Will Richardson’s Why School? seemed to reach out strongly to readers as evidenced by our in class discussion today. In it, Richardson posits that a new educational model is needed, one that moves away from traditional methods and the focus on testing. He states that “institutional change is everywhere,” and the institution of school is not immune (Richardson, 2012, p. 108).
Over the course of our discussion, we hit on many shared opinions. We agreed that many of the practices that Richardson recommends are already used by teachers, or perhaps more specifically, the effective teachers that we have encountered in our careers. An example of this is inquiry-based learning, something several of us do in our schools. While we agreed that ideas such as inquiry are incredibly important, we struggled with the extreme that Richardson seemed to endorse. We shared his view that there are skills that all students need, ideas that need to be learned, but felt that teacher direction and modelling have a stronger place than what seemed to be indicated (Richardson, p. 283). A group member brought up that perhaps this model was more suited for some subject areas than others, such as Social Studies, and worried about needing sequence such as in Math.
There are rival schools of thought when it comes to what students need in the future. A web search reveals an incredibly interesting article on CNN entitled Classical Schools put Plato over iPad. The article explains that there are schools in the United States taking a different approach to what they feel will be needed, namely an appreciation of “truth, goodness, and beauty” (Duin, 2013). Where the classical approach seems to differ is the belief that “you can’t reflect on something if it’s not in your brain in the first place (Duin, 2013).
I personally found it both interesting and difficult coming from a self-directed high school where I both graduated and taught. Since the opening of the school, the self-directed program has been scaled back year after year, with more constraints and controls put into place. When I attended, I think the school was the best combination of Richardson’s ideal and the reality of a public school with detailed IRPs and PLOs. However, the community struggled with students taking more time to complete work (yet with the highest GPA and exam scores in the district, and high levels of success in university), with students not necessarily being taught what they were familiar with, in the format that they were familiar with, and with the idea that students did not always need to be under direct instruction from a teacher.
In discussion, we came to the conclusion that any change needed both support and time to have a chance at success. A change such as Richardson’s would be difficult within a single classroom or single school, without the support of the larger community, which would include the school district, the public, and the Ministry of Education.
Duin, J. (2013, 06 21). Classical Schools put Plato over iPad. Retrieved from http://schoolsofthought.blogs.cnn.com/2013/
06/21/classical-schools-put-plato-over-ipad/
Richardson, Will. (2012). Why Schools?.
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I find it interesting when certain teaching practices or instructional design are identified with 21st century competencies or knowledge era learning, when, in fact, they have always been indicators of good teaching and learning. There are aspects of teaching and learning that are changed by the introduction of ICT into the learning relationships, and access to the Internet. I don’t see how studying Plato is exclusive of using iPads. This is an example of false binary oppositions that get put forward without a real basis in fact. In fact, studying Plato using iPads could be an invigorating way to understand truth, goodness and beauty. However, you have to be careful of hegemonic cultural conditions: whose truth? whose goodness? whose beauty? These are not universal values or constructs. In terms of changing school cultures, look at institutional isomorphism to understand how efforts to change educational paradigms revert to historical norms over time.