How do I deal with this? Is it about time? Is it about it being hard? Is it about adults not understanding?
We spent two days in the clouds (and some on land talking about how education is not keeping up with society, with the fact that we have an old idea of schooling attached to an agricultural calendar and assembly line jobs and old ideas of career choices. It is big thinking, but what does it look like in practice? Teachers who talking about this, are they doing it? Am I doing it?
We can’t throw away everything that DOES work in education. We can reinvent and innovate old things and make them serve our students. There are things that help everyone learn. In PYP we talk about transdisciplinary skills, the learner profile, and the attitudes as universal and under pinning forces to getting learners ready to learn in the real world not just “smart” in the classroom. This language can be replaced by other systems and curriculum and boiled down to learning the “basics”, how to learn and think are the important part of preparing students for the world.
When we come back to reality after the conference… I see boxes of “comprehension kits” and read off the card and answer the question centers happening in reading time all over the school. Do all these kids need the same kind of reading questions? Are they reading texts that they are interested in? Is doing these things giving them a sense of accomplishment? I see people cracking out the spelling lists and spelling groups. Does having spelling list work? At least you’re differentiating the lists, but can we differentiate kids off the lists? Can they do something else?
I listened to a podcast (99% Invisible) recently about average just not being a good tool to apply to people. It talked about how when you calculate an average then have a bunch of people, no one is really average. There are just too many things you are measuring and when you use lots of average measurements. This didn’t work in designing the seats in fighter planes causing crashes. They had an average measurement for arm length, height, leg lengths, etc. When they realized no one could be average at every measurement, they made the seats adjustable. When they innovated the seats, the deaths went down. In school our student have strengths and weakness. No one student is average at number knowledge, average at spelling ability, average at conceptual understanding, average at inferring when reading, and so on. I’m not saying we don’t differentiate. I just think we might need to keep thinking about how to individualize. I’m surely not perfect at this! Just want to start the conversation.
Further reading on average and education:
literacylinksblog 