NECC Day 1: Media and Expertise

Another year, another NECC.  My conference started with an “extra-curricular” visit to the Newseum, Washington D.C.’s newest museum.  The Newseum’s focus (as you may have guessed) is the media: a history of newspapers, TV news, and more.  The highlight was the top-floor room with a giant timeline starting in the 1500’s and extending through today.  All along the timeline there are pull-out trays containing the front page of newspapers reporting on the events of the time.  It’s all here, from reporting on the Salem witch trials and the outbreak of the Revolutionary War to the crash of the Hindenburg and “Dewey Defeats Truman.”  Wow.  This exhibit was worth the price of admission alone.  Other notable displays included a gallery filled with Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs from the last 50 years, pieces from the Berlin wall and a full-size guard tower, and a memorial to journalists who risked – and lost – their lives reporting the news.  The Newseum is not to be missed in DC and it got me in a good mindframe for the conference: people communicating, connecting, learning about their world.

Then came the keynote, Malcolm Gladwell.  I’ve read The Tipping Point and Outliers: The Story of Success and enjoyed both, so I was looking forward to this.  He basically went through a lot of the material from Outliers but framed it in the story of Fleetwood Mac and made a more direct application to schools.  I’d heard it before but what struck me the most – probably because it’s also a theme in this week’s reading in CASTLE book club – is the idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a master at anything.  Both Gladwell and Willingham (the author of the CASTLE book club book) make this point.  Willingham goes even further to say that, since this is the case, we should give up trying to teach students like they are experts – a pretty clear denunciation of constructivism.  Gladwell didn’t go quite that far: he focused on “respect for difficulty”, experimentation, and learning by compensation as the hallmarks of a quality learning environment.  But both of these guys have me thinking a lot about rigor: how difficult should school be, and for whom?  How much repetition in the classroom?  If we’re not teaching kids to construct knowledge and they need so much time to practice things, what does a classroom look like?