Grant Wiggins (of Wiggins & McTighe’s Understanding by Design) recently highlighted the issue of breaking things into little bits in education.
new post on the error of breaking complex goals into itty bitty pieces & marching thru them, & the warning on c core: http://t.co/hwLHJAYgmk
— Grant Wiggins (@grantwiggins) April 20, 2013
He focuses on the following excerpt from the High School Publishers’ Criteria for the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics
Fragmenting the Standards into individual standards, or individual bits of standards … produces a sum of parts that is decidedly less than the whole” (Appendix from the K-8 Publishers’ Criteria). Breaking down standards poses a threat to the focus and coherence of the Standards. It is sometimes helpful or necessary to isolate a part of a compound standard for instruction or assessment, but not always, and not at the expense of the Standards as a whole. A drive to break the Standards down into ‘microstandards’ risks making the checklist mentality even worse than it is today. Microstandards would also make it easier for microtasks and microlessons to drive out extended tasks and deep learning. Finally, microstandards could allow for micromanagement: Picture teachers and students being held accountable for ever more discrete performances. If it is bad today when principals force teachers to write the standard of the day on the board, think of how it would be if every single standard turns into three, six, or a dozen or more microstandards. If the Standards are like a tree, then microstandards are like twigs. You can’t build a tree out of twigs, but you can use twigs as kindling to burn down a tree. (pp. 3-4)
Drawing on the work of John Dewey, Wiggins critiques “a march through endless micro-standards,” an approach that can be often be found throughout music education.
As he writes “let this be a warning to all course designers, curriculum writers, and (especially) textbook designers. The sum of the itty bitty parts is not the whole, ever.” This warning ought to be heeded by music educators in contexts ranging from involvement on state or district standards work and curriculum development to unit planning and every day teaching!
Avoiding such an approach requires emphasizing and keeping in mind the “complex whole.”
From a pedagogical and curricular sense, music educators looking for some concrete ways to avoid what Wiggins is discussing might look to the work of John Dewey (education) Elliot Eisner (arts education).
In terms of ensuring that music teaching and learning emphasize the complex whole and avoid decontexualized tasks, Eunice Boardman’s edited Dimensions of Musical Learning and Teaching: A Different Kind of Classroom and Jackie Wiggins’s Teaching for Musical Understanding (2nd ed.) may be particularly helpful.
Consider reading and thinking about Grant Wiggins’s original post and one can never have too much of Dewey or Eisner to inform the decisions we make in music teaching and learning!