"It's important to find ways to let our kids take ownership of their learning. The more self-directed they become, the more the learning will stick and develop into a transparent lifelong pursuit of continuing excellence and progression. This is our highest hope. Grant Wiggins, co-author of Understanding by Design, gives us a thought-provoking article on TeachThought that explains how we can foster this in our students using 10 different unique instructional approaches."
The 4th of July: a great time to think about independence. No, not yours or mine; the students’ independence. What curricular plan do you have for giving students increasing intellectual autonomy next year?
In all the hullabaloo about standards* and tests, a more basic aim has long been sacrificed in K-12 education: ensuring that students graduate able to handle the freedoms of college and the pro-active obligations of the workplace. As many have long heard me say, my children had more intellectual and executive freedom in Montessori School as 4 year old than they did as high school students.
I recall my son, Ian, as a 4-year-old, pondering which ‘work’ to do that day, on the way to school: food work? sewing work? Or Drawing? Well, why might you choose one or the other today? I asked. And he proceeded to do a cute think-aloud with little furrowed brow, about the pros and cons (based on recent choices and skill deficits).
Fast forward: grown-up Ian has lost 2 room-mates as he begins senior year in college this coming fall. Why did they leave? They were unable to handle the complete freedom to set their schedule and honor their obligations.
What is wanted in education is a curriculum and assessment system that builds in, by design, a gradual release of teacher responsibility across the long-term scope and sequence. Traditional curriculum design runs completely counter to this idea, of course: the work gets harder and harder but the student has practically no executive control over the intellectual agenda up until graduation.
Making matters worse, a number of people have wrongly interpreted the Gradual Release model to say that the last step is called “Independent Practice.” This is utterly misguided. Independent practice is still scaffolded, prompted, and simplified activity in which the student knows full well what single move we want them to use. There is no strategic thinking or executive control needed. The acid test of autonomy therefore, arrives when students confront provide a challenge and no advice about strategy or technique is provided or hinted at. (Editor’s Note: Great point, Grant!)
The big exception is in schools where projects, problems, challenges and independent study provide the framework for the curriculum.
I had the good fortune in the last few weeks of school this year to sit in on 4 different classes where such an approach was being used: a 5th-grade classroom where independent reading and choice of text is the norm; a vocational high school where the team of teachers have built a challenge-based curriculum, a local high school where a team of two teachers has made their Honors Biology a problem-based course, and (in the same district) 8th graders who must completely organize a week of time, all day, to prepare for a simulation in which they propose ways of meeting the UN Development Goals in front of panels of adult outside judges. (This year they piloted a 3rd-grade version of a creation-presentation challenge.)
What watching these diverse experiences got me thinking was: what do these experience have in common? How have the teachers engineered freedom by design? More generally, what are the optimal conditions for achieving student intellectual autonomy and high levels of learning?
The essence of the independence design challenge is to ensure students have maximally self-sustaining worthy work, thereby freeing up the teacher to coach. That’s what makes problem-based learning work: the problems are clear, focused, rich, interesting, on point – and, thus self-sustaining. That’s what makes independent leveled reading work in the 5th-grade classroom. That’s what also makes use of ‘clickers’ in Eric Mazur’s Physics class or Socratic Seminar in my former classroom work: the students are fully engaged in a genuinely intellectual challenge that can engage them in real thought and learning for a good while – and thereby free the teacher to observe, listen, provide personalized feedback and advice.
The work cannot be merely self-sustaining – busywork as opposed to worthy work. No one wrote more often and more thoroughly on this distinction than John Dewey over 100 years ago:
The giving of problems, the putting of questions, the assigning of tasks, the magnifying of difficulties, is a large part of school work. But it is indispensable to discriminate between genuine and simulated or mock problems. The following questions may aid in making such discrimination:
(a) Is there anything but a problem? Does the question naturally suggest itself within some situation or personal experience? Or is it an aloof thing, a problem only for the purposes of conveying instruction in some school topic? Is it the sort of trying that would arouse observation and engage experimentation outside of school?
(b) Is it the pupil’s own problem, or is it … made a problem for the pupil only because he cannot get the required mark or be promoted or win the teacher’s approval, unless he deals with it?…
As a consequence of the absence of the materials and occupations which generate real problems, the pupil’s problems are not his… A pupil has a problem, but it is the problem of meeting the requirements set by the teacher. His problem becomes that of finding out what the teacher wants.
It seems to me, then, that the following conditions have to be met to ensure that the work we give students is self-sustaining and worthy work:
Note: The work is sufficiently self-sustaining if the teacher can formatively assess and provide personalized feedback and advice to each student.
Dewey ironically warns us that getting these conditions just right as a teacher-designer requires a deep understanding of how people learn to think and solve real problems – a design that makes the learner have ti truly think their way through things, and thereby believe that they are creators and discoverers (even if by design we have made the re-discovery possible):
“The educational conclusion which follows is that all thinking is original in a projection of considerations which have not been previously apprehended. The child of three who discovers what can be done with blocks, or of six who finds out what he can make by putting five cents and five cents together, is really a discoverer, even though everybody else in the world knows it. There is a genuine increment of experience; not another item mechanically added on, but enrichment by a new quality. The charm which the spontaneity of little children has for sympathetic observers is due to perception of this intellectual originality. The joy which children themselves experience is the joy of intellectual constructiveness—of creativeness, if the word may be used without misunderstanding.
The educational moral I am chiefly concerned to draw is not, however, that teachers would find their own work less of a grind and strain if school conditions favored learning in the sense of discovery and not in that of storing away what others pour into them…. It is that no thought, no idea, can possibly be conveyed as an idea from one person to another. When it is told, it is, to the one to whom it is told, another given fact, not an idea…. Only by wrestling with the conditions of the problem at first hand, seeking and finding his own way out, does he think…. We can and do supply ready-made “ideas” by the thousand; we do not usually take much pains to see that the one learning engages in significant situations where his own activities generate, support, and clinch ideas—that is, perceived meanings or connections.
This does not mean that the teacher is to stand off and look on; the alternative to furnishing ready-made subject matter and listening to the accuracy with which it is reproduced is not quiescence, but participation, sharing, in an activity. In such shared activity, the teacher is a learner, and the learner is, without knowing it, a teacher—and upon the whole, the less consciousness there is, on either side, of either giving or receiving instruction, the better.
All educational reformers, as we have had occasion to remark, are given to attacking the passivity of traditional education. They have opposed pouring in from without, and absorbing like a sponge; they have attacked drilling in material as into hard and resisting rock. But it is not easy to secure conditions which will make the getting of an idea identical with having an experience which widens and makes more precise our contact with the environment. Activity, even self-activity, is too easily thought of as something merely mental, cooped up within the head, or finding expression only through the vocal organs.” (Democracy & Education, Ch 12)
Freedom for learners and teachers; learners that truly think carefully: not a bad idea on July 4th, from a book appropriately entitled Democracy and Education. Have a Happy, free, and thoughtful 4th.
This post first appeared on Grant’s personal blog; image attribution flickr user woodleywonderworks; 10 Conditions For Self-Sustaining Learning In The Classroom
