20 Suggestions from Students for Education

Over the weekend a friend of mine sent along an article with 20 suggestions from students responding to a twitter discussion with blogger Lisa Nielsen about what they thought the nation should know about educational reform. The full article can be seen here (click). The article is thought provoking and well-worth the 5 min it takes to look it over.

Here were the suggestions from the students

1. I have to critically think in college, but your tests don’t teach me that.
2. We learn in different ways at different rates.
3. I can’t learn from you if you are not willing to connect with me.
4. Teaching by the book is not teaching. It’s just talking.
5. Caring about each student is more important than teaching the class.
6. Every young person has a dream. Your job is to help bring us closer to our dreams.
7. We need more than teachers. We need life coaches.
8. The community should become more involved in schools.
9. Even if you don’t want to be a teacher, you can offer a student an apprenticeship.
10. Us youth love all the new technologies that come out. When you acknowledge this and use technology in your teaching it makes learning much more interesting.
11. You should be trained not just in teaching but also in counseling.
12. Tell me something good that I’m doing so that I can keep growing in that.
13. When you can feel like a family member it helps so much.
14. We appreciate when you connect with us in our worlds such as the teacher who provided us with extra help using Xbox and Skype.
15. Our teachers have too many students to enable them to connect with us in they way we need them to.
16. Bring the electives that we are actually interested in back to school. Things like drama, art, cooking, music.
17. Education leaders, teachers, funders, and policy makers need to start listening to student voice in all areas including teacher evaluations.
18. You need to use tools in the classroom that we use in the real world like Facebook, email, and other tools we use to connect and communicate.
19. You need to love a student before you can teach a student.
20. We do tests to make teachers look good and the school look good, but we know they don’t help us to learn what’s important to us.

My response is one of enthusiastic support for the ideas coupled with a bit of frustration at the structures of school and, frankly, the limitations that still shackle many of the ideas above. I am happy to see there is more push for innovation and authentic connection. I am all for dropping the artificial boundaries that separate learners from teachers and the modernist roles of expert and beginner. I am also all for dropping the regimented learning schedule that somehow compartmentalizes subjects into 45-90 min boxes.

Empty the Chairs

Since returning to school in the fall, I keep going back to the summer where with my two elementary aged children in tow we don’t move from class to class on a schedule or cram dozens of things into a single day. Instead we spend the morning at the stream exploring under rocks or go on a hike for the day. Intermixed into those core activities, however, are dozens of interwoven lessons and lots of learning. What’s fascinating to me is that even with two teachers as parents, our family sets about learning with a fervor in the summer but we don’t re-create a school as we know to do it.

The first thing I notice is that we frequently go out to learn. #8 above says, “the community should become more involved in schools”. I like this idea except that it only goes half-way. From the lessons of summer, I see that learning happens in the community. Why bring in a watered down version of the community when the 100% proof version is out there waiting for you. Everyday during the summer begins with synonymous questions that read both “what should we do today?” and “where should we go?”.

The second thing I notice from our summers is that we use whatever tools are best suited for the job. Within the span of 15 minutes this can mean going from a garden trowel to a youtube video, to skype, and back again in order to learn as much as possible about roly polies aka Armadillidiidae. We don’t rule out technologies but we only “rule them in” when they help us with our overall journey.

The third thing I notice is that each of us is involved in the experience as we are able. This means different things to me, my wife, Asako, our 4th grader and our kindergartner. The hierarchy isn’t predictable either. If you want to know how to make the best mudball you have got to get my 5 year old to teach you. She is absolutely the family expert in this skill. If you want to build something using lego’s my son is your consultant. Contributions are based on skills and abilities not titles and formalities.

The key point I think a lot of the current 21st century learning sound bites lack, as compelling as they are, is an overall re-organizing framework. All of it sounds great to me in isolation and even address many of my fundamental concerns about current pedagogy but the structures of education need a major overhaul so that those of us who get this stuff and would be doing more of it if left to our own devices can actually do it. – AC

One Response So Far... Leave a Reply: