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“Giving Voice to Learning” by Noreen O’DonnellWhat was it Reid Lyon said about education schools?
The Daily
Monday, June 11, 2012
Video by Jackson Loo and Devon Puglia
transcript
PRINCIPAL: The mentality in education right now in America is that teachers are responsible for everything. If someone is successful, it’s because of the teacher. If someone fails, it’s because of the teacher.
NARRATOR [enthusiastic]: So what if students became their own teachers? That’s what’s happening at 10 schools across New York City under a radical new pilot curriculum called Learning Cultures.
NYU EDUCATION SCHOOL ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR CYNTHIA MCCALLISTER: The core of Learning Cultures is the idea that social practices are critical to learning in human beings. Social practices and social interactions are really what make us learn.
NARRATOR: The Daily visited the High School of Language and Innovation in the Bronx, where the students are learning English as a second language.
PRINCIPAL: On the surface, it might look the same. So you might walk into a class and say “Oh look. The kids are working in groups.” Or, “Oh look. In this part, the kids are paying attention to a lesson.” This is completely different.
NARRATOR: After a 15 minute mini-lesson from the teacher, students spend most of their time doing group or independent work on the subject, with educators in a supporting role.
YAN WENG (H.S. MATH TEACHER): They definitely can learn more from their classmates than learning from me, so it’s not from top down.
PRINCIPAL: It’s a huge paradigm shift for educators, to turn over responsibility to students. Good teaching is really about what the students are doing. It’s learning through interaction.
NARRATOR: It’s learning through interaction.
[Shot of students at a table reading a book out loud together]
NARRATOR: This exercise is called unison reading. The children read aloud in synch. [students read a few words, and then a boy at the table calls halt] When they come across an unknown word or concept, they stop, discuss it, and try to determine the answer.
MCCALLISTER: They’re taught to resolve their confusions independently of the teacher.
NARRATOR: Some use iPads as translators, but most turn to each other. The method is applied across all grade levels and subjects.
YAN WENG (H.S. MATH TEACHER): Amazingly students tend to actually take feedback from their peers a lot more than taking feedback from teachers.
NARRATOR: But it doesn’t always work. This student chose a book beyond her skill level because she liked the cover. [book: The Throwaway Piece]
ENGLISH TEACHER: The summary is too difficult to understand, it means that the book is probably going to be too difficult to understand. [student nods]
NARRATOR: Traditionalists might wonder if this is just some wacky ultra-progressive teaching trend.
MCCALLISTER: It’s a pretty different way of approaching academic work, school work.
PRINCIPAL: I never really thought of it as progressive. I just thought this makes a lot of sense, and this actually helps me to accomplish all the standards and all the goals that we’re supposed to be accomplishing in this day and age.
MCCALLISTER: Schools are dysfunctional. You know they’re made for not only a different time, but I think that they were created without acknowledging the things that in our society we fundamentally value, and that is, you know, our freedoms. Until you change the nature of the curriculum so that kids have the space to own their learning—take initiative—they’re not going to learn.
AND SEE:
unison reading: the video
Has Constructivism Increased Special Education Enrollment in Public Schools? By Nakonia (Niki) Hayes
Mathematics Education: Outwitted by Stupidity by Barry Garelick
Growth of Special Education Spending and Enrollment in New York since 2000-01
12 comments:
The math teacher's English is interesting.
She doesn't have parallel structures....
"They definitely can learn more from their classmates than learning from me"
"students tend to actually take feedback from their peers a lot more than taking feedback from teachers"
I wonder if this is a common structure in Chinese.
She uses a participle where standard English would just use a prepositional phrase.
Every time I read about how much more students can learn from their peers than from their teachers, I think about sex education. That seems to be the one area where we all agree that learning from people who actually know something about the subject matter is important. If you don't trust your child's peers to teach them about birth control, why do you trust them to teach algebra?
"Every time I read about how much more students can learn from their peers than from their teachers..."
I wonder why we're supposed to need teachers at all, if the kids are such amazing pedagogues.
Worse yet, this is from a high school math teacher. Of course, many other teachers don't buy into that philosophy. Why don't we ever hear from them? Most of my son's teachers LOVE to directly teach. Now that he is taking AP classes (with lots of summer work and mandatory summer online tests), teachers don't have (or want) time for such silliness. Why don't we ever see an article about how AP classes are run? It's almost as if there are two worlds of education, visible and invisible. You can always cover less material at a slower pace and claim some sort of victory over deeper thinking, but there is a disconnect with the type of courses all of the top students are taking, with no loss in deep thinking and understanding.
Every time I read about how much more students can learn from their peers than from their teachers, I think about sex education.
o.m.g.
brilliant!
I'm going to post the article, too.
These students -- HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS -- are doing things like trying to figure out the meaning of the word "caravan."
These are ELL students, very close to the point when they'll age out of the system, and they're spending their time trying to puzzle out VOCABULARY that can be looked up in the dictionary.
fyi: the iPad student was a girl wearing a head scarf, SITTING ALONE, looking up words she didn't know.
The reading group they showed didn't get farther than about 8 or 9 words before a student (a boy) stopped the group so they could discuss something he didn't understand.
That's what they're all supposed to do: they're supposed to 'breach' the group reading, and discuss their confusions.
The teacher NEVER provides the answers, as far as I can tell.
I wonder why we're supposed to need teachers at all, if the kids are such amazing pedagogues.
I would say the Learning Cultures program is pretty clear that we don't need teachers in the class sense.
We need facilitators & organizers.
We also need evaluators, apparently. It would seem that the one of main tasks of today's teachers is to walk around the classroom and assess students while they're interacting in their Learning Cultures. Of course, since the teachers are no longer teaching, the results of such assessments aren't used to inform their instruction. But these assessments do give teachers something to discuss with parents during conferences and something to base grades on in report cards.
I stopped reading when I saw the phrase "paradigm shift". That's the universal indicator for unadulterated bullshit.
"paradigm shift"
It sounds better than "my opinion", and can work if they can't cite some sort of "research shows".
I wonder if this is a common structure in Chinese.
Parallelism is very common in Chinese, but the learn/learning, take/taking distinction doesn't exist (nor do inflections of any sort), so she probably believes she is using parallelism by simply repeating the same verb, regardless of form.
(I'm not being critical here, just analytical. When I speak a non-native language, the mistakes I make often have to do with not making a distinction that is not made in my native language. She's just doing the sort of thing that I, and most of us, do.)
oh, ok -- interesting
I know NOTHING about Chinese ....
Although -- she makes the exact same mistake twice in a row ... that seems like possibly more than just thinking she's repeating the same verb --- ?
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