Teaching kids how to disagree

What we really need to do for children is teach them that disagreements are a part of life. The important thing to do when a child disagrees with a friend is the same thing an adult should do when they disagree with someone...

From Peter DeWitt's blog "Finding Common Ground."

Montessori Schools Do This

When many of our best thinkers think about how to make creative and innovative thinking part of our schools, they automatically think of Montessori classrooms.

From an interview with Cathy Davidson in Salon:

In the book, you have this fascinating statistic that 65 percent of kids born today will have careers that don’t exist yet. Right now, under No Child Left Behind, the school system puts tremendous emphasis on standardized multiple choice tests, which, as you point out, don't exactly train kids to think creatively about the technological future.

The whole point of standardized testing was invented in 1914 and modeled explicitly as a way to process all these immigrants who were flooding into America at the same time as we were requiring two years of high school, and men were off at war and women were working in factories. The multiple choice test is based on the assembly line – what’s fast, what’s machine readable, what can be graded very, very rapidly. It’s also based on the idea of objectivity and that there's a kind of knowledge that has a right answer. If you chose a right answer, you’re done.

It's really only in the last 100 years that we’ve thought of learning in that very quantifiable way. We’re now in an era where anybody can find out anything just by Googling. So the real issue is not how fast can I choose a fact A, B, C or D. Now if I Google an answer I’ve got thousands of possibilities to choose from. How do you teach a kid to be able to make a sound judgment about what is and what isn’t reliable information? How do you synthesize that into a coherent position that allows you to make informed decisions about your life?

In other words, all of those things we think of as school were shaped for a vision of work and productivity and adulthood that was very much an industrial age of work, productivity and adulthood. We now have a pretty different idea of work, productivity and adulthood, but we’re still teaching people using the same institutionalized forms of education.

So what do we do to change that?

First I’d get rid of end-of-grade tests. They demotivate learning, in boys especially. Establish more challenge-based problem-solving kinds of education. This is hardly revolutionary. Montessori schools do this. I would like to see more attention paid to how you go from thinking something to making something.

Baked In

“You can’t understand Google,” vice president Marissa Mayer says, “unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids.” She’s referring to schools based on the educational philosophy of Maria Montessori, an Italian physician born in 1870 who believed that children should be allowed the freedom to pursue their interests. “In a Montessori school, you go paint because you have something to express or you just want to do it that afternoon, not because the teacher said so,” she says. “This is baked into how Larry and Sergey approach problems. They’re always asking, why should it be like that? It’s the way their brains were programmed early on.”

But the dominant flavor in the dish is his boundless ambition, both to excel individually and to improve the conditions of the planet at large.

From “Larry Page Wants to Return Google to its Start-up Roots”

What makes kids creative?

Two entries about creativity to bang against each other: an article from the Wall Street Journal (brought to my attention by Post Oak parent Lisa Eddleman) and a TED talk from "creativity expert" Ken Robinson.

Hi John

This is a very interesting article from Wednesday's WSJ on what makes children creative. Apparently "creativity" (as measured by particular tests) has fallen over the past several years--the article speculates that the focus on teaching to standardized tests in school, as well as too much TV and computer time have both contributed to the decline.

All the "solutions" to this problem discussed in the article appear to be what Montessori education already emphasizes: listening to children's ideas without judging them as good or bad; teaching children how to pick out the best ideas for solving problems through teamwork; avoid paying too much attention to "outcome" of creative work. None of these things are surprising or novel for Montessori parents!

Best
Lisa

Student engagement

How do schools measure success?

Or perhaps, that is not exactly the question. A related question is, "What makes a good school?"

US News & World Report ranks colleges and universities. It is the ranking survey against which all others are measured, but it does not include any dimension of student experience. That seems like a glaring omission.

Over the past 10 years data has been collected by the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) -- an attempt to focus on the student experience. (Want to read the NSSE survey?)
Does student experience matter?

"Teachers can increase engagement by providing more opportunities for student choice and voice in the classroom, and more hands-on activities that allow students to solve interdisciplinary problems, akin to what they will encounter outside of school." -Denise Pope, Stanford University School of Education

It appears that student engagement is an antidote to the kind of student stress portrayed in the film Race to Nowhere. More from the NYT Blogs...