Human Rights Education
Standards Versus Quality Teaching: Are They in Conflict?
The social studies standards are two and one half inches high. Social studies educators have committed ourselves to these standards, but I suggest we must ask key questions about our use of the standards: What is essential for students to know and be able to do when they leave our schools? What core understandings should students possess? What dispositions should be fostered for living in today's world? What is the role for human rights education? Should human rights education be central to student understanding for living in a democracy and an interdependent world?
I believe these questions are vitally important to us as social studies educators, as it is the quality of pedagogy that most directly and most powerfully affects the quality of learning. A synthesis of research on quality teaching highlights the following features of teachers' effective classroom practice:- promotes high levels of intellectual quality;
- promotes a quality learning environment;
- develops and makes explicit to students the significance of their work. (i)
These features come in direct conflict with a broad standards-based approach that includes "everything but the kitchen sink." I believe educators must be willing to debate and resolve what should be the core understandings and dispositions of social studies education. It is not possible to have quality teaching and enduring learning when the standards are never-ending.
A pedagogy that focuses on high levels of intellectual quality benefits students whether they are low or high achievers, from ethnically diverse backgrounds, or have special needs. Deep knowledge and understanding are essential for intellectual quality, and that requires that educators select a small number of key concepts and ideas within topics and make clear connections among those concepts. Teaching organized around problem solving approaches requires students to engage in higher order thinking-thinking that asks students to organize, reorganize, apply, analyze, synthesize and evaluate knowledge and information. These kinds of lessons call for students to engage in sustained conversations about the concepts and ideas they are encountering. When educators face an interminable multitude of standards to teach, intellectual quality is compromised.
A quality learning environment is characterized by students authentically engaged in learning and teachers having high expectations for all students. When teachers set high expectations for students, the classroom must be a place where risk taking is encouraged and supported. The classroom must be a place where there is positive support for learning and mutual respect among teacher and students, and students have a say in their learning.
Further, teachers' learning expectations must be clearly defined by explicit criteria so that students can use such criteria as reference points for the development of their own learning. Clearly classrooms that are characterized by these attributes are fertile settings for examining human rights topics; in fact they are inexplicitly intertwined-the how you teach cannot be separated what you teach.
Learning must be personally significant to students and deemed worthy of their time and effort. Students need to see why, and to understand that, their learning matters. Making such connections takes time; to understand deeply complex issues necessitates a paring down of the standards-a careful consideration of what's most important. A democracy depends on a well-educated citizenry, a citizenry with the foundations for understanding human rights, democracy, and our relationship to others. Fostering dispositions towards justice and equity is fundamental to these understandings, whether related to our neighbors next door, down the street, or around the world. Teachers and students who engage in lessons characterized by these elements cannot breeze through the curriculum; these lessons take time. Until we seriously examine the role of standards in relation to quality teaching, learning outcomes are in jeopardy.
i) -- New South Wales Department of Education and Training, "Quality Teaching in NSW Public Schools," (Author: May 2003).