Nearly every school year, somewhere early on, I end up doing some sort of informal survey, or engaging in a broad conversation with my students about different ways of learning. The learning strategies I touch on mostly draw from Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences.
This year, just ankle-deep in our first unit of inquiry (an exploration of ways in which our own and other cultures enrich our lives) we became involved in an inquiry into ways of collecting results when posing questions to groups.
Students present their collaboratively-developed data collection tool for peer critique and re-design considerations. (Photo by Jamie Raskin)
Students flexed their prior knowledge by independently developing tools for collecting data. We shared and critiqued some of these tools, applied our new insights to the design of new data collection tools in small teams, then presented them, tested them, critiqued them and came up with a list of essential elements of a quality data collection tool. Students then individually applied their understanding of these essential elements to build their own super-tool for posing questions and collecting answers. I’ll go into more detail on that unit-integrated math inquiry in another post.
I mention it because the question I posed and developed a data-collection tool for was How do you think you learn best? I gave students the options of answering: by reading, by seeing, by listening, by doing or by another way. Not surprisingly, my students answers were about 75% by doing. This result is absolutely in keeping with the answers I receive every time I ask a class this question. It’s also the way I would personally answer it.
Certainly, one reason I ask the question is to collect and consider the learning preferences of my class, and another is to provoke their metacognition and self-awareness of learning styles. It also gives me some reference points for planning teacher-guided learning experiences and some common vocabulary for discussing their strategies for student-led inquiry.
By coincidence the video LEARN came back across my inbox this morning. It’s part of a trilogy of shorts created by a few guys who traveled the world a couple of years ago and composed these short global video reflections MOVE, EAT and LEARN. What I noted, re-watching it, was how nearly every learning experience the filmmakers share from their odyssey is one that is hands-on. Them and others constructing learning by doing.
LEARN from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.
Clearly, this overwhelming preference for learning by doing is not unique to the groups that have populated my classrooms. It is, I would suggest, global.
In my last post, I focused on different inspirations for designing time in a classroom. These decisions are, I feel, among the most important that a teacher makes. I promised that in my next post (which is now this one), I would begin to itemize my beliefs on the essential ingredients of a school day. Well here is something which must clearly be number one. A priority in my daily schedule has to be ample time for students to learn by doing. Hands-on, minds-on, hearts-on and senses-on doing.
In my next post, I’ll continue to grow this checklist of daily priorities.
The Essential Ingredients of a Quality Day of Learning:
- Ample time for hands-on, minds-on, hearts-on and senses-on doing.
Coming off the back of my research on the world of timetabling, I find this lingering question of what should be part of each and every day. I suppose when I ask this, I’m mostly asking about a school day, because those are the bulk of my days. More to the point, as a teacher in an elementary classroom, I design the framework of the day for my students. So this question is partially about what I would like to have as part of my days, and certainly also about what I think should be part of theirs.
I just went on a mini TED talk binge and watched three in a row.
First, Adora Svitak on What Adults Can Learn From Kids. My takeaways were many, but among them was the idea that our aspirations as teachers, as adults, should be to raise children who are way better than we are. No doubt. As she puts it, this is why we’re no longer in the dark ages. It’s an interesting point to make, when you consider resistance against developments in curriculum… The old “If it was good enough for me, it’s good enough for my kid” mentality. We don’t want coming generations to be as good as us. We need them to be better.
I followed up Adora’s amazing talk by watching Paul Nicklen telling tales of his explorations in the polar regions, and the real meaning of the recurring news-bite about the disappearance of polar ice. Listening to him describe his evolving relationship with a frightening, thousand-pound leopard seal, who spent four days trying to feed, nurture and protect him, and the plight of these ecosystems, was the perfect case study for Adora’s point about generational evolution being so critical.
Finally, Elif suggested I watch Neil Gershenfeld on the rise of FabLabs, and the evolution of the digital revolution. The thing which stuck with me in the end was how this phenomenon of tinkering, which I’ve written about before, was creating a next generation of ground-up innovation, much of the examples being the innovation of children. Kids working at scaled-down, budget variations of multi-million dollar MIT facilities who find ways of doing things that are then emulated back at MIT itself. This is a case study of generational evolution. And what’s more, the global potential reach of these laboratories defies the thought that some western, wealthy educational background is a prerequisite to notable innovation and success in high tech fields.
So, I’m back to the question… What should be part of a day in school?
I look at the many takeaways from these three videos and begin to get a feeling of what some ingredients might be. More on this in my next post…
180 days. 6 hours each. September to June.
That’s the way it was when I was growing up in Toronto. That’s the way it is for my students growing up in Yokohama.
Think your schedule sucks? What makes for a good timetable? Image by Guacamoliest from Flickr
Each year when we receive our weekly schedules at YIS, I stare at it dumbfounded. How the heck am I supposed to find effective ways of using five to twenty-five minute blocks of time in my classroom?
Last year I spent several hours sitting with my principal, trying to wiggle things about so that all three second grade classes could have the final period on Fridays together. It was such a complex, brain-numbing task that I asked him how this could be avoided in the future, and was introduced to the process by which our schedules are crafted.
Early in the year, November he said, we start compiling a list of requirements for the following year’s schedule. Things like “every class needs two 45 minute blocks of PE per week” or “teachers should have a minimum of 45 minutes of planning time per day”. When this list is finalized, these conditions are input to the application that generates the timetables across the school. If I were to have any influence over these things, I would have to submit my list of requested conditions for the following year, by the preceding November.
So I did. Last November, I approached my principal (a different one by this time), and explained how my earlier conversation had suggested that I should be bringing my thoughts to her now. She was great. She set up a submission form for all teachers to input their timetable wish-list a couple weeks later. My requests were pretty simple. They included minimum 30-minute classroom sessions, and a minimum and maximum number of teacher planning periods per day.
Because of my demonstrated interest in the makings of the timetable, I was invited to join a working group designed to explore the possibilities of its reinvention, across the school.
The invitation made me realize how little I know about what other schools out there are doing. What alternative models exist? I’ve started looking into it…
Apparently the existing September to June structure is based on agrarian roots. When kids needed to be around the farm to pitch in. This also accounts for the fall (aka harvest) break. See this article for more. As this is not so much the case for most schools (including mine) anymore, people have begun considering other ways.
One particularly popular and growing trend is year-round schooling. There are a few variations on this, but most seem to keep the basics, like an average of 180 days of school in place. The idea is that, however many terms you break the schedule up into, the holiday time is similarly equally divided. It could be something like four 45 day terms, with equal lengths of holiday in between them. The advocates of this structure celebrate it for diminishing the observed academic dip that can happen for students over a long summer holiday (though this dip, seems to be dominantly observed in lower-income households from this articles’s US-based research, as viewed in the chart above).
Block-Based Scheduling in action? From Ano Lobb on Flickr.
Another big point of discussion are the merits of block-based scheduling vs. the conventional 8-period day. Basically, this type of structure has students attending 4 periods per day, of somewhere near 90 minutes each. There are again, multiple variations on how to manage this, mostly in high school type settings. Two popular variations are where students either take only 4 courses at a time, over twice as many sessions through the year, or where students take 8 courses at the same time, but attend each one only every second day. Proponents of the block-scheduling make it’s case by pointing out how fewer transitions in the day mean fewer interruptions and thus, they conclude, more sustained learning time. The study I read, however, suggested that the qualitative data in terms of student learning was inconclusive.
Another point that surfaced in multiple places was the four-day school week. As it suggests, this variation has students in school for the same number of hours as during a normal week, but divided over four days. So, instead of 6 hours per day, it might be 7.5, with a three day weekend. The days themselves could be divided up any number of ways, but the hours would stay consistent. Advocates of this notion seem to push it for its economical advantages, transport and resource consumption take a nice dip. In another context, this argument might be compelling, but I’m interested in the ideals here for now.
I read quite a number of articles (see the list at the end of this post) but the majority of the discussion focused on one of the three subjects discussed above.
So, this week, in my second grade class we tried something different. As usual, we have a lot of big projects and inquiries presently on the go. When I looked at our schedule for Tuesday, I realized that with our usual PE session being cut to facilitate a high school sports day, my students would be in the class every minute of the day, and it was raining. I know my class well enough to know that this is a recipe for stir-crazy madness to creep in.
So, in writing up the day’s schedule on the board, I sketched in a morning planning meeting first thing, a goal reflection period at the end, and sprinkled a whole lot of question marks in between.
I also drew up a short list of my goals for the day, including things like “discuss creative options for sharing at our Species Education Day next week” and “work with a friend to help them assess their 3D solid riddles” (which we’d been writing over the past few days).
My students always check the board pretty much first thing when they walk in, to have an idea of what’s planned for the day, and that day’s schedule got a lot of discussion going. We sat down for our morning planning meeting and I opened the discussion by explaining that today was going to work differently. I had my goals for the day, and I showed my short list, and I wanted to know what their goals for the day were. Students took a few moments to consider and then contributed their items to their goals list. I then asked them to think about what their personal goals were for the day. What did they want to have accomplished by the end of the day, considering how much time we had to work towards it? After a few minutes more, each student had articulated their goal for the day. Some chose to write it down, others didn’t. We then looked at our goals and tried to figure out if any needed to happen before others could. This helped us figure out what we needed to start with… And then they began.
Over the course of this year, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen my class as focused, supportive, independent and productive as they were that day. We even accomplished four of my five goals. At the end of the day, in our goal reflection meeting, each student shared what they’d been able to accomplish and how they thought about their goal. They were very thoughtful and candid for the most part, some reflecting on how overly or insufficiently ambitious their goals had been. But, the most interesting reaction I got was when I asked them how they had liked organizing their own time for the day. “I liked it!” chorused several. “I didn’t like it, I loved it!” said another. “I didn’t love it, I’m in love with it!” added a third. The next day, we tried again, with similar success. And the next…
Awesome and independent as usual, given self-determination and responsibility in their timetabling, my students just dig into it. Photo by Jamie Raskin
This has given me a lot to think about for the next academic year, and some significant pause for considerations of timetabling generally. Here’s where it leaves me… Obviously, in elementary, when most learning is concentrated in one room, you have more flexibility to allow time to be broadly student-directed. In upper school, things are far more departmentalized. But there’s clearly enormous benefit to be had from allowing significant use of time to be student-directed. So, how do you do it? What kind of timetabling and teacher/student conferencing would best allow for the flexibility required for students to set a good amount of their own learning goals, and structure their own time on the way towards achieving them?
I realize this is more a starting place for the timetabling question than a conclusion. But at least I have a sense of one ingredient that is not optional. However teachers and administrators approach parceling out time, individual and collective student voice needs to be part of the decision-making process. I’m looking forward to writing a lot of question marks on the schedule next year…
Further Reading:
- NMSA Research Summary: Flexible Scheduling
- National Conference of State Legislatures on 4-day school weeks
- A broad selection of scheduling-related readings from the Education Commission of the States
- Modified School Schedules (interesting ideas towards the end…)
- What Research Says About Re-organizing School Schedules: The Center for Public Education
- Year-round Schooling from Education Week
- On the Clock: Rethinking the Way Schools Use Time
Related Reading:
- Should recess be before or after lunch? From the Journal of Child Nutrition and Management
- Ewan McIntosh’s blog offers lost of thoughts on working with time in a school context, a couple interesting posts include: Making a Creativity-Friendly School Timetable and Free Up Time by Freeing Up the Timetable.
Very ambitious infographic on summer reading from teach.com… Probably more of an exercise in design than a useful device, but a well executed one anyhow! Now… Where’s the category for enviro travel adventures through Southeast Asia?
Via Teach.com and USC Rossier Online
I haven’t been pushing it much, but in just over three weeks I’ll be on the road for the summer, riding a bamboo bike thousands of kilometers across Southeast Asia in pursuit of stories of environmental struggles and successes, as well as interesting examples of social enterprise.
Having just posted the Greener Shade of School post earlier today though, it’s been a bit on my mind… I know I’ll be connecting with the good folks at Green School: Bali towards the end of the summer, but I bet others will have leads on interesting enviro stories, or even schools doing creative and different things with environmental curriculum and outdoor education…
I would looooooove to be put in touch with any of them. Tips? Suggestions?
For more on GREEN RIDERS visit the site, subscribe to our YouTube channel and watch Episode 1 below!
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