AP World History teachers at Westfield High School (just a few miles from the George Mason campus) have gone completely off the rails with a new policy that explicitly forbids students in their course from consulting any person other than their teacher or any resource other than their textbook (or class notes/handouts) for any assignment in the course. Any person includes the students’ parents.
Setting aside for a moment the idea that it is somehow okay for teachers to forbid students from talking to their parents about their school work (likely illegal and unenforceable in any case), let’s consider what Jay Mathews of the Washington Post calls yet another example of a “harebrained” classroom policy that students have to endure.
The policy states: “You are only allowed to use your OWN knowledge, your OWN class notes, class handouts, your OWN class homework, or The Earth and Its Peoples textbook to complete assignments and assessments UNLESS specifically informed otherwise by your instructor.”
I completely sympathize with the desire of the teachers to try something, anything, to prevent students from cheating, cutting corners, and generally not thinking for themselves. The problem with this particular approach however is that it is completely counter to (a) the way that historians do their work and (b) the reality of life in the world of ubiquitous information.
The teachers in this case must have been feeling a bit desperate if they felt that forbidding students to talk to anyone or consult any resource other than those handed out would be a good way to learn. Knowledge production in history is a collaborative endeavor and to teach students that it should be otherwise is to teach them about a discipline that I am not familiar with. Further, it encourages them to believe that the supposed freshman level college history course they are taking is what is expected of students in college, i.e., use only those resources given to you by your teacher. Not one person in my department teaches that way. Not one.
Further, speaking as one of the consultants who helped redesign the AP history curriculum a few years ago (the one being used by these teachers) I can state categorically that in no case and at no time did anyone working on the redesign anticipate that teachers would so categorically shut students off from other resources.
Now to the idea that students should be cut off from other sources of information online. I’ve written about his issue extensively in this blog. Regular readers will know that I am firm in my conviction that telling students they can’t use a resource like Wikipedia is a good way to stunt their intellectual growth. These resources are part of the intellectual fabric of the modern world, including history, and so to cut students off from them is to deny them the chance to examine them critically.
I guess I’ll have to add Westfield High School to my list of places I’ll never get a job…
As an APUSH teacher, I simply acknowledge that I have no control over my students’ access to information. I have done three things in response to this situation.
1) I use it to my advantage. I open up the resources of the Internet to them by example. I use Wikipedia in class to find factual answers that I don’t know, show short and informative videos on iCue, direct them to review sites geared toward APUSH, etc. This put them in a much better place to find answers on their own when need be.
2) I use it more effectively than they do (I think). I administer chapter tests entirely online through Moodle, and I use all of the available resources within that environment to limit the students’ ability to gain an unfair advantage on graded assignments. The test is timed, questions are shuffled, answer choices are shuffled, and IP addresses for all Moodle sessions are logged. Certainly, the really tech-savvy students can still poke holes in this system if they want to but…
3) I appealed to their sense of honesty and long-term goal attainment. What Westfield has clearly missed is that students decide for themselves how they will approach the resources at their disposal. A draconian policy will lead to better “cheating,” and no policy at all will leave each student to his or her own devices. But a teacher who has rapport with his/her students will be able to appeal to their honesty (and sense of shame, if need be) and, more importantly, their long-term goal attainment. If a student copy-and-pastes all the answers to the ID questions, then he/she will be less likely to know that material on the AP exam than a student who worked through those IDs themselves, reading through both the book and available online resources to come up with an answer in (mostly) their own words. The key concept to teach the students is not “do all the work yourself” but rather “do the work in a way that will create genuine learning.” Sometimes genuine learning will come in the form of collaboration, and sometimes it will come in the form of solitary study sessions. (But even these are collaborative, no? A reader and a writer in a dialogue?) Either way, long-term goal attainment will rest on how well our students’ brains work, not how well they work within artificial information constraints.
I just finished David Christian’s Maps of Time, and the big lesson I took away from it is that collective intelligence is the mark of humanity. The sooner we educators figure out that collective learning and knowledge will lead to brighter tomorrows, the sooner we will be able to train and educate tomorrow’s great thinkers.
“You are only allowed to use your OWN knowledge, your OWN class notes, class handouts, your OWN class homework, or The Earth and Its Peoples textbook to complete assignments and assessments UNLESS specifically informed otherwise by your instructor.â€
hmmm…the second and fourth ones seem reasonable (own class notes and own class homework), but does the first one rule out anything at all that they learn this year? If you’re sick one day, you’re not allowed to borrow someone’s notes? Should textbooks be given some sort of primacy, a “voice from above” authority? I guess the last point gives the teacher some wiggle-room, but not the students.
Well, obviously this policy is not well-crafted or thought-out. But I would also lay some blame at the feet of the College Board. As a former AP History teacher and current AP exam reader, I am usually amused by other educators I meet at these readings. Many of them live in fear of the dictates of the College Board and take ridiculous measures to prevent cheating in their class and on the exam day, the latter taking place in a (somewhat) controlled environment while the former is unmoderated. Reality, however, is that readers are lucky if they get a handful of good essays on a given day, and usually see way too many empty booklets, off-task writings, or worse: generic and redundant essays that reflect how uninteresting history became for that student in an AP class, and resulted in work that either showed little effort, or great effort in spite of poor teaching.
Perhaps if the CB could provide more guidance, and more models, of what they see as exemplar work, teachers could show students which benchmarks to shoot for. Right now, only those few teachers who attend the exam readings see the veil lifted on the exam and understand what a well-designed course could look like. The vast majority, though, are either grasping for answers or mistakenly believe that their high scores are due to excellent teaching and course design…and not the fact that their excellent students probably score well despite the poor instruction they receive.
So, what’s more important: establishing nonsensical parameters and rules that dare teenagers to break them? Or engaging students in history in a truly authentic and meaningful way, one in which students see for themselves the benefits of research and discovery and police their own impulse to “cheat”? (which is basically Chris’ third point)
Finally, you bring up a good (and understated) point Mills. Part of an AP History course is not only to provide an undergraduate history experience for students (after all, if they get a 3 or above students receive college credit on most campuses…so why shouldn’t AP be treated as such?), but students in these AP classes should also be expected to understand how historians work. Isn’t this what we try to show college freshmen and sophomores? These Westfield students should be allowed to question sources and raise new questions: both of which are not seemingly allowed in this policy.
Even the AP exam itself asks students to look at sources, group documents, detect bias and point-of-view, and construct a reasonable argument. Can you do that without exposure to outside material? Probably. Would it be easier if students are encouraged to research on their own and consult other people? Most likely. In AP USH, students actually need to bring in an outside resource–which seems to go against Westfield’s policy.
I’d be interested to see what Fairfax Public Schools’ 9-12 Social Studies Director would have to say about this. Is this a policy that meets the approval of a large state school system? If so, there may be bigger fish to fry.
My grandaugther forwarded these comments to me. at 3/4 o a century the current state of schools is an amazement. The distractions available to students are abundant and ever-present. My brother, a HS teacher of English for over 30 years relied on teaching his students citical thinking. In my experience history continually reinvents itself. Many resouces are flawed or influenced by the opinions of the author. The best teacher leads the student to examine and test information. Like a geneaology chart they hould be able to provide three good references for their writing. And they should be tested out of their memory of what they have discussed, written or learned, plain and simple.
Then too there is the British system of sitting down one on one with a student for an oral exam. A videotape would prove what they’ve learned or not and they could conside it a reality check. Get some grandparents in to do the questions. We had to learn history the hard way – living it.