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Bored Students
Posted by Scott Guthrie on 12/29/2010
In Reply To:Bored Students Posted by Kathy Arizmendi on 12/29/2010
Once we change the model of education to one that is student-centered, you’re on the path to true learning. Getting there, getting past what we are talking about in this thread, is the hard part: we are attempting nothing less than the overthrow of a system of education which is content-recall focused and could care less what the student-widgets think/care about.
Many of us use models/problem solving/discussion/stories to do this in our classrooms, but we are still constrained by the powers-that-be to produce widgets that score well on content-recall tests. Our students may be more engaged in their learning, but they are still not as engaged as they could be.
[Richmond and Dewey quotes addressing this issue].
“If schools were mandated to pursue anything that looked remotely close to Figure 1-3, I wouldn’t be writing this Chapter! Instead, students spend most of their time “assimilating content,” or stated in a more noble-sounding way, “acquiring knowledge.” And so, the primary learning activity in our schools is memorizing! It’s flipping flash cards, or repeating silently to yourself over and over, the “parts of a cell are…,” the “three causes of World War II are…,” the “planets in order away from the sun are…” Students cram facts, terms, names, and dates in there, and then spit them back out in the appropriate place on a content-dump exam. This despite the fact that students perceive much of the content to have little perceived relevance to their lives, and that a good chunk of the content will be obsolete before students graduate.
Notice something about the process of “acquiring knowledge.” It bears no resemblance to the process depicted in Figure 1-3. In acquiring knowledge, no mental model is constructed. No decisions are made about what to include, or how to represent what’s included. No mental simulating occurs. Acquiring knowledge also doesn’t require, or benefit from, communicating. Quite the contrary, the knowledge acquisition process is solitary, and non-thinking in nature. And then, the coup de gras…Will content really equip our young people for effectively addressing the issues they’ll face in the new millennium?”
--Barry Richmond, “A STELLA Users Manual”
“Processes of instruction are unified in the degree in which they center in the production of good habits of thinking. While we may speak, without error, of the method of thought, the important thing is that thinking is the method of an educative experience. The essentials of method are therefore identical with the essentials of reflection. They are first that the pupil have a genuine situation of experience -- that there be a continuous activity in which he is interested for its own sake; secondly, that a genuine problem develop within this situation as a stimulus to thought; third, that he possess the information and make the observations needed to deal with it; fourth, that suggested solutions occur to him which he shall be responsible for developing in an orderly way; fifth, that he have opportunity and occasion to test his ideas by application, to make their meaning clear and to discover for himself their validity.”
--John Dewey, “Democracy in Education”
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