Adopting Progressive Ed. w/ Alfie Kohn

Michael : Hello and welcome everyone to Things Fall Apart, our podcast here at the Human Restoration Project. I am Michael.

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Chris McNutt: And I'm Chris.

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M: And per usual, we're going to intro here with a little bit of background info of what is currently going on.

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CM: So today we're going to be joined by Alfie Kohn here shortly. Alfie Kohn probably is one of the lead inspirations for the Human Restoration Project in terms of what we talk about. Many of his ideas are in line with the exact things that we believe are important. So putting research into practice, getting rid of the competitive nature of schooling, focusing on children with love and support, and just overall humanizing education. Stop focusing on competitive grading and pitting our kids against each other and ranking them and averaging them. And instead focus on them as individuals and engaging their passions and learning to learn, to gather a love of learning. So we're super looking forward to talking to him about that. Right. Some things coming up as a part of the Human Restoration Project. We do offer materials in addition to our discussions. Next month, we're introducing a progressive guidebook, if you will. It's not an end all be all guide to progressive education, but rather a summary of different things that we think are worth thinking about. That's a lot of thinking. So the progressive guidebook will be just kind of an overview of what progressive education is and a huge documented list of all the different possible things you could look at in order to learn more about them. Also, we have some resources already available, which will probably relate to what we're talking about today, such as a reflective development piece over the subjectivity of grading to learn more about how grading practices can have negative effects on children, as well as different projects, such as the Quest Project, which is a fairly large booklet surrounding activities, reflections, and discussion that you can have with your students surrounding recognizing their passions and why it might be difficult to find them. So check those out.

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M: Which is all free, by the way, on the website.

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CM: Yep, it's all free. Thanks to our Patreon supporters. So a special shout out to Skylar Primm and Aaron Flanagan for helping us out. And if you want to contribute to our Patreon page, you could do so for as little as a dollar a month. You can check us out on humanrestorationproject.org to find research and resources, thoughts, podcasts, all sorts of different kinds of stuff pertaining to progressive education. Today, we're joined by Alfie Kohn, a renowned educator who has authored over 100 articles on the importance of progressive practice, including his collection of works, the myth of a spoiled child, feel bad education, schooling beyond measure, punished by rewards, and the homework myth. You can find almost all of Alfie's lectures, blogs, and thoughts on his website for free at alfiekohn.org. Kohn is well known for his views on eliminating competition such as grading in schools, eliminating standardized testing, and truly having a relevant, authentic, caring system that focuses on education over content. You're focused a lot on educational reform movements, getting away from buzzwords such as growth mindset and grit. And you talk a lot about changing systemic issues in education. So removing competitive grading, removing standardized testing. You're trying to find ways to reinvigorate education rather than making the old system slightly more functional. So how do you think we can effectively communicate your message to the majority of educators who care about students but are instead focusing on improving a system that needs more radical change?

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Allie Kohn: Well, I think there's two issues that should be teased apart there. One is how radical or moderate the changes that we make, inviting people to ask the root questions, not how do you tweak grading, for example, to include fashionable new variations like standards-based grading, but instead ask the question, why are we giving grades at all given what the research finds is the effect of grades, and so on for other issues as well, homework or the way the classroom is arranged. All of that could be categorized as pushing deeper with the scope and depth of the questions we ask. But that should be distinguished from the other issue that you raised briefly, which is a tendency to avoid structural causes of problems altogether and focus instead on fixing the kid. So for example, when we talk about making kids more persistent, giving them more self-discipline, making them acquire a growth mindset, here we're not even asking moderate-level questions about the system. We're saying the problem is in the student's head, and we need to change their mindset or attitude or orientation so they can, well, persist longer and be more successful at whatever crap we're throwing at them. And that's not just a matter of turning up the dial with respect to the radicalism of the fixes that we provide, but shifting our gaze from student to structure. And the way to bring educators in on that is to say exactly that, invite them to share their experiences once they have this schema, this sort of mental model that may help them to understand what they've been experiencing and doing in a new way.

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CM: So based off of that, and I love that answer, you have all of these sources that back up your statements. I mean, there's hundreds, thousands of research articles that showcase that aggressive educational practice is so important, ending grading and homework, as you just mentioned, even things like misguided obsession with STEM. So why do you think it is that teachers, administration, parents, community members, teaching training programs, anything like that is not really embracing these ideas, at least at a national wide scale level?

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AK: Well, when I do a presentation, I almost always ask that question or a version of it to see what the parents and teachers there come up with. And I get a range of answers, though they predictably fall into several kind of categories. Well, one is that real progressive education, which is not just about ending traditional practices, but about a number of other related shifts, including helping students to create meaning rather than just memorize facts and practice skills, giving students more say about what it is they're doing, having an educational environment that is more about collaboration than about competition or even self-sufficiency. All of these things challenge basic assumptions, not just in schools, but in our culture. And they are fundamentally viewed as subversive, as unsettling to us based on what we've been raised to assume. And so there's a strong undercurrent toward conservative beliefs that have been accepted as mainstream wisdom in our culture. That's one answer. Another one is that there's a lot of fear. There's fear on the part of teachers about whether they'll get to keep their jobs, about whether they're going to be attacked by their administrators or by parents and so on. And so they tend to play it safe, understandably. And in turn, the administrators have their own fears there, and so do the parents. Another kind of answer is that it takes time and talent and care and courage to do the kind of teaching that we're talking about here. And so there's, apart from what's unsettling about the ideological components of traditional education, it's just harder to do. I mean, basically, any idiot can stay a chapter ahead of students in a textbook and just march through to cover a curriculum that's already set or handed down from above. It takes a much more skilled and experienced educator to help students discover, because that requires a deeper understanding of the content being taught and a deep in-the-bone proficiency at teaching itself, not just the curriculum, but pedagogy, what it means to focus less on what you're doing and teaching than on what it means to learn and to facilitate learning. So all of these may help to explain why we seem to be trapped. And then, of course, there are larger political and economic explanations for the persistence of dysfunctional teaching approaches that shouldn't be, I guess, waved away. The people who have most of the power to impose mandates on teachers are often those who know the least about how children learn. If you're a billionaire like Bill Gates, you don't have to know a damn thing about education. You can buy the Common Core curriculum and make sure that that's imposed from above, which is pretty much what happened. If you're a politician, you get to decide whether there's high-stakes standardized testing even though you know nothing about the best way to teach or to assess and so on. And then there's the, I guess, larger question I always think about, which is if progressive education helps students to acquire not only the capacity but the disposition, the desire to think critically about systems in which they find themselves to be true, active thinkers in a democratic culture, is that really what the people in charge want? That's why when politicians and corporate executives make speeches about education reform, they almost never talk about democracy in a meaningful sense or what's in the best interest of children. They talk about education as an investment. They talk about the competitive global economy in the 21st century. They talk about schooling as if it's nothing more than a means to an end, and the end is about beating people who live in other countries. So if that's what's driving education, thinking about dollars and cents, thinking about winning and losing, well, then you're going to have exactly the kind of traditional approach to education that we have.

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M: That idea of fear is something that Chris and I just talked about recently, which I agree with completely. I don't think anyone wouldn't. One of the biggest impediments that stand in the way of, I think, many administrators, many teachers, and even many parents is most certainly fear of progressive education and what that could look like. As you mentioned, it's kind of that axiom of, it was good enough for me, or that's not the blank that I know. That connects to so much, even music is what comes to mind immediately. How many times I've heard older generations tell me that music isn't the same or whatever is not the same as it was for them, and there's always a fear of change. The idea of you brought it up with this money, and that's something that I think we were just talking yesterday to Ted Dintersmith. We had a podcast, and that's something that I thought was very prominent in the lack of people choosing progressive education in their schools, such as teachers, administrators, et cetera. I think it's money, it has a lot to do with it. You mentioning just Bill Gates and the Common Core and how, man, I remember when that got rolled out, it was incredible how many textbooks that he owns of the Pearson Company, of course, was already ready to roll out all of their DVDs and books regarding Common Core, even though it just came out. But even more so, I do feel like that there are, and this, I don't mean to sound shrewd, I guess, or flippant, but I do feel like when it comes to growth mindset or insert the blank mindset, there are a lot of people who can make a decent payroll off of not inviting progressive education into the classroom, but instead kind of gussying up a standard education or very traditional education by introducing games or fun ways to remember. You're doing the same thing, but you're trying to disguise it as much as possible, in turn making a profit off of silly books or pamphlets or worksheets and things of that nature. In many ways, I think that your philosophy of offering the good news for free on your website, I mean, pretty much everything is there for free, I think it's very valuable and very important.

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AK: Sure. Yeah. I mean, for growth mindset and other things, I'm not sure that's the best explanation. Yeah, there's a program you can buy, but I think that deals more with sort of ideological assumptions. But there are certainly other realms where you want to follow the money, say the direction of reading instruction, where as Dick Ellington and others have pointed out, the best approach to teaching kids to read, according to the research, is to have them make choices among a rich literacy curriculum that features real books of the kind you find in libraries and bookstores. But there aren't, but publishers make a lot more money with basals and primers and textbooks and so on, that contain a very different kind of skills-based curriculum with little snippets of prose that the kids don't care about, didn't choose and so on. And so there's a big push toward that way of teaching reading, because nobody gets rich off the way that's more authentic and more effective.

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CM: So based off of what you've written and kind of based off this discussion so far, obviously there is a lot of pressure that's placed on educators that want to incorporate these ideas, but I mean, there's a lot of factors at work against taking those steps. So what do you feel like then is one step maybe teachers could take tomorrow that would revolutionize their classroom? Is there anything that they could just do and they could just start helping?

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AK: They could ask students what interests them, what questions they have about themselves and the world, and then slowly construct a curriculum with students, not just for them, that is centered on the students' own questions about the world, which would tend to be interdisciplinary. That is, you draw from different fields in trying to find answers to those questions, to create projects that make sense of the world, as opposed to offering a list of facts, a bunch of knowledge to cram into them sequentially, or to divide up social studies from English and English from math in the more traditional way, to shift from a doing-to classroom to a working-with classroom, to shift from a bunch of facts to a quest for meaning is to be, I mean, it sounds easy when I reduce it to catchphrases, but in fact it's terribly hard to do if you haven't done it before, and sometimes even if you have. But if the teacher's mantra is talk less, ask more, with the sense that we're going to try to create a curriculum that's meaningful, then you're able to make other related changes and to do away with a lot of stuff that's propping up the old system. For example, if you give me a diet, if I'm a student, you give me a diet of worksheets and textbooks and quizzes and homework and grades, and I've had nothing to say about what I'm learning or with whom or how, then I'm not going to be particularly interested in this. And so then you're going to accuse me of not being motivated or having the right attitude and you'll then award me points for doing something or stickers or grades or punish me in various ways for not doing what I'm supposed to do and being on task. And then you'll claim that these bribes and threats are necessary and that it's utopian or unrealistic to think we can do without them, given the way kids are today. But in fact, if you start with an authentically engaging curriculum that begins by eliciting the questions and interests that students already come in with, then you don't have to treat them like pets with grades and various other rewards and punishments. And so your classroom can get better in other respects from having moved in that more substantive direction rather than starting out by saying, oh, I read a book that rewards and punishments aren't good. Let's get rid of them, which may make sense, but now because of the way you're teaching and what you're teaching, if you're a traditionalist, which most teachers are, even if they wouldn't describe themselves that way, because of what you're teaching and how you're teaching, the kids have very little intrinsic motivation to do what you're giving them. So now if you take away the extrinsic motivators, the artificial inducements, the carrots and sticks, they got nothing. That's why you have to start with the more fundamental questions, the teaching and learning.

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CM: Hey there, we hope you're enjoying the podcast. The Human Restoration Project stays alive because of generous donations by our patrons. Take a second and check out our website at humanrestorationproject.org for more podcasts, our blog, and all sorts of free resources that we've designed for educators. And if you love what we do, consider supporting us on Patreon. For as little as $1 a month, Patreon supporters receive goodies from being listed in the credits of our resources to early access to what we do next in advance. I don't want to sound too cynical, but I feel like the question almost begs itself to be asked, which is this reform movement towards experiential learning or more passion-based classrooms or inquiry-based classrooms has been around for, I mean, over a hundred years now you have like Dewey and Montessori and Holt, who have you. And it seems like since then, really what we've done is just doubled down on the traditional norms that kind of started all this with, with Thorndyke or whoever, you know, is, is preaching this, this Prussian system, uh, to kind of get kids in line. So where do you feel like is going to be the point that this really sees a drastic shift because Donald Trump is president, um, you've written about kind of how that reflects the culture that we live in and arguably the standardized testing system is bigger than it ever has been. catastrophe, one singular event in order to change all this, or where do you feel like change will occur? 

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AK: Um, I, I don't know, I'm, I'm not very good at predictions, um, and prediction type questions sort of assume that, you know, history plays itself out like a movie we're sitting there passively and watching, and you're asking me to guess what's coming next in the second reel. I, I don't know, I'm not good at guessing what's going to happen, but I also kind of reject the model that assumes that things will happen of their own accord. I think it depends on what we do, uh, not to be too simplistic about it, I hope, um, whether, whether 10 years from now, we're still beating kids to death with standardized tests, um, depends on us. It depends on us as educators, as parents and as citizens. If we're able to build a move, an opt-out movement for parents to, to boycott the tests, um, and to follow the lead of courageous teachers who have declined to give them, and certainly to teach to them, uh, then history will point, then the answer to your question will be very different than if we shrug our shoulders and say, well, this is just life, this is the way things are, uh, that train has left the station, et cetera, you know, that will point in a, in a different direction. The same thing is true of what teacher educators do in universities. Are they preparing young teachers to fit in and mindlessly capitulate to moronic mandates, or are they preparing young teachers to be reflective rebels, you know, um, and that's true with respect to any number of these things. Are, are teachers going to first look at a bunch of, of demands, you know, you gotta give this much homework a night, even though research fails to find any benefit to any kind of homework before high school, and newer research is calling into question the value of qu- of homework even in high school, uh, so making kids work what amounts to a second shift doesn't help academically, and it, it does nothing but harm in terms of their attitudes about learning. So, are, are teachers going to, to take a, um, a, a mandate to give homework and shrug and say, oh well, that's what's expected of me, I'm gonna do it, or are they gonna respond by saying, this doesn't make sense, so my first impulse is going to, to be to reach out to my, to my colleagues, to organize, to mobilize, to provide the administrators and parents with the relevant arguments and evidence, um, and to, to insist on doing what makes sense. You know, uh, we could, we could repeat variations of that same question, that same fork in the road, this or that, with regard to any number of aspects of education, um, and that will determine the answer to your original question of what'll things look like x years from now.

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M: Essentially, it's extremely open-ended, if-then, it sounds like, and it's, um, your prediction is the best non-prediction, I think, that, that you could probably go for, um, in that regard. That said, to switch the topic a bit here, uh, you are most certainly, at least Chris and I would agree, is one of the most, um, abundant creators of, of resources. Your website is just full of articles, blogs, and then your books, your essays, it's extremely overwhelming in a, in a sense, but it's just, um, not much more needs to be said. So without trying to say, what would you suggest from yourself, I'm curious, aside from your own work, which is, I know it's, it's going to be tough to do in a, in a way, um, what maybe books or resources might you recommend to educators and administrators looking to change their, the paradigm or change their mindset, looking to try to think differently about the fear they currently have?

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AK: Oh, I, I, I wondered where that question was going to end and like with respect to what being the answer, you know, if somebody says, what should I read? I say, well, it depends. You know, I love, I love being, to the extent I can be a human bibliography, but I need some guidance here. You want to talk about what great primary grade math teaching looks like, you know, I got one answer for you, how to, how to, how to hold class, democratic class meetings. I got another one, you know, why homework doesn't make sense and so on each, each question, each topic calls for its own sort of resources. So I can point you to the, to the, to the writers who've influenced me, but around fear, gosh, I don't know. I'm, I'm not sure there's a simple, I wouldn't know how to write a book that just says, here's how to deal with your fear. Because it depends what are you afraid of and why two very important questions. Some teachers are just, I think, temperamentally fearful, reticent, and inclined, by the way, to censor themselves so that they can't even point to, if I did, if I started having class meetings in place of, you know, using godawful manipulative management programs like PBIS or various discipline approaches that treat kids like pets, they, you'll, you'll be fired. Everybody's got to be on board with that. In many cases, they could get away certainly within their own classrooms of doing things that were much more respectful of kids, much more constructive and productive, useful and nice. But they don't because they're afraid of everything. And so that self-censorship is probably reflects a temperament that existed before they set foot in a classroom. Others are appropriately concerned based on the history of what's happened in their schools. And so the question is, if you're right that you can't get away with X, then here's how you might be able to do a version, a dilute version of X. And so there's not going to be one source, one reference that says, here's why that's happening and here's what to do about it. It will depend on the particular kind of change you're considering and are afraid of implementing. And even more, it will depend on the particular individuals and situation you work, you work with and for, and the environment and the situation you find yourselves in. I mean, I get emails through my website all the time, you know, what do I do about this? And I have to say, I don't know, I don't know what your tolerance for risk is. And I don't know what your principal is like, whether your principal is secretly on your side and would like to help you or not, or I don't know if you've got 20 other teachers in the building who feel the way you are. And if you marched yourselves into the principal's office together politely, but disappointingly, you might be able to say, let's get rid of accelerated reader, which is killing his interest in reading, you know, and here's why, and here's the research and here's what we propose to replace it with. That might work. So I can't give a single simple answer to the question, although asking a question that deals with overcoming our fears, I think makes sense because that's a good door to open or to put it, use a different metaphor. It's a good lens through which to look, to understand how do you make change.

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CM: Exactly. Exactly. That's a good point. This is going to refer back to something we were talking about earlier, and I realize all these questions kind of have a similar guise to them, if you will, but I think it's important to hit this point. So in one of your most recent blogs and something that you talk about a lot on your Twitter page is about Donald Trump's presidency and how it correlates to our obsession with competition and rivalry, success, success being defined as being rich and famous. Could you go into further detail about how our society reflects this narrative that traditional education imposes on our children and is having cooperation and love in the classroom you think going to be enough to change those cultural norms?

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AK: Well, I can answer the last question quickly. No, it's not enough. It's necessary but not sufficient. We have to look at the structural barriers to adopting a climate of cooperation and love as well as what else needs to happen once people try to move in that direction. So think about cooperation or collaboration as two steps beyond where we are in many respects. One step beyond would not be particularly cooperative but at least not to try to defeat one another. We're in a situation now that isn't just not cooperative, it's not even individualistic in some respects. It doesn't say you do your thing and I do mine. It says my success comes at the price of your failure. It's worse than the absence of cooperation. It sets the game up as mutually exclusive goal attainment so it's bad enough that we give rewards to kids for doing well which undermines interest in the learning itself. We give something worse than rewards. We give awards. An award is a reward that has been made artificially scarce so if I get one, you can't. And the existence of things like spelling bees and publicly posted grades or grading on a curve or ranking high school students or awards assemblies and the like, all of these are set up to teach kids other people are obstacles to your own success and thus you would naturally wish them ill, hope they'll screw up. Not because you're a neurotic or sadistic person but because adults have set up a structure that's not about succeeding, it's about winning which means succeeding at the price of other people's failure. So we have to understand that when we have co-op competitive games, indoor and outdoor games, when we have spelling bees and geography bees, when we take any activity, painting or singing in a chorus, whatever it is, and turn it into a contest where the goal is to make other people fail. When it's now about victory, not about success, everyone ultimately loses, even the winners. And that was the very first book I wrote a very long time ago, a book called No Contest, The Case Against Competition. And I've moved on to other topics but this keeps haunting me, it keeps following me around because the toxically competitive aspect of our culture and including our schooling, the way we raise and teach, socialize our children, threads its way through almost every other topic that we come across, I mean Donald Trump is just an ideal type, a perfect representation of the logical conclusion, the reductio ad absurdum of this where cooperation is viewed as weakness, where the goal in life is this desperate neurotic need to prove your superiority over everyone you come across. He is like a funhouse mirror, a distorted, exaggerated version of the culture that raised him, which is a great... I was using Trump as an example long before he thought, hey, how about if I run for president? Back when we just knew him as a grifter, a desperately left absurd clown. Yeah, that must be nightmarish for you. Yeah, but even back then it was clear where he was just trying to pull a con job on the latest casino or whatever he was doing, that here is proof that you can be rich and famous without being a successful human being in any moral or psychological sense. So he's a good example of what I call negative learning, which is where you pay careful attention to folks doing horrendous things and say, I need to take notes here so I can be exactly the opposite and raise our kids. I even had this idea last year to write a book called Raising an Untrump for Parents. Just make a list of every aspect of his personality and that's exactly the opposite of what I want, what we want for our children, so how do we go about helping them to be otherwise? And part of it, but not all of it, deals with the issue you raised. How do we move away from this pathological fixation on defeating the people around us and ideally move that next step as well towards seeing others as potential allies and collaborators?

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CM: Hope you enjoyed this podcast, we want to connect with you and hear your thoughts. Follow us on Twitter, YouTube, Medium, and other social media, and be sure to check us out on our website at humanrestorationproject.org. If you want to support us in our endeavor of starting a movement towards progressive ed through high quality resources, consider supporting us on Patreon. Thanks again!

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