This article is an excerpt from Will Richardson's new book, Why School: How Education Must Change When Learning and Information Are Everywhere. As you read his excerpt, I'm sure you'll see that his ideas about relevancy to real world application are very exciting. However, this adventureous approach will never go over in our overly regulated educational buraracy and impossible to evaluate teachers and student achievement. A dream it is and a dream it will stay, I'm afraid.
Your thoughts? What would your dream school look like?
Should We Connect School Life to Real Life? Will Richardson. 10.5.12. MindShift
http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/10/should-kids-schoolwork-impact-the-real-world/
I might be stuck in the old-school way of thinking, but I worry that schools will be extending into the real world before students have the foundations that they need. For example, the Connected Math Project is an increasingly popular math curriculum that is more problem based and exploratory. Many math/science-minded students do very well with it. However, those who have struggled on basic concepts are floundering.
ReplyDeleteI think that the project ideas mentioned in this article are awesome. I would love to see more projects that extend past the classroom or school walls- as long as students are also receiving directed instruction for foundational concepts. I am saying that great things come when we try new things in conjunction with what already works.
I agree with Carri.
DeleteA few years back I tutored a middle school student whose class was using Connected Math Project. My sense of CMP was that its real-world problem-based approach could work very well for students with strong math backgrounds. However for struggling students, the discovery method that CMP employs could be very challenging.
The article mentions some very interesting real-world application projects but it seems to me that it would be difficult to use this approach as the majority of one's course curriculum. As Pat mentioned in her synopsis, the difficulty in assessing student projects would be a concern, since it seems we are moving toward increasingly using student test results as one of the measures that will impact teachers' compensation and/or continued employment. This could conceivably cause even more of an instructional focus on "teaching to the test" in the future.
- Paul Carter