Listening as the Key to Education

Eleanor Duckworth is a professor of education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Among the accomplishments for which she is known is a form of student self-evaluation embedded in the learning process which she describes below. She generously agreed to an interview with her student, Debra Shaffer Seeman, to share her insights with us.

To introduce our conversation, please tell us about your philosophy of student learning.

I started out as a scholar interested in children’s thinking, as a researcher talking to children and hearing them tell me how mountains actually change shape when you drive around them and how there are more steps going up a staircase than going down. I was fascinated that there was no way to change what they actually believe by telling them differently. And even more fascinated by what they did if they could not figure out how to resolve a conflict in their own thinking. My question over the years, first as a student of cognitive psychology and then as a student of teaching has been, “How do people learn things and what can anyone do to help?”

Children really want the world and their ideas to make sense. The same holds true of my adult students. Students have the habit of waiting to be told what the right answer is. If you don’t give in to that and instead give them the means for figuring it out themselves, learners find they can do most any kind of thinking with their minds and they learn deeply.

So what role does assessment play in your view?

I’m not crazy about the word assessment. I prefer the word “evaluation,” which puts values to things and doesn’t necessarily put numbers on them. There is a huge role for evaluating in education and it needs to be done “along the way,” which is to say that the way of teaching is to have the students do the talking and then a teacher shapes her work based on what she sees as the student’s understanding. The teacher’s job is to set up the class so that the teaching session and the learning materials are rich enough for the students to do the talking. Only by listening to what the students are saying and how they are making sense of their subject matter will a teacher be able to decide what ought to come next. I try to put the students in direct touch with the subject matter, rather than my view of the subject matter. It’s not a matter of mediating between the subject matter and the learners. It’s not a matter of telling them how to think about it, but keeping the learners directly in touch with the subject matter itself so that the subject matter becomes the authority.

Tell us more about “putting students directly in touch with the subject matter”?

Essentially, the process of teaching is an exploration of students’ thoughts while they are exploring the subject material. This is about getting them interested in the subject matter and not telling them what to think. The teacher is the person who gives the students something worthwhile and interesting to think about without being the authority. The center of attention becomes the subject matter, and the group’s different ideas about the materials provided. To do this, we set up the situations that provide something interesting for the students to talk about. When the teacher becomes a listener, they know what a productive next step will be.

Critical Explorers, the curriculum development project that some of my students have initiated, created a unit on the Industrial Revolution that will illustrate this well. Grade 6 students look at butter molds and ask questions about why the molds have decorations or how they open and close, and how they are worn; they read advertisements in newspapers about butter sales; they read a farmer’s journal that shows where a dairy would optimally be placed in the layout of a house to make the butter production most efficient. They move into other historical documents that debate whether a farmer ought to make her own butter or send her milk to the dairies, which were starting to do the butter-making. They investigate what that required for transportation to get to the market, including refrigeration and trains.  They read different views, published in newspapers of the time, and themselves write such letters, from different points of view.   These students just got to the whole of the Industrial Revolution through firsthand accounts of women's butter making on a farm. The kids love this process, though they do sometimes complain that they have to work hard this way. They like to say that they are solving mysteries and become completely engaged in the process.

 In what form would you like to see evaluation of learning happening?

In order to answer that I’d like to talk about evaluation for whom and at what level. The teacher wants to know what’s going on with her own teaching in order to know what to do next. Teachers also want to give a report to parents about a particular student’s learning and progress. They want to be able to say about each kid, “Here are John’s achievements, his strengths, and what he enjoys.”  Parents want to do their own evaluation of the teacher and school. The principal wants to know how the school is doing and is less concerned with an individual student, but rather needs to evaluate a particular teacher or a curriculum. And then there’s a superintendent who has to deal with many schools and the secretary of education looking at educational policies and overall systems, and so on. At the moment, the only information that we have to inform all of these stakeholders are test scores, which is terribly unfortunate. The one number, the test score, is the only thing available to this whole array of stakeholders.

I think there needs to be sampling at every level so that a principal who wants to evaluate a certain curriculum, for example, would choose a particular unit of that curriculum, then take a sampling from among the four seventh grade classes and look at 5-8 students from each of those classes. That principal would take time to learn thoroughly what they make of this part of the unit, how they’ve come to understand it. Not just using pencil and paper or test scores to evaluate the students’ learning. There could be longer, more complicated sessions where the principal explores the students’ understanding of the curricular material.

What are you looking for in that kind of evaluation?

When I evaluate the work of a class, I’m looking for collaborative work, variety of ideas, depths of those ideas, and a variety of the kids who had the ideas. I once did an evaluation of an African elementary science program that incorporated the same principles that I use for student learning. I created the evaluation tool based on a conversation that I had with Phil Morrison, a physicist who gave an exam in Cornell University’s undergraduate lab. In Morrison’s lab, each student was given the same set of materials with no questions at all. The entire exam was to find a question and answer it.

In Africa, I knew that I couldn’t give comparable tests to two sets of kids, some of whom were in the program and some who were not, because they didn’t study the same things. I had to invent a new form of evaluation based on material that neither group had studied. I took a sample of 10 students and gave them a collection of materials, some that every kid had seen in their life: things like foil from cigarette packages, rubber rings from inner tubes of tires, straw, water, various containers, flashlight batteries, and bulbs, and stuff that none had seen (various construction materials, wheels of different sizes, etc.). I told the kids they could do whatever they wanted to do with the materials and that they could talk with each other. I kept track of what they did and the complexity with which they created things. I didn’t speak with the kids since we didn’t share a common language (of course sharing a language means that a person can engage the student’s learning in many additional ways).

With an assistant, I carefully tracked each group for the same amount of time and followed how many ideas a group created, how they worked together, and how far they were able to take their ideas. Participants in the African elementary science program had a wider variety of ideas initiated by a greater number of kids in the groups. They were also just reaching high gear in what they could do with all of this “stuff.” The kids who were not participants in the program had less variety of ideas, which were shared by fewer initiators—and by the end of the hour, they had just about run out of the ideas.

What kind of advice would you give to administrators and teachers as they develop a strategy toward assessment?

I would give students documents or materials on a similar or related subject to the unit they had just completed, to see how they act as historians or scientific thinkers, like in the African elementary science evaluation.

Another way to enact this kind of evaluation is the presentation of student work. Students can be sent to talk about their own work to other teachers, school board members, principals and other stakeholders—in their own words, with their own excitement. People are always impressed with student work. They love to see their building, writing, calculating and creating—the pieces that speak directly to what the students have learned.

As an overall strategy, I would do sampling at every level other than the classroom. I would almost never do pencil and paper evaluations, which sometimes confound knowledge of subject matter with knowledge of reading and writing. There could be some pencil and paper evaluations in very specific situations following hands-on engagement with the subject matter. Though I think that it’s important to find out why kids have said what they said, which paper and pencil evaluations rarely leave room for.

A student and translator of Jean Piaget, Professor Eleanor Duckworth grounds her work in Piaget and Inhelder's insights into the nature and development of understanding and in their research method, which she has developed as a teaching-research approach, Critical Exploration in the Classroom. Duckworth has retired as professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; she has worked in elementary classroom teaching, curriculum development, teacher education, and program evaluation worldwide. Criticalexplorers.org