Does that strike you as scary? Does that shock you so much that you just dropped your abacus?
Or does it bring to mind exciting new possibilities?
I read a lot about education reform, and, the more I read, the more I wonder why we work so hard to make changes to improve student learning in an educational system that was made in a different era to make a different type of student. It’s as if we are constantly trying to fit 21st-century round pegs into 19th century-style square holes. (Well, I do understand why we do this, but my indignation about that is probably best reserved for a separate post.)
Some of the changes we implement work, but my belief is that, in order to enact systemic change for the better, you have to completely change the system in which you are working. Not all at once, of course; but if we are going to prepare our students for a 21st-century world, the educational system we’re using that was fashioned in the 19th century just isn’t going to cut it.
Based on this need for a new educational paradigm, here are some things I would do to change the way students are educated for the 21st century:
1) Start fostering creative and critical thought instead of the accumulation of useless knowledge. I know, some of you out there are already apoplectic at the use of the word “useless.” I have never met a content-area teacher (including myself) that doesn’t think that every bit of information in their field is important. Well, it’s not. Get rid of your sacred curriculum cows. Covering content isn’t the name of the game anymore—it’s about teaching students how to think, to make connections, and to create meaning and original thoughts.
2) Scrap the way we run the school day and come up with a system that reinforces and promotes creative and critical thinking. In Sir Ken Robinson’s video, he talks about how we are all born with a high creative capacity that seems to be “educated out of us” by the time we get through school. Why not arrange the school day/year to foster and nurture that creativity instead of stamping it out? I know, we’ve instituted changes regarding the school day already. Modified schedules, block schedules. . . all good ideas, but, as they are currently implemented in most schools, they are still just different ways to do the same things in education we’ve been doing. In my opinion, the way the school day is structured needs an entirely new design--it’s too rigid, and promotes separation of thinking within disciplines rather than across them. Everyone acknowledges that learning shouldn’t be compartmentalized in that fashion, yet we just keep doing it because that’s the way it’s always been done.
Why not have more than one teacher from different disciplines teach in a room, and merge content areas into new courses? Why not set up the day as a series of workshops, and differentiate those workshops based on student interest and ability? Why not assign students to teams, and then assign them long-term projects or problems to solve that reach across all disciplines, asking students to learn and apply their knowledge? Sound crazy? It's being done at the New Tech High Schools across the country right now.
3) Abandon grade levels, and group students according to ability and/or readiness. Why do we group students by age? Is there any educational advantage to this, other than it’s an easy way to group children that makes sense to adults? Instead, why not flexibly group students by readiness and ability, so they can collaborate together and grow as learners? What I’m bascically saying here is to differentiate the entire system. Differentiation in the classroom uses flexible grouping; I’m talking about differentiating the entire school day. Think it would be chaos? A little. But some of the best learning situations in my classroom have come straight out of organized chaos—because learning is inherently messy. The more we try and streamline it to make it easier on ourselves (what Sir Ken Robinson calls the “production-line mentality,”) the more we deny students opportunities to engage in thoughtful, meaningful learning opportunities with their ability and readiness peers. Remember, we’re in this for the good of students, not for ourselves.
4) Don’t let students move on in their learning until they have mastered needed standards and objectives. Why are we passing students with Cs or Ds (and even Fs) up the academic food chain when it’s obvious they haven’t mastered the skills needed to move on to the next level? It has always stumped me as a teacher why we let students move on to the next grade with a C or less. Doesn’t that tell students, “We know you haven’t learned what we needed you to learn, but that’s OK—we’ll move you on up the educational ladder anyway. Don’t bother trying that hard, if at all. ” We need to institute levels of learning, and students shouldn’t be able to move to the next level without demonstrating they have mastered the necessary skills and content of the level before it. If you say this can’t be done, then you need to look at this Denver school and this Alaska school that are doing it.
5) Get rid of standardized testing and come up with a meaningful way to measure student learning growth and skills. I’m not going to go over why standardized testing is a poor way to measure student achievement and school quality; I think it’s obvious to everyone in this No Child Left Behind era. How to measure school effectiveness and student learning needs to be entirely rethought and redesigned. If we are truly interested in student’s learning, we need tests that don’t throw out questions that students do well on to maintain the bell curve. In fact, some would say we don’t need standardized tests like that at all. We need to measure student learning, not compare how completely different groups of students with different learning needs and abilities did on the same norm-referenced test year after year.
None of the ideas I propose above are new. They've been around for a while; it's just frustrating to see just how slowly the wheels of change move (as well as frustrating to see how many people cling to educational designs and methods that no longer are effective). I should be happy that more and more people are recognizing the need for educational reform; after all, admitting you have a problem, they say, is the first step.