Too many ideas....

Unbelievable. I finally get myself to the point of setting this up, and then I'm totally stuck because I have so many ideas, I don't know where to start. Do I start with a more fluffy post? A diatribe? A research-based query?

Well, perhaps I shall start with things that are On My Mind as of late, thanks to my program. One of the best books out there on education and learning is the National Research Council's How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School. You can read the entire book online for free by following the link.

The chapter we read for homework this week was Chapter 6: The Design of Learning Environments. The chapter says first that learning environments must be learner-centered, knowledge-centered and assessment-centered (assessment used in support of learning, not as the punitive standardized test commonly associated with the word assessment), but that the classroom and learning are always situated in the larger community, and that students' learning should relate to their experience in the larger community.

A related question that has come up several times in another class is how school benefits or relates to students' lives right NOW. I talked to a teacher recently who said their school was having a major problem with truancy. Threats of grade lowering, etc., made no difference-- students were not interested in being in school. I was a "good student" (i.e., a student the system was made for) and I have many memories of sitting completely bored in class, writing notes to friends as often as I could. Was I engaged with school all the time? No, but I was programmed enough to stay in class because the thought of getting in trouble outweighed the temptation to walk out of class. What if students are not so programmed?

If schools were run like businesses and did not have captive audiences (i.e., students could choose to stay or leave), many schools would fail immediately. I am not advocating creating a three-ring circus every day in the class, or classrooms that are purely entertainment for students, but what responsibility do schools have to create learning opportunities for students that they can use NOW? If students came to school and felt every day that being at school enriched their lives, or taught them something they could take and use that afternoon, how much more motivation might they have to attend school regularly?

Stepping back one level, how do we then balance the juxtaposition of state mandated learning outcomes with student needs and interests?