Edustange

The Asking of New Questions at Classroots.org.

We can’t go back to the days of closed classroom doors and scatter ourselves to the wind on eccentric pedagogical whims.  However, we can leverage our strengths to create and scale-up classrooms with new approaches to teaching and learning that are authentic to students and politically viable to our leaders.  We can radically differentiate what we do to help students and ourselves, and then regroup in teams, schools, and divisions organized on principles more authentic, lasting, and human than standardized-test results.  Let’s get to the future and ask ourselves how we will organize education when everyone meets every standard.  And if we don’t think that’s possible, again, let’s do something different now to make our students the innovators, entreprenuers, and citizens we all want them to be.

I read Chad Sansing’s remarks with interest tonight as I sat catching up with the day’s communication while supper’s rich aroma filled the air.  I’ve used the well-worn phrase industrial education a few times over the last few entries. Some of his remarks on diversity and differentiation caught my attention.

There are within my region public, separate, independent schools and a sprinkling of home schooled students. Within my school division we have a few schools on a four-day instructional week and within the city, an alternate program. These two programs seem constantly in a defensive stance in regard to the rest of the program design. Some years ago this division introduced the Copernican Plan in one of the city high schools. This has fallen by the way. Organizational structures trend toward uniformity. Something loves consistency and organizational interdependence adopts common days (one to five).

Evaluation is personal because we view results as shorthand for those who produced them. Consider how often we place students by their grades and test scores; consider how we talk about students because of their grades and test scores and placements.

What if we placed students by interest? By learning style? By mastery of content?

What if we restructured schools to do the same for adults? What if a school system reorganized to better manage its human capital by creating different types of schools where its teachers and students could find success? Why keep putting square peg teachers into round hole classrooms?

Why is our rhetoric all innovation and our funding all conformity? When do we ask radically new questions of the system to help us do the job it says it wants us to do?

I think we do need breath deep and let differentiated learning take us where it will.