An Open Photo Album

adventuresinlearning:

In the time that we have left in school – in the time that I have left as a teacher – in the time we have to figure out what comes next – I hope we can do these things:

1. Share authority in the classroom with kids: This doesn’t look like chaos; it looks like inquiry, and it builds trust and enable students to become authorities on learning that matters to them. It looks like students posing questions, solving problems, and creating products we could never anticipate on our own.
2. Share school governance with kids: Put kids in charge of tenure and renewal. Let them set the tone for school culture and decide what happens when classmates violate their norms. Provide adult guidance rather than sentencing. Involve kids in sourcing their own food and materials.
3. Cede control of scheduling to kids: We should change how we manage staffing, scheduling, and technology so that students at school can “check out” their work and bring it to the kids and adults with whom they work best. Use the best relationships we can offer students throughout the entire day.
4. Insist on performance assessment: Whether we evaluate students by a portfolio of work addressing discrete standards or one year-long project addressing a holistic rubric, we should help kids acculturate themselves to project- and problem-based learning. We’re leaving them our society, not a multiple-choice test.
5. Be patient with one another: Even while we feel an urgency for change, we should cultivate a patience with one another. It takes time to shift from a traditional classroom to an inquiry-driven one. It takes time to trust kids’ decisions as much as we trust our own. It takes time to disentangle ourselves from tradition and from the pieces of our work that are about us, rather than about our kids. We face the future together; together we serve kids. We will all need the silence; we will all need to resist and be resisted; we will all need one another when the quiet is done and the conflict goes on.