When I first skimmed through Will Richardson’s blog, I was skeptical about his philosophy. He grabbed my full attention when I read, “We don’t give kids time to go deep, we don’t honor failure, and we’re not about learning to learn as much as we are about learning to know.”
Many of Will’s thirteen (“baker’s dozen”) expectations for learning outcomes are practiced in our schools, but how they are implemented are different then the description Will shared in his blog. Our school has worked through transitions and integration processes over the last few years, and most participants have faired well and are content and successful in their new positions or have retired, but I would not say everyone “embraced” this change in our school structure.
The health and fitness areas have been examined and a revised wellness policy was approved this spring. Whether the revised edition will be implemented as structured is an outcome yet to be seen, but with our good leadership and staff, it is possible there will be improvement in these areas. What we need to work on is “developing expertise” in learning to learn. This resource was a good awakening.
In Curriculum 21, the Cloud Institute advocates that students learn specific topics and attributes as future citizens in a sustainable global world. This organization offered a course,”Inventing The Future:Leadership and Participation For The 21st Century” that showed positive outcomes after reviewing the 18 month evaluation. This is a good idea with good intentions, and the participants were ready, willing, and able to contribute, develop, investigate, explore, envision, research, and so on. Not all educational stakeholders are ready, willing, or able to follow this example. These good changes do not happen without incentive from exterior as well as interior motivation from the educational stakeholders. Unless our leadership has bought into these ideas with support from our community and school board, this type of change will not happen. The ownership begins at the top.
As I have stated, our school system has good leadership, but they can only do so much with what has been given to them. I believe we are headed in the right direction, striving to improve in all areas throughout our school unit, but this will take some time to achieve.
Jo Ann,
ReplyDeleteLike so many things that we are currently reading about I find very interesting and often I think, "excellent way of educating our students!" or "how would that work in my school?" The fact of the matter is getting everyone on board. You are seeing this at your school with Will Richardson's Bakers Dozen. Change is good for all of us so we don't form habits from one year to the next that we are so unwilling to try something new or get ideas to help educate our students. Like you mentioned, many schools do have good leadership, but it does start from the top and work its way down to the staff in getting new ideas/programs that will help motivate our students so they in turn improve their learning skills. Hopefully the staff members at your school who have not embraced the "baker's dozen" will jump on board and realize change is a good thing!
That's a great quote you included. Schools certainly spend more time on what a student knows rather than how well they can learn or adapt or think about their learning. And many teachers do not allow students to make up tests or other projects that they might have failed. We need to give them the opportunity to try. I think about some of the great inventions that have been made over time. If these inventors had not accepted failure as a part of life and ingenuity, then we would not have some of the amazing technology that we have today.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing that came to mind in reading your post was about how much time I feel we spend talking about the issues and the things we want to change, that need to be changed, but how little anything actually gets done about it. We learn and learn until we think we are ready as teachers, but we'll never be ready until we try it. We ourselves are products of the system that does not pardon failure and so I think many of us are afraid to try, to take that first step.