“Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.”
Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa, 1928
Cultural anthropologist and perennial educator, Margaret Mead, often employed the Ancient Greek adjective plastikos to describe the versatility of individuals and their ability to develop and adapt. Yet, her contention that education should, therefore, refrain from forming “one particular habit of mind” was neither novel nor unique. In fact, the notion that “education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel” was proffered some 2000 years ago by Socrates (in Plutarch) and reiterated by Victorian men of letters, including, but by no means limited to, Thomas Arnold (1795-1842), John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) and Charles Dickens (1812-1870). Across Europe, precedents for student-centered, freethinking, constructivist learning, moreover, can be traced to the writings of John Jacques Rousseau (On Education, 1762) and his followers, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (Switzerland, 1746-1827), Friedrich Fröbel (Germany, 1782-1852) and Johann Friedrich Herbart (Germany, 1776-1841), founder of Pedagogy as an academic discipline. Here one finds the underpinnings for 20th-century theories of intelligence and cognitive development, as conceived by Jean Piaget (1896-1980) and refined by his contemporary, Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934). Here, too, one finds evidence that knowledge construction begins in the classroom – a locus of sociocultural interactions – where students do and teachers guide.
Although eclectic paradigms for 21st-century pedagogy abound – many drawing upon 200 years (or more) of wisdom and research – political and systemic instability and inertia have prevented Israel’s schools and students from getting ahead of the curve. Thwarted by the so-called “centralization trap” of both state and municipal administrations, proposed innovations have repeatedly failed to deliver sustainable, system-wide reform, and the chasm between theory and practice persists. The age-old quest for meaning and purpose in education continues to reverberate in the hallowed halls of academia but is met in schools with the deafening silence of children “on mute.”
Literalism kills creativity, and textbooks, I shall argue, inhibit curiosity. While studies demonstrate that teachers typically dominate classroom discourse by asking procedural and fact-based questions designed to elicit recall rather than higher-order thinking skills (Almeida 2012), transmittal models of textbook-based teaching are still the preferred mode of delivery in Israel’s schools despite their inherent incompatibility with today’s changing educational demands. Seth Godin (2012) duly rejects such instruction as time wasted in a world where information can be readily looked up and memorized – a world in which skills, not schooling, are the pedagogical ideal. Exigencies of 21st-century education thus call for new, relevant competencies and for the thorough training and retraining of pre-service and in-service teachers as well as the leadership tasked with motivating and effecting requisite performance and learning outcomes. In short, the student-centered classroom demands a departure from uniformity and formalism; it must serve as a dynamic, interactive space that fosters not the transmission but construction of knowledge and meaning whereby students may learn the value of uncertainty and of being “usefully wrong.”
The quality of a school is contingent upon the quality and commitment of its primary resource: teachers. Yet, a vision of education that champions the student-centered classroom is a vision which privileges cognitive development over repetition and recall. It requires agility, creativity and adaptability to a multimodal approach – plastikos – from teachers who are willing and able to augment their own efficacy and skills. After all, meaningful learning is a dialogic encounter, a participatory process that underscores active, autonomous deliberation and accountability. And, as such, the role of the educator is to facilitate critical thinking, creativity, communication and collaboration – that is, the 4Cs, or 21st-century competencies, whereby inquiry-based pedagogy obviates the traditional “sage on the stage” model of instruction.
It stands to reason that, in our so-called Start-Up Nation, the education system should be placing a premium on allostatic leadership – on anticipating and adapting to the future even while emphasizing the influence and legacy of our past. This, however, is not the case. If nothing else, the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic exposed a state of unpreparedness and technological illiteracy in an entrenched, myopic system that has privileged convention over progress. Failing to develop curricula that could both anticipate and adapt to a rapidly changing landscape, the Ministry of Education was caught flat-footed, as were teachers – novices and veterans alike – whose training and experience suddenly felt inadequate if not obsolete. Similarly, the ministry’s recent decision to reform the matriculation exams in the humanities (literature, history, civics and Tanakh) was met, publicly, with indignation and rebuke by the Teachers’ Union and politicians;[1] claims that these subjects would be relegated, together with their teachers, to a secondary status behind English, science and math[2] were coupled with charges that an interdisciplinary, project-based alternative to the exams would result in ignorance, not learning.[3] Public dissent notwithstanding, behind closed doors, humanities teachers take issue with greater demands on their time and the supplementary training needed to develop an integrated curriculum and materials for a program that has no pre-packaged body of knowledge to guide them. Simply put, it has no textbook.
To be sure, Education Minister, Yifat Shasha-Biton, makes a compelling case for a summative assessment rooted in extensive multidisciplinary research rather than rote learning. However, in this instance, the purpose is diminished and largely discredited by a dubious plan that fails to account for the majority of teachers who rely heavily – and, in some cases, exclusively – on textbooks as an alternative to curriculum mapping and lesson planning. The Ministry’s blueprint, moreover, fails to take a holistic view of inquiry-based pedagogy or to appreciate the competencies and commitment required of teachers and students alike for self-directed, project-based learning – from classroom organization and management to teacher-student interactions and the development of tailored curricula and content.
How, then, might Israel’s education system effect a successful reform of pedagogical praxis that privileges transformation over information, integration over compartmentalization, and collaboration over competition? How might teachers better utilize the classroom as a locus of intellectual agency and “interthinking” – a collegial, educative space for reflection and dialogic encounters that foster cognitive, social and moral development? To my mind, and in my experience, Israeli educators must adopt a multimodal and multidisciplinary approach to the community of inquiry, where students “share each other’s perspectives and try to build some bridges between their different ways of understanding a situation” (Sharp 2007). Teachers across disciplines must surrender the subject-specific textbook in favor of an integrated, theme-based curriculum that engages and encourages knowledge construction – a curriculum and classrooms that invite students to verbalize and test theories, to problematize and critically analyze beliefs and ideas, as they learn to embrace uncertainty about complex questions that may not offer a correct or satisfying answer (Glaser 2012).
“All genuine learning is active, not passive. It involves the use of the mind, not just the memory. It is a process of discovery, in which the student is the main agent, not the teacher.” Mortimer Adler, The Paideia Proposal, 1982
In the humanities and social sciences, textbooks are efficient, methodical compendia of information and answers, of social and cultural ideologies and ideas, that impart a worldview rather than inspire learners to develop their own.[4] Well-chosen texts, on the other hand – whether gleaned from literature, history, or the bibliographic annals of Jewish thought – are more likely to elicit wonder. And, insofar as learning is, or should be, a lifelong pursuit that begins in the classroom, it is incumbent upon us, as educators, to stimulate an abiding disposition to ask and question, to deliberate and doubt. Accordingly, we would do well to revise our conception of classwork not as schooling but learning – namely, the active, collaborative construction of knowledge and meaning by a thinking community: the class.
In my own classroom, the dialogic underpinnings of inquiry-based pedagogy instantiate the social, participatory nature of learning as an intellectual transaction in a wider, more diverse field of experience that transcends both subject and text. Visual and verbal elicitation tools, together with creative alternative assessments, allow my students to engage with, then depart from a text which, far from being an end in itself, is a catalyst for making meaning and sense, individually and collectively. Practically speaking, the multifarious skills acquired and honed in this manner are transferable to phenomenological and reflexive paradigms of learning across disciplines and beyond the classroom. Hence, bearing in mind the twofold purpose of my advanced placement ability groups – to learn English while developing cognitive and critical thinking skills – the tools and methods I choose are all conducive to stimulating greater intellectual agency and accountability, not quantitative evidence of achievement and learning outcomes.
Inquiry-based pedagogy, the quintessence of the student-centered classroom, creates more opportunities for discourse, including private and public reflection, as students participate in both individual and group activities geared towards intra- and interpersonal communication and knowledge construction. For example, the Think-Pair-Share (TPS) model, as conceived by Frank Lyman (1981), and which has served as the cornerstone for several other collaborative tasks within our community of inquiry, has allowed me to assume the role of facilitator, or “guide on the side,” and my students to engage more fully with each other. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that inquiry-based pedagogy has been increasingly embraced as an ideal interdisciplinary teaching model by practitioners of Identity Education (IdEd), Civics and cultural studies and could be equally beneficial to enhancing the quality of instruction and learning in Israeli schools.
Teaching and learning are a shared quest for knowledge which must be continually tested, challenged and refined. As such, a successful interdisciplinary, theme-based curriculum needs a roadmap – not a textbook – that utilizes the so-called 4Cs, or 21st-century competencies, to aid novice and veteran teachers in developing lesson plans that follow separate paths to a common destination. It requires an organizing center rich with choices of product and process wherein frequent group discussions and collaborative decision-making across disciplines build a sense of community. By the same token, from the student’s perspective, a coherent theme-based curriculum must lend itself to choice of materials, projects and learning experiences, to making meaningful connections between diverse contexts, and to the exploration of concomitant subsidiary topics.
How, then, might teachers in the humanities and social sciences translate theory to practice? How might they supplant information transmission, or textbook-based teaching, with student-centered production, or inquiry-based learning? The simple answer, as has been argued above, is rooted in sequenced, multimodal lesson planning that engages and encourages students to draw the inferences and analogies needed not only to extract and construct meaning from content, but to transfer their newly-acquired knowledge and competencies to other frames of reference. By way of example, I shall present a subsidiary unit within the year-long, theme-based curriculum I developed for my 9th-grade class to complement their heritage projects (avodat shorashim).
This binary unit, titled “What Makes You YOU?” centered on the theme, “Identity and Cultural Literacy,” and dovetailed our philosophical reading of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, which served as the fulcrum for the first semester’s curriculum. The lesson plans paralleled the students’ reading and reflections upon the little prince’s arrival on Earth (Ch. 16-23); their aim was to, first, familiarize the girls with the theoretical knowledge and terminology necessary to assimilate the concepts of personal and cultural identity, and then to apply these concepts by defining – and ultimately mapping – their own personal (character), social (moral, behavioral, cultural, religious) and intellectual (thinking) “Self”.
PART ONE: Intersubjectivity and E. T. Hall’s cultural iceberg theory
Learning outcome: Students understand that identity is relational – that we all influence and are influenced by others to some degree.
PART TWO: Personalizing the cultural iceberg; identity mapping
Learning outcome: Make thinking visible. After in-class discussion and reflection, students map their answers to “What makes you YOU?” to gain greater insight into their personal, cultural and religious selves.
By its very nature, the community of philosophical inquiry is a dialogic space wherein students think, plan, create, question and engage individually and collectively. Hence, since the spring of 2021, the dialogic crux of Philosophy for Children (hereafter P4C) has served to cultivate my students’ confidence and competencies for convergent and divergent problem solving. Doing philosophy is conducive not only to my role as facilitator but to stimulating greater intellectual agency and accountability among my students. I, therefore, began to consider additional ways in which P4C and inquiry-based pedagogy might succeed where transmittal models of teaching have failed. How might our classroom – a locus of sociocultural interactions – serve the nascent vision of our school’s new headmistress who has set her sights on the pervasive indifference of today’s teenagers to their religious and national legacy? How might our community of inquiry help to excavate layers of identity from the deceptively simple question, “Who are you?”
To this end, the integrated curriculum I designed sought to develop the girls’ cognitive, oral and written skills by engaging them in self-directed tasks (e.g., PBL, games), guided learning activities (e.g., TPS, roleplay[5]) and reflection (individual and communal). Materials and methodologies included visual elicitation tools (photographs and video), verbal elicitation tools (chiefly, peer instruction and Socratic questioning) and assessment for/as learning (entrance tickets and identity mapping). The foremost advantage, perhaps, of creating and using tailored teaching materials – beyond the choice and creativity they allow – is the opportunity to accommodate so-called “happy accidents” which, in our class, are wont to emerge when an observation or insight from a student literally stops a discussion in its tracks, or a news story touches on a related issue, whether directly or incidentally. For the textbook-bound teacher, these might represent unwelcome deviations or distractions when, in fact, they are a testament to the active and interactive learning that takes place in a thriving thinking community.
For more than two decades, educational research has underscored the importance of adopting a multimodal approach to pedagogy. Rooted in the idea that learning, like life, does not occur in a vacuum, 21st-century pedagogy, in both theory and practice, takes an integrative view of education, whereby knowledge and understanding are constructed from a synthesis of sources and experiences. And yet, while curricular integration of content around diverse subject areas has been shown to enhance both teaching and learning attitudes and outcomes, integrative learning becomes meaningful only when students are themselves able to transfer content, concepts and competencies across ostensibly unrelated disciplines.
Whereas the correlation between Arts Education[6] and students’ academic, social and emotional outcomes is undisputed, Luke Rinne, et al. (2011) explain the controversy perpetuated by competing perspectives of arts integration as a means for transferring knowledge and skills to extraneous, non-arts, domains, on the one hand, and its role in imparting to students “valuable dispositions or habits,” such as persistence and reflection, on the other. Rinne, et al. proffer a third argument in favor of integrating artistic activities in non-arts subject areas, suggesting that it “may be a particularly effective means of enhancing long-term retention of content” (p. 89).
In point of fact, exigencies of 21st-century education call for new, relevant competencies from both pre-service and in-service teachers. In other words, if Israel’s schools and students are to get ahead of the curve, the concept of “schooling” as subject-specific inculcation – that is, teaching students what to think – must give way to integrated “learning” – or, teaching them how to think. Practically speaking, teachers, a school’s primary resource, may also prove to be its greatest obstacle if they are unable and/or unwilling to augment their own skills and their students’ inclination towards the transfer of content, concepts and competencies across disciplines which they might then recognize as distinct but complementary domains with a common purpose of understanding.
It should be noted that student teachers are often encouraged to use textbooks only as a resource to inspire ideas. Nevertheless, colleges stop short of teaching them how to adapt the material appropriately, leaving many overwhelmed by the limits of their own knowledge and experience. Moreover, in the shift from subject- to skills-based pedagogy, from transmittal models of teaching to facilitation, from passive assimilation to participatory construction, and from highly prescriptive to integrated curricula, textbooks lack the depth and breadth to meet the needs of an evolving system of education no longer rooted in information, memorization and regurgitation. While I would not go so far as to suggest that textbooks will be rendered obsolete, writers and publishers would do well to acknowledge and accommodate these transitions to make learning more engaging, relevant and relatable.
NOTES
[1] https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-705246
[2] https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/r1z3ahrb5
[4] Much can be – and has been – said about the commercial considerations and pressures on textbook writers and publishers, including Eric Cohen Books (ECB), which holds a virtual monopoly on English Language Teaching materials and texts in Israel’s schools. Nevertheless, this essay will not examine the market forces that render textbooks unproductive – or, for some critics, counterproductive – to education in the 21st century. Instead, it will offer an alternative view of pedagogy that is inclusive, fluid and conducive to student-centered learning.
[5] Roleplay in this context refers to reenacting complex and/or unresolved historical events or incidents, such as the 1913 coroner’s inquest into the death of British suffragette Emily Davison. It is an entertaining and instructional activity whereby students are better able to investigate and assess the issue in question experientially and draw conclusions both individually and collectively.
[6] Arts Education refers herein to the discipline of arts instruction, including the visual, literary and performing arts. Art, for the purposes of this discussion, takes the more narrow sense of visual mediums – plastic, graphic and digital – such as painting, drawing, sculpture and photography.
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Sharp, A. M. (2007) Let’s Go Visiting: Learning Judgment-Making in a Classroom Community of Inquiry. Gifted Education International, 23(3), 301-312. https://doi.org/10.1177/026142940702300311
Timna Hurwich teaches English at the Evelina de Rothschild Secondary School in Jerusalem, Israel. She also runs a private after-school enrichment program for high-achieving students in grades 7-10.
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