JUDGING THE NATURAL RIGHTS VIEW, XIV

 

An advocate of natural rights continues his/her presentation[1] …

The last posting ended with a general overview of the methodological process associated with political systems model – that being the scientific method.  With that, there was a hint as to what that could mean for classroom instruction – that being instruction that implements the inquiry approach.  An inquiry method, to various levels of fidelity, applies scientific modes of study by which students solve open ended problems. 

But the adoption of inquiry has not been the case in most civics classrooms.  Instead, didactic methods have prevailed.  Comprising the educational school of thought or philosophy known as essentialism, civics educators – in line with most of public-school educators – have advocated that the goal of education should be to pass on essential information to the younger generation. 

That would be to impart information regarding the culture, basic work skills, and other general knowledge that prepare students for the life beyond school.  Or more encompassing, this view sees classroom instruction adjusting individual students to society.  The question is:  how does one do that?  The common reply has been didactic instruction, i.e., instruction that dispenses and explains the information that functioning adults need.

          Essentialists have found behaviorist principles to be particularly harmonious – as a psychological perspective – to these educational aims.  As stated earlier in this blog, direct instruction, a technique that basically follows the format of assign-recite-test pattern with appropriate rewards and punishments being what these educators see as the most obvious and straightforward way to meet this aim.  But there have been those within essentialism who have taken on a more sophisticated approach.

An essentialist who devised a fairly responsible model of learning, Robert Gagne, identified what he called conditions of learning – five of them – and nine progressive levels or “steps” in which students can advance and engage with school subject content.  The conditions are:

 

·      Verbal information which consists of knowledge claims one finds among various sources of subject information and can be interrelated with other information in meaningful ways.

·      Intellectual skills are those abilities students can develop by which they process knowledge such as forming hierarchies, contextualizing relevant, new information, or acquiring information that adds distinctive attributes to what is being studied among other skills.

·      Cognitive strategies consist of analytic abilities in which students can break down sets of information that assist in exposing problems, the problems themselves, or the information needed to solve those problems.

·      Motor skills are those behavioral steps that students develop and, through practice, improve upon in which they tackle challenging academic issues.

·      Attitudes are those sentiments students need to motivate themselves to address the material that classroom instruction presents them.

 

And as for the levels or steps, they are:

 

Level 1:  Reception (or capturing the attention of students)

Level 2:  Setting expectations (or students being informed what they are to learn and why they are to learn it)

Level 3:  Relevant retrieval (or calling on students to recall what they know and is helpful in meeting a lesson’s objectives)

Level 4:  Targeted or selective perception (or presenting new information that students are to learn with an array of aids such as visuals, examples, discussions)

Level 5:  Verbal encoding (or presentation of the new information in a variety of language presentations such as graphics or case studies)

Level 6:  Responding (or student presentation of new information in various communicative approaches such as tests, demonstrations, interpretations – perhaps artistic productions)

Level 7:  Evaluative reinforcement (or teaching agents providing students with feedback as to the proficiency students demonstrate with the goal to improve on student performance)

Level 8:  Evaluative assessment (or determination how well students have learned the content)

Level 9:  Enriching the retained information (or have students transfer learned content to novel or real-life situations that do not totally match information learned but need to be adjusted or nuanced so as to be applicable) [2]

         

To break down this overall influence, educational psychologist, Geoffrey Scheurman writes,

 

With the help of computers, cognitive scientists have fueled a “revolution” in the psychology of learning by modeling how learners’ prior knowledge (stored in clusters called Schemata) not only filter, but actually modifies, sensory activity as it is experienced.[3]

 

The hope of “constructive” thought, which Gagne helped develop, is a newer perspective, included in the behaviorist-essentialist model, and has led to the incorporation of more engaging and reflective methods in the classroom as the above conditions and levels indicate.  These might include dialogue, problem-solving, heuristic material analysis, etc.  That was the hope in the years leading up to the twenty-first century.

          But of particular importance would be if teachers would – in the mode ascribed by the behaviorist-essentialist school of instruction – fragment or breakdown their content into logical, sequential pieces of information and have students work with and reassemble the pieces that learners could accomplish in their studies.[4]  In short, it has students actively reflect on the information they are to learn.

Yet, as this blog has argued, these newer approaches have not been widely incorporated.  Instead, this blog, citing expert reportage, has doggedly maintained that the more didactive strategies with minimal to no application of more “constructive” instructional techniques – or as indicated above, insist on the assign-recite-recall protocol.

This is despite the fact that the political systems model lends itself comfortably to this more interactive, essentialist curricular plans.  The political systems model is highly logical and sequential as described and explained in this blog.  It lends itself to mental manipulations about how the system works given varying presentations about how it functions. 

The next posting will continue this presentation of essentialist thinking by addressing the question:  how well does this more sophisticated approach work?  Beyond that, it will begin to report on the commonplaces of curricular development as they apply to essentialist instruction.

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[1] This presentation continues with this posting.  The reader is informed that the claims made in this posting do not necessarily reflect the beliefs or knowledge of this blogger.  Instead, the posting is a representation of what an advocate of the natural rights view might present.  This is done to present a dialectic position of that construct.  This series of postings begins with “Judging Natural Rights View, I,” August 2, 2022.

[2] B. Janse, “Gagne’s Conditions of Learning,” Toolshero (2019), accessed September 15, 2022, https://www.toolshero.com/personal-development/gagnes-conditions-of-learning/.

[3] Geoffrey Scheurman,  “From Behaviorist to Constructive Teaching,” Social Education, 62, 1 (January 1998), 6-9, page not noted.

[4] Peter F. Oliva, Developing the Curriculum (Boston, MA:  Little, Brown, and Company, 1982).