Standard 9, reflection and professional development. A teacher must be a reflective practitioner who continually evaluates the effects of choices and actions on others, including students, parents, and other professionals in the learning community, and who actively seeks out opportunities for professional growth.

Education Philosophy Paper:

A Perennialist Approach Helps More Young Students Succeed

Perennialism: An Introduction

I approach education as an experienced professional who has been involved in public schools in two primary ways: on behalf of my children who just finished attending public schools, and as a person with prior teaching experience.  My teaching philosophy has been shaped by experience with the Montessori program that my children attended--the same place where I have recently worked.  My philosophy has also been influenced by teaching second grade for two years where I observed children at all levels of ability desire deep understanding of such subjects as geology, physics, animal classification, and cultural studies.  My second grade students were philosophical during literature discussions; they were capable of profound, human insights.  These experiences cemented my dedication to thoroughly knowing the subject matter I am teaching so that I can have substantive conversations and activities with students at every juncture.  By extension, I have grown desirous of an academic scope and sequence that stresses rich content knowledge, because children’s desire for information is insatiable.   A content-rich curriculum must be paired with hands-on activities that the child has chosen, however, or the teaching becomes a rote exercise, and student learning becomes stuffing.  

Perennialism, an educational philosophy that is not widely used today, fits my desire to offer students a bountiful and relevant engagement with subject matter presented in a logical, sequential order.  Perennialism, chocked full of information, but offering a variety of viewpoints, is the best method for assuring that all public school children develop their inherent capabilities to the fullest extent possible.  Below, past and present views and examples of perennialism, an exploration of the Core Knowledge curriculum, and current efforts to join direct reading instruction with prescribed content for our youngest struggling readers.                 

Perennialism Today: The Negatives and Positives

Perennialism is not held in high regard in most education circles today, but it is gaining ground.  Perennialism is a part of the behaviorist educational psychological theory, and is often represented as a top-down form of pedagogy where the rewarding and punishing teacher is in control (Ryan & Cooper, 1998).  Perennialism has been described as an inflexible, unchanging doctrine that regards the student as a passive recipient to whom lectures and drills are delivered.   Wiles and Bondi (2007) define perennialism as the most traditional and structured educational philosophy.    

Yet if perennialism qualifies as the most conservative of the educational approaches, Mortimer Adler characterizes perennialism as “...conservative as in conserving the best of the past” (Ryan & Cooper, p. 311).  Adler in his Paideia Proposal (1982)  breathed life into perennialism by espousing that all children, not just fortunate children, should be exposed to a high-quality, classical education because it fosters greater equality.  Adler felt that it was imperative for students to embark on self-discovery and self-improvement by gaining an understanding of the framework of our government and our founding principles.  Adler believed that this type of learning would engender and invite students to demand protection of their civil rights, the right to pursue happiness, and the right to expect a decent standard of living.

Perennialists contend that there is an ordered body of knowledge that students need to know so that the public might unite around a shared identity (Gaudelli, 2002).  Having said that, Americans resist group stereotypes and pigeon-holing, and draw attention to the many exceptions to ‘one size fits all.’  Yet, education leader Albert Shanker noted, “The claims of...separatists reflect the attitude that no one group may make a judgement on any other, since all depends on your point of view.  This extremely relativistic viewpoint conflicts with the need that all societies have to establish some basic values, guidelines, and beliefs” (Shanker, 2003).  An enlightened perennialist educational philosophy outlines fundamental knowledge that forms the basis of education so that children can learn and go on to accept, reject, annotate, extend and embark on the path of their choice.  The acquisition of a broad, liberal base of knowledge enables all children to go on to learn more.  A primary, fundamental course of study becomes enabling knowledge that ensures the child’s future growth.

Perennialism and E.D. Hirsch

The educator E.D. Hirsch echoes the views of perennialism.  Hirsch and his colleagues advanced a specific, sequenced curriculum in literature, mathematics, history, the arts, and sciences—the Core Knowledge curriculum—that provides children with enriched knowledge, expands their vocabularies, and lays an academic foundation on which to build.  The Core Knowledge program comprises about 60 percent of the curriculum at each grade level, leaving teachers and students free to pursue additional topics throughout the year.  What content does Core Knowledge include?   Hirsch poses the question: “Is [the] information often taken for granted in talk and writing addressed to a general literate audience?”  (Hirsch, 2006, p. 123).  For example, Hirsch believes that young grade school children should be taught about the kings and queens of England so they can then be taught about what spurred the birth of our nation.  Children need to learn about autocracy so they can find out about democracy.          

Hirsch and Reading Comprehension

Hirsch is a promoter of better reading ability among all students, and struggling students in particular in his recent writings.  In his book Cultural Literacy (1988), Hirsch maintains that reading comprehension depends on specific background knowledge, and that struggling students, many poor students, and others lag behind in reading because they don’t know enough essential literature, history, arts, civics, and sciences.  Reading ability is the crux of the matter, because it corresponds with learning and communication ability.  A child’s reading ability in second grade predicts that child’s academic performance in his or her high school years (Hirsch, 2006).  Hirsch feels that reading ability is central to our identity as a country, because our democracy revolves around information and our ability to broadly and insightfully discern the plethora of news and details that we have at our fingertips.  But to have a well-rounded reading ability you need to know about a lot of things.                                      

Prior Knowledge Helps Students Perform Better Academically

Cognitive science tells us that the more informed you become about a topic, the easier it is for you to learn more about it (Recht & Leslie, 1988).  Recht and Leslie investigated how prior knowledge affected low and high ability middle schoolers’ memory and retention in reading.  When a reader already had an understanding about the subject being studied, comprehension was better and there were fewer memory errors.  Poor readers were significantly less likely to be able to recall unfamiliar text.  The researchers discovered that knowledge of a subject area determined the amount and quality of information recollected, and that prior knowledge helped poor readers compensate for their low reading ability.    

Building Young Students’ Knowledge and Skills as Readers

Broad liberal arts knowledge builds reading comprehension and satisfies students’ thirst for learning.  Student intellectual capacity is fortified by an ordered curriculum rich in history, science, literature and the arts.  Current approaches that depend chiefly on reading strategies such as making text-to-text or text-to-world connections don’t allow class discussions to go far enough.  It is time to turn away from the current peripatetic literacy block in elementary school and replace it with a rich, sequential exploration of non-fiction, historical facts, and high-quality readings, even for the youngest readers, paired with choice and hands-on activities.  Programs such as these have been shown to increase academic achievement, especially for ELL students and students with special needs.

The Pilot

Ten New York City high-poverty public schools implemented the pilot of the Core Knowledge K-2 Language Arts Program and reaped positive results from 2008-2011 (Dubin, 2012).  Administrators and teachers found that their balanced literacy block relied too much on reading comprehension strategies, such as identifying the audience and finding the text’s main idea.  Writer’s Workshop emphasized the process of writing but not enough attention was being paid to what was written about.  Weak student writing resulted. The children didn’t have enough foundational, topical information to write about.  School administrators and teachers became excited after attending a Core Knowledge conference because the curriculum offered students more substance.  They also desired a program that paired content knowledge with teaching beginning readers to read, and starting in 2008, the Core Knowledge Language Arts Program, which included both of these components, became available for trial.  

Core Knowledge Language Arts Program for Grades K-2

In the Core Knowledge Language Arts Program for young readers, a skills strand teaches decoding, phonics, and fluency coupled with writing (encoding), plus grammar and spelling.  The listening and learning content strand sequentially build the child’s knowledge and listening understanding that leads to better reading comprehension down the road (Hirsch, 2010-2011).  It is the listening and learning strand that I will describe in depth.

In the listening and learning part of the Core Knowledge Language Arts Program, to build broad knowledge in the early grades, students are exposed to texts in literature, science, and social studies that grow in complexity over time (See Appendix A).  The Core Language Arts Program contains more non-fiction texts compared to other traditional language arts curriculums.  In kindergarten the texts begin with just a few sentences, but as the year progresses and children’s attention spans lengthen, read-alouds reach two to four pages.  Some teachers at the ten pilot testing schools initially wondered if their young students could sit still and listen.  However, teachers observed that even kindergarteners and first graders were mesmerized by the rich content.  

The literature domain emphasizes fables, stories and myths because Hirsch sees these as the building blocks of later literary and cultural understanding.  Multicultural selections are included.  For example, the literature sequence features the Caldecott-winning Lon Po Po, the scary ancient Chinese version of Little Red Riding Hood retold by Ed Young.  The social studies sequence features Many Nations: An Alphabet of Native America, by Joseph Bruchac.  The social studies course of inquiry is ordered so that domains build on each other--Native American studies precede Colonial studies, after which Westward Expansion is explored.   Students first learn that as American colonists were fighting for freedom against the British, they themselves kept African slaves.  The domain then studies President Lincoln and his battle to end slavery.  Similarly, science knowledge develops from examining the five senses in kindergarten to studying the human body in grade one.  (Many of these topics are revisited in great depth in later grades.) There are 12 literature, social studies, and science domains per grade level, allowing for two weeks of study and related activities for each topic.  Every lesson includes core vocabulary and read-aloud objectives that remind students what they have already heard and learned, and draws out connections to their own lives.  Discussion guides provide reflective questions at different levels of complexity that children can respond to verbally, in writing, or by drawing.  

The Link Between Oral Comprehension and Reading Comprehension

Read-alouds and discussion are vital to the Core Knowledge Language Arts Program. A child’s reading comprehension is not as sophisticated as their listening comprehension until they are 13 or 14 years old.  Even at age nine when children are becoming more advanced readers, listening understanding still surpasses reading understanding (Hirsch, 2010-2011).  Oral language competence helps to predict later reading and school success for elementary-age children (Biemiller, 2003):

•                By grade 3, children with advanced vocabulary skills possess comprehension abilities at the fourth grade level or higher, while third graders with lower-level vocabulary skills comprehend at the second grade level or below.  

•                Fourth graders who begin the school year with vocabulary deficits show growing problems in comprehension.  

Increasing older elementary students’ academic achievement and avoiding the 4th grade slump depends on enriching the students’ oral language and vocabulary in the early elementary years through a content-rich curriculum.

Outomes

Compared to ten comparison schools in the New York City public system that used other curriculums, the ten experimental schools scored higher on reading comprehension, science, and social studies, while also learning to decode, read and write (Dubin, 2012).  Young students succeeded in learning to read and learning to know simultaneously.   While other good reading programs, such as the Fountas and Pinnell’s series, teach children the speech to print connection through phonics instruction, the Core Knowledge Language Arts Program shows that ample content can be included in the scope and sequence for young students.  Academic achievement increases were especially notable for students with special needs.            

Although Core Knowledge instructs what to teach, teachers at the ten pilot schools devised how they would teach it, using supportive materials from the Core Knowledge Language Arts Program and materials that they gathered on their own.  Teachers noted that they no longer had to hunt high and low for leveled instructional materials on topics, but instead could focus on designing small group, hands-on, and differentiated activities.  Additionally, the teachers at the ten pilot sites recommended assessment procedures that Core Knowledge integrated into the final Core Knowledge Language Arts Program curriculum.   

  

Conclusion

Recently I worked with two Native American 5th grade students on cultural studies projects; one chose the topic of Inca mummies, and the other chose to find out about Roman theatre.  Both children gleefully dove into their chosen research topics, tackling challenging texts and websites with fervor.   Willingly they produced paragraph after paragraph of text that they enthusiastically edited and converted into their own words.  They complimented their written work with art work and then presented their research projects to parents and peers.  Again I was convinced of the need for an ordered scope and sequence of non-fiction study for these children.  But it needs to be sequential, so they’re not studying Greeks for three years in row, and it should encompass the entire year rather than a small part of the year.  Now these children are entering MCA testing preparation season.  Temporarily these two 5th graders will become dull and listless with only occasional sparks.  But rich content fed them.  They will rally when they can pick an area of study which captures their imagination and motivates them to cheerfully produce and write again.

Appendix A (Hirsch, E.D., 2010-2011)

      

Bibliography

Adler, M.  (1982).  The paideia proposal: An educational manifesto.  New York: Macmillan Publishing Co.

Biemiller, A. (2003). Oral comprehension sets the ceiling on reading comprehension.  American Educator, Spring, 27(1).

Dubin, J.  (2012). More than words: An early grades reading program builds skills and knowledge.  American Educator, Fall, 36(3), 34-40.

Gaudelli, W. (2002).  U.S. kids don’t know U.S. history: The NAEP study, perspectives, and presuppositions.  Social Studies, September-October, 197-201.

Hirsch, E.D. (2010-2011). Beyond comprehension.  American Educator, Winter, (34)4, 30-43.

Hirsch, E.D. (2006). The knowledge deficit. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Hirsch, E.D., Kett, J., Trefil, J.  (1993).  The dictionary of cultural literacy (2nd ed.).  Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Hirsch, E.D. (1988). Cultural literacy: What every American needs to know.  New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Recht, D., & Leslie, L.  (1988).  Effect of prior knowledge on good and poor readers’ memory of text.  Journal of Educational Psychology, 80(1), 16-20.

Ryan, K., & Cooper, J. (1998). Those who can, teach (8th ed.).  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.

Shanker, A.  (2003).  The importance of civic education.  In J. Leming, L. Ellington, and K. Porter, (eds.), Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong? p. 80.  Available at http://www.edexcellence.net/doc/contrariansFull.pdf.    

Wiles, J., & Bondi, J. (2007). Curriculum development: A guide to practice. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Merrill Prentice Hall.