An Essential Question
May 11, 2007
Where is the motivation for schools to truly become learning organizations?
I was following links on Will Richardson’s site this morning, which led me to David Warlick’s “2¢ Worth”, an education site I’d (regrettably) not seen before. Warlick was referring to the recent NY Times article about some schools discontinuing the use of laptops because they couldn’t control what students used them for. (This has been widely discussed and debated on many websites -- including Richardson’s and Warlick’s -- and I don’t think I can add much other than to recommend following their comments and links if you’re unfamiliar with the story.)
However, Warlick said something in his May 9 post – a follow-up on this issue -- that really struck a chord with me:
Sadly, we are a generation who was taught how to be taught — not how to teach ourselves. It’s one of the many reasons why the experiences that our children have in the classroom must become much more self-directed, relevant, and rich. They/we need to learn to teach ourselves. Teachers shouldn’t need professional development. They should be saying, hey, I’m going to teach myself how to do that this weekend. It’s about life long learning. Not about a life of being taught.
This sent me wandering down memory lane, to my days in graduate school and my master’s thesis, which looked at applying organizational change theory to school reform. In a nutshell, that’s what prompted me to go back to school for a degree in education. I wanted to know why everything I’d learned about organizational change in the business sector seemed quite foreign to the people running our public schools.
Parallel the following (part of another paper I wrote 'back in the day') to Warlick’s comment above, and the reasons for my and others’ frustration with public school education becomes clear.
“Failed attempts at school reform seem the perfect example of the problem with traditional educational practices. We have begun to ask a diverse body of stakeholders – teachers, administrators, parents, community members and even students – to engage in the complex task of reform. This requires defining a problem or problems, proposing solutions, designing and implementing plans for change, measuring and evaluating results, and continuing to change, as necessary. Indeed, it requires just the sort of critical, analytic, higher-order thinking skills we are beginning to recognize as essential for students. Yet if we are just beginning to recognize these needs for today’s classrooms, doesn’t that pre-suppose that they were not routinely present in the classrooms of the very people who are being asked to consider and implement change? What makes us believe that the ‘average’ teacher or parent possesses these skills? Is it any wonder that teachers are so often resistant to reform efforts.”
I ended that particular rant with this question: where is the motivation for schools to truly become learning organizations? I still have no answer to that question; the ‘accountabilty’ of NCLB certainly hasn’t done it.
Now check out this NY Times article: Telling Bogus from True: A Class in Reading News. Tellingly, the class is taught by a retired journalist. It is one of the most popular courses on the SUNY Stony Brook campus, and the closing quote, from a student, pretty much sums up what’s missing in so many classrooms, “I think I learned more skills that I’m going to use for the rest of my life (in this course) than I did in any other course in college.”
This is one of those essential questions I was talking about in my ‘This System Cannot be Saved’ post. Seems to me ‘what is truth?’ can indeed start in kindergarten, perhaps with The Emperor’s New Clothes? It might be the only viable entry point to effecting systemic change.
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