I was recently covering a Language and Literacy class for a colleague of mine. The students were teacher credential candidates. For part of the session the students divided into “centers.” In one of the centers one student was presenting to the others about “Concepts of Print.” In her talk, I overheard her say how reading “is not natural.” Her statement struck me. What I gathered she meant by it is that many aspects of reading are arbitrary, and therefore should be taught explicitly, e.g., that we read form right to left, which side is the front and which side is that back of a book.

I do not know where she came up with the phrase of reading “not being natural,” and did not get an opportunity to ask her about it. However, I think it plays into a larger debate about reading. To what extent is learning to read more or less natural than learning other things? Does it matter?

Chomsky, half a century ago, developed a hypothesis that language learning was hard-wired into the human brain. He used this hypothesis to debunk behaviorist theories of language learning, and proposed that humans are born with a universal grammar.

While it is clear that humans have a certain portion of the brain that ends up being allocated to language, the rest of his hypothesis is speculation. As behavioral psychology has demonstrated, it is easier to train an animal to do those things for which it is predisposed toward. For instance, since birds peck instinctively, getting them to peck in a certain way or at certain things is a lot easier than to use their wing to point.

Humans seem to be born with a predilection to learn language. While someone who does not have contact with other humans will not develop language, it does appear that if in any sort of social environment, language will emerge. No one without some sort of brain abnormality or injury needs to be explicitly taught language—being exposed to others who use language seems to be all that is necessary. So, in that sense language could be seen as more natural to learn than many other things that some people learn and others do not.

Is literacy another form of language learning and therefore just as natural? Or is more like other things we learn?

Current trends in teaching literacy tend to take the view that it is not natural—some are explicit about that rationale, for others it is just implicit. One could argue that most of formal schooling is based on the notion that learning is an unnatural act, and only takes place through coercion (rewards and punishments) as a motivator, and direct explicit instruction as a methodology. The main reason students are given to do well in school is grades, diplomas and the reward of better job prospects. Information is directly imparted to students through lectures and readings. How to carry out mathematics is explained in the form of algorithms.

If you have read my earlier blogs you can probably guess my belief is more along the lines that effective learning happens naturally. But when I look at the basic principals of how language is learned—the conditions and stages of it—and compare it to other non-formal learning, I do not see any fundamental differences. In other word, I do not see a big difference in how and why we learn language as being all that different from how we learn most meaningful things in life.

My point here, therefore, is that the most effective way to teach literacy is to create an environment that most is like those in which we learn other things naturally. An important aspect of that is a form of immersion. We need to be, at least for significant portions of time, in a community where there is a lot of print, and people using that print for a variety of purposes, both reading and writing. If you look at homes where parents read and write regularly, you will find even toddlers imitating those behaviors. I think you will find that the “concepts of print” mentioned above are for the most part learned without explicit direct instruction or explicit teaching.

Another aspect is that it is risk free. No one gives us grades or benchmarks as we learn to speak, telling us we are ahead or behind our peers. When we get graded and judged, unless we are really good at something, this interferes with our performance, adding anxiety and a sense that maybe we are not good enough. When we judge ourselves as doing more poorly, we are likely to want to avoid doing that activity, and develop a sense that it is something we are bad at.

Yet at school children are constantly being judged and compared to their peers and benchmarks of expectations. Almost nothing a student does at school does not have some judgment attached to it. If not given an actual grade, students are told good job, or given a star or check mark that is was done correctly (or not). And the feedback is mostly about the level of skill, not about the meaningfulness, beauty or effectiveness in any real world sense. As Deborah Meier put it recently in a TV interview, if we taught children to speak that way, we would likely have a nation of stutterers and mutes.

We learn best when the activity we are engaged in has an authentic purpose. In school we seem to teach reading and writing as if the only purpose was so that we can pass tests of reading and writing—or for some future need. In the rest of life we learn most things, language included, because they have a specific purpose at the time we are learning to do them.

When we create schooling that uses the normal outside of school factors of learning – immersion in authentic activities with mentors and peers in a non-judgmental climate — we see a lot more success.

It is common knowledge in education that knowing one’s, or one’s students’, preferred learning modality is important or at least helpful in designing learning strategies for ourselves or them. When I do a search of learning modalities I find dozens of articles in educational journals about how to use this information and why it is important. The interesting thing is that the empirical evidence does not support the claim, despite its popularity. And this lack of support is not for lack of investigation.

First, I want to be clear on what learning modalities are and are not. They are basically the receptive modes of taking in the world—most commonly aural (hearing,), visual (seeing), and kinesthetic (feeling, touching). These are not to be confused with learning styles (of which there are many versions such as field dependent or independent, liking to work alone or with others, risk-avoidant or risk-taker, introverted, extroverted). Nor is it to be confused with Gardner’s seven or eight Intelligences, which are ways of understanding, and really describe thinking about the world rather than how we receive information, which is what modalities are about.

We believe in our modality preference for the same reason humans believe many things that are not true. It just seems so intuitively true. We all have a sense of how we best take in information. Also, it is so often repeated – and even accepted and promoted by supposed experts – that it must be true. There are lots of tests designed by psychologists to measure our modality prefernces and help you figure out your strength. When I first took psychology in the 1980s this dichotomy between the common sense belief and the evidence was pointed out by one of my professors. Even then it had been studied and found to be false. In the 30+ years since then, the literature has continued to pour out on how to teach to modalities, and the evidence that such teaching does not actually enhance learning has also continued, and continued to be ignored by the practitioner side of the field. Special education teachers might say, “Well maybe it is true for regular education, but in special education these differences are real.” However, most of the research is with special education (as are most of the advise articles), and it is just as false in special education as in regular education.

It is a fact that in humans it is the visual area of the brain that is really the biggest—it is just the way that humans have evolved to take in the world. This is true of everyone unless they are blind or are brain damaged in some way. As social beings, however, we interact with other humans to a large extent though hearing and speaking. It is our verbal communication with others that to a large extent fulfills our needs as social animals. Many people claim that, although sight is our most central perception, being deaf is psychologically worse, because it isolates us to a greater extent than does blindness.

And whenever I ask about how people like to learn (not meaning modalities) virtually everyone says “Oh, I’m one of those people that needs to be actively involobved.” We are all kinesthetic, we all learn though doing, touching. And again, the humans have evolved to actually need, desire, touch. There is a famous experiment where a baby monkey will choose the artificial mother that provides soft embrace to the one that provides milk but no physical stimulation.

The fact is that the human brain is extremely interconnected, with each part constantly communicating with the other parts and it puts all the information together to make sense and act on the world. This misreading of the fact that we can divide the brain into parts that control certain functions and trying to then act is if they work independently reminds me of the other fallacy people used to talk about–being “right” or left” brained. Again, while different functions are controlled on the right and left hemisphere, unless we have had an old fashioned type lobotomy, both sides interact at every moment and our brain acts as a whole.

What I have discussed is that all of these modalities are central to being human. What the research has shown is that when you use all modalities all learners learn better! This is really a boon for teachers, since instead of feeling like you need to test each of your students for their strengths and then design separate lessons for each type learner, now what you are best off doing is designing lessons that utilize all modalities. The more modalities you use, the more all students do better. For all students relying on just one or two is exactly that—less.

I give the example of my getting directions. I could just hear it (or read it) (auditory) “Turn right here, turn left there….” Or I could look at on a map (visual). But getting both helps me remember it even better. And then what I like to do, to really get it down pat, is stand up and point the direction of each turn, in turn, maybe even turning my body as well, as I go over it (kinesthetic).

So take heart, the truth in this case makes our teaching easier, not harder.

As one researcher put it, “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing” (Pashler el at, 2009).

Some references:

Kampwirth, T. J., & Bates, M. (1980). Modality preference and teaching method: A review of the research. Intervention in School and Clinic, 15(5), 597-605.

Kavale, K. A., & LiFever, G. (2007). Dunn and Dunn model of learning-style preferences critique of Lovelace meta-analysis. The Journal of Educational Research, 101(2).

Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(3), 105-119.

Sanley, J. D. (1987). An examination of student learning styles and learning modalities on problem-solving success. Unpublished Dissertation, University of Nebraska – Lincoln.

Woolfolk, A. E. (2013). Educational psychology, 12th ed. Pearson.

I am writing this from the Fall Forum of the Coalition for Essential Schools. I just attended a workshop by Kathleen Cushman on “Learning by Heart: The Power of Social Emotional Learning.”

She stated in one of the bullet points of her slides of how building social emotional learning supports academic learning. I think there are very few people who would disagree with this, though it is true that many teachers feel unequipped for, resentful toward, or object to being expected to deal with this aspect of teaching. However, what I notice here, is that often as educators we feel the need to defend anything we do in schools not as valuable for itself, but for how it will help raise test scores, or at least help academically. I have seen this in defense of the arts, in defense of physical education, in defense of good nutrition, etc.

As the author of Emotional Intelligence demonstrated fairly convincingly, to get ahead in most occupations takes emotional intelligence at least as much as it took academic smarts (according to the web site EQ accounts for 58% of your job performance, though I have no idea how one would quantify that). I would argue that this is at least as true in civic life. Political and social change happens when people work together for such change. Not to mention the importance of getting along with our neighbors, our families, etc.

Now, since my assumption is that the purpose of public schools is to serve the larger public—that is not just to help the individual become smarter and more marketable, but to be the place where society educates the next generation into the knowledge and values that are required to sustain and maintain itself. In the case of our country, I see that as helping create a democratic citizenry of a pluralistic society.

This leads me to challenge what we just take for granted—what is the purpose of schools. Most of use rarely think deeply about this question, and assume it is self evident—and that it is primarily “academic.”

But how about this thought experiment; What if we turned this on its head? What if we thought the primary responsibility of schools was to get a citizenry that has a strong social/emotional education? That our schools’ responsibility was to have graduates that had a strong sense of self-knowledge, that are good at managing their own emotions? Graduates that know how to be empathetic, that know how to effectively work with others, and be sensitive to others. Academics, P.E., the Arts, Nutrition, etc., might be seen as instrumental to living an emotionally and socially satisfying life and to contributing to the social and emotional health of the larger society. Just a thought.

People sometimes ask me what I think needs to be done with the schools. This is really a two part question for me. One part is the policy side—what should or should or should not be required. The other part of the question is what are my ideas of what a good school and good teaching look like, which does not imply I believe in mandating those ideas even if I could. In my previous blog, I addressed the first part of the question. Now I will briefly tackle the second part.

A good test of schooling is whether one would send one’s own children there. Those who have read my other blogs entries know I favor progressive/constructivist pedagogy. That means that students have to be engaged in activities that matter to them in order to learn. The more those activities are connected authentically to the kinds of activities one engages in outside of school, the more likely what they learn can and will be used beyond school. There is both the need for students to be able follow their own personal interests and abilities, and expanding those interests.

One also needs to think bout how the experience of school shapes both what a student learns about, and what kind of climate and culture they learn it in. As psychologists such as Vygotsky, Bandura, Wenger and many others have shown, we learn more indirectly from how we experience the world, and watching how the adults in our world act and interact, than we do from any explicit instruction. Therefore, as much as possible the school should recreate the kind of culture, society we want our students to learn to be part of.

There is a built in tension in a democracy, between individual rights and pursuits, while recognizing that we are also part of a larger society. Fascist and totalitarian states focus on the state over the individual, and so schools in such a culture would teach students to obey and focus on obedience to higher authority. In an anarchist or libertarian state it would focus on the rights and liberties of the individual (would such a system even have public schooling, much less compulsory schooling?).

In my school students work not just individually, but also with others, others who are both alike and different than themselves. That in itself is one of the most important skills that I see any citizen needs. Most of what we do in life is in collaboration with others, in both the work and civic spheres. Humans are, by nature, social animals. The way a school and its curriculum is organized takes that into account. It means assessments that are part of the learning process and that mimic or are actual real life products or performances for the most part.

Long term projects would be at the center of most learning activities, activities that require students to integrate a variety of skills and abilities across disciplines. This mimics the kinds of activities and work people engage in for the most part outside of school. Real learning takes place when we work at real tasks that matter. The more in-depth the project is, the deeper the learning will be, and the more likely it will stay with us. Such learning takes time.

Students would sty with the same teacher for a minimum of two years. Deep learning takes deep relationships, and when teachers and students only work together for one year, those deep relationships are hard to build, with the family as much as with the student. If you are changing whom you work with too often, it gets hard to put in the investment in the relationship.

The school would be run collaboratively among the faculty. While it is important for all members of the school community to have a say, how much say would vary depending on the kinds of decision. Major curricular decisions would be the purview of the teaching faculty.

Another aspect is school size. Most of the above ideas are hard to implement in a large school. The larger the numbers of people the more such institutions must make decisions based on expediency and the smooth running of the institution rather on the educational needs of the students. Also, the number of people needs to be small enough so that the school can be a community where all members actually can get to know each other over time.

Some people claim such schooling is only appropriate for the gifted, or is not practical, and could not work in the real world. However, as I have documented in earlier blogs, the evidence is quite strong that it does work, and that actually such practices are probably more important for the disadvantaged than the advantaged, since the advantaged get so many of these advantages outside of school.