Schools give every encouragement to producers, the kids whose idea is to get “right answers” by any and all means. In a system that runs on “right answers,” they can hardly help it. And these schools are often very discouraging places for thinkers. (Holt, How Children Fail, p. 40)
What hampers their thinking, what drives them into these narrow and defensive strategies, is a feeling that they must please the grownups at all costs. The really able thinkers in our class turn out to be, without exception, children who don’t feel so strongly the need to please grownups. Some of them are good students, some not so good; but good or not, they don’t work to please us, but to please themselves. (Holt, How Children Fail, p. 29)
[We used the word producer to describe the student who was only interested in getting right answers, and who made more or less uncritical use of rules and formulae to get them; we called thinker the student who tried to think about the meaning, the reality, of whatever it was he was working on.] (Holt, How Children Fail, pp. 11-12)
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Doubling down on dehumanizing practices won’t help you reclaim student (or educator) ‘misbehavior.’
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Covering content and preparing students for life success are not the same thing.
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“It’s ironic that a shift away from a focus on preparation (take Algebra 1 because you need it for Algebra 2, which you might need to go to college which you might need to get a job) to a focus on difference making is the best possible form of preparation for the innovation economy. A portfolio of work that demonstrates expanding contribution to causes that matter — to a young person and their community — is far more valuable to most colleges and employers than a list of courses passed.
What if, instead of a list of required courses, high school was organized around the opportunity to contribute?”
Vander Ark & Liebtag, Difference Making at the Heart of Learning, 2021 (p. 80)
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You can have a school that emphasizes control and compliance.
Or you can have a school that emphasizes student voice, agency, and risk-taking.
But you can’t have both.
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Virtual schools… I like the concept of shifting ‘time, place, path, and pace’ very much. But I think all of the virtual schools that I’ve encountered still focus primarily on low-level learning, digitized and chunked into a digital adaptive learning system. I don’t think I’ve ever seen ‘deeper learning’ or inquiry- and project-based learning as a core tenet of a virtual school.
That said, maybe virtual schools that focus on deeper learning, student agency, and authentic work are out there! Anyone know of wholly virtual schools that emphasize rich, robust project- and inquiry-based learning; authentic student contribution to the world around them; critical thinking and problem solving; meaningful uses of technology to communicate and collaborate; and so on? If so, I’d love to hear about them!
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Can you say… adaptive learning software?
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Attaching band-aids to our current work doesn’t change much
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Image credit: Patching up school items, Penywise, Bigstock
