Films, videos, and dvds.

In this election year, it is time to consider educational policies and practices that may, or may not, be working in constructive ways to ensure that our children, our legacy for the future, are being educated to assume their roles in a democratic society. For almost 20 years, since George H.W. Bush inaugurated Goals 2000 as a policy for excellence in education, schools in the United States have become increasingly standards-based. The goal of these "tougher" standards has been to increase scores on standardized tests and to compare schools, school districts, states, and even countries in terms of student performance.

Although it sounds good and honorable to desire better performance from our children in kindergarten through 12th grade, what are we really accomplishing? Are we addressing what is needed to create an educated populace? Are we educating children to be productive citizens in a democratic society? The videos reviewed here address both the standards movement, and how improvements in teaching and learning can take place in our schools. Although ACEI is an international organization, these videos primarily address western practices, particularly those of the United States. Input from other nations regarding how teaching and learning are accomplished and measured in their school systems would be a valuable addition to our understanding of how children learn and how learning can be measured.

The first video in this review, Beyond the Standards Movement, from the year 2000, is presented by Alfie Kohn, nationally renowned lecturer and author of publications concerning motivation and education. Kohn makes some excellent points regarding why the standards movement may not be the best way to motivate and promote thinking among young people. The second video, by Constance Kamii, illustrates constructivist teaching and learning of mathematics in an elementary school classroom. The third, a video illustrating the multiple intelligences theory of Howard Gardner, suggests another way teachers can approach student learning. Together, these videos are intended to inspire teachers', administrators', and politicians' reflection about the current standards movement; expand teachers' thinking about how best to meet student learning needs; and teach children to think and, if standardized tests continue to be required, do well on the tests.

BEYOND THE STANDARDS MOVEMENT: Defending Quality Education in an Age of Test Scores. Alfie Kohn (2000); National Professional Resources (40 minutes); ISBN: 1-887943-43-9

"Tougher standards" has become more than a buzzword among educators and policymakers. From the inception of Goals 2000 in 1989, through the 1990s, and continuing more formally with the No Child Left Behind Act signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2002, the trend in education has been toward increasingly more standardized testing. The rationale is that all children should be able to read, write, and compute mathematically at predetermined levels, and that the schools they attend and the teachers who teach them are responsible for the performance of the children in their care.

Alfie Kohn, author of several books regarding motivation and education, presents strong and coherent arguments designed to make educators and politicians think about what is happening to children in our quest for higher test scores. Kohn states bluntly that "Kids are the losers." In justification of this statement, he points out that policymakers have a "misapprehension" of motivation. By this, he means that faced with high-stakes testing, children are likely to attribute their success to ability rather than effort. What has resulted is a generation whose evaluation of themselves depends on the assessment of others, rather than their internal knowledge that when they work hard, they can succeed.

Five results of such "motivation" are: 1) children consider learning as a chore that must be accomplished and is not necessarily tied to anything they know about the world; 2) a preoccupation with ability and children's self-evaluation as well as their evaluation of other children; 3) when given a choice, children select tasks in which they can easily succeed rather than accepting more challenging tasks; 4) children who don't succeed on a test are likely to feel devastated, especially those who perceive themselves as having strong ability; and 5) the quality of learning decreases because once the test is complete, there is no longer a reason to retain the material learned for that purpose.

Kohn presents a compelling case that a preoccupation with raising standards may have exactly the opposite effect from what is intended. Instead of motivating students to learn and teachers to excel, it will create a system driven by coercion, a fear of failure, and unrelenting competition between students, teachers, and schools--all of which undermine excellence. In short, such emphasis on higher scores results in competitive, rather than cooperative, classrooms.

DOUBLE-COLUMN ADDITION: A Teacher Uses Piaget's Theory Constance Kamii (2000); Teachers College, Columbia University (20:49 minutes); ISBN: 0-8077-3009-2

This video documents a program for teaching mathematics based on Piaget's theory of development. It opposes the notion that mathematics is a subject that must be learned by internalization from the environment and that such internalization is best accomplished by providing rules, individual exercises designed to apply the rules, and individual feedback from the teacher.

The demonstrations in the video, taken with a 2nd-grade class in early October and again in February, clearly show the children's thought processes as they struggle with the concept of double-column addition and as they construct, or invent individually, ways to accomplish this task through each child's own natural ability to think. Social interaction (in this case, usually through class discussion) is an important aspect for the development of children's thinking because it allows children to share their constructions and results in Piaget's processes of "assimilation," "accommodation," and "equilibration" until a new challenge is presented. Thus, the child's mathematical knowledge is always growing.

In our current education systems, the fear of standardized testing often results in the teacher short changing the development of children's thinking in order to cover the material efficiently and, hopefully, achieve whatever standard has been set for the tests. When teachers take the time to work with children to refine their thought processes, however, the learning becomes something the child owns and can work from to solve future, more difficult problems, or similar problems presented in different ways.

MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES: Discovering the Giftedness in All. Thomas Armstrong (1997); National Professional Resources, Inc. (44 minutes); ISBN: 1-887943-10-2.

This video presents an overview of multiple intelligences (MI) theory as developed by Howard Gardner. Multiple intelligences incorporates a broad range of human abilities into a coherent system that helps teachers and parents to understand how children learn, and presents at least eight different ways of being "smart." Understanding the numerous ways that children acquire knowledge enables teachers to use a variety of strategies to reach children with different types of intelligence. Teachers and parents can then collaborate on ways that parents can engage their children to help them learn optimally, which should make homework assistance fun and memorable for each child.

The key to MI theory is that it addresses cultural diversity and inclusion of children with disabilities in a manner that enables them to function optimally in the classroom setting. Thus, attention is not drawn to the fact that some children are different in some way, because their learning experiences are constructed to maximize their success. When everybody is having their learning needs addressed, everybody wins.

This video is particularly timely because of the pressure on teachers for high performance for all children. Often, teachers fall into a lecture and drill modality that fails to address the learning needs of many children. If the teacher bases lesson plans on MI theory, then all children in the classroom will be able to learn and retain more. Thus, by taking the time to outline goals and objectives in terms of teaching strategies that meet the multiple intelligences, a teacher is likely to find teaching more interesting and student progress quite rewarding. This video would be an excellent choice for staff development. Some of the experts featured in the video teach at Greentree East Elementary school, a multiple intelligences school in Victorville, California.