Public backlash over changes to teaching has been with us for as long as we’ve had educational initiatives. Take, for example, Common Core math and the many complaints about the “new math.”
the new math doesn’t make any sense!
it’s not how I did it as a kid.
why would I do three steps when I can solve it in one?
This reaction is understandable. Let’s consider for a moment two students who are learning with different strategies.
Memorizes the steps for a procedure like long division. Gets the answer in a few seconds, and looks like he’s quickly succeeding and mastering math.
Takes 90 seconds to do the same problem — splitting numbers up into different models, drawing it out. She gets the answer, but spends a lot of time working through it and seems like she’s behind.
When parents see this, they wonder why teachers would slow Sage down with all this complexity rather than just teaching her the steps to quickly get the answer. It’s genuinely overwhelming for a parent who doesn’t know these strategies to help at home — and understandable they’d expect that the strategies used with Cal are better, since they want the best for their child.
But what people don’t realize is that these longer, harder processes are intentional. They’re designed to build number sense and true understanding, based on decades of research. Using tricks or memorizing steps to solve procedures doesn’t actually build understanding of what you’re doing and why — it produces someone with an entirely different set of skills and ways of thinking.
I’ve seen this in working with students on word problems. I’m recalling one student who was given a problem like: There are 42 students at lunch who need to sit 6 per table. How many tables are needed? Cal might multiply 6 × 42 = 252 and not notice the answer is absurd. A student like Sage who was taught these deeper strategies will sketch out the problem, recognize she’s trying to divide 42 into groups of 6, and understand what the math is actually representing.
What education is actually for
Which leads us to the real purposes of learning: developing skills and literacies. Sage is learning how to think, analyze, and make decisions. She’s developing the kind of understanding that transfers to new situations she can reason through.
This is the type of citizen we want to develop for society — the real underlying purpose when I think about learning and education. Only 28% of adults in the US have enough scientific literacy to read and understand news headlines about science. Think back to the pandemic for a moment to understand the implications of this kind of limitation in our society.
The updated standards adopted across the US in the last decade were designed to create this type of human. And honestly, I adore the aspirational goals these frameworks set up for how we should be learning and thinking.
Science education fails because it “emphasizes discrete facts with a focus on breadth over depth, and does not provide students with engaging opportunities to experience how science is actually done.”
“The framework is based on the view that science is not just a body of knowledge, but a way of thinking…”
“Because students actively engage in learning when they find purpose and meaning in the learning, instruction should primarily involve tasks that invite students to make sense of the big ideas through investigation of questions in authentic contexts.”
These are incredible aspirations that I’m thrilled to work toward as an educator. But are we actually getting there in education? That’s another question we’ll get to soon.