When thinking of writing this article, I was thinking that posterity would find group work one of the most over-rated concepts to be emphasized in education this last decade or two.  But then I realized I didn’t have to wait for posterity.  After 20 years in the biz, I could trust my empirical observations.  Which is something I recommend to all teachers:  if there is a disconnect between your experience and what ideas are handed to you from on high, trust what is in front of your eyes.  That is why my discipline method is so successful:  it is based on what really works, not what should or what I want to work.

Group work has been emphasized in classes with that fanatic insistence in education circles which approaches religiosity, as if by not having your students in groups at all times and opportunities you are committing a sin.   If you put your students in groups when the administrator shows up for evaluation, you are on the right track ( as well as having your agenda on the board and not ever reading from a textbook or encouraging good grammar–textbooks are only invented so you can prove what a good teacher you are by not using it, and grammar is not important as long as students get the idea across–although you can’t get an idea across without grammar, something legions of educators have overlooked).  Lecturing your students, though you might have years of interesting experience and fascinating connections and knowledge to relate,  also makes you a dud in the modern educational community.

Yep, group work has been the fad for years, while it’s reciprocal has gone under-appreciated: individual work with complete silence.

I write about this today because I happen to have had an opportunity to be in a very quiet place studying in a big, noisy city, and so unaccustomed to this perfect silence was I that I realized its rarity, especially having taught in inner-city schools for years, where the absolute silence requisite for intense concentration seems hardly a valued commodity, much less a reality.  Even when my classrooms are silent there is nearly always some noise coming from the halls, or from some machine making noise on campus, or an important non-academic announcement about a pep rally, or an assembly about your rights or another popular social issue ( some schools, I’ve suggested, should have as their mission statement “Anything but Academics!”)

But here, in the midst of a profound silence, I realize how difficult it is to think deeply, to really concentrate, without really profound, nearly perfect quiet over a sustained period of time.  I’m in the midst of poring through a music production manual, and the technical jargon taxes my reading comprehension limits, and hey, I’m no dummy, I’ve got a lot of reading experience, in the millions of pages, and yet–were it not perfectly quiet, without disruption or distraction, I wouldn’t have a chance at getting this stuff.

How much less students with less than marvelous reading comprehension skills and only burgeoning skills of prolonged concentration will be able to truly grasp the advanced comprehension necessary to decode more advanced works without plenty of opportunity in a quiet environment?  Earth to modern education, do you read me?  This takes quiet and sustained effort.

And so little do our students get an opportunity to enjoy this delicious quiet.  First, because of classroom disruptions and ineffective school discipline (which I have solved with my book for those looking for solutions– classroom disruption is hardly as inevitable as is widely held to be true these days), and second because of noise in the environment.

I noticed years ago, that when there was not even a bit of noise in the classroom, I mean perfect silence, you could tangibly feel the concentration ( and therefore intelligence!) of the entire class increase.  But with even a little distraction, that atmosphere was ruined.  If you have felt the same, trust yourself, it is true;  students need more perfectly uninterrupted quiet classroom time to have a fighting chance to garner enough concentration to achieve advanced levels of thinking.

I’m not saying group work is not ever valuable, only that it is greatly overrated.  It is useful as a tool applied when students are self-controlled and at the level of independent behavior and thinking where the exchange of ideas is meaningful.  But it is at the end of the line, not the beginning.  In other words, it is developmentally the last step that should be used in instruction, not, as commonly done, used as a knee-jerk method to employ at every available opporunity.  It is a tool best used after long periods of concentration and independent thinking have been developed, not as a means to create  this kind of thinking.

Those of us subjected to this constant pressure to use group work when students are not developmentally ready for it have witnessed at best, the lack of any meaningful dialogue going on, at worst, an excuse to blab or gossip, and every time-wasting variation in-between.

If you told me my child were to spend vast amounts of time independently concentrating on advanced ideas during their secondary school career, or vast amounts of time in groups discussing things, I know which I think would be the more productive.  I would want them to have the opportunity to think for prolonged periods of time in a concentrated atmosphere, because social interaction, even concerning academic ideas, is much easier to come by.  Geez, you can and should do it at lunch.

So my point here is a perfectly quiet classroom is a tremendously valuable and underrated tool for academic development, and that it should be emphasized more than group work, and teachers should be praised and encouraged to have classrooms which provide opportunity for students to enjoy this priceless and ever rarer commodity.

I do not picture Lincoln writing the Gettysburg Address or Einstein working out the Theory of Relatativity with noise around them (to be fair, I think Alby worked out some of his theory while watching the kiddies at home, but his mind surely did not develop in the midst of chaotic noise).  When you witness your students really making progress, trust your own instincts as to what made that happen, not some theory du jour from high above that has been shoved down your throat.  My experience of group work has been that students mostly aimlessly blab or turn it into social time or don’t have enough intellectual ammunition to make it fruitful, so I spend more time giving them that intellectual ammo through reading, vocabulary, answering questions in written format, emphasizing proper grammar when speaking, and all of the other things that produced writers like Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston and William Faulkner, but for which the modern educator appears to have little use (since I’m onto great American authors and have a penchant for non-linear consciousness I’ll add Cormac McCarthy here; wow, what a writer!)

As it relates to discipline, I recommend a week or two of silent work in the front of the year, to develop those habits and thought processes which will have plenty of time to manifest themselves through other channels on the back end.

Give your students from time to time, or much of the time, the gift of a silent classroom to give them a chance to achieve high levels of independent concentration.  This prolonged concentration in a quiet environment is what really allows intelligence to get to the next level.

If you agree that the opposite of happiness is not unhappiness, but boredom, and extreme boredom could be construed as a kind of torture, and you witness the extreme boredom in classes where students are unable to do the work set before them, and you realize they can’t do that work because they’ve been passed onto that level without the requisite skills (not because teachers don’t know how to teach, the current politically-correct explanation du jour), and you realize they have been passed on to that level without the requisite skill by those advocating social promotion, then those advocating social promotion should be tried for torture.

I’m half kidding.  Many evils are invisible when not a popular topic, and this is one of them.  Millions of students daily are being bored to intellectual death.  I’ll get to the teachers being also being bored by students who can’t do the work, then suffering the ignominy of being told it’s because they’re not delivering the material properly (see, I can use big words, I just kind of like long, borderline run-on sentences as a stylistic choice). I’ve written in my book Classroom Discipline 101 about the concept of FLOW (which I cite from the excellent book of the same name by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whom I don’t quote often because I haven’t learned to spell his name) where we humans are in our maximum state of mind when doing a meaningful task that is neither too easy (which leads to frustration and boredom), or too difficult (which leads to frustration and boredom).

These students don’t benefit from social promotion; those who benefit from social promotion are politicians and administrators who can then cover up the fact that mounds of students in their school districts cannot do appropriate grade-level work.

The original theory behind social promotion, allegedly, is that students will catch up if they are influenced by their peers, and that it hurts their self-esteem to be held behind.  Well, those are pretty stupid reasons actually.  Sure, at times the weak link on a team can be brought up by those stronger around, but not wholesale–in other words, if most people on the team are a weak link, in other words, if not all but one or two students in a class are competent to do the work, the idea that the weaker ones will be pulled along is ludicrous.

So you get, say, a student who is at 5th grade level in math doing High School Algebra.  If you think that is a ridiculous example, you’ve never been in the Los Angeles Unified School District.  It happens there all the time and no one will dare accuse me of lying.  Oh, you will get all sorts of clouded explanations about how they are only 5th Grade Level in certain ways, that developmentally blah blah ad nauseum.  I had to take an inservice where an educator made just such a claim.  I told him if a 5th Grader can do 10th Grade level English, then we can skip levels 6 through 9 and solve the California budget crisis.  Note these educators do not have to prove what they say, they get paid by taxpayers anyway.  In short:  one definition of insanity is saying the insane is possible.  You can make A = Not A.

Now, I know empirically what really hurts self-esteem.  It is not having the wherewithal to do the work before you.  I have seen 16 year olds happily doing work in long division without thought of whether is was beneath them or not–why?  Because it was challenging to them and they were up for the challenge.

An analogy:  Put me on the tennis court with Roger Federer because I’ve been playing as long as him and should be at his level.  I guarantee my self-esteem will not go up as each ball whizzes by me unhit.  Maybe I get lucky on one and it goes back over the net, at which point a millions educators jump up and down with that ‘proof’ that I can do it.

Or put me on the court with a dozen people my age who have no skills at all, do not know how to hold the racket.  I won’t pull them up, I’ll get bored and they’ll keep me from progressing at all.

If you’ve read my book, you’ll know that my philosophy mainly comes from empirical data–what I’ve actually seen happening and what does and doesn’t work, not just blind theorizing.  So what I’m saying here about social promotion is first hand observation as well as logic.  Make sure those who disagree are accountable for their opinions and can show other results.

What this means in the classroom, is you must have work that students can do without being bored, not too difficult or too easy, for your offense to be in place discipline-wise.  My observation is that what bores students is not boring teachers so much as inability to do what is before them. Those at the level of math to send up rocket ships did not get there by having clowns and puppets dance up and down to get across concepts, but by the fascination of the subject itself, and the competence to always go to the next level.  Ah hah, there it is-you should always go to the next level, age independent, not try to skip levels and play make pretend.  Going against reality always hurts in the long run, and in this case we’re losing legions of students to this invisible classroom torture.

I know this puts teachers in a dilemma because I’ve been there:  ”Do I teach the level-appropriate work, or work the students can do?”  I’ll discuss this dilemma later.

Okay, MPT’s, I call’em as I see ‘em.  Go have fun!