"We've all heard the theory that some students are visual learners, while others are auditory learners. And still other kids learn best when lessons involve movement. But should teachers target instruction based on perceptions of students' strengths?"
Written by Bobby Shaddox
Humanities 6th Grade
High Tech Middle in San Diego, CA
I recently had the experience of observing classes and working with teachers in a secondary school. I repeatedly saw posters in classrooms (like the one photographed on the right), telling students how to evaluate and measure their own learning. If you look closely you can see that a student in the NC5 zone is a “medium” student. Upon further inspection, you can tell that they should "be able to compare two sources and suggest various reasons why they disagree." An important skill indeed. But could it be any more dulled down? Could it be any more Pink Floyd “The Wall”? What kind of message does this edu-propaganda send to the wandering gaze of a curious 12 year old?
School sucks.
If I were that student, what message would this poster send me? It says that my teacher, who hasn't the slightest clue of how to appeal to my interests, is trying to prove to his supervisors that he is teaching successfully. It says learning is boring. It says learning doesn’t relate to my world. It tells me that I am a “medium“ learner. This poster tells me that the point of learning is to prepare me for a government sanctioned exam that will determine my lot in life. It tells me to stop wondering. Stop asking. Stop dreaming. Stop creating. That I ought to be an NC8. This is convergent thinking. This is how limits, lines, borders, and boxes squeeze the joy out of learning.
If you want to put something on the wall of your classroom, here's a tip. Skip the government mumbo jumbo. Skip the meaningless, bureaucratic, meta-cognitive Newspeak. It’s not good for kids. If you're going to put something on the wall to inspire students thinking, let it be an exercise in open-ended inquiry. Ask your students to generate questions and then make posters posing them. Teachers should be opening the avenues of learning, not shutting them down and forcing everyone down a single black and white lane. Our world is becoming increasingly more challenging and complex. Why not prepare students for that world?
We want young people to become independent and capable, yet we structure their days to the minute and give them few opportunities to do anything but answer multiple-choice questions, follow instructions and memorize information. We cast social interaction as an impediment to learning, yet all evidence points to the huge role it plays in their psychological development.
That’s why we need to rethink the very nature of high school itself."
Read on...
Despite 80 years of court battles ousting creationism from public classrooms, most public high school biology teachers are not strong advocates for evolution. While vocal advocates of intelligent design and similar non-scientific alternatives to evolution are a minority, more than half the teachers in a nationwide poll avoided taking a strong stance for evolution.
Such teachers “may play a far more important role in hindering scientific literacy in the United States than the smaller number of explicit creationists,” wrote Penn State political scientists Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer, the poll’s architects, in a Jan. 28 Science paper.
Read the WIRED article:
