Dr. David Hopson
“Limiting kids to learning only in the classroom is like buying a Lamborghini and only driving in the driveway” – this recent tweet by Dr. Justin Tarte addresses many of today’s educational issues. From the use of technology to field trips; from project-based, problem solving lessons that have real life implications to the lessons learned in athletics and the performing arts; from the assessment of students through performance based ‘capstone’ projects to students producing artifacts shared with the world; from the understanding that education is a lifelong event rather than one with a defined endpoint such as graduating from high school: the reality is that most students’ lives outside the classroom do not in any way reflect what happens in the traditional classroom.
This dissonance between the traditional, teacher centered, fact-based, rigid form of instruction with tests that primarily measure success by an ability to regurgitate information, compared to research into game based, problem solving, real life application of skills, knowledge, and creation is evident across the educational spectrum. The constant push towards a common curriculum, standardized tests, and standardizing how teachers teach through ‘proven’ instructional practices ignores much of the research concerning how children learn, the importance of play, the need to meet children’s interests, and using new technologies to expand ‘learning’ time well beyond the school day.
Recently, there have been several interesting findings linking the increase in student disengagement in the classroom, an increase in students with discipline problems, and the need for ever more social-emotional supports for children of all ages to the over standardization of instruction, curriculum, and an endless cycle of assessments. It’s also easy to find many teachers and administrators throughout the country writing strong letters to their communities as they leave education after years of working with students because they feel the current direction of education supported by big business has moved away from years of research on how to best teach students.
Despite Massachusetts being a model of educational success in the national and international arena of student testing, and closing gaps between subgroups of students, the latest report of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education (“The New Opportunity to Lead”) seems to show that we’ve been overly reliant on standardization and assessments, and have seen a decrease in educational progress. Although there are many recommendations, the report seems to support including 21st century skills that we’ve all heard so much about over the last decade, which have had little impact on public education discussions and policy.
When one thinks of the power that we each control in finding information, sharing thoughts, creating new works through the merging, reorganization, and application of existing knowledge, and the routine use of technology—especially by the young—it begs the question of why these items aren’t strongly supported by federal and state policy, rather than just updating standardized testing from paper and pencils to computers? Todd Gazda (a past Gateway administrator) captures another aspect of this in a recent blog titled “Enough is Enough” (http://superintendentlps.blogspot.com/) that is certainly worth reading. The question of what we will each do to change the system should resonate with anyone who cares about the future of education in the United States.
