His ideas really stretched our imaginations also. It was interesting watching most of us struggle with whether to agree or disagree with the information he was sharing. After he was done presenting, the conversations either indicated that the person thought he was crazy, the information didn't apply to their situation, or they got it but it wouldn't work for their organization.
Today's blog is an attempt to put a context around what life in school would look like follow the "Fried" principles. So here we go!
Failure isn't "cool"
Freid (2009) argues that failure is overrated. For some reason failure has become "cool", like fail early, fail often. You don't have to throw things against a wall and see what sticks. In schools you often hear people say, this is a learning environment, and that includes failing. Do we ever stop to think what failing in schools really means? Why is failure an option? Isn't the point that we want to teach kids techniques to succeed? And wouldn't our success with students be higher if as teachers our main goal was to find ways to get students to succeed? What if all schools took the approach that this doctoral program takes and that is for the cohort community to work together to see that all of the cohort members experience success? Just for a moment, close your eyes and try to image the classroom where the goal was to never let people experience failure.
Practically speaking I get that we do experience failure and that failure does provide great learning opportunities. I do agree however, that if our schools were more focused on teaching kids to go into things thinking they can make them work and finding a way to make that happen, our students would learn the problem solving skills needed for them to be successful in the future.
Planning is overrated
We don't know what is going to happen in the future...bottom line. Fried (2009) tells us that planning is what people do to make them feel better about the unknown. We are experts at this in education. An example is the textbooks we spend millions of dollars on (and that may be a conservative estimate) every year in our schools. By the time we get them in the hands of the students, they are 5-7 years old already. Most of our new initiatives take years to fully implement. Our professional development programs are training teachers on concepts and ideas that have been in circulation for 10 or more years.
A large portion of our teacher preparation programs train teachers how to plan for their instruction. We spend a great deal of time in education on the planning. It makes me wonder exactly how much time of our day is planning and how much time is actually on doing.
Realizing that not planning could be detrimental to the education of our students, I believe we need to refine "how" we think about planning. The backwards design of planning lessons has been around now for almost 10 years, and many educators have not yet grabbed this concept. We do need to be flexible in our planning. How about starting with this one thing...teachers you can no longer hand out a semesters plans of assignments at a time. How about a little flexibility to respond to the stimuli of your students? How about taking into consideration current knowledge and being flexible with where you want to go?
If we spent a little more time "doing" like Fried (2009) suggests, we may be much better off. Let our instruction be driven by student questions. Let inquiry and problem solving take our instruction into a random direction. Who knows, we may actually help students to experience much more learning than if we continue to give them worksheets and assignments from the book! Inspiration is perishable (Fried, 2009) so we should have systems in education that help students to act on their inspiration when it occurs instead of constantly missing the moment.
The workplace (school) is a place of interruption
I will use this as my last example because I think it is the hardest one to grasp for schools. Schools are a place of interruption also. Let's be honest, they really aren't a place for students to sit and concentrate on solving a problem. We constantly have students moving from class to class, teachers spend most of their time directing instruction, and student "think" time to solve problems is rarely allowed at school. (Those experiences are supposed to happen at home...where no interruptions happen...)
Think if our schools could institute a "no-talking" day once in a while. A day where kids would know that the point is to give them time to think, explore, search for answers, and solve problems. So you can't imagine that? Try to imagine the impact that would have had on you if those were experiences you had on a regular basis in school. Do you think it would have provided a very different educational experience? Do you think school would have been much more than filling out worksheets and writing papers? Keep thinking?
Wolfe (2009) and Estes (2009) discuss how the brain learns best by connecting new information to past experiences and that reflection and working those neural networks requires time for students/adults to assimilate that information. Yet most schools just keep pouring the information in without allowing students time to reflect, think, and create.
I'm not sure if I'm done dreaming on this subject yet. but enough for now!
Estes, D. (2009, June). Brain power. Lecture delivered at the Summer Institute at Cardinal Stritch University, Milwaukee, Wi.
Freid, J. (2009, June). 37-signals. Lecture delivered at the Summer Institute at Cardinal Stritch University, Milwaukee, Wi.
Wolfe, P. (2009, June). Brain research and education: The vital connection. Lecture delivered at the Summer Institute at Cardinal Stritch University, Milwaukee, Wi.
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