Making Real Room for Student Voice

Last weekend, Mark Silberberg, Middle School Principal, emailed me and other administrators here at LREI the following article:

“Our” Curriculum vs. “Their” Curriculum by Sam Levin

When people talk about student voice, they’re talking about feedback sessions and letting students be part of hiring committees. When they say, “Let’s give students a voice,” they mean, “let’s give them a seat at school board meetings.” That’s not what they need. They need a lot more. We need to give them a pen and a microphone and a hammer and a shovel and a chalkboard. We need to give them a classroom and an audience and blank sheet that says “curriculum” at the top. We need to give them a budget and a building. Kids are disengaged. They aren’t learning, and a lot of what they are learning is no longer relevant to the 21st  Century. Fortunately that’s becoming more kosher to say. It’s no longer radical; people are starting to see the problems. But unfortunately, a lot of the proposed solutions aren’t radical enough. They’re superficial. People talk about giving students a voice. A seat at the table. If we’re going to solve these problems, we’re going to need more than that. We want kids to be engaged in learning, to be excited to show up and happy about school? Give them real agency in their own education. We want kids to be learning, to be passionate about their work? Let them learn things that have real meaning to them. Make them the authors of their curriculum. 

Commenting on the article, educational thought leader Will Richardson added:

I’ve been arguing more and more of late that “curriculum” is a major if not the major problem in schools right now. And it’s not just that our current curriculum is in many ways outdated, irrelevant, and bloated. (I was talking to a teacher at an international IB school last week who described in depressed tones that much of his new curriculum could be summed up by one word: “more.”)

The institutional curriculum almost necessarily denies students agency over their own learning. And this is especially damaging when most kids now have the ability to create a personal curriculum around the things they truly care about learning out of the abundance of information, people, and tools they now have access to. Nothing especially new here, but worth saying again.

But creating (not giving) agency for students to build their own curriculum changes the whole game. It requires equity in tools and access. It requires trust. It requires a whole different narrative in terms of what exactly it is that we’re preparing students to be able to do. It requires being ok with not reading Shakespaere, or not speaking French, or not knowing (or caring) what a polynomial is.

And a lot more. But why wouldn’t we work toward giving kids “a classroom and an audience and a blank sheet that says “curriculum” at the top?” What are we scared of?

I love this article, and I have been sharing it with anyone and everyone.  Not only does it speak to an important consideration for the future of education, but also to what we attempt to do here at the high school with our students. From honors projects, where students design and implement their own curriculum based on a specific passion with the help of a faculty mentor, to senior project, which is really a “passion project” seniors design and implement for their last several weeks of high school, we have examples of students designing their curriculum. When students have choice, they challenge themselves (“challenge with choice” as Assistant Principal Micah Dov Gottlieb puts it), and they are more engaged in their learning when they choose what they want to study!

At the same time, we can do more to support a student’s vision of relevant learning. This year, we are surveying students before determining which electives to offer for the 2014-2015 school year. We want to offer what they want to learn. We are in conversation with students about expanding honors projects into larger, self-designed and self-directed classes for year-long credit, such as the weather balloon project,  “Project Leo,” considered an additional science class for three of our junior class members. They have been working on the project for most of the school year, and they look forward to the balloon launch from a field in Ohio on May 10th. The weather ballon project is just one of many examples of students participating in expansive experiments, all student driven with faculty support.

I encourage you to sit down with your student(s) and have the conversation: write “curriculum” on the top of a piece of paper. Take it from there, and share the results with us here!

A Mindset for Family Conferences: How to Deliver Praise

Today and tomorrow parents and teachers are sitting together for spring conferences and having rich conversations about lower school students. April conferences can be celebratory. There is such a span of growth and so much work to consider from September to April: the stories and poems they’ve written, the math projects they’ve persevered through, the self-portraits they’ve created, the block buildings they’ve erected, the great thinking they’ve done, and the collaborations they’ve experienced.    
What to share with your child when you get home? The simple answer is share all of it. The meaning and importance of the home-school connection is reinforced for children when they hear about their parents and teacher getting together and talking. The trickier question is how to praise your child for their accomplishments and growth at school in ways that build confidence and genuine self-esteem rather than inadvertently undermining it. We’ve all heard the warning against over-praising to avoid raising “praise junkies,” but then how to go about it instead? I recommend praising, highlighting, noticing, and talking about the following: effort, persistence, hard work, and making mistakes and learning from them. There will be plenty of examples from your parent-teacher conference, but if you take this advice to heart, you can apply it in ordinary daily opportunities as well.
Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck has conducted extensive behavioral research that shows that “when we praise children for their intelligence, we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.” She counsels parents and teachers to help students focus on how hard they’ve worked rather than on how smart they are. She illustrates how this encourages students to work more tenaciously, take risks, and achieve more. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” Dweck explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.” One piece of practical advice Dweck offers is for parents to regularly share mistakes they’ve made and how they learned from them. She’d like to see a world in which your family’s typical dinner table conversation routine on Friday night is to ask each other, “What mistakes did you make this week? Let’s celebrate those!”
To read more about Dweck’s research, compelling experiments, and advice for parents, check out her terrific book Mindset, or read this not-so-new but very good article about it.   Meanwhile, remember to tell your child how apparent their hard work and effort was to you in all the projects and anecdotes their teachers shared at conference. And if you’re really brave, even consider telling your child how much you enjoyed seeing all the wonderful mistakes in their work!

Be the Change

Sometimes the best way to start a story is at the end.  While yesterday’s Middle School Social Justice Teach-In was a celebration and affirmation of the committed work that has engaged our eighth graders for the past six months, our closing assembly provided us with an opportunity to reconnect with former eighth graders who continue to be deeply engaged in social justice work in the high school. Continue reading Be the Change

The “discovery of the connection of things”

As the philosopher and LREI supporter John Dewey wrote in Democracy and Education in 1916:

To “learn from experience” is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence. Under such conditions, doing becomes a trying; an experiment with the world to find out what it is like; the undergoing becomes instruction, [a] discovery of the connection of things.
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This “discovery of the connection of things” was at the center of an experience shared directly by a group of our eighth grade class and indirectly by the grade as a whole. Continue reading The “discovery of the connection of things”

How to Talk With Children About Their Art

artWhen your child brings home an artwork and says, “Look what I made today.”, what might you say? It is helpful to the growth of your child to validate and appreciate their artwork without using value judgments. By describing the elements of the work and listening to what your child is saying, you are supporting their unique expression and helping your child grow in self-confidence in his/her visual response to the world. Continue reading How to Talk With Children About Their Art

What happens when you don’t call a snow day

“Phil, when do you think it will melt?”
“How long do you think it will take?”
“We are going to protect the ice from the light!”
“We are going to get some new ice and try again!

These were questions and ideas that I heard from one Fours class when I visited their room over the span of a couple of days as they experimented with large chunks of ice found on the roof during their daily visits outside during this cold, cold winter. Continue reading What happens when you don’t call a snow day

Spatial Thinking and Imagination

Albert Einstein imagined himself chasing a beam of light and that helped him develop the theory of relativity. Nikola Tesla imagined his inventions in his mind’s eye and problem-solved some of the steps before he even began building. The two great inventors made singular use of their imaginations coupled with a talent for spatial thinking. I thought of that this week while watching kindergartners joyfully and imaginatively building with blocks. Continue reading Spatial Thinking and Imagination

Focusing on the Math Big Picture

While Curriculum Night is an opportunity to look at the big picture, it is also an opportunity to balance these ideas and the school’s approach to learning against ones own educational experience. This can often be complicated work as the memories and habits connected with how you experienced school may have been very different. One area in which this tension often occurs is with our approach to mathematics and the development of mathematical thinkers. I include below some “big picture” thoughts on math instruction at LREI and its connection to each student’s development as a learner. Continue reading Focusing on the Math Big Picture

Tools of the Trade

At the start of the school year, each seventh grader received an iPad 2 to use over the course of the year. Students are using the iPads throughout the day in their classes and are bringing them home to continue and extend their work. We believe that the small scale tablet form of the iPad offers a wealth of ways for us to enrich the already exciting and demanding seventh grade program. Continue reading Tools of the Trade

The Silence and Solitude of Community

I cannot think of a time in recent middle school history when I have been more impressed with our students. It is no small request to ask 160+ middle schoolers to sit on the floor in silence. They did this with commitment and an understanding of the significance of the moment. Students and teachers who were moved to speak did so in ways that told stories of personal experiences, raised questions about the nature of human understanding and action, and communicated simple and complex fears, hopes and dreams. These moments together confirmed the importance of our human community. Continue reading The Silence and Solitude of Community