Expliciet en direct NT2-onderwijs nodig; haaks op visie Steunpunt NT2-Leuven. Visie van prof. Catherine Snow (keynote ORD, Groningen)
Het Leuvens Steunpunt NT2 ontving in de periode 1990-2010 een 500 miljoen BFR voor het ondersteunen van NT2-onderwijs. Merkwaardig genoeg besloot het Steunpunt al na een paar jaar dat expliciet NT2-onderwijs met een specifieke methodiek overbodig was. Het vo...lstond volgens hen dat de anderstalige kleuters gewoon optrokken met de Vlaamse kleuters binnen de klas, samen spelen in de speelhoeken e.d. Volgens de Leuvense professoren Kris Van den Branden en Koen Jaspaert was er immers geen verschil tussen de aanpak van NT2 en NT1. In het handboek taal 5Acco 2004) voor de lerarenopleiding onder redactie van Van den Branden wordt er dan ook met geen woord gerept over de specifieke NT2-methodiek. Prof. Catherine Snow die vorige woensdag op de ORD-dagen in Groningen een keynote-lezing verzorgde, is het daar absoluut niet mee eens. Zij pleit voor expliciet en direct NT2-onderwijs. We citeren even uit een publicatie van Snow.
Why has the acquisition of English by non-English-speakingchildren not been more universally successful? It appears that non-English-speaking students may be having a harder and harder time learning English. Although it used to take them from five to seven years to learn English (Cummins 1981a; Klesmer, 1994), recent studies suggest it is now taking seven to ten years (Ramrez, Pasta, Yuen, Billings, & Ramey, 1991).
There are students who begin school in kindergarten classified by their school district as limited English proficient (LEP) and who leave it as LEP students 13 years later. Even highly motivated students can have considerable difficulty mastering English. The public, the press, and many educators have blamed bilingual education for the slow rate of English learning by LEP students. Whether or not LEP students manage to survive in school, few can learn English at the levels required for success in higher education or the workplace without instructional intervention. But for many years, teachers who work with these students have been unclear about what instructional role they should play in second language learning. Over the past two decades, some teacher education programs and in-service workshops have suggested that there is no need to teach English directly. Instead teachers have been told by experts that they should speak to children in ways that help them understand, and teach them subject matter using simplified English. They should use pictures, gestures, demonstrations and the like to allow children to acquire English naturally and automatically, and avoid indicating that they notice students English language errors so that learnerswill not be self-conscious and immobilized in using the language. The message is this: Direct instruction can do nothing to change the course of language development, which is determined by internal language-acquisition mechanisms that allow learners to sort things out eventually.
Are these approaches effective? Examining how children acquire English in a variety of settings, Fillmore (1982; 1991) found that certain conditions must be met if children are to be successful. They must interact directly and frequently with people who know the language well enough to reveal how it works and how it can be used. During interactions with English learners, expert speakers not only provide access to the language at an appropriate level; they also provide ample clues as to what the units in the language are and how they combine to communicate ideas, information, and intentions. Learners receive corrective feedback as they negotiate and clarify communicative intentions (Long, 1985; Pica, 1996).
The acquisition process can go awry when the conditions for language learning are not met, especially when learners greatly outnumber people who know the language well enough to support acquisition, as in schools and classrooms with high populations of English language learners.When there is no direct instruction in such situations, children can either make little progress learning English.
Onderwijs. Rijke woordenschat uiterst belangrijk voor onderwijskansen
A Wealth of Words. The
key to increasing upward mobility is expanding vocabulary. Winter 2013
Ed Hirsch over belang van woordenschat en kennis &
methodiek woordenschat- en leesonderwijs
1. Vooraf: enkele
citaten die me heel belangrijk lijken
*Early in the twentieth century, a well-meant but inadequate
conception of education became dominant in the United States. It included
optimism about childrens natural development, a belief in the unimportance of factual knowledge and book learning, and a
corresponding belief in the importance of training the mind through hands-on
practical experience. In the 1920s and 1930s, these ideas began spreading to
teacher-training institutions
*Domain-based approach to literacy (te weinig aandacht in Vl
methodes)
For the purposes of
teaching vocabulary, a domain could be defined as a sphere of knowledge in
which concepts and words are repeated over the course of two or three weeks.
Such repetition happens automatically in a classroom unit on, say, plants and
photosynthesis. Students then learn not just the theme-based words of a
domainsuch as seeds in the kindergartners lessons on farms, or empathy in
the university social-psychology classbut also the meanings of more general
words, such as however, conversely, credible, and annual.
*Te veel aandacht
voor leesstrategieën?
How-to-ism has failed because of its fundamental
misconception of skills, which considers them analogous to automated processes,
such as making a free throw in basketball. In English class, young children are
now practicing soul-deadening how-to exercises like finding the main idea in
a passage and questioning the author. These exercises usurp students mental
capacity for understanding what is written by forcing them to think
self-consciously about the reading process itself. The exercises also waste
time that ought to be spent gaining knowledge and vocabulary. The increasingly
desperate pursuit of this empty, formalistic misconception of reading explains
why our schools intense focus on reading skills has produced students who, by
grade 12, cant read well enough to flourish at college or take a good job.
*Te losse leesthema's
Another mistaken idea that must be scrapped is that
curricula dont need to build knowledge coherently and cumulatively. Consider
the topics or themes that one best-selling reading program covers in the
first grade. Theme Five, called Home Sweet Home, includes lessons called
Moving Day, Me on the Map, and The Kite. The lessons of Theme Six,
Animal Adventures, are The Sleeping Pig, EEK! Theres a Mouse in the
House, and Red-Eyed Tree Frog. Then come Theme Seven, We Can Work It Out
(That Toad Is Mine!, Lost!, If You Give a Pig a Pancake), and Theme
Eight, Our Earth (The Forest, Butterfly, Johnny Appleseed). Theme Nine,
Special Friends, and Theme Ten, We Can Do It!, contain equally
helter-skelter stories. As the names indicate, the texts have little
substantive connection with one another and therefore offer few chances to
speed word-learning through subject-matter familiarity.
2. Bijdrage van
Hirsch
A number of notable recent books, including Joseph
Stiglitzs The Price of Inequality and Timothy Noahs The Great Divergence, lay
out in disheartening detail the growing inequality of income and opportunity in
the United States, along with the decline of the middle class. The aristocracy
of family so deplored by Jefferson seems upon us; the counter-aristocracy of
merit that long defined America as the land of opportunity has receded.
These writers emphasize global, technological, and
sociopolitical trends in their analyses. But
we should factor in another cause of receding economic equality: the decline of
educational opportunity. Theres a well-established correlation between a
college degree and economic benefit. And for guidance on what helps students
finish college and earn more income, we should consider the SAT, whose power to
predict graduation rates is well documented. The way to score well on the
SATat least on the verbal SATis to have a large vocabulary. As the eminent
psychologist John Carroll once observed, the verbal SAT is essentially a
vocabulary test.
So theres a positive correlation between a students
vocabulary size in grade 12, the likelihood that she will graduate from
college, and her future level of income. The reason is clear: vocabulary size
is a convenient proxy for a whole range of educational attainments and
abilitiesnot just skill in reading, writing, listening, and speaking but also
general knowledge of science, history, and the arts. If we want to reduce
economic inequality in America, a good place to start is the language-arts
classroom.
Early in the twentieth century, a well-meant but inadequate
conception of education became dominant in the United States. It included
optimism about childrens natural development, a belief in the unimportance of
factual knowledge and book learning, and a corresponding belief in the
importance of training the mind through hands-on practical experience. In the
1920s and 1930s, these ideas began spreading to teacher-training institutions.
It took two or three decades for the new teachers and administrators to take
over from the old and for the new ideas to revolutionize schoolbooks and
classroom practices. The first students to undergo this new schooling therefore
began kindergarten in the 1950s and arrived in 12th grade in the 1960s.
Their test scores showed the impact of the new ideas. From
1945 to 1967, 12th-graders verbal scores on the SAT and other tests had risen.
But then those scores plummeted. Cornell economist John Bishop wrote in the
1980s of the historically unprecedented nature of the test score decline that
began around 1967. Prior to that year test scores had been rising steadily for
50 years. The scores reached their nadir around 1980 and have remained low
ever since.
Some scholars thought that the precipitous fall of verbal
SAT scores simply reflected the admirable increase in the percentage of
low-income students taking the SAT. But Bishop observed that the same downhill
pattern had occurred in verbal scores on the Iowa Test of Educational
Developmenta test given to all Iowa high school students, who were 98 percent
white and mostly middle-class in attitude. He argued that the declining
effectiveness of American schools was a leading indicator for the shrinking
income of the American middle class. The evidence today suggests that he was
right. The decline in the educational productivity of our schools tracks our
decline in income equality. For 30 years after 1945, Stiglitz observes,
economic equality advanced in the United States; after about 1975, it declined.
Later, another Cornell scholar, the sociologist Donald
Hayes, showed that the decline of the verbal SAT scores was indeed correlated
with a dumbing-down of American schoolbooks. Following the lead of the great literacy
scholar Jeanne Chall, Hayes found that publishers, under the influence of
progressive educational theories, had begun to use simplified language and
smaller vocabularies. Hayes demonstrated that the dilution of knowledge and
vocabulary, rather than poverty, explained most of the test-score drop.
Vocabulary doesnt just help children do well on verbal
exams. Studies have solidly established the correlation between vocabulary and
real-world ability. Many of these studies examine the Armed Forces Qualification
Test (AFQT), which the military devised in 1950 as an entrance requirement and
a job-allocating device. The exam consists of two verbal sections (on
vocabulary size and paragraph comprehension) and two math sections. The
military has determined that the test predicts real-world job performance most
accurately when you double the verbal score and add it to the math score. Once
you perform that adjustment, according to a 1999 study by Christopher Winship
and Sanders Korenman, a gain of one standard deviation on the AFQT raises ones
annual income by nearly $10,000 (in 2012 dollars). Other studies show that much
of the disparity in the black-white wage gap disappears when you take AFQT
scoresagain, weighted toward the verbal sideinto account.
Such correlations between vocabulary size and life chances
are as firm as any correlations in educational research. Of course, vocabulary
isnt perfectly correlated with knowledge. People with similar vocabulary sizes
may vary significantly in their talent and in the depth of their understanding.
Nonetheless, theres no better index to accumulated knowledge and general
competence than the size of a persons vocabulary. Simply put: knowing more
words makes you smarter. And between 1962 and the present, a big segment of the
American population began knowing fewer words, getting less smart, and becoming
demonstrably less able to earn a high income.
Why should vocabulary size be related to achieved
intelligence and real-world competence? Though the intricate details of
cognitive abilities are under constant study and refinement, its possible to
give a rough answer. The space where we solve our problems is called working
memory. For everyone, even geniuses, its a small space that can hold only a
few items in suspension for only a few seconds. If one doesnt make the right
connections within that space, one has to start over again. Hence, one method
for coping and problem solving is to reduce the number of items that one has to
make sense of at any moment. The psychologist George A. Miller called that
process chunking. Telephone numbers and Social Security numbers are good
examples. The number (212) 374-5278, written in three chunks, is a lot easier
to cope with than 2123745278.
Words are fantastically effective chunking devices. Suppose
you put a single item into your working memorysay, Pasteur. So long as you
hold in your long-term memory a lot of associations with that name, you dont
need to dredge them up and try to cram them into your working memory. The name
serves as a brief proxy for whatever aspects will turn out to be needed to cope
with your problem. The more readily available such proxies are for you, the
better you will be at dealing with various problems. Extend this example to
whole spheres of knowledge and experience, and youll realize that a large
vocabulary is a powerful coping device that enhances ones general cognitive
ability.
If vocabulary is related to achieved intelligence and to
economic success, our schools need to figure out how to encourage vocabulary
growth. They should understand, for starters, that word-learning occurs slowly
and through a largely unconscious process. Consider the word excrescence. Few
know the word; fewer still encounter it in their everyday lives. Maybe you do
know it, but imagine that you dont.
Now suppose I gave it to you in a sentence: To calculate
fuel efficiency, the aerospace engineers needed an accurate estimation of
excrescence drag caused by the shape of the planes cabin. That single
exposure to the word is probably insufficient for you to grasp its meaning,
though if you know something about aerospace engineering, youll be likelier to
make a good approximation. Heres an encounter in another context:
Excrescences on the valves of the heart have been known to cause a stroke.
Perhaps now you have a vague understanding of the word. A third meaningful
encounter will allow you to check your understanding or refine your sense of
the meaning: The wart, a small excrescence on his skin, had made Jeremy self-conscious
for years. By now, you probably have a pretty solid understanding of the word,
and one more encounter in a familiar context should verify your understanding:
At the far end of the meadow was what, at first glance, I thought a huge domed
building, and then saw was an excrescence from the cliff itself.
Youve probably figured out that the word excrescence
means an outgrowth. Thats an accelerated, artificial example of how
word-learning occurs. The sense of a word that a listener or reader gains from
multiple exposures to it isnt a fixed and definite meaning but rather a system
of meaning possibilities that get narrowed down through context on each
occasion. As Miller showed, knowledge of a word is a memory residue of several
meaningful encounters with the word in diverse contexts. We retain bits of
those past contexts in memory as part of the words meaning-potential. Almost
all the word meanings that we know are acquired indirectly by intuitively
guessing new meanings as we get the overall gist of what were hearing or
reading.
As the example also shows, it takes knowledge of surrounding
words to guess a new words connotations. Domed building and cliff helped
you guess the meaning of excrescence better than drag and valves did. And
the context for an unfamiliar word isnt just the other words surrounding it in
a text but also the situation referred to by those words. Familiarity with the
relevant subject matter ensures that a students unconscious meaning-guesses
are likely to be right.
So the fastest way to gain a large vocabulary through
schooling is to follow a systematic curriculum that presents new words in
familiar contexts, thereby enabling the student to make correct meaning-guesses
unconsciously. Spending large amounts of school time on individual word study
is an inefficient and insufficient route to a bigger vocabulary. There are just
too many words to be learned by 12th gradebetween 25,000 and 60,000. A large
vocabulary results not from memorizing word lists but from acquiring knowledge
about the social and natural worlds.
The dependence of language comprehension on specific domains
of knowledge comes into clear focus when we turn our attention from all-purpose
words like conjunctions, adverbs, and verbs, and look at nouns. We used to be
taught that a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing. That wasnt a
full definition, since it left out abstract ideas, but it was useful in
emphasizing that a noun names something in the worldtheres no escaping the
referential character of language. You cant know what the noun means without
knowing the thing that it names; conversely, you rarely know the thing without
also knowing its name.
The trick in speeding up word-learning is to make sure that
the subject matter that the words refer to has already been made familiar to
the student. The speed with which students learn new words increases
dramatically when schools create familiar subject-matter contexts within a
coherent sequential curriculum, as the cognitive scientist Thomas Landauer has
demonstrated. The fastest way to learn words is to learn about thingsand to do
it systematically.
Plenty of evidence backs up that proposition. The reading
researcher John Guthrie has shown how well a system called concept-oriented
reading instruction works. Similarly, in classrooms all over the world,
including in the United States, children and adults are successfully being
taught foreign languages through a method called content-based instruction.
The content varies with the age of the student; kindergartners may learn
another language by studying farms, while college students do it by studying
social psychology. The method has proved to be one of the most effective ways
to learn a second language.
The advantages of content-based instruction are enormous.
One is that the topic itself is interesting, so the student has a strong
motivation to understand what is being said or written. But an even more
important advantage is that immersion in a topic provides the student with a
referential and verbal context that is gradually made familiar, which
encourages correct guesses of word meanings at a much more rapid pace than
would be possible in an unfamiliar context. Psychologists refer to certain
skills as being domain-specific, so perhaps a better name for content-based
language acquisition would be domain immersion. The idea is to immerse
students in a domain long enough to make them familiar with the contextand
thus able to learn words faster.
For the purposes of teaching vocabulary, a domain could be
defined as a sphere of knowledge in which concepts and words are repeated over
the course of two or three weeks. Such repetition happens automatically in a
classroom unit on, say, plants and photosynthesis. Students then learn not just
the theme-based words of a domainsuch as seeds in the kindergartners
lessons on farms, or empathy in the university social-psychology classbut
also the meanings of more general words, such as however, conversely,
credible, and annual.
The domain-based approach to literacyusing a coherent,
content-based curriculum to teach languageis the educational policy of the
nations that achieve the best verbal results for both advantaged and
disadvantaged students and narrow the gaps between them. The Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development has devoted massive resources to
international comparisons of educational effectiveness, with particular
attention to gap-narrowing between demographic groups. Its most recent
Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report identifies the
nations that best combine excellence with equity as Korea, Finland, Japan, and
Canada. In these places, the report says, everyone knows what is required to
get a given qualification, in terms both of the content studied and the level
of performance that has to be demonstrated to earn it. In those countries
classrooms, opportunities for a student to make correct meaning-guesses and
build vocabulary occur frequently because the schools follow definite content
standards that build knowledge grade by grade, thus offering constant
opportunities to learn new words in contexts that have been made familiar.
Four decades ago, France led the world in both academic
achievement and equality of educational opportunity. Today, its absent from
the PISA list of the highest-scoring, highest-equity nations. According to my
colleagues in France, the decline began in the 1980s, when French elementary
schools, which once followed a very specific sequential curriculum, began to
diversify according to the American mode, with each elementary school
developing its own plan.
The old French system didnt just have coherent, cumulative
elementary schools; it had coherent, cumulative preschools as well. These
schools have not degenerated as the elementary schools have; indeed, the French
preschool system is still the best in the world. Nearly every child in France
attends a free public preschoolan école maternelleand some attend for three
years, starting at age two. The preschools are academically oriented from the
start. Each grade has a set curriculum and definite academic goals, and the
teachers, selected from a pool of highly qualified applicants, have been
carefully trained.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the French conducted an experiment
with 2,000 students to determine whether sending children to preschool at age
two was worth the public expense. The results were remarkable. After seven
years of elementary school, disadvantaged students who had started preschool at
age two had fully caught up with their more advantaged peers, while those who
had started at three didnt do quite as well, and those who had started at four
trailed still further behind. A good preschool, it turned out, had highly egalitarian
effects. A very early start, followed by systematic elementary schooling, can
erase much of the achievement gap, though the payoff isnt fully apparent until
the later gradesa delayed effect that is to be expected, given the slowness
and cumulativeness of word-learning.
To grasp the significance of this remarkable result, its
important to grasp the extreme difficulty of narrowing the verbal gap between
advantaged and disadvantaged students. The problem has been called the Matthew
Effect, an allusion to Matthew 25:29: For unto every one that hath shall be
given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken
away even that which he hath. Advantaged students who arrive in the classroom
with background knowledge and vocabulary will understand what a textbook or
teacher is saying and will therefore learn more; disadvantaged students who
lack such prior knowledge will fail to understand and thus fall even further
behind, relative to their fellow students. This explains why schooling often
fails to narrow the gap and may even widen it.
The French data show that the Matthew Effect can be almost
fully overcomewith an early start and curricular coherence. But how? Why
didnt the Matthew Effect sink those very early preschool children in France
who started out as cognitive have-nots? Part of the explanation is simply
quantitative: disadvantaged children at age two are at less of an absolute
disadvantage. If the more knowledgeable kids start school knowing 200 words
while the less knowledgeable know just 100, the latter may be far behind
percentage-wise, but still, theyre just 100 words behind in absolute terms.
The French preschools help fill in that gap by teaching the less knowledgeable
kids enough words and things to enable them to understand the language of the
classroom. Yes, they have to guess more meanings than their more advantaged
classmates dobut they can do so correctly because of the careful way in which
the curriculum puts all the children in the catch-up zone of content
familiarity.
The picture is complicated by the fact that the advantaged
children continue to hear and learn much more from their parents and peers
outside school. (Thats why its so much easier for less knowledgeable children
to catch up in math than in language: math is chiefly a school subject, while
language is learned constantly outside school, where differences in background
remain significant.) So again: How did the disadvantaged French children catch
up with their advantaged peers?
Heres how. Systematic schooling using a coherent and
cumulative curriculum covers a wide range of domains as the years go by. The
cognitive scientist Keith Stanovich has shown that the vocabulary of the
classroom and of books is far richer than that of everyday conversation even
among highly educated groups. Hence, as schooling covers more and more
subjects, it imparts an ever-broader vocabulary. Under those conditions,
disadvantaged students do have to keep successfully guessing more words than
their advantaged peers do. But eventually, the knowledge and vocabulary gap is
virtually closed.
To make the necessary school changes in the United States,
an intellectual revolution needs to occur to undo the vast anti-intellectual
revolution that took place in the 1930s. We cant afford to victimize ourselves
further by continued loyalty to outworn and mistaken ideas. Of these, the idea
that most requires overturning is how-to-ismthe notion that schooling should
concern itself not with mere factual knowledge, which is constantly changing,
but rather with giving students the intellectual tools to assimilate new
knowledge. These tools typically include the ability to look things up, to
think critically, and to accommodate oneself flexibly to the world of the
unknowable future.
How-to-ism has failed because of its fundamental
misconception of skills, which considers them analogous to automated processes,
such as making a free throw in basketball. In English class, young children are
now practicing soul-deadening how-to exercises like finding the main idea in
a passage and questioning the author. These exercises usurp students mental
capacity for understanding what is written by forcing them to think
self-consciously about the reading process itself. The exercises also waste time
that ought to be spent gaining knowledge and vocabulary. The increasingly
desperate pursuit of this empty, formalistic misconception of reading explains
why our schools intense focus on reading skills has produced students who, by
grade 12, cant read well enough to flourish at college or take a good job.
Another mistaken idea that must be scrapped is that
curricula dont need to build knowledge coherently and cumulatively. Consider
the topics or themes that one best-selling reading program covers in the
first grade. Theme Five, called Home Sweet Home, includes lessons called
Moving Day, Me on the Map, and The Kite. The lessons of Theme Six,
Animal Adventures, are The Sleeping Pig, EEK! Theres a Mouse in the
House, and Red-Eyed Tree Frog. Then come Theme Seven, We Can Work It Out
(That Toad Is Mine!, Lost!, If You Give a Pig a Pancake), and Theme
Eight, Our Earth (The Forest, Butterfly, Johnny Appleseed). Theme Nine,
Special Friends, and Theme Ten, We Can Do It!, contain equally
helter-skelter stories. As the names indicate, the texts have little
substantive connection with one another and therefore offer few chances to
speed word-learning through subject-matter familiarity.
Well, you might say, thats just first grade; surely more
coherence will come later. Actually, no. Theme One of fourth grade is
Journeys (Akiak, Grandfathers Journey, Finding the Titanic, By the
Shores of Silver Lake), and Theme Two is American Stories (Tomas and the
Library Lady, Tanyas Reunion, Boss of the Plains, A Very Important
Day). In sixth grade, Theme One is Courage (Hatchet, Passage to Freedom,
Climb or Die, The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle), followed by Theme
Two, What Really Happened? (Amelia Earhart, First Lady of Flight, The Girl
Who Married the Moon, Dinosaur Ghosts).
Since large parts of the school dayusually two morning
hoursare spent teaching literacy, the opportunity costs of such incoherence
and fragmentation, especially for disadvantaged students, are easy to imagine.
The misguided approach fails to do what domain immersion does: repeat words and
concepts steadily, teaching students not only the subject under study but also
an abundance of words.
Because vocabulary is a plant of slow growth, no quick fix
to American education is possible. That fact accounts for many of the
disappointments of current education-reform movements. For example, the
founders of the KIPP charter schools, which have greatly helped disadvantaged
children, recently expressed concern that only 30 percent of their graduates
had managed to stay in college and gain a degree. But note that KIPP schools
typically start in fifth or sixth grade, and while KIPPs annual reports show
that their students achieve high scores in math, they score significantly lower
in reading. I interpret those facts to signify that middle school is too late
to rectify disadvantaged students deficits of vocabulary and knowledge.
Word-learning is just too slow a process to close those initial gaps in time
for college. The work of systematic knowledge- and word-building has to begin
earlier.
I would make three practical recommendations to improve
American students vocabularies, and hence their economic potential: better
preschools, run along the French lines; classroom instruction based on domain
immersion; and a specific, cumulative curriculum sequence across the grades,
starting in preschool. Of these, the last is the most important but also the
toughest to achieve politically. But the new Common Core State Standards for
language arts, now adopted by more than 40 states, may offer a ray of hope (see
The Curriculum Reformation, Summer 2012). One statement in the new standards
reads: By reading texts in history/social studies, science, and other
disciplines, students build a foundation of knowledge in these fields that will
also give them the background to be better readers in all content areas.
Students can only gain this foundation when the curriculum is intentionally and
coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across
grades. A second encouraging passage: The Common Core Standards do
notindeed, cannotenumerate all or even most of the content that students
should learn. The Standards must therefore be complemented by a well-developed,
content-rich curriculum.
These two statements are big steps forward from the failed
how-to approaches of the recent past. Their sentiments should be imported into
all state and district standards and then followed up concretely. My hope is
that some influential district superintendent will require a specific grade-by-grade
knowledge sequence. The striking success of one major urban district could
transform practice throughout the nation.
The best schools and teachers have already taken some of the
steps that Ive advocated. After James S. Coleman and his colleagues completed
Equality of Educational Opportunity (1966), he became distressed that the only
lesson people took from his great work was that American schools of the 1960s
made far less difference to educational outcomes than family and economic
status did. There was another finding at least as important: exceptionally good
schools, though better for all students, were especially valuable for
disadvantaged ones. Inferior schools, by contrast, harmed disadvantaged
students much more than they harmed advantaged ones.
Distressed by the oversimplification of his work, Coleman
proceeded to do important research on the success of Catholic schools in
raising all students, rich or poor, to high levels of achievement. He found
that a key factor in their success was their strong focus on subject-matter
knowledge. Many other factors were at work: discipline, focus, expectations,
all the many complexities that help determine school outcomes. But at the heart
of the matter were the lessons themselves, which, in these Catholic schools,
followed a cumulative sequence. The schools employed domain immersion avant la
lettre.
It isnt overstating the case to say that the most secure
way to predict whether an educational policy is likely to help restore the
middle class is to focus on the question: Is this policy likely to expand the
vocabularies of 12th-graders? The physicist Max Planck once said that
professors never change their minds. But teachers and principals can, when
shown a better way. Educators and policymakers should inform themselves about
the critical importance of factual knowledge and about the need for a specific
and coherent yearly curriculum to impart that knowledge and language
effectively. That wont just improve students vocabularies; it will help restore
the Jeffersonian ideal of equality of opportunity.
E. D. Hirsch, Jr. is a professor emeritus of education and
humanities at the University of Virginia and the founder of the Core Knowledge
Foundation.
Onderwijskrant. Verzet van Leuvense rector Torfs & Onderwijskrant tegen dure en nefaste accreditatie
Leuvense Rector Torfs organiseert verzet tegen dure & nefaste visitatiecommissies van NVAO & verzet van Onderwijskrant
1. Verzet van Leuvense rector Torfs
In een interview in Knack (11 juni) formuleert de Leuvense rector Rik Torfs felle kritiek op de accreditatie(commissies) van de NVAO. Ze kosten volgens hem niet enkel te veel tijd en geld, maar tasten vooral ook de kwaliteit en identiteit van de oplei...dingen aan. Visitaties dringen niet door naar de kern van de zaak, ze kijken uitsluitend naar externe zaken.
Vanuit Onderwijskrant zijn we best tevreden met de kritiek van Torfs en met het feit dat hij van plan is om het verzet tegen de accreditatie-visitaties te organiseren. Het verwondert ons enkel maar dat het zolang geduurd heeft alvorens verantwoordelijken in verzet gaan tegen het accreditatiesysteem. Met Onderwijskrant hebben we van meet af aan zon systeem betwist en opgeroepen tot massaal verzet. Torfs bevestigt de kritiek die we al vele jaren formuleren. Rik Torfs is alvast van plan om samen met een Utrechtse rector Bert van der Zwaan verzet te organiseren tegen dure en nefaste visitatiecommissies van NVAO. We raden Torfs aan om hier ook de vele opleidingen hoger van de Associatie Leuven bij te betrekken. Zijn kritiek op de accreditatie in het universitair onderwijs, geldt o.i. minstens evenzeer voor het hoger onderwijs.
We citeren even enkele belangrijke passages uit het interview met Torfs. De geviseerde faculteit moet de visitatie uitgebreid voorbereiden en een zelfevaluatierapport opstellen voor de commissie. Het is een bijzonder bureaucratische klus, zegt rector Torfs. Je loopt bovendien het risico dat het officiële rapport oplevert die niet erg aansluiten bij wat er op de academische vloer gebeurt. Het grootste probleem is dat die visitatoren vaak andere wetenschapsparadigmas hanteren, dan wij. Visitaties zijn formalistisch en dringen niet door tot de kern van de zaken. Ze kijken uitsluitend nar externe en meetbare parameters. Daarom ervaren veel docenten die toetsing als een vervreemding, meer dan als een wezenlijke feedback die de opleiding naar een hoger niveau tilt.
Commentaar van RF: De accreditatie valt niet enkel duur en tijdrovend uit, maar tast inderdaad ook de kwaliteit en identiteit van de opleidingen aan. Mijn eigen (ex-)lerarenopleiding kreeg telkens (2x dus) een Nederlander als voorzitter. De eerste keer was de man in kwestie een sympathisant van de anti-autoritaire Eigen-Wijs-scholen en de tweede keer was de vrouw-voorzitster een propagandiste van het constructivistisch( kantelend') leren' en van het werkplekleren (Raf Feys).
Torfs: Aan dit alles hangt ook een fikse factuur vast. Voor de visitatie van de kleine faculteit kerkelijk recht (met 60 studenten), kostte het de universiteit samen ruim 65.000 euro. Dit jaar zijn vijf bezoeken gepland met een prijskaartje van 231.806 euro. Maar dit is slechts de helft van het verhaal. Alle je er onze kosten nog eens bijrekent, verdubbelen de bedragen.
Torfs vermeldt ook met een kwinkslag dat de visitaties nogal eens worden uitgevoerd door gepensioneerde Nederlandse professoren die hier graag komen tafelen. Torfs vermeldt niet dat er ook Vlaamse (al dan niet gepensioneerde) professoren en docenten bij betrokken zijn die ook graag de royale accreditatievergoeding opstrijken.
2. Onderwijskrant over accreditatie & niveaudaling in hoger onderwijs
In Onderwijskrant nr. 160 (januari 2012) formuleerden we eens te meer kritiek op de accreditatie. We vonden dat de accreditatie niet enkel in Nederland, maar ook in Vlaanderen tot een niveaudaling leidde. Enkele citaten. In verband met de nieuwe accreditatie-doorlichtingen in het hoger onderwijs klaagden we vanaf 2005 in Onderwijskrant en elders aan dat de doorlichters weinig of geen aandacht besteedden aan de productcontrole, aan de leerresultaten en aan het niveau van de studenten en van de opleidingen. We betreurden ook dat de NVAO en de doorlichters/visitators vooral procesgerichte criteria hanteerden die ontleend waren aan een competentiegerichte en constructivistische onderwijsvisie - die mede verantwoordelijk is voor de niveaudaling in het hoger onderwijs in Nederland en Vlaanderen.
Op 30 november 2011 sprak NVAO-voorzitter Karl Dittrich zich plots heel kritisch uit over de niveaudaling in het Nederlands hoger onderwijs en over de nefaste invloed van de competentiegerichte aanpak in het bijzonder ('Kwaliteit vraagt om kwaliteitscultuur', toespraak ter gelegenheid van Nationaal Hoger Onderwijs Congres, Rotterdam 30 november 2011). De malaise en niveaudaling in het hoger onderwijs zijn volgens Dittrich vooral ook een gevolg van de invoering van competentiegericht onderwijs, gecombineerd met al te grote verwachtingen rond de zelfstandigheid van studenten; de visie op de docent als coach i.p.v. inhoudsdeskundige en docent en de onderwaardering van kennis.. We zijn het eens met Dittrich, maar betreuren dat precies zijn accreditatie-organisatie die competentie-gerichte procescriteria bij de visitatie heeft opgelegd.
In het Nederlands hoger onderwijs vond de competentie-gerichte aanpak vroeger ingang dan in Vlaanderen en de invloed van Nederland op de accreditatie-beoordelingscriteria was vrij groot is. Het is ook vaak zo dat in Vlaanderen een Nederlandse visitator - met een vaak andere visie op degelijk hoger onderwijs als voorzitter fungeert binnen de visitatiecommissies. In mijn eigen (ex-)opleiding was dit overigens telkens (al 2x) het geval. Bij accreditatie-doorlichtingen op Vlaamse lerarenopleidingen hoger onderwijs stelden we zelfs vast dat er vaak geen enkele visitator over enige ervaringsdeskundigheid binnen de lerarenopleiding beschikte. Het verwondert ons ten zeerste dat die opleidingen dit lijdzaam hebben ondergaan.
Niet enkel in Nederland, maar ook in Vlaanderen kregen lerarenopleidingen die barnumreclame maakten met hun doorgeschoten competentiegerichte aanpak en met quasi schrappen van het lesgeven bij de eerste accreditatieronde veelal de hoogste accreditatie-score. Opleidingen die minder de competentiegerichte toer opgingen en beter de leerprestaties bewaakten, werden door de doorlichters veelal aangespoord meer competentiegericht te werken. De accreditatie-doorlichting en de overheid die bij de hervorming van het hoger onderwijs en bij de accreditatie de competentiegerichte aanpak oplegden, zijn dus in sterke mate verantwoordelijk voor de niveaudaling in het hoger onderwijs. Gelukkig waren er in Vlaanderen heel wat docenten die lippendienst bewezen aan de opgelegde aanpak. In het Zelfevaluatierapport dat aan de doorlichters werd voorgelegd, probeerde men dat wel zoveel mogelijk te verdoezelen. De accreditatie-komedie viert hoogtij! Het is hoog tijd voor een massaal protest.
Onderwijs.¨Prof. Biesta: modieuze taal van het 'leren' verdringt de taal van het 'onderwijzen'
Een van de inzichten die Biesta in zij recent boek The Beautiful Risk Of Education. heeft verduidelijkt is de ideologie van de taal van het leren. Volgens Biesta vormt the language of learning een bedreiging voor the language of education. Zelf omschreven we de verdringing van de taal van het onderwij...zen in Onderwijskrant vaak ook in termen van ontscholing. We besteedden er heel veel bijdragen aan (zie www.onderwijskrant.be).
Over de opkomst van de taal van het leren schrijft Biesta o.a.:
The rise of the new language of learning is the result and perhaps we should say the partly unintended outcome of a numer of developments. These include (1) the impact of new theories of learning, particularly constructivist theories ( ); (Commentaar: vanaf 1988 bestreden we Onderwijskrant het constructivisme en zijn toepassingen binnen het wiskundeonderwijs, de taalvakken...
(2) the (postmodern) critique of authoratian forms of teaching;
(3) what John Field (2000) has called the silent explosion of learning, that is, the fact that more and more people are engaged in more and more different forms and modes of learning, particularly nonformal and informal ones;
(4) the indivualizing impact of neoliberal policies and politics of education ( ). Biesta: 2014 p. 63
Ook in zijn artikel uit 2012, Giving teaching back to education, legt Biesta uit hoe de leraar en het onderwijzen uit het onderwijs zijn verdwenen. Dat zien we aan woorden als: het nieuwe leren, krachtige leeromgeving, samenwerkend leren, constructivistisch leren en leergemeenschappen.
Prof.-socioloog Jules Peschar: Passend onderwijs (cf. inclusie-M-decreet) wordt een ramp op 1 augustus & macht in het onderwijs is verschoven naar (grote) besturen (Didactief)
Passend onderwijs = Experimenteel theater spelen
Wat is de toekomst van passend onderwijs? Emeritus-hoogleraar Jules Peschar adviseerde over het te volgen beleid. 'Wat de samenwerkingsverbanden precies vanaf 1 augustus moeten doen, is volstrekt onduidelijk.'
De metafoor die Jules Peschar gebruikt is mooi. Dat moet je hem nageven. Het oud-lid van de Evaluatie Commissie Passend Onderwijs, met gevoel voor drama: 'Passend onderwijs is als een toneelstuk dat straks in 152 theaters op even zoveel verschillende manieren zal worden opgevoerd. Binnen vijf jaar zal dat leiden tot rechtszaken. Let maar op.'
Als lid van de ECPO moest Peschar met zijn collega´s het beleid evalueren en adviseren op het gebied van passend onderwijs. De commissie produceerde verschillende kritische rapporten tot haar opheffing op 31 december 2013.
We spreken Peschar in het kader van onze terugblik op onderwijsbeleid sinds de commissie Dijsselbloem. Wat ziet de emeritus-hoogleraar onderwijssociologie als hij achterom kijkt? 'Het idee was destijds natuurlijk dat er draagvlak moest zijn voor onderwijsvernieuwing en zeggenschap over onderwijsdoelen. Daar is weinig van terechtgekomen.'
´Na Dijsselbloem beleed iedereen met de mond dat er meer autonomie moest komen voor leraren, maar in de machtsstructuren is sindsdien niets veranderd. De macht bleef bij de besturen.' Dat is volgens hem een kwestie van regie, of liever 'gebrek aan regie', bij de overheid. ´Onderwijs is een soort experimenteel toneel, waarbij de regisseur in de zaal zit en iedereen zelf mag zeggen hoe het stuk eruit gaat zien.´
Bij de eerste de beste onderwijsvernieuwing na Dijsselbloem - operatie passend onderwijs - geldt dat gebrek aan sturing op veel vlakken, aldus Peschar. 'Er zijn nu 152 samenwerkingsverbanden primair onderwijs gevormd die het moeten gaan doen. Maar wat dat het is, is onduidelijk.'
´De overheid zegt: de samenwerkingsverbanden weten wel wat goed is. Van te voren landelijk vastgelegde criteria ontbreken.´ Er klinkt ongeloof en verontwaardiging in Peschars stem. 'Zowel het Centraal Planbureau als de Algemene Rekenkamer hebben om die reden gezegd dat passend onderwijs niet te evalueren is. Ze zeggen eigenlijk: we kunnen er niks mee. Is het dan wel verstandig zo'n grote vernieuwingsoperatie door te zetten?'
'Evidence based' zou na Dijsselbloem een voorwaarde voor vernieuwing worden en de term echode nog een tijdje na. Maar er is niet aan voldaan bij passend onderwijs. Peschar: 'Er zijn op kleine schaal wat experimenten gedaan, maar die liepen af in december 2013. Toen was passend onderwijs al wettelijk vastgesteld. Bovendien waren dat experimenten waarvoor mensen zichzelf konden aanmelden, dus experimenteel onderzoek in technische zin is nooit gebeurd.'
Peschar is behoorlijk pessimistisch over passend onderwijs. Zoveel is duidelijk. En hij wijst als schuldige vooral naar de politiek en het ministerie. 'Het kabinet had de tien geboden van Dijsselbloem boven zijn bed moeten hangen. En toen het in gebreke bleef bij het handhaven van die leefregels, had het ministerie de bewindslieden daaraan moeten herinneren.' En dan: 'Op het moment dat OCW dat nalaat, is wat mij betreft de professionaliteit van zo'n departement in het geding. Een staatssecretaris moet toch kunnen vertrouwen op zijn ambtenaren?.'
De inspectie is nu bezig een nieuw toezichtskader te ontwikkelen voor het basisonderwijs. Kan dat geen soelaas bieden? Peschar reageert een beetje cynisch. '"Is bezig te ontwikkelen" ja. Maar de operatie passend onderwijs gaat op 1 augustus van start. Scholen weten dan dus nog niet waar ze aan toe zijn en waar ze uiteindelijk op afgerekend worden. Er wordt nu gezegd dat zorgleerlingen straks op dezelfde manier beoordeeld zullen worden als "gewone" leerlingen in het regulier onderwijs. Dat zal een negatief effect hebben op de gemiddelde resultaten van reguliere scholen.' In de evaluatiecommissie is gewaarschuwd dat zo'n gelijke behandeling contraproductief zal gaan werken: scholen zullen zorgleerlingen uit de weg gaan, omdat die de resultaten drukken. Tevergeefs, zegt Peschar. De overheid doet niks.
Wie Peschar goed beluistert, krijgt het gevoel dat we straks met z'n allen een donkere kamer binnenstappen. ´Het gekke is´, zegt Peschar, ´passend onderwijs is niet per 1 augustus gerealiseerd, nee, dan begint het pas. Het is een majeure vernieuwingsoperatie, maar er staat niemand klaar om de boel te evalueren* en bij te sturen: de ECPO is opgeheven. De directie Jeugd Onderwijs en Zorg binnen OCW die over speciaal onderwijs gaat, bestaat niet meer. Er is dus geen organisatorische eenheid meer binnen het ministerie die het proces straks bewaakt. Mensen die lastige vragen kunnen stellen, zijn onvindbaar. Als je al geen twijfels zou hebben bij dit proces, dan zouden dit soort dingen die twijfel toch oproepen? Ik voorspel een parlementaire enquête naar passend onderwijs in 2020.´