Stamping out "Brown Bear is Brown Disease

Joyce Kasman Valenza

Eight years ago, a fifth grade teacher sent his class to my library with an assignment he'd been using for years. Students were to fill in the blanks on a worksheet about the state they were assigned. So, I loaded copies of MECC's Fifty States Database on each of the Apple IIgs's and each child was out of there in ten minutes. They had their printouts and were proud to have gathered every bit of information needed to complete the assignment.

The teacher stormed in furious. "This was supposed to be a 45 minute project!" I had messed up the plan. He suggested that I hide the database.

Recently social studies teacher Mike Walker and I watched as his students prepared multimedia projects on Latin American culture. Mike was disappointed. Though the reports were technically appealing and they contained a great deal of information, the students drew no conclusions and to top it off, they expected us to be impressed with their flashy pictures, sounds and video. For their next project, Mike would not even let them touch a computer until they had read through enough material to come up with a *thesis* statement that they could support. We also provided students with a rubric, or assessment tool, that clearly stated what we expected out of their projects.

Technology has indeed made it easy for students to find facts, lots of them. But learning is not about filling buckets. Technology has made it easy for students to substitute flash for content. But as teachers and as parents, we should not be impressed. We must keep our expectations high. Finding facts is sometimes very important, but for most of us, what we do with the facts is much more important. It is a long journey from data to wisdom. Along the way students must convert data to information, information to knowledge, knowledge to understanding, and it is possible, that understanding will lead to wisdom. If the journey is to occur at all, our students need to learn how to examine, evaluate, analyze, reconstruct and make new conclusions from the vast amounts of information they are gathering. They need to know how to find the irrelevant and discard it.

Unfortunately, many student assignments do not encourage "critical thinking." We must ask them to use information more meaningfully. If you asked me to "write a report about Pennsylvania," I would ask you "why?" My paraphrasing of the article in Grolier's Electronic Encyclopedia would not be nearly as good as the article itself. The paraphrasing exercise would teach me little but how to transfer information without getting into trouble for plagiarizing. Ask me instead to compare the development of Pennsylvania to the development of Massachusetts and relate my comparison to the natural resources of each state. Better yet, let me come up with my own hypothesis and try to prove it. Teach me how to look for patterns in information, take notes with a purpose and to organize my ideas while I take notes.

Graphic organizers and scaffolds can be a big help in getting children to regroup data. For younger children, let the information be transmitted in the form of a dialog. Have each correspond with a child from the state they are studying and ask them to find out more about the state from the eyes of the other child. The end product need not be a report. Ask them to compose a picture of the child they are interviewing, based on a written description. Decorate the border of the picture with visuals relating to the child's home state. Use the state's name to create an acrostic poem and publish it on the Web. Desktop publish a travel brochure and make sure it lures visitors. Plan a field trip itinerary to the most important sites.

Barbara Stripling is one of my heros. The author of Brainstorms and Blueprints and former president of the American Association of School Librarians, she labels non-thought assignments: "Brown-bear-is-brown disease." She suggests that now that technology has freed us of many of the problems we used to have accessing information, students should have more time to to *process* information, to do the harder work. She warns, "We must also be careful that technology does not become our master. We mustn't accept second class information. The bits and pieces we find off the Web do not replace thoughtful biographies and essays. We need to focus *not* on questions that require two-word answers, but on the 'essential questions,' the main understandings about a topic, the questions that lead us to other questions." Stripling says, "it didn't help me to know that Jamestown was founded in 1607 until I knew what the world was like in 1607. History is real people."

Similarly my friend Sue tells me a story of her daughter Kristy, who as a second grader was asked to memorize the names of all the Presidents. Kristy got all the names down. Sue asked her, "What's a President?" Kristy shrugged her shoulders.

Harriet Nash of Drexel University describes how she would organize a unit on the American Revolution. Learning would be child-centered and it would allow children to teach each other and apply critical thinking and decision making. In Nash's unit students are asked to create new forms of information, not collect information randomly. Instead of the usual "do a report on George Washington," Nash might simply use a sentence from the text and ask students to defend it with evidence collected from research: "George Washington was a good strategist." Such a question inspires thought and information searching with a purpose. Nash provides other suggesions to promote active, engaged research and learning. Her students would actively reenact a battle sequence. A math piece might investigate what the army would eat and then ask students to prepare a meal calculating how measurements would be adjusted to feed a class of thirty. A music piece might ask students to recreate a traditional fife and drum song. When possible, Harriet suggests children experience real visits. If that is not possible, take a virtual field trip or conduct phone or email interviews with personel at the various historic societies.

Through joint planning and team teaching with content area teachers, librarians can help change the questions. Our suggestions for alternate assignments and approaches can make a significant difference in getting children to make learning connections and ensure that they compare, evaluate, analyze and communicate information in meaningful ways. Real life is about decision making, not reporting facts. Children are innately intuitive, capable of exploring questions far more intriguing than those we usually ask. We must ask them to think and ask their own questions.

And maybe they'll ask *why* some bears are brown and others are white.

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