Inspiration, hunger: these are the forces that drive good schools. The best we educational planners can do is create the most likely conditions for them to flourish and then get out of their way.
-Ted Sizer
True accountability would demand that we ask children if they like school; then we would have to care about their answer - and be prepared to do something about it.
Where interest lies; achievement follows.
Susan Engel puts it this way:
You can't achieve the broader goals of making people into readers, making people love ideas, love conversation, love knowledge, want to get good at things, if you don't make school a place where kids want to be.For more on how high school can be less about the system's needs and more about student's needs, check out The Independent Project:
Kids are born with a natural curiosity to learn and know more about the world around them. The tragedy of formal education is that this curiosity is destroyed pretty quickly in the first few years of school.
ReplyDeleteI would add to Susan Engel's list and' helping kids to understand themselves, others and relationships ' so that they can become better people , and make their classrooms and schools into cooperating and caring learning communities.
Kids are concerned with how much we care and less with how much we know, giving them a voice so teachers have the opportunity to learn from their students.
I just posted on the intrinsic value of the immediate experience -- liking what we do. I wasn't explicit about this but I think we need to accept that some things need to be done even if we don't like them and that pertains to part of the educational experience.
ReplyDeletehttp://staff.prairiesouth.ca/sites/stangea/2011/04/10/saturday-morning-breakfast-cereal-2/
There is so much that we can learn from this model to apply to our own schools and classrooms.
ReplyDeleteI'd heard about the Independent Project before but the video really brings it to life