(cross posted from PHSprincipalBlog)
"In a world where information was scarce, schools operated as kind of a repository of that precious resource. But now information is abundant. A school doesn’t have to harvest and distribute this scarce resource. It has to serve some other kind of function." -Daniel Pink
We must define those new functions! What thoughts do you have?
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High schools definitely need to serve some other type of function. When I graduated from PHS almost ten years ago, I left with the skills necessary to be successful in college. I attribute much of this success to classes that forced me to seek out information on my own. The projects and assignments that I remember now are the ones that challenged me to think for myself and produce some sort of product.
I was lucky enough to have Mrs. Wegner as a teacher during my junior year and senior year. I remember so much from her class because a lot of our assignments were either project-based or required intense critical thinking – we made poetry portfolios, wrote our own short stories and submitted them to a writing contest, and gave speeches that required us to conduct our own research and use technology.
As a teacher, I hope that I can engage my students in this way and challenge them to think for themselves. In order to do this, we need to look at what the future could bring. While students need to understand the content of any given course, they also need to be able to evaluate and synthesize information on their own. What does this mean? I think it means that schools need to give students the power to do this.
My English III students recently completed a project in which they were asked to design the perfect high school. One group decided that books would simply not do. It’s not that they didn’t value reading – they just looked at reading in a different way. They wanted each student to have a laptop so that he/she could have access to online texts, search engines, and so forth.
Some of my students want to bring iPods and handheld devices to school. Now, of course, this could pose some serious problems. Will the students “pass” notes electronically? Will the students cheat? Yes, that is possible, but it is also something we deal with now in a different format. Could this also prove to be valuable, though? Yes. If students have questions or want more information about a subject, they can look it up in seconds (on their own), read the information, evaluate it, and then make sense of it.
Maybe I’m crazy, but I say bring on the iPods, laptops, ebooks, and whatever else is out there that I don’t even know about yet. There are some logistical and financial issues to deal with, of course, but I’d love to see how this might impact the way our students view knowledge and learning.
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