Education reform
Education Reform: The Way Forward DRAFT Mark Janssen, PhD, HD, rev.20150914
This document is aimed at the teacher and the school administrator who wants to improve her/his acumen in the quest of developing an educated society.
The standard k-12 educational track puts excess pressure on conformance (the “factory model”) and not enough attention on developing the individual. This is a failure of pedagogy, not of funding. As civilization benefits from an educated society, so do educators benefit from well-rounded, independent individuals. If, on the other hand, you find yourself at a personal crisis and at a loss on how to develop further, then find the document On Being an Academic.
The issue of making education is broken down to four issues:
- Curriculum: best subjects, teaching materials.
- Environment: class environment, establishment of order, setting.
- Assessment: grading, progression with age.
- Scheduling: course of education, best schedule of daily activities.
Debate them all you want, then return to these core subjects: reading, writing, arithmetic, and geometry. These four subjects exercise the two major cognitive axiis: analytical<->creative and logical<->spatial, respectively. They should have a strong foundation in these basic skills which will allow them to develop themselves. Without these, you don’t have a sound, capable individual. Creative writing can be encouraged and use of calculator.
The only thing to add here is drawing and rhythm, supporting the teaching of colors and tone, respectively. These should be included in special terms to occur mid-year (see section on Scheduling).
Reading: starting with learning about the nature of language (it allows us to learn from each other, compared to dogs, who communicate but don’t really learn from each other), that there are other languages besides English (“Como esta bien?” would ask How are you?), the alphabet (from which all words are made by combinations) and how letters relate to sound, words (to label things or actions in the world), Upper and lower case (so as to set-off significance), sentences (to express a thought, an idea, or your feelings), and stories which give a complete telling of something. Develops comprehension/analysis, imagination-building, and cultural narratives.
Writing: to remember things, to tell something to someone without being there, to express yourself by telling a story like you might draw a picture (but in words), or just to inform someone of your name or details. Develops: Legibility, Literature, Documenting the world.
Arithmetic: to count things, to add things abstractly without needing physical/concrete things (like your fingers), to estimate sizes of things without having to count them, to estimate the future to save time/effort, to measure. Develops: exactitude and precision, engineering.
Geometry: lines, vertices, shapes, using nodes and lines to express relationship (city A connects to city B, arm connects to your torso) called a graph, how you can branch from one thing to many things to organize them (tree diagrams), folding things, knots, blocks, special shapes (Platonic solids). Develops: problem-solving ability for your imagination in the world, tool-making, extending tools.
These establish the baseline for independent learning. After this the focus should be self-directed study with continual checking in and interaction, curating a library for exposure to many ideas and feed the imagination and understanding, open spaces/laboratories with the tools allowing free-form exploration as well as greater specialization.
School environment should have: partitions for attention focus, ergonomics to foster inner calm, and the best materials for the teaching tasks. Importantly, in our current state of society, it should also have aesthetic distraction when student attention exceeds teacher’s pace or otherwise occupied by extra-classroom events unnoticed or unaddressed beforehand by the teacher.
Partitions: Distinct classroom spaces for separation of activity: learning, play, rest. Ergonomics: Consider representing and balancing the five elements of Taoist alchemy: water, stone, wood, fire, and air. This means reducing visual clutter and honing what decorations you use. Wood desks, rather than cold composites. Paper and instruments which the right qualities. Best Materials: Tools: crayons, colored pencils, picture books, writing pads, blocks, legos, strawbees, rope, puzzles (for home exercises), books. These should be provided by the school, both to offer uniformity of teaching material (equals less distraction) and so as not to exclude poorer students from excelling. Aesthetic Distraction: windows to trees outside, natural, non-occupied environs, pet the class cat, etc.
That should be exhaustive, though the details have to be mastered, because the first three are in tension with each other (too many materials out and you don’t isolate attention focus), which is why you have the fourth.
There are two main categories of assessment: pre-performance and post-performance. Everyone in the West is familiar with post-performance: assessing the student after a test, but pre-performance assessment is equally important and allows the best observation of a student’s mental environment in ways that standardized testing can never achieve as such testing is always limited in scope.
Pre-performance testing takes a form like this: “A fork appears in the road, of which you can only choose one [….various developed narratives or choices placed in front of the student], which do you choose?”
You must learn to read the non-verbal signals that can communicate a tremendous amount of knowledge to you as one who is developing another human being. In so doing, you can let these choices guide your goals for the student.
The idea here is not to rank students, but to evaluate based on pre-established, well-developed criteria, independent of a particular teacher. Students having trouble performing need to be addressed before trouble amplifies towards end of term.
Criteria should be established for establishing mastery in the four disciplines. Absent such mastery the student will be underprivileged. Student ability should not differ markedly, the issue is mastery of psychology -- that means the teacher has to exert the effort to master the student. The “special-needs” category is a separate issue to be addressed at other levels, not by the school district.
The main term-end grading categories, should be Pass, Fail, Exemplary. “Pass” should be meeting or exceeding 50% of highest performance criteria for each category or task, not for allowing half of exercises to have failed. However, during the term, the teacher may find it useful to use the A-E grades to keep track of their relationship to the student. “Exemplary” should be for when the student exceeds prior standard and sets a new standard for the school, given his/her grade. Upon which time, the example should be integrated into next year`s curriculum. “Fail” is for when student-teacher working-relations are failing and should be taken up by school administrator before term-end, not passed up to the next grade without prior communication to next grade`s teachers. Teaching tricks might be available to prevent such. RE-WRITE Again, this is the least important of you 4 issues
Beyond the conventional assessment techniques of grading, there is another technique which can provide equally good information about students and has been left completely unused: putting equally good and valid choices in front of them, and see which choice they make.
This can be especially important, for later-stage development (past core), where the goal is to develop the individual in a way that has nothing to do with grading them in relation to anyone else. This also offers an opportunity for teachers to learn by the allowance of student creativity. This gives the opportunity to assess the student when faced with ambiguous choices -- in one glance offering high-information about the student`s mental environment.
At it`s most basic, this category would include the full lifecycle of infant to adult learning. In practice, with the traditional organization of society (parents and employment on either end), this should be restricted starting from post-language acquisition and ending at independence from parents: about 3 to 16-18 years old. I’ve kept the traditional designators of kindergarten, first grade, second grade, etc. for the sake of the reader. I would partition sections into kindergarten, core learning (I-VI), and trades (VII-XII).
Schedule, normally a limiter of freedom, becomes necessary only because of the societal arrangement and practical limitation (due to funds) of having 1 teacher for many students, otherwise it is not necessarily a component of education. For example, there are two scenarios where scheduling is not an issue: 1:1 individual teaching, and open, many:many classrooms where everyone is helping each other. As students get older, and their educational needs diversify, this latter will be used to address economic limitation by using open, group classrooms.
Four levels of schedules to manage: daily, monthly, yearly, and the full range of approximately 12 years education. In each interval should start with an orientation (what you attempt to accomplish, what tools will be available), include an intermission in the middle, and a clear finale at the end.
Daily: Stretch, recap of prior session, intermission: recess/break, finale: tangible record in possession of student Monthly: intermission: J-term Yearly: intermission: summer: swimming/sports; something to bring to next year’s beginning? Full Term: intermission: 6-7th grade boundary: travel or 2nd language acquisition; immersive language can be fun, w/o need for assessment phase, sports development; eschew the sit-down classroom in the final term of the 6th grade, and let them watch the various open sections. For the beginning of seventh, you can let them have access in the first week, and see who shows up. Let regular sessions begin a week late.
For each grade, one physical/outdoor and one creative recess each day. The purpose for breaks is perceptual and kinesthetic novelty (also known as “taking a break”), exercising personal choice (“ego-development”), liberating the mental/physical selves ("freeform activity"), and cross-fertilization of minds through socialization. Focus on one or the other for the third point, not both. Example for kindergarten: go bug hunting, it takes them outdoors and develops their perceptual faculties. Carefully-chosen entertaining video programs can be effective (exercising novelty and imaginative/perceptual freedom). If the videos are curriculum-related, don't put it in the break period, integrate it into the classroom.
Basic schedule deals with daily orientation, absorptive instruction, breaks, outward expression: writing & geometry. This order hopefully allows the internalizing of co
Both of these will be important in the second half of education. , like a wood-shop for example where senior school members can teach the younger..
Pre-school development should start with maximizing freedom, access to many different options and activities (crayons, building blocks, card games, teaching areas, reading areas, etc). Attention thereafter is how these energies into the elementary teaching program.
restricting in this document from age of language acquisition to independence,
Focus on welcome, quick review of learning from prior day, what will be discussed today and how that will help you in your life.
In closing, these materials and instructions were built under such various auspices and pressures such as and related to the fulfillment of our (shared) Judeo-Christian era heralding a post-growth, Messianic Age and, in any case, are offered in kind, gratis.
DRAFT
Prior revision:
Separate education into three phases:
Kindergarten: becoming familiar and comfortable with the school environment (who’s who, what is where), sensory-motor development, how to take care of your body, how to take care of your mind and be attentive to the world around you, socializing techniques (formally: "negotiation"), conflict management.
Grades 1–6: Orientation at grade 1 around full school grounds (what they’re there for, where they’re heading). Then, focus on reading, writing, arithmetic, and geometry. Nothing much beyond this. The axiis developed here are analytical<-->creative, and logical<-->spatial, respectively.
Each grade can have special classroom “environments”. One grade, for example, could include elaborate hamster tunnels where children learn to care for the small creatures, learning about reproduction, body functions. Another grade could be growing herbs or flowers in the window. The idea is to give uncontroversial and healthy supplementation that parents might not be giving at home to teach appreciation of their body and the Earth on which they’ll always depend.
A special one-month section each year for special instruction and creative relief: visiting places around the town, basic health, hiking trips, outdoor survival, maps and geography, self-defense. These one-month special terms will also give teachers a break.
Grading: eliminate the 70% marker and go for 50% (Pass/Fail). Students should not fail for falling below 70% (a source of a lot of unhealthy judgment). Have a special merit for above 90% (“A”) to offer something for students to strive (not struggle) for. Special, private endorsements can be added by teachers to student portfolio. Concerns should be raised directly to parents.
Grades 7–12: Eliminate classrooms and focus on self-directed study and mentoring. Develop critical thinking, research and inquiry, and keeping a notebook or portfolio. Have a large library, well-curated by a full-time librarian and mentor. Workshop spaces where they can experiment with ideas gained from this study, forming a positive feedback loops of knowledge -> experience -> understanding -> more knowledge. These spaces would be staffed full-time with experts in the various domains to assist and guide various creative and industrious activities: metal/wood shop, science lab, greenhouse, art center, music center, and computer shops. The idea is to be the professional guide, not the dictator. Teachers should meet with individual students on a daily basis and talk about concerns/ideas and establish plans. Mentors (assistant volunteers) from the community with the relevant expertise can oversee the shops, giving meaningful work for retirees (for example) while distributing some of the load so teachers can focus on life paths for the students and improving trouble spots. A curriculum plan offering 6-years of increasing breadth and/or depth for each area should be developed if there are students with such focussed interest. The National Education Association should collect these in a common database or web site so that educators can continue to hone best practices and cross-fertilize each other. Different ages can teach each other and co-mingle in shops rather than segregating ages, making it easier for teachers 'and students. Much more can be accomplished by integration for both the students and the teachers. Be on the lookout for good in-class teachers to channel towards future generations. No preset time periods necessary, students can eat their sack lunch at a common area whenever they want. Teachers can establish “down time” and “office hours”. Library and shops should stay open from 8–5, perhaps until 10 if community members help supervise and parents get involved. This would facilitate community involvement and feed back continual improvements to the public school. A slot for sports, I suppose would be necessary too somewhere (see below).
This freedom of self-guidance gets rid of student-teacher rebellion as I look at history...rebellion of youth is a normal exercise. Generally this has been positive, but in instances it has had catastrophic consequences. The difference is the ability to deal w/ rebellion/conflict. Compromise is crucial. This leads to a positive outcome. Those who are unwilling to compromise or at least listen to other points of view either die very unhappy or bring about physical torment or at its worst - war. issues and students could possibly select the year they wish to graduate. If some students wanted to be done after grade 7, they could do so, if they’ve developed a portfolio which the school deems sufficiently responsible to graduate. Students who have left can come back up to the age of 18 unless they’re willing to be an assistant. That is, adults can come back to school and build their portfolio, utilizing the public system as long as they’re willing to give assistance elsewhere.
Special one-month terms during the 7–12 phase should include things like responsible engagement with their government of the People, guided outings for living on Earth, student presentations, 1-month trial job positions at various local industries for job experience; investigating and preparing for college admissions, basic independent living (cooking, cleaning, mending), working with the law and contracts (renting apartments, for example), and so forth. Integrating with 4-H somewhere would be desirable. These 1-month break ideas should be also be published on a website so that educators across the world can compare ideas and successes, refining the education process and curriculum for everyone.
While positions in the 7–12 shops could be filled by quasi-volunteer experts in the community, the librarian should be a hired professional. Further, a hired professional or superintendent for managing and administering the school should be hired. With the right such administrator, teachers should feel comfortable reporting to such.
Rather than grading here in this last phase, help the student to develop a portfolio — a resume that they can show to get immediate work or apply for college. No more bullshit competitiveness — leave it for soccer tournaments where they can develop healthy competition. Instead, portfolios can list different levels of achievements (these achievements should be refined: “proficient in the use of a woodshop”, “knows how use glass lab equipment”, etc.)
Sports: Get rid of expensive American football we’ve talked about this. Your solution is to “get rid of” things that run contrary to your person experience/beliefs. Are changes needed? YES! But to “get rid of” is not an option. Soccer develops muscle and bones, the cardiovascular system, mind-body coordination, working as a team, gender equivalence, strategy, leadership. Leaders here can go into business management. Soccer requires very little but a ball and is played practically everywhere in the world. The idea here is not to win against the town next door, but to develop the traits mentioned above to create a well-rounded, healthy and capable individual. For winter sports, something indoors, perhaps basketball or something creative. I applaud you for including the development of the physical body.
As a contrast and balance to the regimen of sports, the music group and arts group can form a creative, ad hoc formation of how the class wishes to define itself. Let the class decide as a whole each year and together. Different towns can show off to each other their best students and ensembles at year-end. By graduation, the class can decide what their legacy should be.
This changes the landscape for higher education. Following the above prescription will give graduates a much clearer direction in life and a portfolio that they can market right away. Colleges should partition themselves into two types: those which aim towards the abstract (Harvard), and those which go towards specialization (MIT). Additionally, colleges should focus on life-long learning, since the portfolio is something people can continue to develop their whole life and could be used to re-enter the academy at any time. Additionally, these portfolios can act as a guide or inspiration to future students when they retire should they decide to assist the education effort and become mentors.
Publicly-funded education should probably stop after grade 12, excepting where state leaders are developing specific trades for particular needs in statecraft, industry, or the arts. There the state can subsidize student higher education or, better yet, offer scholarships sponsored by individuals from the community.
In closing, the ultimate goal of education should not be to train individuals to enter the workforce but to create a vibrant and healthy society of independent thinkers and responsible citizens. This statement leads me to believe both cannot exist. I disagree if that is your hypothesis.
Credit to Evergreen University (Olympia, WA) for pioneering idea of student portfolios. Dan Keene (Tacoma, WA) for appreciation of soccer. Various hippies, Montessori education, Waldorf schools for explorations of education reform and Robin Stevens, under-recognized supercoach of Gothenburg, Nebraska. WOW … now I do consider myself special!! Thanks...I think? Note: I am a product of public education. This positive experience is my bias.
Note: Your efforts are to be commended. Your thoughtfulness provokes me to think! You would make a very good teacher.