Active Learning

I was browsing through Alfie Kohn’s article about Progressive Education and revisited the concept of Active Learning vs. Memorization. Read this conversation that he cited in his article. Check out the highlighted last paragraph.

“A friend of mine, who is a teacher-educator, had a daughter in fifth grade at the time of this story. She came home, he wrote me, with a worksheet on simple machines—ball bearings, inclined planes, pulleys, that sort of thing. As he came home from work, she said, “Dad, test me, test me!”

“Well,” my friend said, “Why don’t you just tell me what you’ve been learning about?”

“OK, but first ask me what these things are!”

“OK, if you insist. What is a ball bearing?”

“OK, easy dad! A ball bearing is blah blah blah.” A verbatim repetition of the definition she had learned from the teacher.

My friend said, “But Rachel, what is a ball bearing?”

“I told you, Dad. A ball bearing is a blah blah blah blah.”

To make a long story short, he continues, “I turned over the ottoman, which is on wheels, and showed her the ball bearings, and her eyes got wide.

“‘Cooool! That’s what a ball bearing is? How does it work? Can we take apart the ottoman? Oh, I get it. Why didn’t Mrs. Lambert just tell us this is what it was? Can you buy these at the store? Where do they sell these things anyway? Hey, wanna help me make something that rotates? Hey, cool, watch what happens if I hold one of these things and try to spin this thing. What would happen to this thing if the balls were really big? Would the wheels go faster?’”

A progressive school is not about memorizing the definition of ball bearings, or the date at which an event happened in history, or the difference between a simile and a metaphor. That’s not to say that these topics aren’t covered. It’s to say that questions that kids have drive the education.“

Scouting for a School Series (SSS): Choosing a School for the Wrong Reasons

When I look at the votes in our poll recently, I noticed that a lot of our readers are parents. Well, parents, this may be a difficult pill to swallow.. but a healthy pill, nonetheless. This may help you in choosing a school for your child or help you in the school where you are currently in.

Alfie Kohn, a speaker advocating progressive education, talks about non-progressive parents existing in progressive schools. I want to give this guy a standing ovation with this paragraph alone..

“The problem with almost any of these criteria for sending kids to a school is that you end up with parents who are impressed by the wrong things. I was in a classroom recently at a progressive school where, during a parents’ potluck breakfast, the Moms and Dads were glowing over the fact that their kids could spell “Australopithecus” or knew some obscure fact that the parents themselves didn’t know. “Isn’t that a wonderful education?” Of course, that’s not necessarily very impressive at all. But if we haven’t made a good match and helped to educate parents, as well as allowing them to educate us about what’s good for kids, you end up with parents who are worried about the very best features and who start to exert pressure, especially as the kids get older, for a more traditional kind of education because they didn’t come to the school for the right reasons in the first place.”

Parents, you may be asking what the right reasons are.. well, that’s what the blog is for.. to help you find out.. However, I do know this for sure. Don’t seek a progressive school having traditional expectations. It doesn’t add up.

My advise to school teachers and administrators is to prioritize your parent orientation. Encourage your parents to attend. In our school, we started to have intimate parent interviews prior to enrollment to ask the reason they chose the school and their expectations from it. It helps in preventing traditional expectations in the future. We learned this from experience