The overall ideas of this unit are particularly applicable to my professional life at this time. Student directed learning and adapting methods to formulate curriculums with that in mind is the "hot topic" of my district right now. Last year, our district bought into the program being sold by the Schlechty Center...as in literally bought, for a rumored $250,000, the "revolutionary" curriculum design ideas of Phil Schlechty and his team. Attending several mandatory WOW (working on the work) workshops to learn these cutting edge ideas on how to get our students engaged in our lessons, I was less than impressed. Most of the things we were being told seemed pretty common sense to me; things that I believe an educator should be concerned and self examining if they did not seem common sense to him/her. The core of the Schlechty philosophy is focusing on rearranging the way we plan our curriculums, all the way down to how we formulate our individual lessons. Instead of just trying to think of the most efficient way to present the necessary content to our students, we need to apply/consider different design qualities when planning: examining the backgrounds and aptitudes of our individual students and the group as a whole, choosing aspects of a concept, deciding what needs to be an essential fact, and what things need to be enduring understandings, then designing engaging lessons that are not only intentionally applicable to the students' lives, but also largely self directed - because after all, kids will find it more interesting if it applies to their lives and they get to actually experience what they are learning right? Duh. Like I said, from the beginning, I have been insulted with my district's insistence on us as a staff spending countless staff development hours studying this "new and revolutionary" idea.
I hadn't read Dewey since undergrad, but the two of his works we read for this unit just seemed like such great timing and furthered my frustration with Schlechty. Turns out Mr. Schlechty, your ideas are not so new; Mr. Dewey was writing about those things and more over 100 years ago. I was surprised how many observations about the learning structure of a classroom and curriculum are still true today. As I'm sure would prove very disappointing to him, we as educators, still seem to be struggling to let go and alter our role as information spoon feeder to that of a facilitator and learning coach. I fully agree with Dewey, and Schlechty for that matter, that learning is not just more meaningful, but flat out more useful and beneficial when students can identify and experience what they are learning.
I thought it was interesting when Dewey was writing about his struggle to find desks for his classroom. He could only find individual desks that were not designed to facilitate collaborative work and learning. I thought, wow, is that now exactly how it still is today? Even down to the way we design our classrooms and how our kids are arranged as they learn has virtually gone unchanged in the century since his publications. As a 10th grade history teacher, I am ever-trying to make/design my lessons to reflect the ideas of this units' readings - often putting my students in groups to collaboratively work on a lesson together and trying to make the experiential education drive what we do as much as the content. We were told something as a staff a couple years ago that has stuck with me - as high school teachers today, we are the first teachers in history that are knowingly teaching/preparing a student body for a world that does not yet exist. With the rate of change in our culture/technology/etc., the things we teach them today will probably not be applicable by the time they graduate college, so we need to shift our teaching focus. We can't worry solely about teaching content, but instead need to train our students to become life long learners and collaborators. They need to leave our classroom with more than facts and figures, but skills and ways of learning that will guide and help them in the real world. The "old" or conventional way of teaching simply will not accomplish that goal.
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