The Attitudes of Weaving Imagination into an Academic Framework
Recently I conducted a survey of a representative cross-section of the junior class. The purpose of the survey was to determine how students define success. I disaggregated the responses by gender and academic level and was a little stunned to find that every group defined success primarily as good grades and admission to a respectable college. Some students also mentioned friends, family, being true to oneself, but they are all marching to the same mantra: meet the standards, get the grades, go to college. Because they recognize that we are the gatekeepers, with authority to impose standards and determine grades, they comply with our demands, many of them putting in long hours to do so. Responses to the open-ended questions on the survey often alluded to the stress induced by the relentless pressure to produce work Omega Replica that will earn the necessary good grades. The survey results strongly suggest that many students operate in survival mode with no time or energy to engage creatively with assignments. A student in survival mode looks for the most direct route to the target grade; investing personal passion and imagination in simultaneous assignments from five or six disciplines must seem not only impractical but downright irresponsible.
I work in a district where curriculum, including standards and rubrics, is developed by teachers and then submitted to the Board of Education for approval. There is broad recognition that we need to maintain a balance between implementation of board-approved curriculum and freedom to experiment with new ideas and new approaches, so teachers will have fresh material to contribute when curriculum comes up for review. We realize that there’s no such thing as a perfect curriculum, so we focus on continuous improvement. In each cycle of revision, our standards and rubrics more clearly reflect the opportunities and imperatives of the 21st century. Nevertheless, as this process moves along, students are caught in a catch-22: to keep the door to the future open they must meet standards established five or more years in the past, standards that tend to focus on the skills that are important to us rather than the skills that will be important to them.
The Connecticut State Department of Education, in its Connecticut Plan for Secondary School Reform, cites Howard Gardner’s “five minds of the future,” which include “the disciplined mind of the critical thinker, the synthesizing mind of the problem solver, the creative mind of the innovator, the respectful mind of the collaborator, and the ethical mind of the leader”. Connecticut’s plan gives a central role to Gardner’s vision of future thinking: “Those who live in the 21st century will need to practice all of these modes of thinking on a daily basis. School must be the training ground for students to acquire and internalize these ‘minds’ for success”. If school is, indeed, to be this training ground, students need relief from the quantity of work they Omega Replica Watches currently produce, so they have the time and the mental and emotional space to think critically, synthesize, innovate, collaborate, and develop the character to ethically lead. To that end, I’ve been experimenting with assignments that lure students into spending more time and thought than they intended on the work. In return, I’m giving fewer assignments and changing how the work is assessed.
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