Microanalysis of Everything
A Painting |
A Pile of Confetti |
From teacher evaluation frameworks with dozens of sub-skills to the content standards broken down into multiple sub-standards, to the micro-analysis and documentation of reading and math skills, it has become a situation of "Analyzing everything that moves!"
Albert Einstein said that genius is defined by taking the complex and making it simple. So why in education is the opposite being forced upon teachers - taking the simple and making it complex?
If you have a beautiful painting and then you dice it into a thousand pieces, what do you now have? Confetti! The whole painting and the pile of confetti are not the same thing.
Lev Vygotsky [iv] used a similar analogy in warning us against the use of atomistic or reductionist approaches to education. He said:
Albert Einstein said that genius is defined by taking the complex and making it simple. So why in education is the opposite being forced upon teachers - taking the simple and making it complex?
If you have a beautiful painting and then you dice it into a thousand pieces, what do you now have? Confetti! The whole painting and the pile of confetti are not the same thing.
Lev Vygotsky [iv] used a similar analogy in warning us against the use of atomistic or reductionist approaches to education. He said:
This mode of analysis can be compared with a chemical analysis of water in which water is decomposed into hydrogen and oxygen. The essential feature of this form of analysis is that its products are of a different nature than the whole from which they are derived. The elements lack the characteristics inherent in the whole, and they possess properties that it did not possess. When one approaches the problem of thinking . . . by decomposing it into its elements, one adopts the strategy of the man who resorts to the decomposition of water into hydrogen and oxygen in his search for a scientific explanation of the characteristics of water, its capacity to extinguish fire . . . This man will discover, to his chagrin, that hydrogen burns and oxygen sustains combustion. He will never succeed in explaining the characteristics of the whole by analyzing the characteristics of its elements [v].
We must not atomize, or over-analyze by slicing and dicing the curriculum or the concepts and practices related to authentic teaching and learning. Teaching and learning are holistic.
References
[i] Moll, Luis C., Vygotsky and Education: Instructional Implications and Applications of Sociohistorical Psychology, Cambridge University Press, 1990, page 6.
[ii] Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist, developed the theory of the ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development) in education.
[i] Moll, Luis C., Vygotsky and Education: Instructional Implications and Applications of Sociohistorical Psychology, Cambridge University Press, 1990, page 6.
[ii] Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist, developed the theory of the ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development) in education.
