[NLA] Re: Evidence-based practice in Adult Literacy Education

[Peter Kondrat]

Andrea's post helps clarify some of my own thinking on this important question.

If teaching is a science, like chemistry or geology or microbiology, then we can
certainly isolate specific methods or techniques that "work" in order to achieve
the desired outcome. The skill of the teacher ought to be inconsequential in
evaluating the efficacy of the method. That is the whole premise of scientific
inquiry. But what if you believe (as I do) that teaching is a craft, like weaving
or throwing pots or woodcarving? Then the experience and technique of the teacher
is central, and it resists any attempts to "standardize" it, to make it
mechanical and measurable and even predictable. The best part of teaching is the
part that is idiosyncratic and mysterious. The most compelling and effective
teachers I have encountered are charismatic and compassionate -- would anyone
dare to try to quantify and "bottle" those traits?

My experience is that there is no more a "best method to use in teaching adults
to read and write" than there is a "best method" to cook an egg or make a quilt
or blow glass.

Embedded in this effort to find scientifically valid methods is the belief that
good teaching can happen in the absence of a good teacher. I don't buy it. In
fact, one of the things I have learned from observing skilled teachers is that
the methodology is not as important as the intangibles. I think that lurking
behind the call for "scientifically valid" methods is the idea that underpaid and
undervalued education workers can indeed "deliver" quality instruction if they
are given a scientifically validated script that will take learners through a
scentifically validated series of behaviors. The learners will then be
scientifically assessed. It harks back to the factory model of education, updated
for the new century so that the operative model is a circuit board assembly
plant. Learners' brains and classrooms and schools and curricula are more complex
and more precious than that.

I'm not sure where my musings lead in terms of the politics of education and the
increasingly emphatic demands of those who steer policy.

Peter Kondrat

AWilder106 at aol.com wrote in part:

>  I think if we can't figure out the
> best methods to use in teaching adults to read and write, we had best be in
> another business.   Methods have to be described, validated, measured, and
> shown to be reliable!!!  This should be the center of our discussion!!!  Do
> we have studies which test out methods?  Do we have teachers, or
> organizations who have done their own research?

--
Peter Kondrat
Director
New York City
 Professional Development Consortium
32 Broadway, 10th Floor
New York, NY 10004
tel: 212 803 3355
fax: 212 785 3685
http://www.lacnyc.org/pdc


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