On the first day of school, my sister walks into her child’s second grade classroom to find that there are no desks. There’s one table with four chairs off to the side. A high-top table with a couple of chairs is near the front of the room, and on the other side is a table with no chairs, perfect for standing and doing projects. The rest of the room is dominated by a comfortable couch, an ottoman that can seat four kids, and padded chairs arranged facing different directions. It feels like an activity room, not a classroom, and the students are thrilled with the arrangement.
In another elementary school in a different district, the children are told they are too noisy at lunch, so they no longer are allowed to talk while in the cafeteria. They must eat in silence for the entire period. In a high school across the county, a teacher tells his students to do whatever they want because he didn’t have time to write lesson plans. The students surf the Internet and watch Netflix on their phones.
Recess, snack time, and social studies are losing ground to intense focus on reading skills and preparation for standardized tests. But reading scores are not improving. Why the discrepancy? Why are there oases of innovation, like in my niece’s class, but for the most part, education in the U.S. is still focused on a technocratic, skills-based curriculum with little attention to student engagement and autonomy?
I believe it comes down to beliefs—the deep, underlying paradigms that we hold in the U.S. about what constitutes teaching, learning, knowledge, and the end of schooling itself. Without a change in these paradigms, we are just adding superficial changes to schools and classrooms. Consider Khan Academy, lauded for teaching math skills online for free. It still is grounded in a predominantly traditional approach to instruction that has long since been found by mathematics researchers to be an ineffective way to promote deep understanding and critical thinking, the kinds of knowing needed in a 21st-century information economy.
The paradox is that many teachers think they are changing their practices, but they are not. The culture of the school influences what teachers do and how they teach. Galileo School, a charter school I founded, took the approach of changing school culture by working to change existing beliefs about schooling. These guiding principles, based on psychological theory and research, serve to create a climate of engagement and achievement, and may serve as a guide for other schools seeking to change their school culture.
Belief #1: Nurture is important for fostering an environment conducive to learning. We call this the Love Principle. The goal here is to focus on the individual child, supporting their social and emotional development FIRST before focusing on academic achievement. So, for instance, our elementary classrooms have comfy quiet corners filled with books when students need to calm down. They choose to go there–the teacher doesn’t send them. Also, recess and snack time are never taken away as punishment or sacrificed due to the curriculum. Each day starts out with a morning meeting to check in with students and resolve any lingering class issues or problems. This principle comes from research on developmental psychology and the importance of warm and supportive classroom environments.
Belief #2: Students learn best when they are appropriately challenged by work that is not too easy or too difficult for them. We call this the Goldilocks Principle, and it’s based on Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development. Too often, schools focus on teaching students what they already know or what they cannot yet understand. With this principle in play, its differentiation on steroids, with kids moving to different classes and different groups to work on activities in their Zone, based on pretesting and formative assessment. For instance, we had a Kindergartner leaving his class at math time to attend math with the second graders because that’s where his math level was.
Belief #3: Students are motivated when they have voices and choices in their learning. This belief, the Power Principle, comes from Self-Determination Theory–that autonomy is a psychological need and an important driver of motivation. Students are given developmentally appropriate choices throughout their day and year. This ranges from what types of projects would best demonstrate their understanding of the content, to larger choices, such as having a say on school-wide and board-level committees. The same goes for teachers, who we treat as professionals, and who are given autonomy over their classroom and a voice in school policy.
Belief 4: Engagement and learning happen when students are allowed to explore areas of their passionate interests. We call this, with permission from Joseph Renzulli who coined the term, the “No Child Left Bored” principle. Students choose areas to study during their afternoon Creative Productivity blocks, where they study topics like aquaponics, rocketry, dressmaking, interior design, roller coaster design, aviation, etc. for two weeks (elementary school) to 4 weeks (middle school) at a time, with local experts brought in as guest speakers. This principle is based on research on the powerful role of interest in learning.
Belief 5: Students want to make a difference in the world, so we encourage students to use their gifts and talents to solve problems to make the world a better place. We call this the Empathy Principle, and it comes from research on altruism and empathy, as well as research on authentic problem-solving. For example, in one grade, students identified problems that they noticed in their lives and of those around them, and then they created prototypes of inventions to solve those problems. In another, they created greeting cards and sold them in the school to raise funds to help a local charity.
There are other powerful beliefs that influence education, such as the belief that all students can learn, that I think are important foundations for schooling. The ones above are suggestions that have worked at one particular school and that might be helpful if adopted by other schools. Imagine a middle school giving their students greater autonomy rather than shutting down their choices right when they are developmentally ready to exert more control over their lives. In any case, the underlying beliefs of each school should be examined to see if they are truly serving students.
For more information, we are exploring these beliefs and innovative practices at the new UCF Center for Creating and Sustaining Innovative Schools (www.ucfccsis.org) that is launching fall 2018.
Good information