Teach Broad, or Teach Deep? Coverage versus Depth

Let's take a break and talk about teaching and learning for a change. This policy stuff will make your eyes bleed if you look at it too long at a stretch.

Below is a comment I left on a history teacher's blog after Skyping into a professional development workshop at his school in the Philippines from my apartment in Korea today. They were talking about "learning 2.0," "digital literacy," "21st century teaching and learning," name your buzzword.  The new tools and possibilities, at bottom. The history teacher asked the question that often comes up in this context: "How can we give time to this when we have so much material to cover?"  And it's a reasonable enough question. Here's my stab at one answer - or at least more questions. The ones about research, I hope some of you might be able to teach me about in the comment thread.

Here's a podcast of that discussion, by the way. As an example of free professional development, it's interesting. I was in my living room in Seoul, speaking to teachers and a tech coordinator gathered in a classroom after school in Manila, the Philippines. It's 45 minutes long. We talk about how blogging, Twitter, and social media in general has transformed my own life as a teacher and a person - and how it can change students' too - and then about how teachers can use or, depending on method, abuse these new tools when they try to integrate them in classroom practice. I've supplemented the discussion with links to further reading and examples here. (And I know full well that the French Revolution was in the 1790s, though I said "1890s" in the talk. D'oh!)

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And here's that comment about the dreaded "coverage versus depth - for the sake of high-stakes tests" dilemma. I want to call it:

Spoons for Feeding, and Spoons for Digging: Two Approaches

A student who took AP World History the year after I had her for a grade nine European history class came to me during lunch and said the AP teacher lectured every class, and nobody was learning anything. (He told me he hated it, but he had to, because he had to cover 5,000 years for the AP Exam.) They wanted to come to me during lunch so they could understand it coherently - as narrative, cause/effect, the Great Story. It had little to do with technology. To me, it had more to do with active versus passive learning.

If a teacher “delivers” something to me, s/he did all the heavy lifting. All I did was sit there, possibly napping, and have it dropped in my lap. If the teacher lets me deliver, I have to do the lifting. I can’t fake that.

The students could have been giving the lectures instead of him. He could have quizzed them on the student lectures to keep the other students listening. It would have given variety to the class that the same teacher lecturing week in, week out can’t give.

Question: Do we have any evidence that teaching everything the course says to cover, even if it’s bloated beyond reason, leads to learning of everything that’s taught? Or to more correct answers on that test?

I don’t know, but I suspect that students who studied fewer chunks, in more depth, might remember more come test time. Because what they did cover, they were given time to learn.

Those who never learned due to the fast pace of the delivery? Don’t their test performances mostly rely on dead-week cram sessions of discrete facts - many of which they probably mis-remember on test day anyway? Again, I don’t know, but I suspect. And if that’s true, that’s tragically ironic: because the teacher’s desire to save time actually produced a colossal waste of learning for an entire course.

I’d love to see an experiment where students were given a week to cram with, say, an AP World History test-prep book - Barron’s or whatever, but never took the class. Reward: college credit for the course. Then compare their scores to those of students who sat through lectures for a year, and then crammed during dead week. I wonder how significant the difference in test scores would be?

A happy medium between full expulsion of some parts of the content and equal coverage of them all is to help students memorize the chronological time-line in its largest periodizations. That gives them better odds at acing a few more bubbles.

Philosophically, I’m attracted to an approach that says flatly: I’m not teaching you all the content so you can get a grade for your transcript. If I do that, I impoverish something more valuable than your GPA (if that’s the case), because you’ll remember a few things short-term, but learn next to nothing of value. (I do have evidence of that that I wrote about here, on how AP seniors knew shockingly little, and understood less, about history after 11 years of being A students in many history classrooms.) So you need to study some other things on your own.

Hm. Or better still: in this Moodle forum, or wiki, or whatever, with your friends.

To me, this isn’t a question about technology. I’d be tempted to make these choices in order to slow down with chalk, pencil, and paper just as much.
(For more posts on "21st century learning," see these.)

Image by Seb Payne