Progressive vs. Traditional – Who’s right, who’s wrong (12-17-08)

There I was, sitting in the kitchen at an antique wooden table staring at a giant page of numbers. Rows and columns filled with digits jumped off the paper, screaming at me where only an hour ago my mother’s turkey loaf had done the same. The multiplication table was my nemesis (no different then the turkey loaf). I don’t remember what grade I was in or who my teacher was, but the sound of my father’s voice reaming into me about how important it was to master this matrix of data from one through twelve still resonates in my head. As the family embarked into the living room to watch one of the classic Star Wars films on the latest and greatest technology, laser discs, I was stuck at that antique wooden table, staring at numbers and for the one and only time in my life, wishing it was the turkey loaf instead.

School didn’t have to make sure I mastered my multiplication fluency, my family did. In fact, there are a lot of things school didn’t have to do for me.

Here are just a few examples

• How to act around professionals: My father always had business colleagues over at the house.
• How to advocate and negotiate: I learned this through compromising with my mom from an early age.
• How to speak using professional language: It’s all I heard from birth through adulthood.
• How to persevere in difficult situations: That’s all I saw. No one around me ever folded growing up. There was no task that couldn’t be accomplished. From starting companies to getting patents approved…anything and everything was possible.

Now let’s go back to that pesky multiplication table. My personal experience strikes at the heart of the national debate between progressive and traditional math instruction. The reality is that not all students from the multitude of backgrounds that we teach need the same thing. In fact, providing them with the same instruction is a complete disservice. To argue for Saxon math (the most traditional drill and kill curriculum I’ve ever seen) or Interactive Mathematics Program (IMP – the most inquiry, discovery based curriculum available) is a ludicrous notion if the students that the curriculum is going to serve aren’t taken into consideration.

The bottom line…I don’t think it mattered what curriculum my math teachers used during my middle and high school years. Regardless, I was going to have my math fluency down…not much of a choice when your father is an engineer. However, when I consider the students that I’m teaching, impoverished minority adolescents entering 9^th grade with only 8 % demonstrating grade level proficiency, it’s clear that my fate as a numerically literate individual is not the same for the clients I serve unless our school does what my family and my school were able to do for me.

It’s no secret that every “beat the odds” school I’ve visited across Colorado and the country uses direct instruction as their primary means of delivering information. Their thinking…we have way too much to cover because we’re already two to three years behind. There is no choice but for the teacher to own the content and for the students to sponge it up. As a result, you don’t see collaborative groups working through open ended projects at their own pace. You don’t see spiraling curriculums in place where the teacher moves on even though the majority of the class hasn’t shown mastery because they know that the topic will come back sometime before the end of the year or maybe next year. In fact, what you see is the opposite. A consistent push for mastery of specific learning outcomes that are the foundation of mathematics understanding.

Coming out of college all I could think about was getting students to see relevance in their mathematics and engaging them in exciting, dynamic learning experiences. I wanted them to discover the big ideas of mathematics with my facilitation, but I didn’t want to force or rush it. I taught with little to no urgency. In contrast, the schools that are preparing our most under serviced youth in this nation, poor, minority students, for college and beyond teach as though every minute was a last breath in an effort to resuscitate a drowning victim. These schools recognize the Lisa Delpit perspective that so cautions us of worrying so much about engaging and encouraging our “behind grade level” students that we fail to teach them the rules of the game.

Her argument is framed around writing and literacy, but its message resonates in the world of math education just the same. If all we worry about is engaging our students in mathematics thinking and we fail to teach them function-notation or the various ways to write a ratio then we are not preparing them for life. There is a way the game of life is played and grammar, punctuation and sentence structure all play a role. Just because a student is able to organize some creative thoughts on a piece of paper doesn’t mean we’ve gotten them ready to compete. Those thoughts need to be presented with a commanding understanding of formal English language if we want them to be taken seriously and accepted when they enter the global economic workplace. Math is no different.

We can’t simply pat our students on the back for finding a pattern in a sequence of numbers. They need to be able to use the professional terms associated with such mathematics. I found the “recursive routine” and the “starting value” is ________ and the “rule’ that gets you to the next “term” is ___________. Students need to engage in the fundamentals and formalize their understanding using the same mathematics language that will be presented to them when they enter college. If we want them to become successful college students then we have to treat them as such from early on. This includes not only our interactions with them, but the way in which we deliver content and what we deem as acceptable mastery before moving on to the next piece of content.

In the end, the debate between progressive and traditional math instruction is one that we all know the answer to, we’re just not talking about it. Picture it as a possible 100 % combination. Meaning, in a perfectly balanced classroom we would see 50 % of one mixed with 50 % of the other. In my case, having been pounded with “math facts” from an early age I would have thrived regardless of the ratio, but it’s clear that a progressive leaning combination might have served me better, say a 70 % progressive/30 % traditional ratio. On the other side of the spectrum, if my students are provided with the same 70/30 split then it is unlikely they would ever really catch up and be able to compete with their middle and upper class counterparts. An ideal ratio for my 6^th and 7^th grade 9^th graders would be the inverse, a 70 % traditional/30 % progressive ratio. As I emphasized earlier, not every child needs the same education and to provide them with the same, even at a high quality, would be doing a great disservice.

There is no singular solution to this national debate between Progressive and Traditional math instruction practices. Both have a place in the American classroom. However, both can’t have the same amount of weight in different classrooms serving different students. We must look at who is producing results, for which students and with what practices. The Avon, Connecticut’s and Cherry Creek, Colorado’s of our nation will most likely prosper regardless of curricular and instructional practices decisions. The same can not be said about the Newark, New Jersey’s and Oakland, California’s. Education reform in the world of schools and math must consider the assets and deficiencies of the clients they are serving if they are to be truly effective.

As the “beat the odds” schools in our country are living and dying by the motto “every minute counts” so too must our push for delivering appropriate and necessary math instruction to our under serviced students. It’s not ok to simply engage in mathematical thinking and to share ideas. It’s a great start, but it doesn’t get kids who are four and five grade levels behind to catch up. If our philosophies clash with our realities then we must waive “bye-bye” to philosophy and “hello” to reality. Results are the only thing that matters and instead of thinking like education reformers lets think more like venture capitalist. What’s the bottom line?