What do you get when you combine PLC's, a book on Creative Problem Solving, the V.F.W, home education, Seth Godin, PBS, and educational models? Let's put them in the Education Innovation blender and find out?
Schools, teachers, and school districts are always asking how it can increase student learning. Teachers and administrators alike ask themselves how we can increase student achievement, increase test scores, and improve teaching.
Grade level and department PLC’s focus on the five questions that DuFour created.
1. What do we want to students to know?
2. How will we know if they know it?
3. What will we do for those who don’t know it?
4. What will we do for those who already know it?
5. How can we use our SMART goals and evidence of student learning to inform and improve our practice?
These are great questions. They help to direct teaching. But are they Catalytic Questions?
Tim Hurson, author of Think Better: An Innovator's Guide To Productive Thinking, says, "In my experience, one of the most common reasons that programs, products, and change initiatives don't work is that the wrong question has been asked." The right question is what Tim calls the Catalytic Question. It was Tim who inspired me to put questions at the end of many of my posts. So, are we really asking the right questions?
The questions that education and DuFour ask come from what I call the “Closed Model of Education”, or CME. The questions we need to start asking are the questions of what I call the “Open Model of Education”, or OME.
And those questions are very different because the questions of the CME above assume one very important thing…
The teaching and the learning will be done in the classroom at a school.
The OME makes some very different assumptions, thus, asking some very different questions.
I view the OME something like this…
OME is about learning, not teaching. When you think about teaching, you limit the learning to what the educational organization supports. Think about it. If I asked you, “How can we improve instructional practices and teaching?” you would come up with choices and answers limited to what can be done at a school.
If I asked you, “How can students increase their learning?” then you are free to come up with any idea that can help a student learn. And students in the OME can learn, anywhere, at anytime, from anyone, using multiple models.
This is just a sampling of the differences.
A focus on student learning means that we have to allow for the fact that students can learn at home, on-line, on a job site, in a classroom, at a museum, at a lab, in a factory, and just about anywhere else that a student can think of.
Core knowledge is still essential, but student should be free to come up and seek out other learning opportunities. The OME allows that a student could learn just as well about the Korean, Vietnam, and Iraq wars from a teacher, watching PBS, or visiting the local V.F.W. A student can learn about science in the classroom, but he or she can learn about science at a lab at a local company or hospital.
If student learning is the goal, then no source of student learning is off the table for the OME. While the CME must force fit everything into its highly regulated, top down control, standards based model. I ask you, which is more authentic and aligned with the current realities of the real world?
It simple comes down to the questions we decide as a nation and society to ask and answer.
How can we increase student achievement, test scores, and teaching?
Or
How can we increase student learning?
As Seth Godin says in his book Meatball Sundae…."It’s not an organization, It’s a movement."
Recommended Reading:
Are 21st century skills a solution to a problem that may not exist?
Check out the comment section of this post for a great and lively look at 21st Century Learning.
When Students Design Their Own Learning
ASCD blog. I am a member and highly recommend it.
Mozilla and the future of education, part 1
Mozilla and the future of education, part 2
Digital Education Revolution: School Development Day - Teacher Professional Learning
Why waste time with a false comparison? A real comparison looks at the whole picture, but I rarely see a comparison that is not partisan and incomplete. It seems to me that a dualistic vision of education in which there is the (chorus of angels here) Good Model and the (theme from Jaws here) Bad Model is one of the reasons we never get anywhere. We don't see the middle way. There are flaws in both systems and students would be better served if we looked for them. As an example:
closed model:
A highly regulated system characterized by a fixed curriculum of information in which fundamental information is taught in a systematic way.
positives: information is presented in a step by step way and is organized for building on previous concepts. Content is manageable and assessment is easily accomplished. There are no gaps in the learning of foundational content.
negatives: learning is taught in discreet slots of time and is usually limited to particular times and venues. opportunities for tangential learning is minimal; The type of work considered must be adaptable to the highly structured environment of a classroom; in some cases and in some environments work will be at your seat and driven by the need for order rather than intellectual inquiry; ingenuity and creativity is limited by demands of the curriculum and the environment which limits these in order to maintain classroom control. System is unfriendly to certain valid forms of teaching and learning.
open model:
An unregulated system characterized by a flexible model that does not assume which information is fundamental but seeks to identify information that a student will want to know and in which learning is organic and develops out of multiple modalities and tasks.
positives: Learning happens in a variety of settings and empowers the learner to be in charge of their own learning tasks; flexible setting allows for a broader variety of learning opportunities; A multitude of foundational concepts can be integrated into tasks that are highly engaging. More opportunities exist for mentoring, unique learning environments, etc.
negatives: an unregulated system (much like unregulated mortgage industries) provides limitless possibilities for a lot of things... including abuse and misuse; fundamental knowledge that is not highly appealing is likely to be overlooked by young learners whose standard of excellence is lower than their reach. Gaps in foundation are probable. Lack of organizational structure may be a chaotic force rather than a creative one. System is unfriendly to certain valid forms of teaching and learning
etcetera....
When we really investigate systems we create better systems...
Posted by: audrey | October 01, 2008 at 07:35 AM