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X-ray Glasses for Teachers

University of Rochester, New York

Roey Perlstein-Dvir

Israel

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A little about me

We all work so hard to educate children to be democratic citizens.
And yet, democratic values and beliefs are increasingly receding.
Why would that be? What aren’t we seeing?

15 years of teaching;
First in special education, and currently in a city public school;
History and civics teacher, civics coordinator;
Home class educator

Explicit teaching

The Hidden Curriculum

Explicit teaching

The Hidden Curriculum

Why would a Teacher need X-ray Glasses?

“The Hidden Curriculum describes those learning situations that are both non-explicit and unconscious, and are consistent, pervasive and ongoing. This refers to learning situations that are a secondary result of the teaching and learning process or of the physical and social environment of the school. As a further requirement, they should be identifiable and understandable by students exposed to them, when they are presented to the students explicitly.”

a Little bit about me - I came into formal education unwillingly, having seen my mother’s struggles throughout the years. But after having worked in informal education for a decade, I realized that the formal education system was the place where kids spent most of their time, and the only place where I might find all of our kids, and so – if making an impact was what I was after, that is where I need to be. And so, for the past 15 years I have been teaching history and civics, but always viewing these subjects primarily as a springboard for education – that personal and social process through which children become adults.
So diving in - why would a Teacher need X-ray Glasses? As a student of political science, I view school as society’s main socializing agent for our young future citizens, and hence, I treat as one of school’s main tasks the preparation of children to live as fully participating citizens in a democratic society. This view is upheld by all democratic countries, many of which have also made this goal a law, meant to guide their schools.

And indeed, teachers work very hard to instill in their students core democratic beliefs, values, norms and behaviors. Not just through civics and social sciences classes, but also through social-emotional learning, group activities, and in general – the set of norms and behaviors that teachers explicitly expect of their students. We teach them to work and play nicely with others; to collaborate; to be respectful; to accept majority rule. And so many others.
And yet, democracy is increasingly under attack in various countries around the globe. Human and civil rights are pushed aside in the face of group interests; nationalism and populism are gaining tract; and great numbers of citizens are increasingly doubting the power of democracy to create a society in which they will feel safe and taken care of.
Taking these two points together, I wish to ask – what are we missing? What aren’t we seeing, that goes on in school, and could explain this fragility of democratic beliefs and behaviors, despite all the effort being put into democratic education?
Our usual model of teaching and learning posits, that we have students, sitting in front of a teacher, delivering content through explicit teaching. This, in turn, is supposed to create the knowledge, skills, and among others – democratic values and behaviors we aim at.
Building on more than a half century of research, I wish to claim that within the classroom, and within schools in general, there also operates a hidden curriculum, working behind the scenes and many times contradicting our explicit teaching and creating the crisis of democracy I mentioned earlier.
The term “Hidden Curriculum” has been attached to very many different aspects of education, and from widely varying points of view, and so it is necessary to clarify what I mean here by this term. Through extensive research, and borrowing much from Philip Jackson, Michael Apple, Jane Martin and others, I have formulated the following synthetic definition, which is the most inclusive, without losing the ability to operationalize it for empirical investigation: “The Hidden Curriculum describes those learning situations that are both non-explicit and unconscious, and are consistent, pervasive and ongoing. This refers to learning situations that are a secondary result of the teaching and learning process or of the physical and social environment of the school. As a further requirement, they should be identifiable and understandable by students exposed to them, when they are presented to the students explicitly.”
While the scope of this presentation is too limited to go into the fine details of this definition, consider the following example for clarification: Each year, as part of celebrating the Jewish holiday of Purim (somewhat similar to the American Halloween), students in Israel write their own ‘Purim Codes of Behavior’, setting special school rules for the week before the holiday. These codes include, for instance, rules regarding dress code, as well as things that teachers are allowed and forbidden to do during this week. Last year my school had a rule stating, that whenever a teacher says the word ‘no’, the students may stop the lesson and sing any song they choose. As you can imagine, this is rather annoying, and makes teaching quite difficult. But that’s the price we pay – that’s the rule set for that year in collaboration between school management and the students’ council. However, just one day after these rules were published, the principal sent out a message to the entire staff, stating that this specific rule was canceled. At face value, this is just another case of teachers wanting to carry out their job to the best of their ability. But what do the students understand from it? What message do children get from the responsible adults, when the law that they participated in creating, and which is supposed to express their collective will, is arbitrarily canceled by a higher authority?
This is where a teacher’s X-ray glasses will come into use. I propose a model in which teachers will learn, with their peers and with their students alike, how to expose the Hidden Curriculum latent in their teaching. This, I claim, should allow teachers and students to work through and around the negative implications of the Hidden Curriculum, clearing the path to a more effective and holistic democratic education, and a stronger democratic society.

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Text, Context, Subtext

Not knowing how our Hidden Curriculum impacts students, �our ability to impart values and behaviors will forever remain limited.

Using techniques of metacognition and explicit teaching with students can serve to alleviate the negative implications of the Hidden Curriculum.

In order to enable teachers to achieve this, a PD course will be enacted, where teachers will act as a community in learning and implementing these tools.

CC: image by Frank Green

The model I had just presented is aimed to show, that without knowing how our Hidden Curriculum impacts students, our ability to impart values and behaviors will forever remain limited. The imagery of the iceberg is quite apt here – if we navigate our teaching using only what we see on the surface, we will inevitably run into the treacherous ice beneath. Meaning, that any attempt to reform civic education, and education in general, without taking into account the influence of the Hidden Curriculum, is inherently crippled, at best, and at worst might backfire unexpectedly.

The Hidden Curriculum cannot be completely overcome – subtext and hidden messages are a natural aspect of human communication. However, I suggest that using techniques of metacognition and explicit teaching with students can serve to alleviate the negative implications of the Hidden Curriculum, and allow us to create a more robust, in-depth education for democracy.

The way there goes through teachers changing their thinking about their practice, and hence, looking at the next school year, a PD course will be enacted, where teachers will act as a community in learning and implementing these tools.

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What would it look like?

What do we think we’re telling students?

What do students actually understand from this?

What does this tell students?

How do we know that?

An iterative process –

theory -> action -> reflection

Overview of course program:

Community building – group agreements, brave space, vulnerability;
Goal setting – personal and as a group;
A personal interpretative framework - Who I am in how I teach is the message: self‐understanding, vulnerability and reflection;
The problem – what is the Hidden Curriculum? - developing a personal working theory;
My students and I - testing the theory;
Back to the group – what did we learn?
The Extractive Teaching Protocol
Back to the field
What worked? What didn’t? what now?

What can such a program achieve?

Let’s consider the following examples:

Students are presented with the following instructions in class. What do we think we’re telling students? What do students actually understand from this? Why don’t we just ask them? This will allow us to compare the way they comprehend our messages, with what we think we are conveying to them.

A teacher sits in class with a BLM shirt. What does this tell students? Does this speak of inclusion, affirmation? Or perhaps rather of exclusion, of teachers’ political opinions being forced on the students? And for which students? How do we know what it makes them feel and think, if we don’t have a conversation with them about it? It is this type of metacognitive discussion that is proposed as a tool for digging deeper into our own teaching, and excavating what lies underneath the surface.

These two cases exemplify what are basically the proposed tenets of the PD course: first – it requires us to approach our students’ thinking with respect, seeing them as active agents in their thought processes, and not just receptacles for our own thoughts and knowledge; second – it requires an investment of time and effort in explicating those situations that we usually take for granted. The claim here, of course, is that this investment is also a wise one, and will bear fruit in a deeper understanding between teacher and students, and in a streamlining of the educational process, resulting in learning that is much more effective and affective.

And so, the first step in the PD course, where teachers are meant to learn with and from both their students and their peers, will be for teachers to create their own working theory of the Hidden Curriculum, meaning their perception of how it manifests in their teaching. This will be followed by surveys taken by both the teachers and their students, which will allow the teachers to compare their thoughts with those of their students.

Following this, an iterative process will be implemented, where a theoretical instrument is studied together – be it the concept of the Hidden Curriculum or tools for metacognitive conversations with students and for explicit teaching that makes visible the teacher’s train of thought, followed by in-class intervention, and then back to the peer-group for personal and group reflection, and further development of the theoretical and practical tools. This idea is based on the “Understanding by Design” conception developed by Wiggins and McTighe, where they state their assumption that “all purposeful and effective teachers follow a cycle of plan-revise-teach-assess-reflect-adjust many times”. In the proposed course, a community component is added to this process to make it more robust and meaningful.

As further measures for assessing and improving the project, two additional surveys are proposed – one at the end of the course and the second at the end of the school year, to allow both the teachers themselves and myself as the researcher, to assess the impact of the course on the teachers’ practice.

Looking at the course from a bird’s view, it will be constructed as follows:

Community building – writing group agreements, emphasizing a brave space that allows for the vulnerability necessary for critical reflection;
Goal setting – both personal and as a group;
A personal interpretative framework – studying excerpts from Kelchterman’s article: “Who I am in how I teach is the message: self‐understanding, vulnerability and reflection”;
The problem – what is the Hidden Curriculum? - developing a personal working theory, to then test in the field;
My students and I – testing the theory - what are the differences and similarities between how I see my teaching and how my students see it?;
Back to the group – what did we learn? – collaborative reflection;
Into the heart of the program: The Extractive Teaching Protocol – studying the FLoWER model for unearthing the hidden messages in our teaching, in collaboration with our students;
Back to the field – does it work?
And back to the group: What worked? What didn’t? what now? How do we deal with the various possible objections to the model?

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From theory to practice

Thinking about the concept, are there any Hidden Curriculum messages �you think you may be inadvertently sending �your students?

[A word about the situation back home]

The next six months will be dedicated to further, in-depth, development of the PD sessions.

In June, the course will be proposed to the Professional Development centers.

If all goes as planned, a course will open mid-September 2024, spanning about 3 months.

The transition from theory to practice requires, first, a word about the situation back home: while Israel is struggling to maintain a semblance, at least, of normalcy during these troubling times, initial inquiries showed that due to the war, this schoolyear will be irrelevant for any new professional development courses.

Thus, the next six months will be dedicated to further, in-depth, development of the PD sessions themselves.

In June the course will be proposed to the Professional Development centers catering for the Ministry of Education, for acknowledgment and advertising to teachers.

If all goes as planned, a course will open mid-September 2024, spanning about 3 months. This will allow teachers to incorporate the tools they acquire during the course into their daily teaching practices, leaving the rest of the schoolyear for independent practice and implementation, which will serve as the basis for the end-of-year assessment survey.

To conclude, I wish to leave you with the following question: Thinking about the concept, are there any Hidden Curriculum messages you think you may be inadvertently sending your students?

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References and Resources

George, T. (2023, June 22). What is action Research? | Definition & Examples. Scribbr. https://www.scribbr.com/methodology/action-research
Jackson, P. W. (1990). Life in classrooms. Teachers College Press.
Kelchtermans, G. (2009). Who I am in how I teach is the message: self‐understanding, vulnerability and reflection. Teachers and Teaching, 15(2), 257–272. https://doi.org/10.1080/13540600902875332
Martin, J. R. (1976). What Should We Do with a Hidden Curriculum When We Find One? Curriculum Inquiry, 6(2), 135–151.
Meuwissen, K. W. (2017). “Happy Professional Development at an Unhappy Time”: Learning to Teach for Historical Thinking in a High-Pressure Accountability Context. Theory and Research in Social Education, 45(2), 248–285. https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2016.1232208
Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by Design (2nd ed.). ASCD.