Wisdom-Centered Learning: Striking a New Paradigm for Education.

A Nobel Prize Laureate Crafts a Blueprint for Implementing the National Goals

Three years ago, Ohio began in earnest to implement the six national goals set at the 1989 education summit.

The task proved a jumping-off point for me to think deeply about the shortcomings in U.S. math, science, and teacher education (for starters), and how we might solve them.

To respond to the long-term charge of improving mathematics and science education, I immersed myself in social science research. My task was to find clues about what is needed to strengthen the present education system.

My colleagues at Ohio State University and the National Academy of Sciences guided me to an education research literature of exceptional quality and depth. One noteworthy comparative study in 1992 by H.W. Stevenson and J.W. Stigler focused on education in the Far East.

I also reviewed my knowledge of several long-standing education reform projects--Success for All, Reading Recovery, and Physics by Inquiry--whose leaders all have 20 or more years of experience in reform. Finally, I reflected on my own experience with scientific and technological paradigm shifts.

Resolution Unknown

Several things became clear. The real shock--at least for me--was to learn that the problems of educational reform have no known solution, at any price, despite centuries of thought, since John Amos Comenius wrote about reform in 1632. Second, I realized that the U.S. education system lacks positive feedback loops of sufficient magnitude to move us beyond the status quo.

Indeed, the deep problems that afflict financially strapped inner-city schools also are found in Ivy League science departments as well as in private schools that educate the sons and daughters of billionaires. Teacher education is notoriously weak at every level. Additional problems include the poor quality of texts and materials, the fast pace of the curriculum, hopelessly inadequate advanced planning and preparation for classroom instruction, and inadequate assessment. Even the casual reader will see that money alone cannot solve these problems.

In this article, I have provided a "dress rehearsal" for constructing a new paradigm to fulfill the national education goals. I cannot follow the lead of Copernicus and announce the completed new paradigm myself; that must be built on the collective process of many constituencies. Instead, my bare-bones paradigm reduces a complex human problem to the relative simplicity of a physicist's frictionless inclined plane. I have neglected the problems unique to individual schools or districts, considering only a few key problems of long standing that are ubiquitous in all levels of U.S. education. This restriction, I felt, is essential if we are to build an initial understanding of any new paradigm.

My paradigm proposes two positive feedback loops. One would create a 20-year apprenticeship system for teachers; the other would create a system of continuous improvement for classroom materials, curriculum, professional development, and classroom assessment.

Lifelong Training

In the outdated paradigm, teacher education begins and ends in college, yet teachers often report they learned more about teaching in their classrooms than in college.

Furthermore, virtually all the research I studied emphasized that reform could not succeed without continuing professional development for teachers on the job. Many different melodies contributed to this refrain. Here are five themes:

* Understanding subject matter at a deeper level.

This would allow teachers to encourage and respond effectively to student questions. For teachers with elementary school certification (who teach in elementary and middle schools), this means sufficient expertise in all elementary and middle school subjects, starting with mathematics, all sciences, history, social studies, reading, and writing--a range of expertise few have now. This expertise would take many years to acquire; college is not long enough.

* Mastering better classroom management techniques.

The lack of such techniques devastates an isolated beginning teacher, especially in an inner-city school. Classroom management requires the skills of an orchestra conductor to ensure all 30 students are learning simultaneously (even in college). Orchestra conductors prepare through lengthy apprenticeships, not in college lecture halls.

* Mastering the learning needs of a multicultural, multilanguage, multiability classroom.

Again, this mastery requires practice and guidance.

* Coping with intense time pressures.

The crushing burden of five or more hours of classes per day leaves little time for professional activities, class preparation, and the like. Throughout the Far East, teachers teach three or four hours of class a day--the latter only for teachers in a single self-contained homeroom, rather than separate classes.

* Coping with the adult organizational environment of schools.

This aspect refers to interactions with parents and principals as well as endless administrative tasks that take time away from teaching.

Unattainable Goal

The need for professional development is infinite, yet we allot only meager funds for it. To make matters worse, our national goal is to be first in the world in mathematics and science by the year 2000. This means doing even better in mathematics than Far Eastern elementary schools that far surpass ours in mathematics achievement.

Researchers found that part of the reason for success in Far Eastern schools was that their teachers had professional development sessions built into their weekly school schedule, continuing throughout their entire career. Teachers reported that they really learned to teach in these professional development sessions, rather than in college.

The researchers also found that Far Eastern teachers provided far superior teaching to their students than did U.S. teachers whom they also observed. The Far Eastern teachers produce carefully planned lessons, sometimes around a single mathematical problem, giving students time to think and time to propose alternative ways to solve the problem. The teachers use problems that have been handed down and polished through many generations of teachers rather than created the night before class.

To provide U.S. teachers with the same sustained professional development and interchange as Far Eastern teachers have, along with a workable daily schedule, would require reducing teaching schedules to the same three-or four-hour limit found in the Far East.

This is not simply a money problem; the problem is that no credible plan exists for this wholesale change of teaching schedules. Our administrators are overwhelmed by proposals for smaller, piecemeal reforms, each backed by a limited but vocal constituency.

In building a new paradigm, my strategy was to start with the need for lifelong school-based professional development as in the Far East. Then I asked how to reorganize schooling so the professional development would become financially feasible and politically stable, i.e., widely accepted as essential, rather than a luxury that can be eliminated whenever budgets are cut or school or government administrators change. Fortunately, a remarkable book, Schoolteacher, by a sociologist, Dan Lortie, provided the clues I needed to address this goal.

Long Apprenticeships

In the new paradigm, all potential teachers would spend roughly 20 years as guided apprentices before being examined and certified as fully professional teachers. The 20-year period would begin early in school, where all students (regardless of their career goals) would spend part of their time (perhaps 12-20 percent) involved in peer tutoring and other teaching functions. The students would receive guidance and formal instruction from faculty to help them coach other students successfully.

In doing this, they would learn teaching skills needed for the workplace, parenting, and active citizenship. They also would build deeper subject-matter understanding by teaching it.

This apprenticeship would continue through college, constituting roughly 12 years of the 20-year process. Then the first eight years on the job, whether as a graduate student, teaching assistant, or a faculty member in school or college, would complete the apprenticeship for aspiring professionals. Combined with the apprenticeship, potential school and college faculty would spend several years gaining experience in work settings appropriate to their future students.

Teaching Inadequacies

I used to blame myself for my inadequate teaching skills compared to those of Arnold Arons, a personal friend. But after attending a college-level cooperative learning workshop, observing a professional development session for Reading Recovery teachers, and watching Physics by Inquiry classes using Lillian McDermott's inquiry modules, I blame a research university culture that sent me off to my first graduate teaching experience with only a textbook, a class list, and a room assignment.

As a graduate student, I was introduced to heroic feats of physics research, mountaineering, and international folk dancing, but not to heroic feats of teaching. I was supported by colleagues engaged in research, but was not part of an interdisciplinary team that counseled students and guided them to a broad liberal education. The fact that innovation in teaching is not revered, even in the best universities, is a problem that needs immediate redress.

Growing efforts now exist to provide modest help to beginning teaching assistants, but they are not as comprehensive as the apprenticeship I recommend. In addition, a key barrier to college-level teacher education (and a problem in other respects, too) is the overspecialization of faculty.

To counter this, I suggest adding a new top rung to the academic career ladder, called perhaps "university professor," for which interdisciplinary breadth would be required. Since research faculty at universities often provide continuing education to America's leaders--a task that requires extraordinary breadth and vision--I recommend the teaching apprenticeship for these faculty only end with successful promotion to "university professor."

Instructional Methods

The new paradigm substantially alters the teachers' and students' day. I report on three key differences here.

First, students in the new paradigm coach each other to learn as they build workplace and living skills as teams. Much of this coaching would occur in a "learning unit" consisting of several students grouped around a table with a more experienced student acting as peer tutor or teacher's helper.

To complete the learning unit, classroom supplies and a networked, personal computer would be available. A well-researched reform called "cooperative learning" can be used to organize the group so the students work together and encourage each other to learn, in or out of the classroom. Cross-age peer coaching also has been extensively researched.

The second priority of teachers would be instructional planning. Teachers in the new paradigm would have ongoing collaborative professional development to improve teaching skills as their top priority. In turn, they would spend time guiding junior colleagues, peer tutors, cooperative learning groups, and perhaps other volunteers in their teaching responsibilities.

The ongoing professional development would be aimed partly at helping faculty make effective use of the time they do spend teaching, as well as preparing them for their unfamiliar teacher-education-type responsibilities. A fair amount of this time would still be spent with students (such as the peer tutors) but in a new, more collegial relationship.

Direct classroom teaching would be teachers' third priority. Yet the total time they spend in direct teaching plus classroom-related functions would be substantially reduced to make room for the two new top priorities.

This reduction in teaching time would be compensated for by the vastly greater amount of teaching (coaching) that the students would provide each other. Each student would get hours of attention, mostly from fellow students, instead of the meager minutes of individual attention given the typical, unfavored student in today's classrooms.

Much of the teaching in the new paradigm would actually be coaching rather than lecturing. As a foundation for learning all academic subjects, the higher-order skills required for work (or for living and citizenship), from critical thinking to mathematical problem-solving, to written and oral communications, would be learned along with interpersonal skills and values through constant practice. Students now are bored and alienated by the constant rain of disconnected facts and formulae in school textbooks.

The higher-order workplace skills to be taught in the new paradigm should be far more satisfying to learn and far more useful to students. This focus would be a generalization from the interpersonal skills already taught in research-based models of cooperative learning and peer coaching.

Furthermore, the questions all students bring with them to kindergarten, which now are suppressed early in elementary school due to slavish adherence to scheduled curriculum, would be encouraged and nurtured in the new paradigm by wise teachers and fellow students. The students, in particular, would play a leading role in providing personal attention and encouragement for one another's efforts.

With its emphasis on higher-order skills and high academic achievement for all students, the new paradigm is aligned with the national goals.

Classroom Quality

One serious problem with education is its inability to provide students with quality learning experiences. For example, in the best learning environment, students are reading an interesting story instead of memorizing vocabulary; finding many ways to solve a challenging mathematical problem rather than plugging numbers into a memorized formula; pursuing a coherent sequence of guided inquiry lessons in electricity, enabling them to build operational understanding of current, voltage, and resistance, instead of requiring them to plug numbers into Ohm's Law; having students experience examples of each new idea (such as "fraction") before they learn the name for the idea, instead of being forced to memorize jargon that makes no sense to them; and asking hard questions in class and giving time for students to think through a response, instead of asking simple memory-based questions and expecting a rapid response.

Quality also means, more broadly, that the arts and human concerns have an equal role with intellectual learning.

The mathematics teaching that researchers observed in the Far East met many of the requirements of quality; the teaching they observed in our country fell short. The U.S. priority was rushing through curriculum as rapidly as possible with no slowing to achieve quality.

They also found that improving quality was a major focus of the weekly collaborative professional development sessions of Far Eastern teachers, sessions unavailable to most U.S. teachers.

Quality in the classroom stems from two sources:

* quality in the teaching itself, and

* quality of everything that happens in advance but affects classroom teaching and learning (I call this source quality in advanced planning).

Advanced planning includes professional development of faculty; development of materials, software, and supplies; establishment of classroom rules and organization (such as the organization and training of learning units); examples prepared in advance for classroom lessons; parental encouragement of learning; and school budgeting (for supplies, teacher/student ratios, professional development, etc.). Virtually all advanced planning throughout the U.S. education system is poor.

In many cases, the poor quality of advanced planning is the result of poor design--from poorly written textbooks to inadequately tested reform plans to superficial "packaged" staff development sessions. Design improves incrementally with classroom testing and careful revision. Unfortunately, most designs are brought to the classroom with grossly inadequate testing and revision.

By contrast, the leaders of the more successful reform programs have focused on building quality into their plans with repeated testing and revision taking as many as 20 years to refine. This extended testing is a necessary prerequisite for all students to learn and understand challenging discipline content.

Besides cooperative learning, other reforms I studied included Robert Slavin's school restructuring program called Success for All, normally cited with those of James Comer, Ted Sizer, and Henry Levin, as well as two more specialized reforms called Physics by Inquiry and Reading Recovery. In developing and refining their programs, the leaders of these reforms were establishing new education planning professions with professional standards for quality.

Delegated Leadership

The new paradigm for education would delegate leadership of demanding planning and testing activities to "planning professionals," and not leave it to ill-prepared outsiders nor even to faculty, unless they have the time and the extra preparation these professionals require. The list of education planning professions includes educational architect, instructional designer, teacher-leader, content-educator, and change facilitator.

Then there is a very special planning profession I call "education systems integrator" whose purpose is to draw a multitude of reform plans into an overall system design that expands to encompass more and more schools over time.

Marie Clay, the designer of Reading Recovery, and Robert Slavin, the designer of Success for All, are the two education systems integrators I have met. It requires exceptional talent and experience to become a successful education systems integrator.

Teaching is itself partly a planning profession, as are others. Administrators, parents, school board members, government agency heads or staff, and politicians all contribute to the success or failure of teaching and learning, so these are, in a sense, planning professions, too.

In the old paradigm, planning is carried out by people who have little time, training, aptitude, or professional support for their work. In the new paradigm, all planning professions would have entry requirements, an apprenticeship or induction process, a professional society, a professional development framework, and a growing technical culture grounded in basic research.

In the new paradigm, all the planning professions would be expected to test their designs and redesign them in response to testing to be sure they are successful across a broad range of teachers, students, and institutions. Unfortunately, in the present system, little support exists to complete such tests properly.

Starting Points 

How do we move from the current paradigm to the one I suggest? One early step is to select a small number of institutional champions of the new paradigm--institutions that have both the capability and the willingness to make it work. These institutional champions would receive major planning assistance in return for undertaking a multiple challenge.

The champions would make an immediate clean break with the current paradigm. They would pioneer a sustained professional development framework, for example, in which teachers, administrators, parents, and others begin to pursue a global professional culture for each of their professions; begin to define the graded steps of apprenticeships for each profession; and begin to identify heroes and their exploits that will help justify these steps.

The next challenge would be to demonstrate (after several years for planning and testing) a new daily schedule for teachers and students. The teaching schedule would need to operate at a cost per student up to 20 percent lower than typical sister institutions, without disrupting the essence of the new paradigm.

The second part of the challenge makes no sense unless one accepts just how grim the present situation is. The basis for the challenge is that with enough high-quality professional development available to the students as well as the faculty, most teaching by students should become more effective than the teaching now being provided in most classrooms at any level.

A typical student should benefit more from several hours of coaching per day by students, coupled with overall guidance and some direct teaching from a teacher or professor, than the few extra minutes of personal attention from the faculty that the present paradigm offers. This should be especially true given that current faculty have had no such professional development and are often too stressed to be helpful to all students.

Furthermore, by relieving teachers of much of their current classroom hours and busywork, and not counting out the minutes of personal attention per student from them, the costs of instruction can be reduced rather than increased. One reason for reducing these costs is to leave about 20 percent of the instructional budget to pay for not only classroom supplies but outside services, including the new planning services.

The institutional champions would establish long-term supplier contracts with groups supplying professional designs, including educational architecture, instructional design, and professional development. Each institutional champion would need the leadership of an education systems integrator to build a coherent education plan that pulls together the plans of numerous suppliers. They would likely be heavily dependent on the quality of their suppliers' offerings to achieve highly effective instruction, due to the brutal restriction for operating costs. In consequence, they should demand the same inspired level of quality in planning and professional design as professional musicians demand from composers of the music they perform.

Another requirement of the institutional champions would be to organize the redesign process. This would become important after their initial implementation of a new paradigm, which would have included the buildup of a network of suppliers and another network of sister schools adopting the new paradigm. In the redesign process, all aspects of the planning and operations of all the schools in their network would be examined and priorities set for redesign.

Then the planning suppliers, in consultation with school staff, would develop a new generation of plans in response to these priorities. The goals of the redesign would be:

* higher quality instruction;

* higher reliability across the full range of schools, teachers, and students in the network; and

* lowered unit costs for a given amount of learning by students.

Redesign would occur periodically and with sufficient frequency so that expertise develops with school-system redesign as a continuing process. This expertise is non-existent today because the last full system redesign-the introduction of "scientific management" into big city schools--took place nearly a century ago.

Reconfiguring Funds

Budgetary pressures on education must be responded to with intelligent planning through the build-up of the redesign capability rather than placing catastrophic burdens on operating personnel. This is one of the most important reasons for building a planning capability for education rather than acceding to teachers and professors who insist they can handle all the planning themselves without outside help.

For 20 years of planning to pay off, as required in the reforms I studied, many schools must benefit. However, because of the huge number of schools in the United States, if each eventually devoted 20 percent of its budget to buy planning services, the total budget nationwide for planning would grow to about $40 billion a year. These funds could in turn enable many plans to be tested and redesigned over decades to reach an extraordinarily high level of quality.

Because of the enormous potential payoff of widely shared, high quality plans, I would urge that the initial institutional champions have major government subsidies to support their contracts with their planning suppliers. The federal Chapter 1 program for disadvantaged students might be one source of funds.

Many educators will find the cost-reduction challenge unachievable based upon their own very valid experience. However, I envision the champions drawing on nationwide craft experience with peer tutoring, as well as educational research (such as cooperative learning), neither of which is part of the daily experience in most schools.

Furthermore, a far broader opportunity exists here in return for sufficient investment in planning--the opportunity to use a range of human collaborations and computer technology applications to enhance learning at low cost.

Human collaborations not yet mentioned include team teaching across different subjects and the more general notion of "interactive professionalism." Computer technology applications include electronic communications, visual displays, word processing, computations, access to electronic information, and distance learning.

To compensate for the exceptional difficulties disadvantaged minorities encounter with our present system of education, I urge that institutions having high percentages of such students be overrepresented (not underrepresented) among the initial champions of the new paradigm.

Unfortunately, an element is missing in this discussion--reliable and thorough third-party evaluation of current long-standing reforms and the plans they have developed. I believe that a high national priority should be given to strengthen basic research and advanced training in evaluation.

Greater Feedback

Among the numerous disasters in the present system, one is the constantly changing priorities in the endless layers of management above individual classrooms. These priorities change whenever a principal, superintendent, school board, chief state school officer, governor, secretary of education, or president is replaced. Rarely are the priority changes related successfully to classroom problems, the ongoing efforts to address them, or sensible visions of the future. The result of these changing priorities is constant chaos in the classroom (teachers I know talk about TYNT--"This Year's New Thing").

In the new plan, two feedback loops would be permanent features of the system, independent of the short-term priority shifts. The first is the apprenticeship for future teachers. They would benefit, starting at an early age, from the professional development of the present school faculty.

This apprenticeship means the next generation of faculty would start their careers far better prepared than the current generation. This, in turn, would further boost the second following generation of apprentices.

The second feedback loop is the redesign process. Everything happening in school classrooms would be evaluated. Periodically, classroom materials, teacher professional development programs, and the like would be extensively revised in response to the evaluation. Both feedback loops depend, for their success, on accurate information on problems that need to be addressed.

Ensuring wide adoption of any new paradigm by most schools and school districts is one of the long-unsolved problems of reform. However, I suggest the following major effort to achieve the adoption of the proposed new paradigm for education.

The initial institutional champions would foster an expanding network of client schools by an intensive mentoring process. This would be similar to the facilitation process already in use by the school restructuring programs cited earlier, but with far more support devoted to each new institutional recruit than is the case today.

The mentoring process would include:

* paid, year-long sabbatical leaves for faculty from potential client schools. They would help with both teaching and planning in the champion institution and participate fully in professional development.

* peer-to-peer relations between client schools and schools already in the network, as each client school goes through the difficult restructuring process to move to the new paradigm.

Classroom Evaluation

In agreement with the national goals, a plan to assess schools is emerging, to be based on national and state standards for student outcomes. However, classroom evaluation is at least as informative as student assessments.

In my new paradigm, I would use classroom evaluation and student experiences with learning to drive improvements on an equal basis with standards. Education would become a demand-based system in which student experiences, judged by students themselves with the help of third-party evaluators, would play a vital role.

A school being recruited for a champion's network would see constant quality improvement and unit cost reduction within the network schools while it largely stands still. Given time, this type of message is difficult to resist, as I found from watching personal computers penetrate large organizations dominated by mainframe computing systems in politically powerful centralized computing centers. However, schools would be free to choose to join any network or to remain isolated, although they would remain under strong pressure to achieve statewide standards.

Finally, while evaluation teams would be thoroughly and professionally trained, their membership would be drawn predominantly from the type of community a given school or other institution serves, so that the culture and needs of the community receive full attention in the evaluation.

To ensure the necessary diversity among professional evaluators, any basic research initiative in evaluation should include multi-year traineeships for promising recruits from the diverse populations of today's communities.

New Wisdom

The problems addressed here are of long standing.

The understanding needed to address these problems has developed only recently, mostly through research and careful observation documented in the literature. Much of this understanding comes from attempts at school reform including reflection on the most recent 30 years of failure. Until recently, the bulk of education reform has resembled the Ptolemaic approach of piling equants on top of deferents on top of epicycles instead of seeking a new starting point, a new set of priorities that would ease the problem.

It is time to focus scarce financial and human resources on just a few "institutional champions." These champions, in return, would provide initial demonstrations of a new paradigm in operation and then facilitate growing networks of sister institutions also making the paradigm shift.

These champions need to benefit from the wisdom of the leaders of the small cadre of emerging planning professions, the leaders I have met and cited and those I have yet to locate or calibrate. They would inaugurate the feedback loops critical to sustained educational improvement.

I urge readers who are not already education reform experts to read the literature and verify the documentation through direct observation of classes and off-the-record discussions with students, faculty, colleagues, political representatives, and neighbors. I know of no other way to build a constituency that will press for an intelligent reordering of priorities in education instead of continuing the business-as-usual or, what would be worse, pressing for a more limited but doomed implementation of the national goals.

This constituency has to plan to reallocate current resources to support new priorities rather than expecting all change to be predicated on new dollars. This constituency has to become a counterforce to most of the population who are indifferent to the problems of education reform or, what is worse, have falsely assigned blame for the present problem and are now demanding a quick fix by the people they have blamed.

Reading the research literature will leave you depressed unless you believe, as I do, that a way exists to resolve the deep and long-standing problems. The concepts presented here--a 20-year apprenticeship, an altered teacher and student day, growth of the planning professions, changes in the research university, and feedback loops informing redesign drawing on demand-based evaluation--are all intended to contribute to such an optimistic belief.

However, to help readers build this belief, I simplified what I learned and ignored problems I did not study. The initial champions will not have this luxury; they will need our full support and our full patience to succeed. Success should, however, be worth this support and patience.

One major goal that success should bring within reach is the dream of an educated, democratic state, with education being sufficient to enable all of us to understand, as well as to share, ownership in today's complex national decisions that affect all our lives.

Kenneth Wilson, who received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1982, is co-principal investigator with Project Discovery, a program of math and science reform for K-12 teachers funded by the National Science Foundation and the state of Ohio.

He is co-author of a forthcoming book on redesigning K-12 education, published by Henry Holt.