him to read various words. I don't know what motivated her to want to do that, but I did not discourage it.
5. Modeling
Again this is something schools do better than homeschools by virtue of the shear numbers of potential models within schools when it comes to models for academic work. At home, you are limited to modeling your parents and older siblings. However, when it comes to other types of work, students can and do benefit from the opportunities they have to model their parents because of the number of hours spent together with them. Children observe their parents engaging in tasks that they might not be able to observe if they were enrolled in school, such as operating a farm or home-based business, not to mention the myriad errands that parents tend to accomplish when their kids are not with them. When you homeschool, you tend to drag your kids all around so they tend to see more of the "adult" world than they otherwise would. When I did banking or any kind of household commerce, she came with me. There were many times where she came with me or my husband to work and observed us at our jobs, simply by default because there was nowhere else for her to go.
When my daughter was in Kindergarten, I was pregnant, so I dragged her with me to the gynecologist for the prenatal visits. Because they are with their mothers so frequently, I have noticed that homeschooled students tend to know a lot more about pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and all of the elements of human reproduction than their similar-aged schooled peers. Partly because they spend more time around animals and partly because their mothers' pregnancies are more disruptive of their routines. It amuses me that now that my daughter goes to school, she is the go-to person for answers to questions her peers in middle school have about sexual reproduction, especially since her expertise on the subject is largely cobbled together from books and direct observation of the rabbits we kept. It especially amuses me when she is exasperated from answering their questions and complains to me, "Why don't their moms teach them this stuff! Their moms should be teaching them!" Why don't their moms teach them, indeed.
Homeschool kids tend to know more about how to take care of babies, how to cook and clean a house, how things go with money and jobs and all of the regular things that grown-ups have to deal with. They know more about the "real world," the world outside of schools, because those are the models of behaviors they have to learn from, so those are the things they learn about.
6. Extracurricular activities
The most group learning that homeschool students do with other children not in their household tend to take place around what most people call extra-curricular activities. I distinguish clubs that children join, like Boy Scouts or youth groups at church from taking classes at the art museum, because of the greater level of commitment implied. When you join 4-H, there are expectations of performance from persons outside of their own family, especially other children their own age. These clubs meet the requirement that Moreno draws her attention to begining on page 306 where she describes the five essential elements of cooperative learning. These clubs offer opportunities for activities that possess elements of positive interdependence, individual accountability, face-to-face interaction, social skills, and group processing.
Overall, the opportunities and variety of ways in which students can engage in sociocognitive learning experiences when they go to a traditional school are vastly greater than for students who homeschool, even though we can see that for traditional homeschoolers, learning does not occur apart from other people. When parents are choosing to remove their children from schools and forgo those opportunities, what they are really saying is that their perception is that the school isn't making good use of its capacity to provide those opportunities, so overall, their children are better off without them.
Within a family, brothers and sisters will be occasionally or frequently called upon to "help" brothers or sisters learn something. Parents may even use this as a behavioral management tool, as in "if he is helping his brother with his flashcards, he will not be pulling his sister's hair." Depending upon relationships in the family, brothers and sisters may take it upon themselves to teach a sibling. For example, I have a friend who loves to talk about how he son, who was a late reader, learned to read because his older sister thought that he ought to. My daughter loved to read books with her preschool brother and teach him to read various words. I don't know what motivated her to want to do that, but I did not discourage it.
5. Modeling
Again this is something schools do better than homeschools by virtue of the shear numbers of potential models within schools when it comes to models for academic work. At home, you are limited to modeling your parents and older siblings. However, when it comes to other types of work, students can and do benefit from the opportunities they have to model their parents because of the number of hours spent together with them. Children observe their parents engaging in tasks that they might not be able to observe if they were enrolled in school, such as operating a farm or home-based business, not to mention the myriad errands that parents tend to accomplish when their kids are not with them. When you homeschool, you tend to drag your kids all around so they tend to see more of the "adult" world than they otherwise would. When I did banking or any kind of household commerce, she came with me. There were many times where she came with me or my husband to work and observed us at our jobs, simply by default because there was nowhere else for her to go.
When my daughter was in Kindergarten, I was pregnant, so I dragged her with me to the gynecologist for the prenatal visits. Because they are with their mothers so frequently, I have noticed that homeschooled students tend to know a lot more about pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and all of the elements of human reproduction than their similar-aged schooled peers. Partly because they spend more time around animals and partly because their mothers' pregnancies are more disruptive of their routines. It amuses me that now that my daughter goes to school, she is the go-to person for answers to questions her peers in middle school have about sexual reproduction, especially since her expertise on the subject is largely cobbled together from books and direct observation of the rabbits we kept. It especially amuses me when she is exasperated from answering their questions and complains to me, "Why don't their moms teach them this stuff! Their moms should be teaching them!" Why don't their moms teach them, indeed.
Homeschool kids tend to know more about how to take care of babies, how to cook and clean a house, how things go with money and jobs and all of the regular things that grown-ups have to deal with. They know more about the "real world," the world outside of schools, because those are the models of behaviors they have to learn from, so those are the things they learn about.
6. Extracurricular activities
The most group learning that homeschool students do with other children not in their household tend to take place around what most people call extra-curricular activities. I distinguish clubs that children join, like Boy Scouts or youth groups at church from taking classes at the art museum, because of the greater level of commitment implied. When you join 4-H, there are expectations of performance from persons outside of their own family, especially other children their own age. These clubs meet the requirement that Moreno draws her attention to begining on page 306 where she describes the five essential elements of cooperative learning. These clubs offer opportunities for activities that possess elements of positive interdependence, individual accountability, face-to-face interaction, social skills, and group processing.
Overall, the opportunities and variety of ways in which students can engage in sociocognitive learning experiences when they go to a traditional school are vastly greater than for students who homeschool, even though we can see that for traditional homeschoolers, learning does not occur apart from other people. When parents are choosing to remove their children from schools and forgo those opportunities, what they are really saying is that their perception is that the school isn't making good use of its capacity to provide those opportunities, so overall, their children are better off without them.