For today's post, I am going to continue to follow Susan Patrick's predictions from her 12/31/15 iNACOL post about how education will continue to evolve and change in 2016. Her third prediction is student-centered environments.
Student-centered learning environments already exist, but they don't usually exist in the confines of a brick and mortar building, surrounded by teachers, administrators and paraprofessionals. In my mind, I picture student-centered environments that look similar to a children's museum, where exploration is the best way to learn. At the nearest children's museum, children are greeted by a turtle living in an aquarium, then there are different rooms for them to explore and the adults, or as they call them, playologists are there to guide and foster their creativity. On one side, one finds a grocery store, a pizzeria, a music room, an art room, and a dramatic play area. On the other side, one finds a hospital, a post office, a bank, an aerospace room, and a motion room. Continuing upstairs, one will find a toddler play area with a house, slides, and pretend garden, a large tinker-toy room connected to a model train area and completed with a Lego room.
When we visit the children's museum, you can be sure that we will be visiting each and every one of the areas, but where we hang out the most is very personal to each child. For my usually timid three year old, he loves the gigantic slide and will go down it multiple times. (By the fourth time, I'm done counting). He's in love with the experience of riding the slide, but he's also interested in driving the ambulance at the hospital and playing with the trains. However, what he loves the most right now is going down the huge slide. For my daughter, who is five, there's not a specific spot where she will gravitate. She likes to flutter around like a butterfly and try everything. Typically, she's been through three or four rooms before my son is ready to move on from the grocery store or the ambulance. This type of infrastructure makes it a unique learning environment for each of my children.
Granted my children are three and five and their jobs are to experience the world and try out things, but I imagine a K-12 system where they're given a similar experience to help them learn about the world. What if schools no longer looked like an early 1900's schoolhouse? What if they looked more like a children's museum and as they grew their experiences grew with them? What if the teacher was no longer the "sage on the stage" most of the time and students really did have voice and choice in how, what, and when they learn?
The naysayers will say it's too expensive, "You can't build a school to model a museum!" They will say "that's not the way it was when I was in school." They will say "they need to learn the three r's." With community partnerships and systemic changes as Patrick suggests will happen in her second prediction, yes we can! We can change schools to meet the personalized learning needs of each and every student and we can give them time to let their brains re-charge by using some exploration time to assist in their learning the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic at the same time.
No comments:
Post a Comment