In recent years, a number of Americans have been awakening to the realization that today’s children are not receiving a high-quality education. The nation’s test scores in everything from reading to science are evidence of that.
But while many Americans now recognize what a good education is not, many are unsure exactly what it is.
Former New York school teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto once answered that question in his book Weapons of Mass Instruction. According to Gatto, the sign of a well-educated mind is one that can make connections and is connected to four different things:
Connected to Different Human Styles
Connected to Complex Experiences
Connected to Intellectual Ideas
Connected to Itself (i.e. self-knowledge)
These four connections, Gatto noted, are not a part of the normal educational system. In fact, today’s education system seeks to do just the opposite:
School disconnects, as it was charged to do. It is Caesar’s "divide and conquer" strategy brought to peak efficiency. Children are divided from their families, their traditions, their communities, their religions, their natural allies – other children – their interests and on ad infinitum. They are, as Walter Lippman deplored, disconnected from the entire Western intellectual tradition which gave societies the greatest gift of personal liberties they had ever seen, disconnected from the experiences of risk-taking and adventure in which the grand discoveries of history have been fashioned; young men and women emerge from school unable to do much of anything …
The “disconnection” strategies of public schools are almost the exact opposite of those practiced by homeschool families, who, incidentally, seem to be doing quite well when it comes to churning out well-educated minds.
Given that, perhaps it’s time we stop pretending the public school system can be the surrogate parents for the nation’s children. Perhaps children have been provided with the best educators they can have from the moment they were born.
According to Professor Kenneth Calvert, Common Core, well-intentioned from the beginning, will utterly fail its students. Rather than raising the educational standard in the United States, it codifies and federally enforces mediocrity. Worse yet, in regulating education the federal government has overstepped its constitutional boundaries, by attempting to control teaching methods, preventing teachers from exercising their craft effectively.
The following video is a clip from Q&A 5 of Hillsdale’s Online Course: “A Proper Understanding of K-12 Education: Theory and Practice,”featuring Kenneth Calvert, Associate Professor of History and Headmaster of Hillsdale Academy, and John J. Miller, Director of the Dow Journalism Program.
Common Core is one of these well-intentioned pieces of legislation in which the federal government is trying to do something for children. They've perceived that children are behind the rest of the world and so let's create a national legislation that's not going to be forced on states, but we'll give them money, and the states will take it. It's just wrong-headed in so many ways. Number one, it's unconstitutional. From the get-go there is nothing constitutional about the federal government getting its hand into education. Number two, it doesn't do what they want it to do.
[The Federal Government] wanted to raise standards in their minds commensurate with, equal with, world standards. Neither the literature nor the science or the math standards come anywhere near that. What Common Core has ended up doing is creating, basically, what they considered to be, the lowest common denominator, the average point which students can be expected to reach. In our school and from the Hillsdale perspective it’s our belief that if you hold the bar high, very few kids are going to get there, but most of these kids are going to get beyond anywhere they ever thought they would get, that they would actually achieve higher goals than they thought they could.
By keeping the bar low, by keeping it at this kind of average, you have doomed [students] to a low level of education. They never know how far they can go. We think that it lowers the bar. It lowers the expectations.
It also does not allow teachers to be teachers. Teachers in the Common Core are teaching to tests. Much of the curriculum more and more is becoming scripted so that can't have a Socratic dialogue, a give and take where most of the real education actually takes place.
Teachers are being robbed of their calling, of their discipline. What you begin to create here in a number of these efforts of the Federal Government to create new educational legislation, what you've done is begin to create bureaucrats in the classroom rather than real teachers. I've met teachers in public and private and charter schools who are looking at what's coming down the pike, and they are not happy. More and more, especially some of the older teachers, they will tell me that what they used to be able to do twenty years ago, which was exciting, enlivening, and drawing out a love of the life of the mind in their students—all of that is beginning to disappear.
It's well-intentioned legislation, right? We know what good intentions lead to. It is not to the right place. We need to give our teachers, our schools--public, private, charter--greater freedom to be what they need to be. This also demands that our teachers be highly educated, learned, true experts in their areas. They need to be the ones in the classrooms really bringing out this love of learning and love of the life of the mind in these young ones. Honestly, we're not doing a lot of that right now either.
Deal keeping focus on failing schools after defeat at ballot
Gov. Nathan Deal asked Georgia lawmakers on Wednesday to support a new plan to fix low-performing schools after voters last fall rejected a proposal for the state to take over public schools that consistently struggle.
Keeping a focus on education in his State of the State speech to the Legislature, Deal said the number of students enrolled in failing schools — meaning they posted failing scores on standardized tests at least three years in a row — rose from about 68,000 in 2015 to nearly 89,000 last year.
“It should be abundantly clear to everyone, including those in the education community who so staunchly support the status quo, that this is unacceptable,” Deal said. “If this pattern of escalation in the number of failing schools does not change, its devastating effects on our state will grow with each passing school year.”
The Republican governor, who is midway through his final term, pushed hard last year for a constitutional amendment allowing the state to take control of low-performing schools. Teacher unions and parent-teacher associations fought that plan, saying it usurped control from local school boards. Voters resoundingly defeated the amendment in November, with nearly 60 percent opposing it.
Deal offered no specifics Wednesday of what the new plan might include. But he told lawmakers he’s working closely with House Speaker David Ralston, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle and other House and Senate leaders to present a bill during a the 40-day session that opened Monday.
“I think Georgians do expect us to make education a priority,” Ralston said at a news conference last week. But he also gave no specifics on what new prescription lawmakers might offer for struggling schools.
Sid Chapman, president of the Georgia Association of Educators, said his group hopes to work with lawmakers on that final plan. He said it’s not fair to label schools as failing based on test scores alone, and said factors such as poverty and hunger among students need to be considered.
“It’s not about the teachers not being good educators,” Chapman said. “We’re not at all about being status quo. We’re on the front lines every day.”
Deal also asked lawmakers for $160 million to give teachers a 2-percent pay raise next year. Overall, he proposed $606 million in new spending for the remainder of fiscal 2017. Deal’s proposed state budget for fiscal 2018, which begins July 1, contains nearly $25 billion in total spending — an increase of 3.6 percent over the current year’s budget.
Teachers aren’t the only ones in line for pay increases. Deal wants $82.7 million total to fund 20 percent raises and incentives for state law enforcement officers, such as state troopers and Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents. He also requested $25.8 million for pay raises averaging 19 percent for caseworkers with the state Division of Family and Children Services.
Deal’s priorities also include devoting millions of dollars to guarding Georgia agencies and businesses against hackers and other computer criminals.
The governor wants lawmakers to approve $50 million for a state-run Georgia Cyber Innovation and Technology Center. The center would specialize in cybersecurity training and research and would be based in Augusta, where the Army is moving its cyber command headquarters to Fort Gordon.
“This invaluable resource will put Georgia at the pinnacle of efforts to enhance American cybersecurity in the public and private arenas with a resource unlike any other in the country,” Deal said.
The new cyber center would be developed in coordination with state universities, the military and the National Security Agency, Deal said. It would be located on 17 acres that once housed the Georgia Golf Hall of Fame, which closed in 2007 because of financial woes.
AJC poll finds support for school choice, vouchers
Bob Andres
Georgia voters appear ready to embrace more charter schools and other alternatives to traditional public schools, even if it means sending tax dollars to private or religious institutions, a new poll for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has found.
With the election of Donald Trump, the diversification of America’s educational system is on the national agenda. Betsy DeVos, his pick for education secretary, is an advocate for charter schools and for subsidizing private school tuition with public dollars using so-called vouchers.
The poll found strong support for expansion of what people in education circles call “school choice,” with 61 percent of the polled registered voters saying they favor more of it, despite assertions it could undercut public school funding. Among those supporting more choice, there was even stronger support for vouchers, which have been a lightening rod for controversy in education policy. School vouchers can be redeemed at private schools to subsidize tuition.
Opponents say alternatives to public schools peel away the best students and the most engaged parents while siphoning away public support and funding from traditional schools, undermining them. Proponents say public schools have stagnated and are failing the children who are stuck in them, leaving them with few alternatives and a bleak future. They accuse teachers and school administrators of having a vested interest since their jobs could be on the line if parents can choose something other than a neighborhood school.
Gov. Nathan Deal used many of the same arguments last year in arguing for his proposed Opportunity School District. It was designed to convert under-performing traditional schools into charter schools, which are publicly funded but independently managed.
Voters soundly rejected that idea but the defeat apparently did not mean they had soured on school choice. The poll reveals among choice supporters there is an ardent core, 69 percent, who said their support would not waiver even if it meant vouchers for private or religious schools.
Mark James, 49, a Republican who installs heating and air systems and lives in Cherokee County, told the pollsters he fully supports school choice and vouchers. He said in a subsequent interview that he sent his own, now grown, children through the Cherokee public schools, which he said were fine. But he appears to feel empathy for students in under-performing schools in urban areas such as Fulton and DeKalb counties.
“You hear about them on the news,” he said, adding he thinks nothing will change if it’s left up to teachers and principals. “Somebody needs to step in and help them,” he said. “Maybe that would calm down the crime rate down there if people started getting an education.”
It’s been more than two decades since Georgia’s first charter school law was adopted. Now there are more than 100 of the schools. A growing number are under the authority of the state, as opposed to the local school systems, which used to have exclusive chartering authority. Four years ago, voters overwhelmingly supported a constitutional amendment that also gave the state that authority. The State Charter Schools Commission grew from that referendum, and last year it listed more than two dozen charter schools under its authority.
Georgia also has dipped its toe in the voucher pool, allowing limited funding of private schools with public money since the 2008 adoption of the Qualified Education Expense Credit law. Taxpayers pledge money to specific private schools, including many with religious affiliations, and get a state tax credit for the same amount. The tax credits allotted yearly has grown to $58 million. It’s been capped by lawmakers for several years at that amount because of the controversy about the idea. The legal authority behind the program is unsettled, with a legal hearing pending before the Georgia Supreme Court later this month over allegations that it’s unconstitutional to use tax dollars to fund religious institutions.
Since his defeat on the Opportunity School District, Deal has vowed to make failing schools the focus of the legislative session that began Monday. He has not revealed the details of his plans, but school choice and vouchers are said to be components. State Rep. Kevin Tanner, R-Dawsonville, is developing the proposal and has said he is not yet ready to discuss it. The AJC has reported meanwhile that several people briefed on a House education measure for failing schools said it would involve a six-year process culminating in an exit route for students: if performance doesn’t improve, the students could be offered vouchers or state help in switching schools.
It appears there would be some resistance to a voucher plan, though. Sen. Lindsey Tippins, R-Marietta, the chairman of the state Senate committee that oversees educational legislation, is skeptical, saying they amount to a Band-Aid solution.
“I really don’t think that that’s a solution except for those individuals who have the wherewithal to take advantage of the vouchers,” he said. Kids without advocates or basic support, like someone with a car who can drive them across town, will be left behind, he said. “It’s much more critical in my mind to go to the root causes of why schools are failing. It’s going to be harder work.”
About the poll
This Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll surveyed 919 registered voters statewide from Jan. 2 to Jan. 5. The margin of error for each response is plus or minus 4 percentage points. The survey, conducted by Abt SRBI, used both land-line and cellphones. The data are weighted based on mode (cell-only, land-line-only and mixed), region (metro vs. nonmetro), gender, age, race, education and ethnicity (Hispanic vs. non-Hispanic). Some totals may not equal 100 percent due to rounding.
What Kids Need From Grown-Ups (But Aren't Getting)
Annelise Capossela for NPR
Erika Christakis' new book, The Importance of Being Little, is an impassioned plea for educators and parents to put down the worksheets and flash cards, ditch the tired craft projects (yes, you, Thanksgiving Handprint Turkey) and exotic vocabulary lessons, and double-down on one, simple word:
Play.
That's because, she writes, "the distinction between early education and official school seems to be disappearing." If kindergarten is the new first grade, Christakis argues, preschool is quickly becoming the new kindergarten. And that is "a real threat to our society's future."
If the name sounds familiar, that's likely because Christakis made headlines last October, writing an email that stirred angry protests at Yale, where she is a lecturer at the Yale Child Study Center.
When a campus committee sent students a memo urging restraint in choosing Halloween costumes and asking them to avoid anything that "disrespects, alienates or ridicules segments of our population based on race, nationality, religious belief or gender expression," Christakis wrote a memo of her own. She lauded the committee's goals of trying to encourage tolerance and foster community but wondered if the responsibility of deciding what is offensive should fall to students, not their administrators.
"Have we lost faith in young people's capacity — in your capacity — to exercise self-censure, through social norming, and also in your capacity to ignore or reject things that trouble you?" Christakis wrote.
Many Yale students accused Christakis of being racially insensitive and called for her ouster. In December, she stepped down from her teaching duties, telling The Washington Post, "I worry that the current climate at Yale is not, in my view, conducive to the civil dialogue and open inquiry required to solve our urgent societal problems."
What does Christakis' role in the heated debate over racial insensitivity and free speech on campus have to do with her views on preschool? Surprisingly, a lot. I spoke with Christakis about her new book and the turmoil at Yale. Here's an edited version of our conversation.
What is this phenomenon that you call "the preschool paradox"?
It is the reality that science is confirming on a daily basis: that children are hardwired to learn in many settings and are really very capable, very strong, very intelligent on the one hand. On the other hand, the paradox is that many young children are doing poorly in our early education settings.
We've got a growing problem of preschool expulsions, a growing problem of children being medicated off-label for attention problems. We have a lot of anecdotal evidence that parents are frustrated and feeling overburdened. So that's what interests me: What is going on?
We have very crammed [preschool] schedules with rapid transitions. We have tons of clutter on classroom walls. We have kids moving quickly from one activity to another. We ask them to sit in long and often boring meetings. Logistically and practically, lives are quite taxing for little kids because they're actually living in an adult-sized world.
On the other hand, curriculum is often very boring. A staple of early childhood curriculum is the daily tracking of the calendar. And this is one of those absolute classic mismatches, because one study showed that, after a whole year of this calendar work where kids sit in a circle and talk about what day they're on, half the kids still didn't know what day they were on. It's a mismatch because it's both really hard and frankly very stupid.
We're underestimating kids in terms of their enormous capacity to be thoughtful and reflective, and, I would argue, that's because we're not giving them enough time to play and to be in relationships with others.
Why do you think so many educators and policymakers have come to see play and learning as mutually exclusive?
Yeah, it's incredibly weird — this fake dichotomy. The science is so persuasive on this topic. There's all kinds of research coming not only from early childhood but animal research looking at mammals and how they use play for learning.
I think there are two answers. There really has been tremendous anxiety about closing achievement gaps between advantaged and less advantaged children. You know, we're always as a society looking for quick fixes that might close those gaps. Unfortunately, it's had downstream consequences for early learning, where we're going for superficial measures of learning.
I think the other problem is that the rich, experience-based play that we know results in learning — it's not as easy to accomplish as people think. And that's because, while the impulse to play is natural, what I call the play know-how really depends on a culture that values play, that gives kids the time and space to learn through play.
What does playful learning look like?
Playful learning is embedded in relationships and in things that are meaningful to children. I use the example of the iconic [handprint] Thanksgiving turkey. When you really get into what's behind those cutesy crafts, a lot of curriculum is organized around these traditions, things around the calendar, things that are done because they've always been done.
When you look at how kids learn, they learn when something is meaningful to them, when they have a chance to learn through relationships — and that, of course, happens through play. But a lot of our curriculum is organized around different principles.
It's organized around the comfort and benefit of adults and also reflexive: "This is cute," or, "We've always done this." A lot of the time, as parents, we are trained to expect products, cute projects. And I like to say that the role of art in preschool or kindergarten curriculum should be to make meaning, not necessarily things. But it's hard to get parents to buy into this idea that their kids may not come home with the refrigerator art because maybe they spent a week messing around in the mud.
Preschool teachers are very interested in fine motor skills, and so often they think that these tracing and cutting activities [are important]. I would argue that those are not the most important skills that we need to foster.
What are the most important skills we need to foster?
I think the No. 1 thing is that children need to feel secure in their relationships because, again, we're social animals. And children learn through others. So I think the No. 1 thing is for kids to have a chance to play, to make friends, to learn limits, to learn to take their turn.
You're talking about soft skills, non-cognitive skills ...
I actually won't accept the term non-cognitive skills.
Social-emotional skills?
I would say social-emotional skills. But, again, there's a kind of simplistic notion that there's social-emotional skills on the one hand ...
And academics on the other ...
Right, and I would argue that many so-called academic skills are very anti-intellectual and very uncognitive. Whereas I think a lot of the social-emotional skills are very much linked to learning.
I think the biggest one is the use of language. When kids are speaking to one another and listening to one another, they're learning self-regulation, they're learning vocabulary, they're learning to think out loud. And these are highly cognitive skills. But we've bought into this dichotomy again. I would say "complex skills" versus "superficial" or "one-dimensional skills."
To give you an example, watching kids build a fort is going to activate more cognitive learning domains than doing a worksheet where you're sitting at a table. The worksheet has a little pile of pennies on one side and some numbers on the other, and you have to connect them with your pencil. That's a very uni-dimensional way of teaching skills.
Whereas, if you're building a fort with your peers, you're talking, using higher-level language structures in play than you would be if you're sitting at a table. You're doing math skills, you're doing physics measurement, engineering — but also doing the give-and-take of, "How do I get along? How do I have a conversation? What am I learning from this other person?" And that's very powerful.
What is high-quality preschool to you?
The research base is pretty clear. I'll start by telling you what it isn't. We start by looking at two variables. One set are called "structural variables" — things like class size, student-teacher ratios, or even the square-footage of the classroom and what kinds of materials are in the classroom.
And then there are so-called process variables, which are different. They tend to be more about teaching style. Is the teacher a responsive teacher? Does she use a responsive, warm, empathic teaching style? And then the other key process variable is: Does the teacher have knowledge of child development? And is that teacher able to translate that child development knowledge into the curriculum?
Which seems like a hard thing to measure.
It's actually not. And there are many good measures — things like: Is the teacher on the floor with the child? Is the teacher asking open-ended questions? You know: "Tell me about your picture" versus "Oh, cute house, Bobby." It's actually not that hard to measure.
But here's the thing. The structural variables are easier to regulate. And, if you have a workforce problem where you're not paying teachers well and a pipeline problem where there aren't good career paths to get into teaching, it's much easier for us to focus on the structural variables when those have an indirect effect only. The direct effect is the process variables.
My colleague Walter Gilliam at Yale has come up with this wonderful mental health classroom climate scale, which really looks at these process variables in very granular detail — so, not only looking at the interactions between the teachers and the children but how the teachers are interacting with each other.
You mount a spirited defense of unscheduled kid time [at home]. Less shuttling to and from sports practice, dance practice, swim lessons. Be sure, you say, to give your child time to sit on the floor and stare at the ceiling if that's what they want to do. I know a lot of parents who would find that view heretical.
That's because we don't have faith in young children. And we don't really have faith in ourselves. And we've been programmed to believe that the more enrichments we can add on [the better].
I think boredom can be a friend to the imagination. Sometimes when kids appear to be bored, actually they haven't had enough time to engage in something. We quickly whisk it away and move them along to the next thing. And that's when you say, "How can I help the child to look at this in a new way? To try something new, to be patient."
You've really kind of adultified childhood so kids really don't have those long, uninterrupted stretches of time to engage in fantasy play. And because we've kind of despoiled the habitat of early childhood, a lot of times they don't know what to do when given that time. So we kind of have to coach them.
I think there's a little bit of a repair process that we need to engage in. Because if you've got a kid who's used to going to a million lessons and only uses toys that have one way of using them and then, suddenly, you put them in a room with a bunch of boxes and blocks and say, "Have fun!", the kid's gonna say, "Are you kidding me? What?!"
I want to transition to Yale now. You were talking about creating a safe space earlier — for preschoolers. In a video taken of Yale students responding angrily to your Halloween email, one African-American woman berates your husband, who co-manages a residential college with you. She yells, "It is your job to create a place of comfort and home for your students, and you have not done that." Is it possible to create a space that is intellectually safe, where free speech prevails, that is also comfortable?
I guess the question would be, "Is comfort the goal?" My hope is that young people of all ages could feel safe in a community where dialogue is welcome. That doesn't mean you get to scream at people and throw things at them. I would like to see people feel safe in a community where they could have different ideas.
We had at Yale a representative from Planned Parenthood come to speak. I think it would be really great if we also had an alternative view, and that people could listen and say, "You know what? I really disagree with that, but this does not threaten me to my core. I can disagree. Maybe I can even hone my argument better by hearing an alternative view."
I think we can have a safe community, but does that mean that we're always comfortable? Well, I think that's very unrealistic and probably not a good idea to aspire to being comfortable all the time.
You wrote in your email: "Have we lost faith in young people's capacity — in your capacity — to exercise self-censure, through social norming, and also in your capacity to ignore or reject things that trouble you?"
The counter-argument, lodged by many Yale students, is that some things — including Halloween costumes — are simply so offensive, culturally, that not only can they not be ignored, they shouldn't be allowed in the first place. What do you make of that argument?
I want to be clear that I would probably agree with the vast majority of things that my critics find offensive. So I think I have been very misunderstood. Yes, there are things that are horrible. There are things that offend all of us and hurt our feelings.
I also would argue that much of it is context-based. As I heard from many students after the fact, people have really different ideas of what is hurtful. And there were things in the [Yale committee's] email that didn't address some people's hurts. For example, costumes about disability.
I think my point was, because context matters and because the world is full of injury and there is no question that some people bear a disproportionate burden — I accept that — we can't really create a world where administrators, teachers or parents can insulate people from these kinds of things.
Now, I do want to be clear: There are all kinds of ways to respond to being hurt, including filing a police report, reporting to your supervisor or professor or RA in a dorm, talking with your friends, ignoring. To me, I think the social norming piece is really important because I believe we put way too much faith in these administrative guidelines, "suggestions."
Is that really how behavior change happens? I don't know. I think for some things, absolutely, legal recourse makes a difference. But for other things, I think, peer norming is highly effective, and to me, Halloween costumes would be in that category.
We can't really predict people's intent. Often people use Halloween as an expression of satire, biting humor, and so we don't know. In fact, we had an amazing conversation with David Simon [creator of HBO's The Wire]. He came to speak to our students, and he was really pushing them. If you go to a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans, you know, you're gonna see things that would strike the average Yale student as offensive. But if you understand the history and the context, then there's a different interpretation.
As I've grown older, I've grown more confident in young people to have these conversations, to fight for their rights, to sometimes ignore things. They have a whole toolkit of strategies, and we have to start at a really young age, giving kids the space to talk to each other, to get to know each other, to listen to each other. That's linking back to my book.
I think the habitat has to be one that prizes dialogue and talking and listening skills. We have an opportunity right now to do that for a whole generation. We're kidding ourselves — like with the [preschool] worksheets — there is no limit to the number of suggestions and guidelines we can offer to students, but if they don't understand each other and are not willing to talk to each other and listen to each other, I think that's going to have limited impact.
Halloween costumes are sometimes indicative of a long and tortured past of institutional racism and oppression, and it seems what the students were arguing for here was institutional protection — an expectation that, "Why can't the institution just protect us from this craziness?"
And how well has that worked out [historically]?
Not very.
I don't mean to be callous. I have great empathy, and I think my teaching and my syllabus reflect that. I'm on the side of young people. But I'm more of an old-school lefty. I think it's very important for us to question establishment responses to things. Sometimes it's very important to have an establishment response, and other times I think it's less helpful.
And I would say, proactively trying to manage Halloween costumes, however gently worded, I think there's a downside. Or, at least, let's talk about the potential downside. And I think it might be an erosion of the faith in young people to influence one another and to listen to one another and learn from one another.
Why did you resign your teaching post?
I have great respect and affection for my students, but I'm worried that the climate of civil dialogue and openness — I'm not sure we're there yet. I have a lot of faith in students. And I think time is a great healer of wounds.
Finland Will Become The First Country In The World To Get Rid Of All School Subjects
In an era of technology and easily accessible information, our schools still expect from us to know everything from the books, without considering whether this is going to be what we will actually need in our professional development. How many times have you wondered if you were going to need a subjects you were made to learn because the curriculum said so? Finland has decided to change this in their educational system and introduce something which is suitable for the 21st century.
By 2020, instead of classes in physics, math, literature, history or geography, Finland is going to introduce a different approach to life through education. Welcome to the phenomenon based learning!
As Phenomenal Education states on their website, “In Phenomenon Based Learning (PhenoBL) and teaching, holistic real-world phenomena provide the starting point for learning. The phenomena are studied as complete entities, in their real context, and the information and skills related to them are studied by crossing the boundaries between subjects.”
This means that instead of learning physics (or any other subject) for the sake of learning it, the students will be given the opportunity to choose from phenomena from their real surroundings and the world, such as Media and Technology, or the European Union.
These phenomena will be studied through an interdisciplinary approach, which means subjects will be included, but only those (and only parts of them) that contribute to excelling in the topic.
For example, a student who wants to study a vocational course can take “cafeteria services” and the phenomenon will be studied through elements of maths, languages, writing and communication skills. Another example is the European Union, which would include economics, languages, geography and the history of the countries involved.
Now take your profession as an example and think of all the information you need to know connected to it – you are now thinking the PhenoBL way!
This kind of learning will include both face-to-face and online sessions, with a strong emphasis on the beneficial use of technology and the Internet through the process of eLearning. You can read more about it here.
In the learning process, the students will be able to collaborate with their peers and teachers through sharing information and collectively exploring and implementing new information as a building tool.
The teaching style is going to change too!
Instead of the traditional style of teacher-centered learning, with students sitting behind their desks and recording every instruction given by the teacher, the approach is going to change to a holistic level. This means that every phenomenon will be approached in the most suitable and natural way possible.
However, as Phenomenal Learning states, “The starting point of phenomenal-based teaching is constructivism, in which learners are seen as active knowledge builders and information is seen as being constructed as a result of problem-solving, constructed out of ‘little pieces’ into a whole that suits the situation in which it is used at the time.”
This educational system tends to include leaning in a collaborative setting (e.g. teamwork), where they would like to see information being formed in a social context, instead of it being seen only as an internal element of an individual.
This approach is going to support inquiry-based learning, problem-solution and project and portfolio learning. The last step is going to be practical implementation, being seen as the outcome of the whole process.
This reform is going to require a lot of cooperation between teachers of different subjects and this is why the teachers are already undergoing an intense training.
In fact, 70% of the teachers in Helsinki are already involved in the preparatory work in line with the new system.
Co-teaching is at the base of the curriculum creation, with input from more than one subject specialist and teachers who embrace this new teaching style will receive a small increase in their salary as a sign of recognition.
From a teaching perspective, this style is very rewarding and worthwhile for the teachers too. Some teachers, who have already implemented this style in their work, say that they cannot go back to the old style.
This is indeed not surprising at all, as the interaction in this teaching style is something every teacher has always dreamed of.
Currently, schools are obliged to introduce a period of phenomenal-based learning at least once a year. The plan is to completely implement the PhenoBL approach by 2020.
A similar approach called the Playful Learning Centre is being used in the pre-school sector and it is going to serve as a starting point for the phenomenal-based learning.
Research in child development over decades as well as modern neuroscience clearly show that young children learn best when they are active. That means they get to put their hands on things, interact with other kids and adults, move a lot, create, play. But in the current school reform era, that’s not what is happening in too many classrooms. The emphasis is on “rigorous instruction,” and young children are forced to sit at their desks doing academic work — sometimes with little or no recess and/or sufficient physical education.
Here is an excerpt of a speech about this issue by Nancy Carlsson-Paige, early childhood education expert and a founding member of a nonprofit called Defending the Early Years, which commissions research about early childhood education and advocates for sane policies for young children. She is professor emerita of education at Lesley University in Cambridge, Ma., where she taught teachers for more than 30 years and was a founder of the university’s Center for Peaceable Schools.
Carlsson-Paige is author of “Taking Back Childhood.” The mother of two artist sons, Matt Damon and Kyle Damon, she is also the recipient of numerous awards, including the Legacy Award from the Robert F. Kennedy Children’s Action Corps for work over several decades on behalf of children and families, and the Deborah Meier award by the nonprofit National Center for Fair and Open Testing. She recently was a keynote speaker at a recent symposium of early childhood educators from the five Nordic countries (Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway and Iceland) and the United States.
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This is part of her speech, which I am publishing because it speaks to the continued emphasis on academics — and lack of sufficient play — for our youngest students:
Hello everyone.
It’s really inspiring to learn about early childhood education in the Nordic countries where play is so valued and children don’t begin formal instruction until the age of 7. We have a very different situation here in the United States, where the pressure to teach academic skills to young children has been increasing over recent years.
For the last 15 years or so, our education system has been dominated by standards and tests, by the gathering of endless amounts of data collected to prove that teachers are doing their job and kids are learning. But these hyper requirements have oppressed teachers and drained the creativity and joy from learning for students. Unfortunately, this misguided approach to education has now reached down to our youngest children.
In kindergartens and pre-K classrooms around the country we’ve seen a dramatic decrease in play. There are fewer activity centers in classrooms and much less child choice, as well as less arts and music. At the same time, teacher directed instruction has greatly increased, along with more scripted curriculum and paper and pencil tasks.
This unfortunate change in early childhood education can be described as a shift away from child-centered classrooms to skills-centered ones.
Given that we have decades of research and child development theory to support whole child early education, the shift from child-centered to skills–centered education often seems inexplicable and bizarre. But early childhood educators have not been at the policy-making tables to be able to advocate for developmentally appropriate, play-based learning for young kids.
In addition, we have a longstanding problem in our country that does not seem to plague the Nordic countries. Here in the U.S., there is an enduring misconception about the nature of play. Play is typically not seen as valuable or essential to learning. It’s more commonly viewed as an activity separate from learning rather than as one in which students learn.
Children all over the world play. They all know how to play, and no one has to teach them how. Any time we see a human activity that is wired into the brain and accomplished by all children worldwide, we know it is critical to human development.
So much is learned through play in the early years that play has been called the engine of development. Children learn concepts through play; they learn to cope and make sense of life experiences; and, they develop critical human capacities such as problem solving, imagination, self regulation and original thinking.
When we watch children building in blocks for example, we can see that they are naturally working on many math and science concepts (classification, seriation, 1:1 correspondance, causality, symmetry, etc.) Teachers encourage this kind of play-based learning and build onto it with new concepts and skills that relate to what children are doing. If kids build a tall tower, the teacher might suggest they measure it with unifix cubes or paper tubes. Enthusiasm grows as kids find out how tall their building is. They count, measure, compare. Based on a teacher’s judgement, they might draw or write what they find out. But the new skills children are learning are meaningful. They are connected to them and an experience that came from them. The new skills make sense and enrich the activity.
In the U.S. today, skills are often separated from children’s play and active experiences. Many teachers, under pressure to meet mandates, teach isolated skills and facts directly to groups of children. This makes the skill or fact become an end in itself rather than an integral part of a more holistic and meaningful experience. And it takes the joy, excitement and empowerment out of learning.
When I think about this, I remember a letter I read years ago that was burned into my memory forever. It was from a school principal, written to his teachers. The principal was a survivor of a concentration camp. In the letter, he said he had seen educated people — nurses and engineers — build gas chambers and kill innocent children. And so this principal said he was suspicious of education. He said: “Reading and writing and math are important only if they serve to make our children more human.”
The principal understood that you can be very smart and have lots of knowledge and you can use it to destructive ends. He understood that it is dangerous to use knowledge outside of a context of meaning, mind and heart, and morality.
I think when we have the kind of education common in the U.S. today — where we separate skills children are learning from their experiences and what they care about — we begin the process of dehumanizing education. We teach children that knowing facts and skills, letters and numbers, is enough. That how we use these tools is not what matters in education.
Two summers ago I spent a week with another family I’m close to. At the end of the week, my friend Lynne had to leave to visit her mom who was ailing. Lynne explained to Quentin, her 5-year-old grandson who adores her, that she had to leave a little early to go see her mom. When Lynne drove out of the driveway, Quentin cried loud and hard, an anguishing cry. I tried to comfort him, and for a while he was inconsolable. But after a while, Quentin’s cries grew quieter. I said, “Quentin, I have an idea. Why don’t I get some paper and markers and you can make a drawing for Nana. Then we can go to the post office and send it to her. She will be so happy to get a drawing from you in the mail.”
Quentin shook his head yes, this seemed like a good idea. I got the drawing things and set him up at a table. When I came back a while later to see what Quentin had drawn, I was most amazed. On the paper he had written letters:
I M U N O Nu
Y D U H to L
I R L L U
(Provided by Nancy Carlsson-Paige)
He read it to me. You might be familiar with early invented spelling; this is a great example. Quentin had written: “I miss you Nana. Why did you have to leave? I really love you.”
Quentin’s mom, a school principal in New York City was in the room, and she said in amazement, “Quentin has never written before this.” Then Quentin turned to me and said, “I surprised myself!”
The need to write to his Nana, to convey his strong feelings, led Quentin to find the letters to express himself, his love for Nana and his sadness over her leaving.
Letters, words, and numbers are tools that we use for greater purposes of all kinds — to express ourselves, to solve problems, to investigate questions we want to pursue. But they aren’t the end point. They are a means to greater ends. Ends that have meaning and are connected to us. We should learn in school that we own these tools and can use them. And we should have educational experiences that help us develop the morality, heart, and civility to know how to use what we know for the greater good.
I hope we early childhood educators in the United States can strengthen our advocacy for children so they can have a more child-centered education. And I hope that we can advocate for a schooling where reading, writing and math are connected to what children care about and experience. This is the way to help children learn optimally and learn to love school. And it’s the path we have to be on if we want to educate not just children but future citizens who will contribute to making a better world.
