I had a meeting yesterday with some really amazing Philly folks yesterday who both have worked with and and for the school district at various points in their career, and we had a really far-ranging conversation about SLA. It was the kind of conversation that resonates for weeks, with ideas from the meeting percolating up into blogs and conversations and documents for quite a while after. The best part about the meeting is that these folks quickly understood what I’m trying to do, agreed with the general principals and then hammered me about every as yet unfilled hole in the philosophy. So if you see posts in the coming weeks that seem like "Hmmm… Chris hasn’t really dealt with that issue explicitly before…" you probably can chalk it up to something that was a topic of conversation in that meeting.
To wit… after looking through a lot of our early planning documents, one of the gentlemen said "You know… I understand what you’re talking about, but you never explicitly state what you want your students to gain from having gone to SLA. What do you want your students to become?"
Great question — right? I mean, on some level, it’s the ultimate backward planning question — and it’s what should inform everything we do. And I think he knew I had a clear idea in my head to the answer, but it wasn’t on paper anywhere. The closest we come is probably that last sentence of the mission statement:
At the SLA, learning will not be just something that happens from 8:30am to 3:00pm, but a continuous process that expands beyond the four walls of the classroom into every facet of our lives.
And what’s interesting is that when I wrote it, I deliberately constructed the sentence so that it wasn’t "students will understand that learning isn’t…" because I wanted the learning to include all members of the community — myself included.
But that still begs the question — what do want our students to become?
My first instinctive response was this, I don’t want to deliberately create the ’21st Century Workforce.’ I think if that’s your goal, you shoot way too low. I want our students to be the ’21st Century citizen’ in that they understand how to thrive in an ever-changing world. I want them to have the cognitive tools and energy and passion not just to react to the changes around them, but to help to shape those changes. We really don’t know what the next fifty years will look like — and that really is the span of time we’re looking to prepare current high schoolers for — the next fifty years. (That’s actually a bit scary and daunting just to write.) So the best thing we can do for them is to help them develop their ability to analyze, communicate, create and adapt. And that’s the capstone project. That’s inquiry-based education. That’s behind the language of the five core values of SLA — inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation and reflection.
And we tossed all those words around for a while before getting me to the statement of "I want our kids to be able to have the skills to adapt to a changing world." And then, this morning, Christian posts this:
Can I hear an amen from the crowd?
Schools need to refocus their efforts to reflect the lessons of the outside world and to help create what Resnick calls adaptive learnerspeople who can perform effectively when situations are unpredictable and task demands change. Adaptive learners are not likely to be developed in an isolated academic cocoon.
Source: Ronald A. Wolk, "Worlds Collide" editorial, 1.1.06, Teacher Magazine
Amen.
And again — to hammer home a favorite topic of mine of late — where this really gets powerful is that a conversation in my office now ties into a conversation in Texas and who knows where else. If we do this right — if we all pull off this high-minded idea that we can transform our schools into places where kids think on their feet and show us what they know with the work of their own head, heart and hands, if kids come to understand, internalize and celebrate that meaning is not just found in a book, but found in the space between reader and text, and person and person, and in the intersection of classroom and world, our kids will be passionate, adaptive learners and citizens. And in the end, that’s what I hope they become.
Thoughts?
