Do schools quash students' enthusiasm for learning?
Here’s a quick task for you… Look up your local school or district’s vision statement. Chances are it looks something like this:
- Barker Road Middle School is an educationally progressive student-centered learning community committed to excellence through an integrated educational program, with focus on excitement for life-long learning and a responsibility to provide a caring and harmonious multi-cultural environment.
- The mission of the Goldendale School District, in partnership with the family and community, is to provide an educational foundation that promotes integrity, self-worth, and lifelong learning, while developing healthy, productive, responsible members of society.
- The purpose of the [Chatfield Senior High] community is to create, with our students, an atmosphere of academic excellence and respect by providing educational and extra-curricular opportunities, encouraging life-long learning and responsibility, while promoting diversity and school pride.
I’d venture to say that 90 to 95 percent of school and school districts’ vision/mission statements probably have something in them about lifelong learning, lifelong learners, etc.
Now, let’s contrast this widespread phenomena with the fact that most students generally leave K-12 education with less enthusiasm for learning than when they entered. For example, most kindergarteners and first graders entering the system are excited, energized, engaged, and happy. Does this describe your district’s high school seniors? Do twelfth-graders exhibit the same love of learning - the same thrill of engagement with academic material - as when they entered the district 12 years previous? Probably not.
So what’s happening? An occasional inspiring teacher aside, why do students become more apathetic about formal learning the more time they spend in our schools? What is it about our educational system that (dare I say it?) beats the academic enthusiasm out of our children? We have good, caring, dedicated people serving as teachers and administrators. Most of them have training in effective pedagogy and child/adolescent development. So what’s going on?
In his work on learning organizations, Peter Senge notes that
Real learning gets to the heart of what it means to be human. Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we reperceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life. There is within each of us a deep hunger for this type of learning.
Presumably this is what a school system is striving for when it says that its vision - its ultimate mission - is to foster lifelong learning and nurture lifelong learners. And yet these lofty, inspiring words are increasingly inapplicable as we go up the grades. I think that’s both sad and a damning indictment.
What would it take for your local school or district to come closer to its own rhetoric?
Comments
I had a great conversation, f2f, with a parent today who has a child not enthusiastic about school. The parent was looking for a way to put some excitement into the student day. This student has a laptop, so I suggested iTunes and listening to podcasts from the University podcast selections or from Math podcasts.The parent asked why this hadn't been brought up as an option. The lightbulb came on, we techno people love this stuff, and no matter how much we talk and gather great sites, we, I , need to post this information for parents and teachers in a more explicit way. Off to make another blog! Thanks Scott.
Posted by: Cheryl Oakes | March 29, 2007 1:18 AM
I believe a major contributing factor is that teachers teach within a learning style that is closest to what they would want and/or enjoy. This is not necessarily the case of the students themselves.
I have worked with a librarian flat refuse to add e-books to a library collection because she doesn't understand how someone could read a book without having the feel of the book while she is doing it...
Additionally... We have some faculty that do not want students writing essays on computers because the Illinois Standard Assessment Tests have a writing portion. Our scores might be compromised if they are not well prepared to hand-write their essays.
Students are not as tech savvy as many people believe, but they are savvy enough to realize how much of their time is wasted writing one on paper.
Posted by: Scott Meech | March 29, 2007 4:06 AM
Scott, interesting that you bring this up. Here's a study you might be interested in, which notes that students who are used to using the computer underperform on handwritten state writing assessments:
http://tinyurl.com/22gh7o
"de-emphasizing computers in schools to better prepare students for low-tech tests – may be pragmatic, given the high stakes attached to many state tests. But they may be shortsighted in light of students’ entry into an increasingly high tech
world."
Posted by: Scott McLeod | March 29, 2007 2:37 PM
Until teachers get away from being a sage on the stage things aren't going to change. They've got to give up control, a terrifying prospect for most, and give control back to the students. Use different types of media to engage different types of learners, and give them responsibility for their own learning. What would make you more interested in history... reading a 20 year old textbook or walking thru history in 2nd life? 2nd life hands down.
Posted by: Jennifer J | April 2, 2007 3:34 PM
Life-long learning is just one of the platitudes that appear in vision statements. "Including all stakeholders" is another, and that rarely means students, the largest stakeholder group of all. Student enthusiasm, engagement, life-long learning and empowerment are all pieces of the same puzzle.
Vision without a corresponding action plan is meaningless. This whitepaper gives districts a path to add student leadership to technology plans to better support the district vision. http://tinyurl.com/2eve7g
Posted by: sylvia martinez | April 3, 2007 6:04 PM
This discussion reminds me of one I participated in as a Science teacher several years ago. The title of that workshop session was "How to Instill Curiosity in Your Students", or some such thing.
It was a really weak session, with lots of platitudes, until a research physicist, who was not a Teacher in the common sense, told the crowd that the premise of the discussion was absurd- students come to us with way more curiosity than is healthy, and our goal should be to stifle enough of it so that they could survive until adulthood. The art, of course, was in stifling only that much, and no more.
That comment changed the discussion completely, and for the better.
Posted by: Brian Scholin | April 3, 2007 6:27 PM
I teach in an alternative high school were students are placed because they either have attendance problems, a lack of credit, safe school violations, and many other reasons. I find that these students are, for the most part, intelligent, creative, good kids who have made some mistakes.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that many of these students have a preferred learning style that probably was not addressed in the regular high school. They are hands-on, visual, or aural learners and did not do well. After a while of not being successful or not getting the one-on-one help they needed they lost their desire to learn.
Once they receive instruction that is interesting and geared toward their personal learning preferences, and they are supplied with strategies to help them in situations when lessons are not presented in their personal learning style these students begin to turn around and become successful. Using projects, cooperative learning, multimedia lessons, and other creative learning strategies teachers are able to show these students that they can learn.
When this happens they understand that they can learn and they do become lifelong learners.
Yet another thing that helps students to gain a desire to learn is if the teacher can at least tell the students why the teacher himself likes the discipline he is teaching. Share with the student his/her passion for their subject. Then the student won’t say, “When am I ever going to use this?” Share the passion, if the teacher likes to learn, the student might catch on too!
Posted by: Grant Harkness | April 3, 2007 9:44 PM
Absolutely love the Peter Senge reference of whom I have been a devote and advocate for years.
It has been said that "curiosity killed the cat" but I would add that "creativity gave it nine lives."
Perhaps a more fitting contextual question would read "Do Schools Quash Creativity?" Therein, we may discover the problem and solution.
Posted by: Jim Ross | April 4, 2007 11:45 AM