Changing How We Learn
We no longer need drones willing to do the mind numbing work on assembly lines, or soldiers who take orders without question. Now the military needs intelligent people capable of making creative decisions in unusual conditions instead of cannon fodder. Our industry needs creative individuals so we can excel in innovation. The nation's needs have changed, and so must it's education system.
Despite having educational reform about every ten years, education hasn't changed much. We still have teachers standing in front of bored students, trying to cram their empty heads full of knowledge. This cookie cutter, one size fits all, competitive learning environment tries to fit round pegs in square holes. This authoritarian system required harsh discipline to force students to do what they didn't want to do.
With teachers overworked and classrooms too crowded, the typical classroom where the teacher lectures to the students is dysfunctional. The class would have to be geared to the lowest common denominator, yet it would still go over the heads of some, while the bright students would be bored. Both extremes would tune out the lectures and would divert themselves with class room disruptions which would hamper everyone.
People learn in different ways. Some learn better by listening, others by seeing and many by doing hands on activities. Everyone has different interests, attention spans, and learning abilities. Smaller classes allow teachers to individualize instruction and to give special attention for different needs, but the trend is for larger classes.
A better solution would be utilizing the advanced students to teach or tutor those who are having problems. Research indicates that kids learn more from other kids. The real key to classroom discipline is to keep everyone busy doing something that is challenging and enjoyable to them. Student tutoring others would help and might even result in future teachers.
A cooperative learning environment would teach kids the value of their fellow students, and the advanced students could help the slower ones. In the existing competitive system other students are branded either rivals or losers and often treated as such.
Imagine a learning environment in which learning assignments and problems are assigned to teams of 3-4 kids. Each team would consist of high and low performing students, and they would all share the same grades which would be determined by averaging the test grades of those in the team, so it would benefit the higher performing students to help the lower performing students to learn.
When I taught, I ran a chess club. The best person in chess in the school was also a Title 1 student with learning disabilities. People think in different ways and some kids excel in speaking while others excel in writing, or logic, or math or problem solving. A team approach would allow hidden skills to be discovered and flourish. Cooperation would allow everyone to feel that they were valuable members of a community and would encourage empathy, so bullying would decrease.
Those who don't do well in a competitive system don't enjoy feeling like losers and pick on others to make them feel more important. 20% of students are bullied. More than 160,000 children miss school every day, due to fear of attack or intimidation by other students. Suicide is the third greatest cause of death in teenagers. 40% of them were bullied. Two thirds of school shootings were conducted by victims of bullying. They are the losers.
In our competitive system we dote on the winners but the losers are often tossed away and consigned to prisons. Switching our school systems to a cooperative instead of a competitive system will decrease crime and help our young be valuable members of society.
Research also indicates that "Hands On" activities that demonstrate principles are much more effective than lectures. Teachers should not be the font of all knowledge. They should be the facilitators of learning, teaching kids to teach themselves. In a cooperative system the job of the teacher would be to assign teams goals and problems that would challenge them and also which would force them to utilize higher levels of learning.
Blooms Taxonomy of Learning indicates that there are three different ways (Domains) to learn. They are Cognitive: mental skills (Knowledge), Affective: growth in feelings or emotional areas (Attitude), and Psychomotor: manual or physical skills (Skills).
The Cognitive skills are what we generally think of when we think of education. Cognitive Skills are broken down to 6 different skills:
1 Knowledge: Remembering - Recall data or information.
2. Comprehension: Understanding - Understand the meaning, translation, interpolation, and interpretation of instructions and problems. State a problem in one's own words.
3. Application: Applying - Use a concept in a new situation or unprompted use of an abstraction. Applies what was learned in the classroom into novel situations in the work place.
4. Analysis: Separates material or concepts into component parts so that its organizational structure may be understood. Distinguishes between facts and inferences.
5. Evaluation: Make judgments about the value of ideas or materials.
6. Synthesis: Creating - Builds a structure or pattern from diverse elements. Put parts together to form a whole, with emphasis on creating a new meaning or structure.
Memorization or knowledge is the most basic level of learning. This is important because it is the foundation upon which the higher levels of learning are built. Most traditional schools and tests concentrate on learning and testing knowledge. Some people think that the knowledge base is the be all and end all of education.
Restricting education to the lowest learning order is like having a high powered Ferrari and keeping it in first gear.
Most teachers tell kids which facts to remember, and they test how well they remember those facts with multiple choice tests. This is the simplest and easiest way to teach.
No Child Left Behind program and the Race to the Top program, are heavily reliant on tests to determine accountability. But most of those tests just test memorization. Word problems in math are better at testing higher levels of learning like comprehension, application and Analysis, and essay questions can often test the higher levels like creativity. Most of the tests being used however just test the lowest levels and there are such harsh consequences to doing poorly that teachers often have to concentrate on teaching for the test. The higher levels of learning get left behind.
In a cooperative learning environment there should not be such pressure to perform within a set time period. You can't force creativity and the stress often shuts down the creative juices. Having the kids do essays or word problems, and giving credit for demonstrating the proper logical thought processes instead of just grading the answers, evaluates higher cognitive skills, but this takes more grading time and is more subjective so is not done very much.
Yes a good knowledge base is necessary as a foundation to build on. But we need to concentrate on developing the higher levels of learning. We need to shift those high powered Ferrari's through all of the six gears until they can reach their highest potential!
If we are to generate creative people who can think for themselves and be innovative, who can teach themselves throughout life, people who can lead the nation, and make it into an innovative powerhouse, then we need to change how we teach. We need to give students complex tasks in a cooperative atmosphere, using more hands on experiments, more technological programs that challenge the individuals, and whatever else is necessary to develop the higher levels of learning.
http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/bloo...