FOUND: What’s up with ‘Schooling’?

Lincoln's schooling was so slight as to be almost nil. He did not grow up in a literary atmosphere. But in the matter of his official utterances he must be compared with the ablest geniuses and most cultured scholars that have preceded him, and not merely with his early associates.

Henry Ketcham, The Life of Abraham Lincoln

How does someone become a genius without ‘schooling’? And do we have a word that describes the kind of education Lincoln went through that made him as great as he was?

Through close observation and student interviews, we found that students failed to engage in the coursework and spent little to no time studying. Students were disengaged from their learning responsibilities and the derailing of their studying began as early as elementary school.

David Castillo and Peter McIntosh, Khan Academy: Learning Habits vs. Content Delivery in STEM Education

How do students become disengaged at school? And how is society changing this trend?

According to Castillo and McIntosh, “Improving content delivery helped, but not enough” and “Poor learning habits revealed the core problem”. “When we stopped worrying about whether Khan Academy videos were better than our own lectures or whether the exercises had the appropriate mix of concept vs. drill, we recognized that we had found a powerful tool that reached students and changed their habits in ways we had never even considered possible.”

It sounds like they have found principles that will help Learners Drive their Education. So, how are Khan Academy videos changing learning habits? The authors list the following aspects of Khan videos that influenced this change:

• “Most exercises are not multiple-choice, which eliminates guessing.
• Questions are randomly generated, which eliminates copying
• The short video clips engaged students and allowed them to replay the material until they understood it; and
• The online environment and Khan Academy’s overall design appeals to the students, resulting in significant engagement time.”

I’ve known about Khan Academy for a while, but I haven’t taken the time to really investigate it for Learner Driven Education principles. What else in our society is changing ‘schooling’ into something that is Learner Driven? And how are they doing it? How do we let go of worrying about 'content delivery' in order to find what really helps students succeed? What helps the student rise above his environment to greatness like that of Lincoln?

~vbb

FOUND - Reasons to Stop

I'm just finishing up a study of Abraham Lincoln's life through Henry Ketcham's autobiography. Two posts about education in schools have me making some interesting connections between our battle today to reform education and the battle of Lincoln's time to conquer slavery.

Cevin Soling frames his perspective on education in clearly 'good vs evil' terms in his essay "Why Schools Must Be Abolished".

Seth Godin also unequivocally declares war on the current school system in his latest (and free) ebook entitled Stop Stealing Dreams. He addresses this topic from the perspective of our children's dreams and goals and how education has not but must foster them to fit the needs of our changing economy.

Both adamantly call for radical changes in how we view and do education, changes reminiscent of the call and efforts to abolish slavery.


What similarities and differences do you see between our challenge today and the challenge of Lincoln's generation?

FOUND – Learning through Landscapes

Sometimes you find something and you think, “Hey! That totally fits what we’ve been talking about on the Leaner Driven Education blog!!” If that ever happens to you, please share it in a comment on the Learning Experiences tab above. Some of them we'll put into a FOUND post.

I’ll start.

My husband is a landscape architect, and in our family we love exploring new parks (and criticizing the flow of parking lots—weird huh?). We particularly love a great play ground. Here’s a picture of one of our favorite play grounds here in China.

The Chinese love to use cool rocks in their landscaping.

One of my favorite blogs is Playscapes. In her post, Natural Playground Inspiration from Learning through Landscapes, Arcady shared information about playgrounds that promote outdoor learning and play in natural play spaces. Here's one of the videos that she shared:



In LDE language, these play spaces do a wonderful job of creating learning experiences based on a child’s need to explore and create in open ended, physically demanding and challenging ways.

What I LOVE about these play grounds is how they have used largely materials that can easily be found in their environment/community. Did they consult experts in creating these playgrounds? Yes. But experts and parents and teachers were not the driving force, the children were. Did they take a chance? Yes! What I saw, however, was that the environment they created did such a good job helping the children to explore and create in open ended, physically demanding and challenging ways that the risks and problems that are found in other play spaces were almost nonexistent. And the rich environment naturally led to play that built upon the lessons they were doing in the classroom.

~What kinds of landscapes do you, or someone close to you, enjoy playing in?

~What do you have in your learning environment and community that will give your Learner a place to explore and create in open ended, physically (or otherwise) demanding and challenging ways? (and just for play ground type learning)

~vbb