A Utopian "What if?"

I've been reading Peter Gray's book Free to Learn recently, which has made me reflect widely on my last 6 years in the education profession. I have thought about the different schools that I have taught at, and the different experiences and challenges that have lead me to where I am now. Peter gray offers a fresh perspective on school. I'm going to start this blogpost with some quotes from his book. 

"[One of the sins of education is] Judging students in ways that foster shame, hubris, cynicism, and cheating. It is not easy to force people to do what they do not want to do." 

"We rely now primarily on a system of incessant testing, grading, and ranking of children to motivate them to do their schoolwork." 

The system itself has fostered what it has been fighting so long to weed out. The system itself has created a culture of shaming students, ranking students, and making learning a chore.

"By the time they are eleven or twelve years old, most are realistically cynical about the idea that school is fundamentally a place for learning. They realize that much of what they are required to do is senseless and that they will forget most of what they are tested on shortly after the test."

I remember this from school. What was the point of learning all the science and history and statistics that I learned in high school if I was going to forget it straight after the test? I wasn't even going to use the stuff I learned to do anything, I just had to write it down on a piece of paper so that other people could judge me. 

"Teachers often say that if you cheat in school you are only cheating yourself, because you are shortchanging your own education. But that argument holds water only if what you would have learned by not cheating outweighs the value of whatever you did with the time saved by cheating. If by cheating in Subject X, you gain more time to really learn Subject Y, which you care about and which may or may not be a school subject, then you haven’t really shortchanged your education."

Free to Learn has inspired me to think about ways of education that I have yet to experience, it has inspired me to ask the same question as my last post; "What if...?"

What if we set up school to be different, and we didn't rank students on what they could remember. What if we set it up more like a real world... 

Lets say we have a class of 30 students. We require each student to come up with an idea for a project. (I had the word inquiry here but I want to get away from it because students, parents and teachers have very specific and different ideas about what inquiry is) Their projects could be things like photography, game creation, furniture creation, car creation, jewelry making, make up applying... the list is literally endless. This is something that each student has to do by themselves at this stage. Everyone must come up with a topic that they'd like to be "project lead" for. Once they have done that, and sorted out what they need to do to complete it, they advertise for help. 

Lets say I'm the project lead for creating a computer game. I will need to advertise for jobs like a coder, a graphic designer, a marketer, a website designer, a software engineer, etc. etc. etc. If each student in the classroom is project lead of one project, and must apply for say, 2 other jobs, we could have the beginnings of an amazing student led curriculum. Students could assess each other on the amount of effort they put into the project, the ease of working with others, the quality of the work they produced. Each group could be assigned to a teacher who works alongside them, facilitates outside help to teach people the skills they need to be able to do their jobs that they've applied for, and makes specific links to the curriculum to help check off the learning outcomes they have completed. 

Students would be engaged in student led big project learning, where they are creating something that is of use to the world, that they can see value in, that they can use in their every day lives, that is only facilitated by a teacher. Students are judged by peers, and do not have to guess what the teacher is thinking in order to get the 'right' answer. 

If we want to our students to think critically about their learning and their education, we have to be prepared to think in very different ways about how we are educating them, and what we are educating them for. 

"Schools characterised by intense moral purpose - where trusting relationships are nurtured and inquiry-mindedness is a way of life, where learning is vibrant and engaging for young people and adults - are exciting and rewarding places in which to learn and work." 

- Linda Kaser, Julie Halbert