The Academic Achievement Challenge: What Really Works in the Classroom?

A Review by Nicholas Bekas

The term learning centered has been grating on me for a while, and I have not been able to identify why. It is not because the term and its associated movement have been reduced to a cliché like other pop culture fads such as disco and pet rocks. I don’t think the verbiage of “learning centeredness” bothers me that much either. It is no worse than other jargon or slang, and certainly less annoying than “bling bling,” “shorty,” or “po-po.”

What bothers me is that being learning-centered is invulnerable to examination, much like the political verbiage of the last five years, (e.g., patriotism, the death tax, pro-life, conservative). I know that deconstruction and postmodernism are now also fads, but I have always liked the term “as if” in Derridean thought. The term learning centered makes it seem “as if” teachers have not been learning centered and have not been focused on helping students learn. The term itself admits no discussion, no rebuttal. It is a closed sign, one that no longer has connotative meaning. In socio-linguistics, the development of unassailable terminology is referred to as “framing the debate.”

This framing creates an either/or mentality, a world of strict distinctions. No classroom ever has such clear boundaries, and even the most obtuse teacher knows this. If one has certain generic characteristics, then he is either this or that type of teacher; he is either “the guide on the side” or “the sage on the stage.” The rhetoric has become so pervasive and perfunctory that it is now meaningless. Questions about being learning-centered are so ubiquitous on hiring committees that every candidate is the same. I would almost hire - on the spot - the one person who refuses to answer any question using the term “learning centered.”

Until recently, I thought I was simply being a bit peevish and irrational. After all, I did not disagree with the tenets of being learning centered and have upon many occasion been accused of being an acolyte myself. But then a colleague gave me Jeanne Chall’s The Academic Achievement Challenge: What Really Works in the Classroom? As I read it, I slowly began to understand what bothered me, and the stone in my psychic kidney began to dissolve. Learning-centered theorists have never established or acknowledged the historical roots of its movement and its basis in good research. By not doing so, it has positioned itself as revolutionary when in fact its ideas are as old or older than higher education in this country. Also by relying on anecdote and theory, it has not used the vast amounts of research that have been conducted in the past 50 years. Chall’s book clarified for me why this is problematic in education and leads to bad practice in the classroom.

Educators’ greatest failing, according to Chall, is their failure to use research to inform practice:

Whether because we have too little supporting evidence or simply fail to use that which we have, we go about debating the merits of one or another practice as though we were in an intellectual vacuum relative to our own past experience (5).

What fills the vacuum, according to Chall, is research based on theory, which should be the starting point for debate about what work in the classroom. She argues that there is rich history of research in education that should inform practice. For example in reading education, research has shown that whole language is not as effective as direct instruction when teaching elementary school children to read. Despite this research, whole language is still the most dominant methodology used in elementary education. Even though unmediated skill and drill practice does not improve writing ability, it is still a mainstay of writing curricula. Ignoring the data from reliable and valid research is like a judge not reviewing precedents and case history when making a decision. If a judge decides to ignore case history and precedent when making a decision, he affects the whole legal system, not just one case. That decision reverberates in courts throughout the country. The same can be said for new practices that are based only on theory. They undermine the foundation of the educational system. Learning is not a discrete experience. It is recursive and spiraling despite all of the linear language we use to codify it for political reasons.

Besides faulting educators for uncritical acceptance of the latest research, Chall also criticizes educators for adopting new strategies whose trendy hype is all that recommends it. If there is no data from multiple research projects to support the strategy, then Chall believes educators should be reluctant to implement it until it has been validated by other studies. She says:

What is particularly striking about educational innovations is that most were considered successes long before they were actually sufficiently tried and tested. Seldom were they presented together with a rationale based on educational theory and research. Nor had they been tried first in small pilot studies before being offered as solutions to serious national educational problems (3).

If no new research is designed, conducted, and reviewed to test the effectiveness of the strategy’s adoption, there is no way to ensure the validity and reliability of the method. Adherents to innovation based on an unproven theory have a myopic tendency to view “the new method . . . (as) the true method, (which) . . . cannot be questioned even though its weaknesses may be found quite early” (133). Once a method becomes dogma, it is difficult to have an objective debate about its effectiveness because people’s judgments are clouded by ideological adherence to the “true method.”

Chall argues that learning-centered proponents have glossed over the importance of so called teacher-centered strategies in the development of student learning. She uses research on reading development in children to support her thesis that no one theory or approach works best in all situations. For example, most statistically significant research has consistently shown that teacher-centered instructional methodologies are often more effective in teaching children to read than learner-centered methodologies. She says:

In teacher-centered approaches to educational instruction, facilitating in and of itself is not enough, and interest alone cannot be relied upon. We learn, according to this view, from those who already know and from the accumulated knowledge of the culture. Not all learning is joyful: to become educated one must be able to deal with the dull but necessary along with the exciting and interesting. But this kind of learning can also bring excitement and joy (7).

Here Chall mirrors Roland Barthes’s concept of jouissance, a painful-pleasure derived from a difficult reading. Chall believes that the same experience is central to meaningful learning sometimes. Pleasure comes from the struggle, the grappling with learning, and it is the teacher’s responsibility to use the methodologies appropriate to the material being learned to produce that grappling. Sometimes, being learning-centered, being a facilitator is necessary, and sometime being teacher-centered, being the director is necessary.

According to Chall, learning-centered teaching with its emphasis on "reading can be acquired without tears and is fun" is one of the reasons students enter college without the necessary reading skills (68). Such teacher-centered practices as phonics, mastery learning, and direct instruction have had a more significant impact on a student’s ability to read than the learning centered approaches of whole language (148). Her main criticism of the whole language approach and of other learning centered methodologies is that they “... assume that the learning of skills and knowledge is less essential” even though research “... indicates that higher learning depends heavily on both" (127).

Trying to be learning-centered or teacher-centered monolithically in all teaching contexts is impractical. In Chall’s review of the research, she found that “the practices of most (effective) teachers ... could better be viewed as hybrids drawing from both approaches" (12). A good teacher tries to adapt classroom practice to the need of her students; this is the essence of being learning-centered. Sometimes to reach a stage where the teacher can be a facilitator, she must first be more of a director, more teaching-centered because sometimes such practices produce better learning.

Perhaps, Chall’s most important point is that educators too often have a panglossian view of the classroom. We believe that somehow our classrooms are different than reality in the sense that an ideal approach or methodology does exist. Most educators believe there is a silver bullet. Chall argues that "ideal types do not really exist ..." (30). In trying to bring the ideal to the real, there is a reduction of learning because the circumstances of learning in classrooms are so variable that it is near impossible to expect the ideal to produce the same results as advocated in theory. The ideal is really found when reality is studied and used as the starting point for good practice. Sometimes being learning-centered means the teacher does know best. Sometimes it means the teacher does not know what’s best. In Chall’s estimation, the arbiter of what works should not be what’s fashionable but rather what has been proven to work by good research.

As a society we are enamored of the fad du jour. Education is particularly susceptible to this because as a whole, we are more attracted to big theoretical ideas backed by metaphor and anecdote. Even when specific examples and data are used, they are nebulous enough to be non-debatable. If there is debate, it usually becomes an ideological argument based on anecdote or personal beliefs, not on data. And usually, the ensuing debates allow ideology to supersede data and devolve into the realm of the irrational. Most classroom practice is itself based not on research but on theory, anecdote and personal belief or experience. Jeanne S. Chall, in her book The Academic Achievement Challenge: What Really Works in the Classroom?, puts the learning-centered debate into a historical context and calls into question the efficacy of the learning-centered movement’s dominance in education. In doing so, she summarizes the major theories that led to the development of learning-centered philosophies, and then she reviews the research on whether teacher-centered or learned-centered instruction is most effective.

Reading this book has helped end a nagging suspicion that all is slightly familiar and yet slightly askew. Reading this book has helped confirm something I have forgotten: a theory can be dangerous without research. One thing in exclusion of another is a form of intellectual dictatorship. Espousing an idea that asks us to consider multiple perspectives and multiple data sources before implementing a methodology is not relativistic and does not impinge upon academic freedom. This book should be required reading for all educators because it shows how educators from all levels can practically address issues of accountability and learning without the hype. In a way, this book is retro in a time when retro is cool.

Contact Nicholas Bekas, Professor of English.

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