This is an edited version of something originally posted in Schooling ≠ Education on October 27, 2005
In the conference in Nebraska focused on Rethinking the High School Experience there were many conversations about developing experiments around how people learn. This morning I was sent a link to an article in the Omaha World Herald entitled – Rocking the boat in class.
What follows is my response to the person who sent the article:
Thanks for sending this along (I read the article on the online version of the paper).
From my perspective this article frames one of the major challenges to be faced in ‘rethinking the high school experience’.
Here we have a teacher (a man) who paid attention to his experience and adapted. His students were bored and not connected to the ‘curriculum.’ He was creative and found a way to connect students to the curriculum AND get them interested in it. He took the risk to ‘try something’ (he did an experiment) and it seems to have added some value.
The environment he is in is not supporting his risk taking, nor are they paying attention to the results. There isn’t a lot of information in the article about the student experience but it implies the students are more engaged. His experiment is working. Imagine what the resulting impact on the students will be if he is not allowed to teach in the way that gets them interested and provides a connected experience. Imagine if the students see someone modeling a behavior they like and the ‘system’ shuts it down.
So, herein lies the challenge. Once you allow someone to take a risk and start doing things differently if you stop it, squelch it, or in some way inhibit that behavior there is potentially a backlash that is harder to recover from then if you didn’t open up for risk taking in the first place.
So, I’m saying if you are really serious about ‘rethinking the high school experience’ than the ESU’s and the state department have to be ready to fight the battles that will surely come from people ‘trying something different’…
Educating people about what the intention is can mitigate these potential battles. It also helps to understand what the potential results are when trying new things. This can be accomplished in various traditional ways. These include professional development, workshops, forums, community meetings, PR, marketing, and public service announcements. Another way to educate people is the one we talked about in the conference – dialog. Getting people into these conversations about the purpose of education, why we do things the way we do them, what we might do differently, etc. – will go along way in creating an environment that will support further dialog and the safety necessary for people to both be open to new ideas and to try them.
