Ownership
Hey.
We should all be well into if not finished with the book. Take ownership of something that struck you and lead a discussion. Let's make this happen.
We should all be well into if not finished with the book. Take ownership of something that struck you and lead a discussion. Let's make this happen.
After reading the introduction, I was fighting some resentment about what seemed an unsubstantiated dig at college, liberal arts, and advanced degrees. It took me all of Part I to get past that, but I did come to appreciate the author's viewpoint. Here's how:
ReplyDeleteFirst, the apprenticeship model is something that is well-aligned to what we do at CRB. In a 2014 version of "what good teaching looks like at CRB", we focused on apprenticeship, inquiry, and purpose. Tony Wagner writes about the old days when students "learned by studying under the tutelage of a master. They learned by doing. They remained in apprentice mode until achieving mastery" (21). This is similar to Ted Sizer's point that "Apprenticeship literally makes students become workers, but with implications for pedagogy, where coaching is the key pedagogical act." Since the experience of CRB asks students to integrate work and academics, we seem well-positioned to help students learn as apprentices working side by side their teachers to create something together.
A second point struck me in a similar vein. Wagner urges us to "help kids grow their passions into competencies" (48). We are asked to help students get better at the very things they're most interested in and to create the possibility of actually adding value to a company that is tied to their own passion. I find this a beautiful idea that, like apprenticeship, aligns nicely with what we're already trying to do and could keep doing better and better.
Those are my thoughts so far!
One of the first books on education that made me sit up and re-examine my role as a teacher was Daniel Willingham's Why Students Don't Like School. His central claim is that schools are not designed to teach in the way the brain is designed to learn. Since reading that book ten years ago, developing a curriculum and pedagogical approach that tap into the brain's natural impulse to curiosity has been my passion. In many ways, the critiques and solutions proposed by Wagner and Dintersmith compliment what cognitive science has discovered; where they exceed Willingham is by connecting the misaligned goals of schools with real economic and moral stakes for the students and our society in general.
ReplyDeleteThe "Seven Survival Skills" that Tony describes on pages 47 and 48 seem to me a good place to start. If these were the end points from which teachers backwards planned, we would necessarily have to rethink how a classroom functions. In our particular situation, we even have a leg up on other schools through CWSP. While many other schools profiled in the book achieve great things by partnering with community organizations, we already have that built into our school, and it could provide the jumping off point for our students to explore these skills beyond the classroom and begin to make connections between their experience in school and real world demands.