Project Idea #1: Establish a true three-part government in school. Live the democracy.

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How serious are we – U.S. schools and educators – about educating citizens for our American democracy?

How many of our schools allow for, or even promote, student governments that model and mirror the three-part system of our governmental system?

Imagine a high school that elected two senators for each grade level. Imagine that high school electing representatives for each grade level, based on population of the grade level. Or perhaps advisories or homerooms could provide for the “state” structure to mimic.

What if there were a true judiciary of the student body, elected and appointed just in the same mechanisms as our U.S., state, and municipal judiciaries? 

What if there were a true executive branch of the student government, elected and empowered in the same manner and mechanism as our President, governors, and mayors?

Imagine that such a system started in elementary school, progressed through middle school, and culminated in high school. 

Over the years, how might our democratic citizenship be “practiced” in the ways of leading and participating in our civic structure and responsibilities?

Imagine a student or group of students who became so passionate about such an idea that they made it happen. Image if they lived the lessons they are being taught in U.S. History and Government classes. 

What system of government are students actually practicing in school? Is it a representative democracy? Is it a relative dictatorship? I wonder what that’s teaching them over 13 years. 

What if they lived and practiced the system that we want them to take responsibility for? What if we operated school in the ways that would more authentically educate a citizen of our democracy?

Imagine. Make happen. What are the possibilities?

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I am thinking of writing a series of blog posts about project ideas that could happen within a school – projects that could both transform school and, ultimately, transform us beyond school. This is my first prototype. I’d love to know what you think.

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The driver and the passengers. Is school driver’s ed or passenger’s ed?

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When traveling in a car, who tends to learn the routes better? The driver or the passengers? Who better internalizes the paths and roads and mental maps of the journey?

It’s an interesting metaphor for schools, isn’t it? If we say we want children to be and become deep learners who internalize the cognitive and social skills and knowledge to direct their own paths and journeys later, then how much are we willing to commit to letting them be the drivers more often?

While it’s certainly not always the case, I’ve found that subject-area organization of school – the traditional math, then English, then science classes for a little less than an hour each – tend to be driven by the teachers, and the student-learners are more the passengers.

If you want to test that assumption, then ask a K-12 student to describe to you what they will be doing and studying during an upcoming day or week of school. Then ask them who decided on that plan – that route.

Yet, in project-point-of-origin settings, where the learners launch projects based on their curiosities, interests, wonderings, and passions, the students tend to be in the drivers’ seats, and the teachers can become more like navigational passengers (not backseat drivers!) on the journey.

Who are you letting drive the learning? What’s your school’s balance among time for the teachers to drive and time for the students to drive? Whom do you say you want to engage in deep, powerful learning?

So, I can’t help but ask: Do we want school to be more like “Driver’s Ed” or “Passenger’s Ed?”

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Inspired by Krista Tippett’s interview with Dr. Adele Diamond.

Related posts on It’s About Learning – search category: “Curiosity”

Two Questions On My Mind – How We Spend Our School Time

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For some time, I’ve been contemplating more than a couple of questions. Yet these two keep emerging for me in the past few days and weeks…

  1. If most life is project-based, is it too much to devote ~10% wk in project-origin in school? (3.5 of 35 hrs.) 2.5 hrs is pass time! ON TWITTER
  2. Interesting to visit schools July-Aug, and on Sat/Sun. Lots of sports practices. I wonder… why we feel we cannot “practice” academics too ON TWITTER

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  • What if you were to stop one tradition/practice in your school? | Steve Mouldey

    tags: #MustRead stopdoinglist pruning subtraction sayingNO

  • Why Do Americans Stink at Math? – NYTimes.com

    Incredible article, masterfully written, about the recent history of math education, with a Japanese and American comparative analysis. Goes into the beauty of lesson study and instructional rounds – job-embedded, contextual, local case study of enhancing professional practice. Deep connections to Jo Boaler’s work. Dan Meyer.

    tags: #MustRead math mathematics matheducation Lesson study Instructional_Rounds

    • where Matsuyama taught, he turned his classroom into a kind of laboratory, concocting and trying out new teaching ideas.
    • Instead of having students memorize and then practice endless lists of equations — which Takahashi remembered from his own days in school — Matsuyama taught his college students to encourage passionate discussions among children so they would come to uncover math’s procedures, properties and proofs for themselves.
    • The Americans might have invented the world’s best methods for teaching math to children, but it was difficult to find anyone actually using them.
    • In fact, efforts to introduce a better way of teaching math stretch back to the 1800s. The story is the same every time: a big, excited push, followed by mass confusion and then a return to conventional practices.
    • The trouble always starts when teachers are told to put innovative ideas into practice without much guidance on how to do it.
    • But our innumeracy isn’t inevitable. In the 1970s and the 1980s, cognitive scientists studied a population known as the unschooled, people with little or no formal education. Observing workers at a Baltimore dairy factory in the ‘80s, the psychologist Sylvia Scribner noted that even basic tasks required an extensive amount of math. For instance, many of the workers charged with loading quarts and gallons of milk into crates had no more than a sixth-grade education. But they were able to do math, in order to assemble their loads efficiently, that was “equivalent to shifting between different base systems of numbers.” Throughout these mental calculations, errors were “virtually nonexistent.” And yet when these workers were out sick and the dairy’s better-educated office workers filled in for them, productivity declined.
      • Fascinating paragraph about learning in context and the power of applied use to deepen one’s understanding of subject area or discipline. Argument for real-world context and PBL approach.
    • The cognitive-science research suggested a startling cause of Americans’ innumeracy: school.
    • How could you teach math in school that mirrors the way children learn it in the world?
    • She knew there must be a way to tap into what students already understood and then build on it. In her classroom, she replaced “I, We, You” with a structure you might call “You, Y’all, We.” Rather than starting each lesson by introducing the main idea to be learned that day, she assigned a single “problem of the day,” designed to let students struggle toward it — first on their own (You), then in peer groups (Y’all) and finally as a whole class (We). The result was a process that replaced answer-getting with what Lampert called sense-making.
    • Consequently, the most powerful influence on teachers is the one most beyond our control. The sociologist Dan Lortie calls the phenomenon the apprenticeship of observation. Teachers learn to teach primarily by recalling their memories of having been taught, an average of 13,000 hours of instruction over a typical childhood. The apprenticeship of observation exacerbates what the education scholar Suzanne Wilson calls education reform’s double bind. The very people who embody the problem — teachers — are also the ones charged with solving it.
    • Left to their own devices, teachers are once again trying to incorporate new ideas into old scripts, often botching them in the process.
    • When Akihiko Takahashi arrived in America, he was surprised to find how rarely teachers discussed their teaching methods. A year after he got to Chicago, he went to a one-day conference of teachers and mathematicians and was perplexed by the fact that the gathering occurred only twice a year. In Japan, meetings between math-education professors and teachers happened as a matter of course, even before the new American ideas arrived. More distressing to Takahashi was that American teachers had almost no opportunities to watch one another teach.
    • In Japan, teachers had always depended on jugyokenkyu, which translates literally as “lesson study,” a set of practices that Japanese teachers use to hone their craft. A teacher first plans lessons, then teaches in front of an audience of students and other teachers along with at least one university observer. Then the observers talk with the teacher about what has just taken place. Each public lesson poses a hypothesis, a new idea about how to help children learn. And each discussion offers a chance to determine whether it worked. Without jugyokenkyu, it was no wonder the American teachers’ work fell short of the model set by their best thinkers.
    • The best discussions were the most microscopic, minute-by-minute recollections of what had occurred, with commentary.
    • Of all the lessons Japan has to offer the United States, the most important might be the belief in patience and the possibility of change. Japan, after all, was able to shift a country full of teachers to a new approach. Telling me his story, Kurita quoted what he described as an old Japanese saying about perseverance: “Sit on a stone for three years to accomplish anything.”
    • To cure our innumeracy, we will have to accept that the traditional approach we take to teaching math — the one that can be mind-numbing, but also comfortingly familiar — does not work. We will have to come to see math not as a list of rules to be memorized but as a way of looking at the world that really makes sense.

  • What if teachers had a logo? What would yours be? | Steve Mouldey

    What’s your brand? Your mark as an educator? HT @GeoMouldey

    tags: #MustRead

  • http://www.mimathandscience.org/downloads/math__professional_development/how_teachers_learn_20110908_165813_22.pdf

    Old paradigm vs New paradigm professional learning. Episodic and siloed vs embedded and contextual.

    HT @romathio

    tags: professional development PLC professional learning #MustRead

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