A recent post by Jeff Utecht over at The Thinking Stick called "Flipping the Classroom: Going Beyond the Obvious" addresses this student ownership issue that is so near and dear to my teaching heart. In this post he talks about his own ideas regarding the flipped classroom, but also discusses the flipped classroom as not just having students receive content at home, but turning it into a process whereby students learn skills above content--the skills to own their own learning.
In other words, don't just flip your instruction. Flip school itself.
In the post the first phrase that struck me was "...the classroom and what it looks like when content is everywhere." As I've said before (here and here), our content doesn't really matter that much in an age where students have instant access to content; content coming from the front of the room isn't where true learning is at. What it's time to do now is make sure students have the skills (as Jeff Utecht says in his post) needed to be a learner.
What does that entail? I think it's really about teachers planning for student learning of skills that transcend content, skills that students will really need in school and after graduation. Some of the skills mentioned were search skills, making connections, and communicating to a global audience, and skimming efficiently. I agree that all of these are necessary, but I would add one--synthesizing all that information and individual connections into a cohesive whole. Students need to learn how to take all the bits and not turn them into ideas that are already out there, but into their own original ideas.
In other words, they need to know how to make sense of it all on their own, pulling the connections together to form new understandings. To really "flip" school, the way learning happens in classrooms should empower students to learn how to think by and for themselves. As was said so nicely in the article,
"The flipped approach is about empowering students with the skills needed to learn on their own, not empowering teachers with new ways to deliver content.
You want to empower students to learn on their own? First we need to give them the skills to do so. Where are we teaching students the skills they need to be "empowered learners"? Let's replace content standards with skill standards and assess those...then we can talk about flipping education as a whole. "
Exactly. We need to flip, reverse, change, reform, or redesign (pick your verb of choice) how school is done around those few skills that matter.