School 2.0 — The Schools that We Need

Most of my comments are in italics!

Sitting now at Chris Lehmann’s keynote about school 2.0.  Why does it matter?  He’s showing pictures of his children, and we all care about his children and all of he children.  He worries that school is going to beat the love of learning from his children, that they are going to say, here, site, fold your hands, and listen and follow instructions.  “Our children need us to be better than we are.”

He says that we need to stop thinking that schools should run more like business.  Thinking that schools should be like business, assumes that businesses are all doing it right.

The myth of the mesiah teacher is a lousy way to reform an education system.  They’re gone.  They don’t stay.  Then can’t stay…  The biggest problem a lack of vision at the highest level and often at the lowest level.  Rows of desks are about keeping order in the classroom.  Chris admits to suggesting that a new teacher put her desks in a row temporarily to…

My batter is dying.  I need to just listen!

Later:

I’m plugged in now and just wanted to share this one think about Chris’ presentation — which was amazing.  But at the end, he talked about a students, which whom teachers had worked for two years to help him with his writing.  They felt he had the talent, but he resisted.  …until one day, when he wrote a blog post on some topic that he cared about, and started getting more and more comments on his post from inside and outside the school and from great distances.  The young man then went to his english teacher and said,

“I want you to help me improve my writing.  My grammar isn’t good enough for my ideas.”

I thought that was enourmously powerful.

3 thoughts on “School 2.0 — The Schools that We Need”

  1. Great post.
    The whole notion of “the schools we need” has been haunting me. How can we move forward? You voiced some of my own concerns, the attention to the neat rows…. the inability to form and keep the best of the best, the lack of of vision both at the top and bottom….. and now with budgets being tightened, I see anything that can be cut away from the classroom (and sometimes in the classroom) is cut. And that includes initiatives around technology, which includes the critical work we need for 21st Century Learning, and professional development…. which is the first line of battle that we need to commit to to improve the learning for our students.
    All that being said, it is the end of the story that gives hope for the kind of purposeful and authentic learning experiences that we need to provide to make the enormously powerful learning happen on a daily basis. Fingers crossed that we will have the tools and the insightful dedicated professionals to do it.

  2. Reading about Chris Lehmann’s students always gives me goose bumps. “I want you to help me improve my writing. My grammar isn’t good enough for my ideas.” What a powerful learning experience for that student! SLA’s model needs to be replicated all over this country and world for that matter. And what I could do if I had the support and leadership of Chris Lehmann.

  3. Mr. Warlick – Thank you for the sprinkling of hope. I’m thinking about my own classroom and I’m wondering why the sort of situtation Chris describes at the end of his presentation doesn’t happen more often in my own classroom and in my own high school building. Here’s a brainstorm.

    The obvious barriers (maybe barriers is the wrong word – but these are environmental / systemic factors which might impede the kind of authentic, purposeful learning that Chris Describes) :
    1.) Access– 50% of my students qualify for free and reduced lunch
    2.) 50 minute class periods which isolate content areas from one another and fragment lessons, activities, and thinking
    3.) Poor, inadequate assessments which unfortunately drive instruction and curriculum decisions (standardized tests)
    4.) The (system’s, government’s, parent’s) need to quantify achievement and learning

    Perhaps a not-so-obvious barrier:
    5.) To what extent does authentic, purposeful learning need to happen spontaneously? To what extent does the situation through which it happens need to be completely self-directed and self-motivated? Can spontaneous, self-directed and self-motivated learning situations happen within the context of school? I feel like to a certain extent Chris is arguing for less structure (less instruction, waiting for the student to motivate him/herself) and that it is the structure which “beats the love of learning out of students”. I wholeheartedly agree – but doesn’t any semblance of structure create a learning situation that feels artificial or manipulated, and when there’s even a hint of structure is the student simply performing / completing tasks because it’s for school and not for themselves or for some other real, authentic motivation? But if we do away with all structure, at what point do we stop calling what we do “school”?

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