Like many of those whom I read and admire, I spend much of my time moving between excitement and frustration and terror. As I read the ideas and plans of the wonderful digital education community, I’m always seeing new possibilities as the digital vision becomes more and more a reality. Yet facing the realities of my school and myself, I’m frustrated by the long distances and enormous hurdles between today and tomorrow. Likewise I am sometimes overwhelmed by fear of unintended and misintended consequences. After all, when children and their future are the laboratory, a disastrous experiment can not be wiped up and washed down a drain.
That being said, I still wonder whether we are serving them with the current curricular skills taught in schools. Too much of the subject matter and accompanying skills seem to be designed to serve the needs of our generation, and again I worry whether we teach the world we learned because this is how we understand education. We teach them how to make buggy whips because that’s what we learned because we’ll always need buggy whips.
What started me thinking about this today was reading a few assignments for high school term papers. The term paper is one of the sacred cows of the high school experience. It is generally a miserable experience for students to research and write and for teachers to teach and grade, and there are very few if any life applications for these skills short of research itself. With these qualifications, one would think that this buggy whip would be well on its way toward extinction, but parents, teachers, and in an odd way students hold to this totemic rite of passage as an educational bootcamp.
I want to be reasonable about this, I’m certain (at least somewhat certain) that at some point in history someone learned something from this experience. However, the way the research paper is assigned and taught ignores several essential shifts. Research and note-taking skills are based on a model of information scarcity rather than information ubiquity (and why would anyone write something on paper cards that could be bookmarked and made instantly available?). Similarly the lengthy paper presenting the totality of others’ ideas (in the student’s own words) besides being a template for plagiarism is also based on an information scarcity model. finally the paper itself is dissimilar to the bulk of writing done in the professional world. In an average day I write thousands of words, most of these are emails, some are articles and blogposts, some are responses to other’s blogposts (in fact, I wonder if the paper assignment itself is on it’s deathbed, but that’s another day).
Yet a suggestion that this buggy whip be abandoned is greeted with fear and disdain. Teachers and parents are fearful that something will be “lost” with the disappearance of this dinosaur. Some sneer that the rigor of the educational process is being lost. Some retreat to the last refuge of the educational traditionalist, “They’ll need this for college.”
To all of these objections I want to shout, “Shut up, voices in my head!” I understand the fear and I feel it. What if we make these changes and we BREAK A GENERATION OF KIDS?
Still it’s no longer possible for me to embrace the teaching of 20th Century skills. We need to teach students skills (including research and writing) that they will actually use in the way they will use them.
For example, I wish someone had taught me how to bring a blog post to an effective close, but I never learned this, so I guess I’ll just stop…
I invite your comments.
Smiles, your blog title had me thinking 2 things.
a. Are we continually beating a dead horse or
b. Are we urging things to move forward?
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That said…….
We are at a great precept in the education world right now where the way we have always done it it beginning to be questioned.
The fact that I can almost certainly say that most teachers DO NOT evaluate term papers the same way from when they begin to when they are done (even with a rubric) first of all makes me want to say enough is enough. After reading 15 hours of term papers can we honestly believe the teacher has given the same effort and comprehension to each paper? No. And on top of that, each paper written influences the teacher which again makes it an unfair grade.
So, I am with you in let’s find another way…….
But then I wonder how…….and are teachers ready to give up ONE STANDARD way for perhaps 100 possible ways.
Could a student create a blog post, a wiki, a presentation, a piece of artwork, a graphic, a movie, a podcast, a song, a play, a brochure, a sculpture, a quiz, a speech, a poster, a mobile, a diorama, a photograph, or even a research paper to prove not only understanding of what they learned but also how they have applied what they learned to their life.
Or would students — themselves — also just find the easiest way to turn in a requirement to get a grade?
Your blog post is much more than just thoughts of a buggy whip, it brings in the bridle, the saddle, the cart, the bucket of oats — and more.
The research paper just might be the horse — but what we do with it…….that might be the hardest things teachers and students will have to work on.
Just my thoughts.
Jen
It is good idea. I support you.