"It's important to find ways to let our kids take ownership of their learning. The more self-directed they become, the more the learning will stick and develop into a transparent lifelong pursuit of continuing excellence and progression. This is our highest hope. Grant Wiggins, co-author of Understanding by Design, gives us a thought-provoking article on TeachThought that explains how we can foster this in our students using 10 different unique instructional approaches."
The 4th of July: a great time to think about independence. No, not yours or mine; the students' independence. What curricular plan do you have for giving students increasing intellectual autonomy next year?
In all the hullabaloo about standards* and tests, a more basic aim has long been sacrificed in K-12 education: ensuring that students graduate able to handle the freedoms of college and the pro-active obligations of the workplace. As many have long heard me say, my children had more intellectual and executive freedom in Montessori School as 4 year old than they did as high school students.
I recall my son, Ian, as a 4-year-old, pondering which 'work' to do that day, on the way to school: food work? sewing work? Or Drawing? Well, why might you choose one or the other today? I asked. And he proceeded to do a cute think-aloud with little furrowed brow, about the pros and cons (based on recent choices and skill deficits).
Fast forward: grown-up Ian has lost 2 room-mates as he begins senior year in college this coming fall. Why did they leave? They were unable to handle the complete freedom to set their schedule and honor their obligations.
What is wanted in education is a curriculum and assessment system that builds in, by design, a gradual release of teacher responsibility across the long-term scope and sequence. Traditional curriculum design runs completely counter to this idea, of course: the work gets harder and harder but the student has practically no executive control over the intellectual agenda up until graduation.
The big exception is in schools where projects, problems, challenges and independent study provide the framework for the curriculum.
What watching these diverse experiences got me thinking was: what do these experience have in common? How have the teachers engineered freedom by design? More generally, what are the optimal conditions for achieving student intellectual autonomy and high levels of learning?
The essence of the independence design challenge is to ensure students have maximally self-sustaining worthy work, thereby freeing up the teacher to coach. That's what makes problem-based learning work: the problems are clear, focused, rich, interesting, on point – and, thus self-sustaining. That's what makes independent leveled reading work in the 5th-grade classroom. That's what also makes use of 'clickers' in Eric Mazur's Physics class or Socratic Seminar in my former classroom work: the students are fully engaged in a genuinely intellectual challenge that can engage them in real thought and learning for a good while – and thereby free the teacher to observe, listen, provide personalized feedback and advice.
(a) Is there anything but a problem? Does the question naturally suggest itself within some situation or personal experience? Or is it an aloof thing, a problem only for the purposes of conveying instruction in some school topic? Is it the sort of trying that would arouse observation and engage experimentation outside of school?
As a consequence of the absence of the materials and occupations which generate real problems, the pupil's problems are not his… A pupil has a problem, but it is the problem of meeting the requirements set by the teacher. His problem becomes that of finding out what the teacher wants.
No single, obvious, or superficial solution path – yet, the task is doable.
Benchmarks, checkpoints and other formal and informal formative assessments, to ensure students are on course and on time.
Explicit norms of mutual respect and personal responsibility, preferably built with student input and sign-off.
Note: The work is sufficiently self-sustaining if the teacher can formatively assess and provide personalized feedback and advice to each student.
"The educational conclusion which follows is that all thinking is original in a projection of considerations which have not been previously apprehended. The child of three who discovers what can be done with blocks, or of six who finds out what he can make by putting five cents and five cents together, is really a discoverer, even though everybody else in the world knows it. There is a genuine increment of experience; not another item mechanically added on, but enrichment by a new quality. The charm which the spontaneity of little children has for sympathetic observers is due to perception of this intellectual originality. The joy which children themselves experience is the joy of intellectual constructiveness—of creativeness, if the word may be used without misunderstanding.
The educational moral I am chiefly concerned to draw is not, however, that teachers would find their own work less of a grind and strain if school conditions favored learning in the sense of discovery and not in that of storing away what others pour into them…. It is that no thought, no idea, can possibly be conveyed as an idea from one person to another. When it is told, it is, to the one to whom it is told, another given fact, not an idea…. Only by wrestling with the conditions of the problem at first hand, seeking and finding his own way out, does he think…. We can and do supply ready-made "ideas" by the thousand; we do not usually take much pains to see that the one learning engages in significant situations where his own activities generate, support, and clinch ideas—that is, perceived meanings or connections.
This does not mean that the teacher is to stand off and look on; the alternative to furnishing ready-made subject matter and listening to the accuracy with which it is reproduced is not quiescence, but participation, sharing, in an activity. In such shared activity, the teacher is a learner, and the learner is, without knowing it, a teacher—and upon the whole, the less consciousness there is, on either side, of either giving or receiving instruction, the better.
Freedom for learners and teachers; learners that truly think carefully: not a bad idea on July 4th, from a book appropriately entitled Democracy and Education. Have a Happy, free, and thoughtful 4th.