The implications for today’s schools are clear: If you are not proactively seeding your own experimental forays into a new way of helping kids learn, and doing so with the understanding that those experiments may one day overtake everything else that you do, then your community is likely standing flat-footed in the face of the biggest changes in education in more than a century.
It’s one thing to create a maker space, provide students with some “genius” time for personal learning, or bring project or inquiry learning opportunities into the classroom. The question is why we’re doing that. Is it because they are the trendy new things that other schools are doing? Is it so we can say that we are “changing” or keeping up with the times? Or because we want to be seen as “innovators”?
Or is it because we believe these things honor more fully the ways in which kids learn most deeply?
That reason is scary, right? Because, as Sam suggests, it means we understand that those new practices aren’t just boxes to check. Instead, they are first steps that “may one day overtake everything else that you do.”
“Experiments” in schools that aren’t driven by beliefs about kids and learning won’t change anything in the long run.
Hi Will,
This is a question that I have been thinking about a lot. I teach a grade 8 “genius hour” class. The school that I am in is one that students love being at, but at the same time it’s a place that is neck deep in working hard to do the wrong thing right, in my opinion.
So it *is* scary. I believe that my class provides my students with the opportunity to learn deeply about themselves, and about how to iterate solutions to problems. I can see that belief reflected in their eyes when they talk to me about their work, and why they want to do it so much. But it is a very isolated experience, I think.
The solution is scary. It means dismantling what we do, disassociating ourselves from many of the institutions that give us “validity” in much of the community’s eyes (standards, grades etc). It means putting the student’s voice at the center of our conversation. That is where my empathy dries up though. that should not be scary, that should not be negotiable.