What is your One Wish for this School Year?

Earlier this week, out of the blue, our Instructional Technology Coordinator strolled into the Curriculum Office, sat down next to my desk, and asked, “What is your one wish for this school year?”.  Caught off guard by the abruptness of the question, I thought for a moment and replied, “I wish we could shift our instruction to be more student centered instead of teacher centered”.  I then internally cringed because it sounded like such a canned answer.  He nodded his head, contemplated the statement for a moment, stood up, and walked away without saying a word.  I thought, “I hate when he does that”.

Had the conversation continued I am sure I would  have elaborated on my answer, but like George Costanza from Seinfeld I always seem to come up with the just right response after the moment is gone. Unlike George’s “Jerk Store” response, I think I would have been better able to articulate a different response that would have gone something like this:

I wish....

we could move from, what Larry Geni’s Teacher Handbook  would call a “curriculum transfer model” to more of a “preparing for life model”.  The curriculum transfer model has the teacher serving as the “gatekeeper” to information where all student learning must go through or come from the teacher.  It is the traditional way schools have approached learning since the development of public education.

The “preparing for life” model has rearranged those three parts and places the curriculum in a location accessible to all, with the students and teachers being able to interact to discuss and share their understanding of the curriculum whatever the subject.

In science class, students would be put in situations to nurture their natural tendencies to be inquisitive (ask good questions), curious (develop a sense of wonder; I wonder...?), social (collaborate/work together),and analytic (ability to exam evidence and make connections).  They would not follow “cookbook” type labs, but instead (with support) develop investigations.  The science teachers would build off the students prior understanding when introducing new information and if the students do not have a prior understanding of a new topic then the teachers would have the ability/understanding of the topic to use demonstrations or activities that would provide a common base for all students to work off of as they develop their understanding.

In math the teachers would not show students how to solve problems, but would instead create scenarios or ask questions that help students see patterns, make connections, and develop relationships between the numbers.  I elaborated on these thoughts in an earlier post titled “If THEY build it, Learning will Come”, so I won’t go much further here.

In language arts, students K-12 would develop voice and choice through some form of a readers and writers workshop.  The key here is that the more reading and the more writing the students do while in school the better they get at each, which means the teachers are talking less and the students are immersed in authentic reading and writing.  I also addressed this topic in an earlier blog titled “Oh good, are they just reading?”

In social studies students would receive lecturs on a limited bases and instead be given a series of standards or a problem to investigate.  Once they start their individual research, they would revisit, with their groups, in order to share and discuss their findings or take part in a “fishbowl” type activity as a whole class.  The point here is that students determine how they are going about learning a topic (with teacher support) which will naturally lead to more motivation and ability to make connections.  In our district, I  have seen this work in a single classroom as well as across a grade level in the form of Mock Congress.

In global language class students would walk through the doors and enter a completely different culture in which to be immersed.  English would become the second language and the particular language being “taught” would be the primary language.  If you think about how we learned our own first language as children, we did not learn to conjugate verbs and take written test, but instead:  observed, followed a model, experimented, asked questions, and repeatedly tried and failed with nurturing corrections from our parents.  I would love to see an intro to global language class run as some form of conversation based learning like this.

In my opinion, the fine arts have it down because there is continuous formative assessment and feedback taking place once a concept is introduced.  The communication between learners (teachers/students, students/students, students/teachers) is key for the learning and application of a skill.  Learning is social and we, as humans, have evolved to learn best in a social environment.  We are naturally curious and are actually energized by learning more about the world in which we exist.  Schools, run in the form of a factory model, have gotten away from this and a lot of that is due to trying to measure the success of a school through testing.  
I wish schools would be run more like a greenhouse, rather than a factory or business, and if we must have some quantitative way to measure the success of schools, let’s look at the differential between how fast kids run into school as compared to how fast they run out of school.  If we can keep that differential low, in my opinion, we have all the quantitative evidence we need to show kids are excited to come to school to learn.