TITLE: Let's Kill and Dick and Jane AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: August 08, 2007 3:40 PM DESC: ----- BODY: No, I've not become homicidal. That is the title of a recent book about the Open Court Publishing Company, which according to its subtitle "fought the culture of American education" by trying to change how our schools teach reading and mathematics. Blouke Carus, the creator of Open Court's reading program, sought to achieve an enviable goal -- engagement with and success in the world of great ideas for all students -- in a way that was beholden to neither the traditionalist "back to basics" agenda nor the progressivist "child-centered" agenda. Since then, the reading series has been sold to McGraw-Hill. Thanks to the creator of the TeachScheme! project, Matthias Felleisen, I can add this book to my list of millions. He calls Let's Kill and Dick and Jane "TeachScheme! writ large". Certainly there are differences between the K-8 education culture and the university computer science culture, but they share enough commonalities to make reform efforts similarly difficult to execute. As I have noted before, universities and their faculty are a remarkably conservative lot. TeachScheme! is a principled, comprehensive redefinition of introductory programming education. In arguing for his formulation, Felleisen goes so far as to explain why Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs -- touted by many, including me, as the best CS book ever written -- is not suitable for CS 1. (As much as I like SICP, Matthias is right.) But TeachScheme! has not succeeded in the grand way its implementors might have hoped, for many of the reasons that Open Court's efforts have come up short of its founders' goals. Some of the reasons are cultural, some are historical, and some are probably strategic. The story of Open Court is of immediate interest to me for our state's interest in changing K-12 math and science education in a fundamental way, a reform effort that my university has a leading role in, and which my department and I have a direct interest in. We believe in the need for more and better computer scientists and software developers, but university CS enrollments remain sluggish. Students who are turned off to science, math, and intellectual ideas in grade school aren't likely to select CS as a major in college... Besides, like Carus, I have a great interest in raising the level of science and math understanding across the whole population. This book taught me a lot about what I had understood only incompletely as an observer of our education system. And I appreciated that it avoided the typical -- and wrong -- conservative/liberal dichotomy between the traditional and progressive approaches. America's education culture is a beast all its own, essentially anti-intellectual and exhibiting an inertia borne out of expectations, habit, and a lack of will and time to change. Changing the system will take a much more sophisticated and patient approach than most people usually contemplate. Though I have never developed a complete curriculum for CS 1 as Felleisen has, I have long aspired to teaching intro CS in more holistic way, integrating the learning of essential tools with higher-level design skills, built on the concept of a pattern language. So Open Court's goals, methods, and results all intrigue me. Here are some of the ideas that caught my attention as I read the story of Open Court:

On variety in approach:
A teacher must dare to be different! She must pull away from monotonous repetition of, 'Today we are going to write a story.' Most children view that announcement with exactly what it deserves, and there are few teachers who are not aware of what the reactions are.
s/story/program/* and s/children/students/* to get a truth for CS instructors such as me.
A student is motivated to learn when her activities scratch her own itch.
Teaching techniques that may well transfer to my programming classroom: sentence lifting, writing for a real audience, proofreading and revising programs, and reading good literature from the beginning.
On a curriculum as a system of instruction:
The quality of the Open Court program was a substantive strength and a marketing weakness. It required teachers to be conversant with a variety of methods. And the program worked best when used as a system... Teachers accustomed to trying a little of this and a little of that were likely to be put off by an approach that did not lend itself to tinkering.
I guess I'm not the only person who has trouble sticking to the textbook. To be fair to us tinkerers, systematic integrated instructional design is so rare as to make tinkering a reasonable default stance.
On the real problem with new ideas for instruction:
Thus Open Court's usual problem was not that it contradicted teachers' ideology, but that it violated their routine.
Old habits dies hard, if at all.
In the study of how children learn to comprehend text, schema theory embodied the "idea that people understand what they read by fitting it into patterns they already know". I believe that this is largely true for learning to understand programs, too.
Exercising existing skills does not constitute teaching.
Quoting a paper by reading scholars Bereiter and Scardamalia, the best alternative model for a school is
... the learned professions ...[in which] adaptation to the expectations of one's peers requires continual growth in knowledge and competence.
In the professions, we focus not only on level of knowledge but also on the process of continuously getting better.
When we despair of revolutionary change:
There are circumstances in which it is best to package our revolutionary aspirations in harmless-looking exteriors.... We should swallow our pride and let [teachers] think we are bland and acceptable. We should fool them and play to their complacent pieties, But we should never for a moment fool ourselves.
Be careful what you pretend to be.
Too often, radical new techniques are converted into "subject matter" to be added to the curriculum. But in that form they usually become overgeneralized rules that fail too often to be compelling. More insidious is that this "makes it possible to incorporate new elements into a curriculum without changing the basic goals and strategies of the curriculum". Voilá -- change with no change. Then we obsess about covering all the material, made harder by the inclusion of all this new material. I've seen this happen to software patterns in CS classrooms. It was sad. I usually think that we elementary patterns folks haven't done a good enough job yet, but Open Court's and TeachScheme!'s experiences do not encourage me to think that it will be easy to do well enough.
On the value of a broad education: This book tells of how the people at Open Court who were focused exclusively on curriculum found themselves falling prey to invalid plans from marketers.
In an academic metaphor, [Open Court's] people had been the liberal-arts students looking down on the business school. But now that they needed business-school expertise, they were unable to judge it critically.
Maybe a so-called "liberal education" isn't broad enough if it leaves the recipient unable to think deeply in an essential new context. In today's world, both business and technology are essential components of a broadly applicable education.
On the need for designing custom literature suitable for instruction of complete novices:
Teaching any skill requires repetition, and few great works of literature concentrate on long "e".
My greatest inspiration in this vein is the Suzuki literature developed for teaching violin and later piano and other instruments. I've experienced the piano literature first hand and watched my daughters work deep into the violin literature. At the outset, both use existing works (folk tunes, primarily) whenever appropriate, but they also include carefully designed pieces that echo the great literature we aspire to for our students. As the student develops technical skill, the teaching literature moves wholly into the realm of works with connection to the broader culture. My daughters now play real violin compositions from real composers.
But designing a literature and curriculum for students is not enough. Ordinary teachers can implement more aggressive and challenging curricula only with help: help learning the new ideas, help implementing the ideas in classroom settings, and help breaking the habits and structures of standing practice. Let's Kill Dick and Jane is full of calls from teachers for more help in understanding Open Court's new ideas and in implementing them well in the face of teachers' lack of experience and understanding. Despite its best attempts, Open Court never quite did this well enough. TeachScheme! is a worthy model in this regard. It has worked hard to train teachers in its approach, to provide tangible support, and to build a community of teachers. In my own work on elementary patterns, my colleague and friend Robert Duvall continually reminds us all of the need for providing practical support to instructors who might adopt our ideas -- if only they had the instructional tools to make a big change in how they teach introductory programming.
... which leads me to a closing observation. One of the big lessons I take from the book is that to effect change, one must understand and confront issues that exist in the world, not the the issues that exist only in our idealized images of the world or in what are basically the political tracts of activists. In an odd way, this reminds me of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, with its precept that we should draw what we see, not what we think we see.

Let's Kill Dick and Jane is a slim volume, a mere 155 pages, and easy to read. It's not perfect, neither in its writing nor in its analysis, but it tells an important story well. I recommend it to anyone with aspirations of changing how we teach computer science to students in the university or high school. I also recommend it to anyone who is at all interested in the quality of our educational system. In a democracy such as the U.S., that should be everyone. -----