In our class last night (HTH 216 - Advanced Project Based Learning), someone made an off-handed comment about the state standards and how they play in to project planning. The two Explorer Elementary teachers shared a look of confusion as the rest of us sort of brushed it off (see Carlisa Endoso's comments on my post "Talking with a colleague about PBL" - I started to respond to Carlisa by adding another comment to that post, but it seemed like a conversation worthy of more than a footnote.)
Carlisa mentions that at Explorer Elementary, she feels incredibly supported in her efforts to be creative and have curricular freedom, but that ultimately it's the state standards that drive the teachers' thinking about project ideas. The ideological perspective that supports teacher autonomy, freedom and creativity is definitely something Explorer shares with the other schools in the High Tech family; however, it seems like the starting points are different.
I think the reason why the High Tech teachers glazed over the discussion of standards in our class last night is because standards almost never come up in conversation in the HT schools. We are encouraged to worry more about doing exciting, rigorous curriculum that we think is meaningful and worth doing - and to worry less about coverage of standards. Most of us find that, when we do this, we hit a good number of the standards anyway. (In language arts, for example, a great number of the standards refer to skills, not information, so our humanities teachers' typically skill-oriented approach jives pretty well with that.) The reason why they still come up in articles and other materials that are distributed outside the HT community, as Carlisa noted, is that we understand standards to be a reality all teachers have to accept; if what we do is going to be of value to teachers who feel pressured by standards coverage, they need to know that our methods can be applicable to their situation.
That being said, it seems to me that most teachers who are told to teach "to" the standards find this task stifling and overwhelming, which puts them in a frame of mind totally contrary to being creative with their practice. Rather than a system of accountability, then, it creates a climate of mediocrity. I'm excited to hear that Explorer has found a way to use the standards as a jumping off point for truly engaging teaching practice, and I'd love to hear more about how they manage to do that.
My favorite HTH example of "coverage" of the standards was when Jeff Robin did an art project with his class that covered all the standards for visual art in only one week. His conclusion: "If you make anything it is still better than studying standards."
To visit Explorer Elementary's website: http://www.explorerelementary.org
To visit Jeff's Digital Portfolio: http://jeffrobin.hightechhigh.org
2 comments:
This may already be assumed in the PBL approach, but doesn't teaching to standards tend to produce homogenous knowledge and thinking? In the workplace, diversity of information sources, thought processes, and mental frameworks provides a powerful competative edge.
Understanding standards - what they are, how they are selected, their purpose and relation to the system - may be much more useful for students' future opportunities than being fluent in the standards themselves. Understanding a system is of much greater strategic importance than knowing specific pieces of information within the system.
These comments come from observations of non-profit management, and I'm not sure how to make link them directly to teaching practice.
That's a really good point about workplace expectations versus school standards. I wonder how many schools reflect the workplace environment in the way you're suggesting...
Then again, there are lots of jobs where individual employees aren't a part of the thought processes or mental frameworks of the business. For example, low-skill factory positions probably don't require a great diversity of thought. Kids who go through twelve years of filling in bubbles on scantrons are probably well equipped to fill those kinds of jobs.
Some would argue that our society needs schools to be a sorting mechanism, to filter some kids to high-skill jobs and some to low-skill jobs. After all, somebody has to pick up the garbage and clean the toilets.
It's a shame, though, that those low-skill, low-wage jobs are almost always filled by poor kids from poor neighborhoods, while the high-skill, high-wage jobs are filled by affluent kids from affluent neighborhoods. So the "sorting system" is more a system of maintaining the social strata.
Post a Comment