The Four Rs – an Alternative to the Tyler RationaleWilliam E. Doll Jr.

Presented by Amy MacKinnon Evelyn MacLeodAmanda MacIntosh

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• Everyone is familiar with the old 3 Rs

• Reading, 'Riting and 'Rithmetic.

• Doll Jr. challenges us as teachers to go beyond the old 3Rs and to explore the new 4Rs!

Out with the old and in with the new!

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• Doll Jr.'s work is based in Post Modernism times. His idea is that curriculum should be generated with no pre-defined outcomes.

• Doll’s 4 Rs include: Richness Recursion Relations Rigor

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Richness• Richness is the curriculum's depth.

• It may have inefficiencies, chaos, disequilibrium, lived experience, etc.

• It is continuously negotiated between teachers, students and texts.

• The possibilities inherent in a curriculum are what give it not only its richness but also its sense of being.

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Recursion• Recursion lies at the heart of transformative curriculum.

• Recursion differs from repetition by adding in reflection.

• Recursion develops competence. Learning is thought of as a loop. Every ending is a new beginning and this is how we make meaning from our learning.

• This curriculum will be open, not closed. It is eclectic and interpretive. Dialogue is essential (student –student, student-teacher) to ensure learning is transformative, not shallow

• Dewey, Piaget and Whitehead are all advocates

...and so school should be... about life.

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Relations• Relations are transformative in two ways: pedagogically and culturally

• Pedagogical relations focus on the connections within a curriculum’s structure, which give the curriculum its depth. Through all of this, the textbook is seen as something to revise, not as something to follow.

Curriculum in a post-modern frame needs to be created by the classroom community, not the textbook authors.

• Cultural relations emphasizes narration and dialogue as key vehicles in interpretation. Narration brings forward the concepts of history (through story), language (through oral telling), and

place (through a story’s locality). “Curriculum in a post-modern

frame needs to be created by the

classroom community, not

by text-book authors.”

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• We perform the teaching act when we help others negotiate passages between their constructs and ours, between ours and others’.

As teachers, we do not

and cannot transmit

information directly.

This is why Dewey says

teaching is an interactive

process with learning as a by-product of

that interaction.

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Rigor• Purposefully looking for different alternatives, relations or connections.

• It also means searching for and identifying hidden assumptions.

• The learner must account for these assumptions when one is constructing their learning

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Rigor is… Rigor is NOT…• More or harder worksheets

• Honours/advanced classes

• The higher level book in reading

• More work

• More homework

• Scaffolding thinking

• Planning for thinking

• Assessing thinking about content

• Recognizing the level of thinking students demonstrate

• Managing the teaching/learning level for the desired thinking level

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How can we encourage these in our classrooms?• Collaboration

student-student, teacher-student, teacher-teacher richness and relations

• Cross-curricular activities meeting outcomes across several subject areas with one activity richness, relations

• Trial and error experiential learning recursion, rigor

• Production open-ended production vs closed reproduction richness, recursion, rigor

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Key Components• Teachers must create a safe environment when students feel comfortable sharing their thoughts, feelings

and findings

• Students need to have time to work with facts or information as an imaginative and dynamic way

• Teachers must pose open-ended questions

If educators taught in accordance to Doll Jr.’s 4Rs, students like the 13 year old boy in delivering this TedTalk wouldn’t have to drop out of public education:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h11u3vtcpaY

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Reflections• Our curriculum does not lend itself well to the 4 Rs

• Richness and rigor require more time than our curriculum allows, given the lengthy list of outcomes in many subjects.

• Some of the most powerful learning occurs when teachers add the 4 Rs to our skeleton curriculum

• Cross-curricular connections are crucial

• In an ideal world, we would have unlimited time and resources to do the 4 Rs justice.

• Ideally, everyone needs to be onboard

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Reflections• Our curriculum attempts to portray that it is open

• Time is a huge constraint/barrier

• Teachers often incorporate the 4Rs on a smaller scale

• It is not intrinsic to our curriculum.

• Grade 3 and 6 Math Projects on PEI are prime examples of how we are not allowing experiences that are recursive. Too often we are focused on improving set performance as opposed to developing competence and genuine understanding.

On PEI, there is a disconnect between teaching based on Doll’s 4 Rs and the emphasis on particular forms of assessment

e.g. Progress monitoring, Provincial assessments

Teachers are expected to cover the outcomes!!

We would love for our students’ learning to always be able to look like this!

References

Doll, W. (2013) The Four R’s – An Alternative to the Tyler Rationale. In: Doll, W. A Post-Modern Perspective on Curriculum 1993). New York: Teachers College Press. 174- 183.

Instrell, R. (2011) Breaking barriers:Multi-modal and media literacy. Conference presentation retrieved from www.mediaedscotland.org/BreakingBarriers.ppt

Lewis, N.C. (2004). The intersection of post-modernity and classroom practice. Teacher Education Quarterly, 31, 119-134.

Retrieved from http://www.teqjournal.org/Back%20Issues/Volume%2031/VOL31%20PDFS/31_3/lewis.pmd - 31_3.pdf