May 4, 2007
A professor of mine once referred to school reform as "moving around the deck chairs on the Titanic." I've come to believe she was right.
The recent confluence of three news stories drove me, finally, to this conclusion: I, like so may others, have been moving the deck chairs on the Titanic around long enough. The ship is going down and we need viable alternatives … FAST!
This recognition came from news events which led me to ask what I think should be every educator’s question: What can we learn from this? While the smaller lessons are not necessarily the same for each of these three stories, the larger lesson is: Far too often, and especially at the secondary school level, we are wasting time teaching things that are meaningless to students.
The three stories in the news were the firing of Don Imus, the dropping of all charges against the Duke lacrosse players and a more local brouhaha about Wilton High School’s refusal to allow an advanced theater class to perform a devised theater piece about the Iraq War.
At some point in the future, I'll share some of the 'essential questions' I jotted down as curriculum groundwork on each of these stories, but for the moment, I want to focus on the last story, about the theater class in Wilton, which really hit home. After their blatant disregard of first amendment laws, the school/district has been scrambling to ‘save face’ by saying they are willing to work with the drama teacher to review the script in order to have it performed at school after all … as long as it meets a set of criteria they have established.
This school district needs to admit it made a mistake. We tell kids to admit their mistakes all the time. We all know that we learn more from our mistakes than anything else. Yet they persist in trying to make this award-winning drama teacher the culprit in teaching her advanced theater students a little something about drama as a means to confront controversial issues, i.e., drama as art. What is more, she did so within district-approved curriculum!
As so many others have said, this is not just about integrating technology. It is about the futility of reforming education. Tom Haskins recently wrote a strongly worded essay to this effect, and it was well-augmented by a comment from Stephen Downes. Will Richardson has also recently voiced frustration about dealing with the increasingly archaic educational system. In other words, it's time. This system cannot be saved. The NEW world needs a NEW educational system.
But what? and how? Surely there are other alternatives beyond charter schools and home-schooling. To paraphrase my charming son, we can’t use analog solutions for digital problems. Let’s get some ideas out there and beginning building alternative educational networks for the digital age.
Some initial thoughts:
- We still need a place for the children of working parents to go
- We still need to think about learning developmentally (there are still things you need to learn, e.g., how to read, before you can go on to the next step)
- All learning needs to connect to other learning (Listen to George Siemens; It’s the whole network thing – that’s how our brains work!)
- Narrow and deep seems to promote deeper thinking. Can we find some essential questions that we can start with in kindergarten and then build on for the next 16 year, allowing tangents based on personal interests?
join the conversation
May 5, 2007
Great post! Can you explain 'narrow and deep' a little more? Don't think I've ever heard the term.
May 6, 2007
Narrow and deep simply means to cover less territory, i.e., study fewer things, but to to really drill down on what you do study. This helps avoid that superficial name/date thing that characterized my high school education, at least. I don't know if you recall, but I used to say that I didn't know education had anything to do with thinking until I got to college; until then, it was just about memorization and regurgitation.
BTW narrow and deep was also a popular retail term at one time, describing the difference between fewer styles with considerable inventory vs. more styles with less inventory. When I grew up in Penney's shoe department, we carried relatively few styles, but the most popular ones, carried year after year, came in 9 colors, 16 sizes and 4 widths. This was because the value was considered more intrinsic (basic/good quality). Today, stores like H&M have built their reputation on "broad but shallow", with a huge range of fashion merchandise (extrinsic value) that gets replaced rather than repurchased (at the wholesale level).
Different philosophies for different times! In the early 70's, we were still on the cusp of the consumption shift from need to want. We all know where we are today!
#3 Jarrett
said . . .
May 7, 2007
I know your blog is still very new but I have to say, I love it already. I plan on sharing it with my peers. It has me thinking about many things. I have been thinking about what needs to change and has left me with some questions. If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to get your opinion on something. First, I need to give you a little back story. I have a very interesting position here. I am the Diversified Occupations Coordinator. I run a work study program. My students are granted early dismissal in order to go to work. We have the block here so my students usually have my class along with 2 others and have 1 block off for work. While they are in class with me, I teach them employability skills. I don’t think we had anything like this at McMahon. I don’t know if other schools in the area did but it is a fairly common program down here in PA. Here is my question. Do you think that schools should continue to push the idea that everyone needs to go to college? I feel like my program has so much potential but due to the constraints of the system it is treated like a place to drop kids who just need a credit to graduate. It seems like an after thought for those who aren’t college bound.
#4 Elenor
said . . .
May 7, 2007
I love the idea of starting Kindergarteners with essential questions. One place I'd start is to have students react - we do a miserable job teaching kids to develop a point of view and explaining it. Without a point of view, learners stay passive - if the obligation is to develop a point of view, we would learn to accept all incoming information much more critically. I had a history teacher in HS who assigned a weekly reaction paper. Regardless of what we were learning, we were required to select one of the items we learned and react to it - it was a very broad and fascinating continuous assignment.
Maybe another basic question is "how would you communicate this information to others". Again, this would require active processing, and then translating the experience into another form or medium.
I saw Avenue Q last night (adorable!) and so another question is "purpose". What is your purpose today? this year? this lifetime? There is no reason we can't get kids to begin to think about themselves in relation to the rest of the world early in their lives - and take an active part in their own development and responsibility for their own actions. If we did, perhaps we wouldn't tolerate the abuse of the planet that we currently tolerate. Perhaps we wouldn't have invaded Iraq and wouldn't be occupying it now. Which brings up the Wilton situation. Who better to explore the impact of our warmongering than 17 and 18 year olds?
June 16, 2007
All sounds good, who picks? Traditionally the parent would choose the learning mode because they would select the knowledge transfer that would optimize their survival, it wasn't about the children, it was about the survival of the elders. Now that we have moved to a model of "It's for the children", and the parent is not as directly in the equation for the decision around the training for the children.
Yet, I still believe that the parents are the center of the solution, if the parents are not motivated to work with their students at home, then the student is unlikely to be successful. The school should test for this and separate the kids into two groups:
1. Parents are involved
2. Parents are not involved
In group 1, traditional curriculum could be used, it has a proven track record.
In group 2, college students who want to be teachers and retired volunteers would be screened for background, time availability, and ability, also certified via a simple exam that maps to the current standardized exams. These volunteers would then work with the students directly via internet, with strict rules against actual meetings with the children, that is important, these are not substitutes for parents, in case the parents figure out that they need to be active in their kids lives.
Track the interaction, develop an expert system that can monitor the interactions for badness, incorrect knowledge transfers and to learn how to implement a caring teaching artificial intelligence (which would not have to pass the Turing Test, but likely would be able to). Humans would still be involved, the Artificial Intelligence would augment the volunteers and prevent volunteer burn out, which is what happens to parents. This would map to the home schooling model, except on line.
June 17, 2007
Thanks for joining the conversation Sam! Parent involvement is certainly a huge issue, but I'd hesitate to divide the kids between those with involved parents and those without. That could create even more segregation along socio-economic lines, although it would be nice to get all the college and retired volunteers to help those kids whose parents don't have the time or education to support their kids educational needs. At the same time, I wish our schools would take the whole issue of parenting more seriously. If we did a little (or a lot!) more preparation for the enormous responsibility that parenting entails, perhaps there would be fewer kids who were neglected ... or worse. As I've said time and time again, I really think education is 'all about the relationship'. It really doesn't matter what you teach, or how you teach it, if there is a bond of trust and caring between the 'teacher' and the student. I certainly don't believe 'teachers' have to be the equivalent of today's licensed professional. I think they have to be people who truly care about kids in a holistic way, who can see beyond a child's limitations to their potential, and who understand what motivation to learn is, and how to encourage it. That's a little simplistic, I know, but I think a lot of the content can be handled electronically. We also need to whittle that class size down as much as possible and/or bring in those volunteers of which you speak to give each child as much personal attention as possible -- especially in those early years in which the child needs to build their base skills in reading, writing, math and scientific thinking.