Archive for May, 2009

This is the second post in a series about adding independent study to high school.  My series was inspired by a single post by Dave Pollard on his blog, How to Save the World.  I invite you to read “No more teachers, no more books” (the first post in the series) for context and for a link to Mr. Pollard’s thought-provoking essay.

“Keeners” aren’t the only group of students who might be interested in trying the independent study concept described by Mr. Pollard.  He describes the most successful of his former classmates as “natural learners.”  These students were able to thrive by learning at their own (accelerated) pace and by working cooperatively to master the curriculum.  Another too-common type of student, a type I’ll call “unmotivated slackers,” should find similar benefits in this less-structured environment.  As I explain below, these two archetypes are really just two sides of the same coin.

Natural Learners

 Natural Learners are the stereotypical “gifted” students.  They are the students who love to read, get in arguments with their friends about philosophy or other abstract concepts, write poetry and short stories, and ask thoughtful, insightful questions that leave the teacher at a loss for an answer and perhaps a bit intimidated.  I would guess that about a third of my Honors students fit into this category.

The problem with putting Natural Learners into a regular classroom with more “average” students is that the teacher will either devote most of his or her attention to the Natural Learner’s questions and comments, which leaves the rest of the class feeling confused, then bored, then restless… or else the teacher will devote most of his or her efforts toward teaching and remediating the average or sub-average students, leaving the Natural Learners feeling bored with the tedium and restless as a result.

Even when Natural Learners are separated into an “advanced” or “honors” course, the necessity of following a curriculum can mean that classwork is repetitive or uninteresting.  Additionally, placing a lot of these kids into a confined space and forcing them to work together sometimes creates rivalries and explosive arguments as each student tries to demonstrate his or her intellectual superiority.  Even in a well-behaved honors class, there’s usually that one “smarter-than-thou” kid who does to class discussion what Ahmadinejad does to United Nations meetings.

In a different environment, all that can change.  Mr. Pollard describes the effect that independent study had on these students:

We discovered that, together, we could easily cover the curriculum in less than an hour a day, leaving the rest of the day to discuss philosophy, politics, anthropology, history and geography of the third world, contemporary European literature, art, the philosophy of science, and other subjects not on the school curriculum at all.  We went to museums, attended seminars, wrote stories and poetry together (and critiqued each others’ work).

The Natural Learners in this program were able to help each other cover the curriculum without wasting time with repetition.  They then went beyond the curriculum, learning and discussing subjects that a high school teacher would never have taken the time to introduce.  Presumably, the “Ahmadinejads” and other loners in the group ended up studying alone, preventing rivalries and clashing personalities from disrupting the learning environment.

Unmotivated Slackers

A common thorn in many teachers’ sides is the presence of students who simply can’t be bothered to pay attention or to complete assignments.  What many teachers fail to realize is that these Unmotivated Slackers are often among the most intelligent and curious minds in the classroom.  Natural Learners who become bored with repetitive, tedious, quantity-over-quality lessons and assignments often transform, as if by magic, into Unmotivated Slackers… often as soon as early adolescence.  This group makes up the last third of my Honors students… and they are almost always the students who don’t get recommended for Honors the next year.

The degree of “laziness” varies from Slacker to Slacker:  some will simply refuse to do anything useful, some will skip homework but take tests, and others will do the bare minimum necessary to pass the class by as small a margin as possible.  All of them, however, will be more willing to apply their intelligence if they see the chance for real rewards with a minimum of tedium.

While I hate assigning labels to individuals without actually knowing much about them, I noticed some interesting facts about Mr. Pollard in his post:

In Grade 11, my second last year of high school, I was an average student, with marks in English in the mid 60% range, and in mathematics, my best subject, around 80%.  I hated school.

Barely scraping by in at least one class?  Sounds almost like an Unmotivated Slacker, especially considering what happened when he saw that improving his grades would qualify him for the independent study program:

The chance to spend my days with this latter group, unrestricted by school walls and school schedules, was what I dreamed of, so I poured my energies into self-study.  By the end of the first month of school my average was almost 90%, and I was exempted from attending classes in all my subjects.

Motivation + intelligence = remarkable improvement.  After Mr. Pollard had been in the program for a while, his grades were even higher… because his peers had shown him the intrinsic rewards of learning.

My peers had done what no English teacher had been able to do — inspire me to read and write voraciously, and show me how my writing could be improved.

What have we learned?

This independent study program proved beneficial to the Natural Learners because it kept them from sinking into the depths of Unmotivated Slackerhood and allowed them to learn far more than they would have in the classroom.

The program helped the Unmotivated Slackers find motivation and transform back into the Natural Learners they were always capable of being.

My question is, why on Earth aren’t we doing this in more schools?

In the next posts in this series, I’ll explore a partial (and, to my mind, wrong) answer to this question, along with the benefits of the independent study program on the average, everyday student.

The full text of this post, including the excerpts from Dave Pollard’s essay, is licensed under the CC-by-nc-sa 2.0.

I found a fascinating essay on the subject of “unschooling” at Dave Pollard’s How to Save the World.  While I can’t say that I’m in complete agreement with Mr. Pollard’s essay, I was very much inspired by the narrative with which he opens his “Unschooling Manifesto.”  The copyright notice on his website indicates that the essay was published under a Creative Commons license, so I’m quoting a few paragraphs below (heavily edited for brevity; I’m already going to be posting my thoughts in a series of posts spanning several days).

In Grade 11, my second last year of high school, I was an average student, with marks in English in the mid 60% range, and in mathematics, my best subject, around 80%.  I hated school.

Then in Grade 12, something remarkable happened: My school decided to pilot a program called “independent study”, that allowed any student maintaining at least an 80% average on term tests in any subject (that was an achievement in those days, when a C — 60% — really was the average grade given) to skip classes in that subject until/unless their grades fell below that threshold.  There was a core group of ‘brainy’ students who enrolled immediately.  Half of them were the usual boring group (the ‘keeners’) who did nothing but study to maintain high grades (usually at their parents’ behest); but the other half were creative, curious, independent thinkers with a natural talent for learning.  The chance to spend my days with this latter group, unrestricted by school walls and school schedules, was what I dreamed of, so I poured my energies into self-study.

To the astonishment of everyone, including myself, I did very well at this.  By the end of the first month of school my average was almost 90%, and I was exempted from attending classes in all my subjects.  We discovered that, together, we could easily cover the curriculum in less than an hour a day, leaving the rest of the day to discuss philosophy, politics, anthropology, history and geography of the third world, contemporary European literature, art, the philosophy of science, and other subjects not on the school curriculum at all.  We went to museums, attended seminars, wrote stories and poetry together (and critiqued each others’ work).

As the year progressed, the ‘keeners’, to my amazement, found they were struggling with this independence and opted back into the regular structured classroom program.

My peers had done what no English teacher had been able to do — inspire me to read and write voraciously, and show me how my writing could be improved. My writing, at best marginal six months earlier, was being published in the school literary journal.

Our independent study group, a handful of students from just one high school, won most of the province-wide scholarships that year.  I received the award for the highest combined score in English and Mathematics in the province — an almost unheard-of 94%.

Now… I know what I said in my recent post “Broken pieces, broken whole,” and I stand by that.  “Fixing” things with educational instutions won’t get us where we need to go; we’ve got to fix the entire educational system, including the parents and lawmakers and so forth.

Even so… this “independent study” program sounds like it has promise.  Real promise.  There are a number of student archetypes described in the anecdote (as well as a few that aren’t), and I’d like to discuss the benefits of this program for each of them.

Keeners

Mr. Pollard refers to a group of students that he calls “keeners.”  These students are heavily motivated to succeed in their classes… as long as someone is breathing down their necks.  In the Honors classes that I teach, I’d say at least a third of the students are in this group.

These students have “extrinsic” motivations; they succeed because reward or punishment is offered based on the degree of their success or failure.  These students are typically afraid of their parents, often bursting into tears when they see a bad grade.

Keeners thrive on structure.  When a teacher is watching, they will behave.  When their assignments are being graded, these students will do their work.  When parents are checking report cards and contacting teachers, these students will work their keen little butts off to get things done.

It’s interesting… but not really surprising… to read Mr. Pollard’s description of how the keeners failed to succeed in the unstructured independent-study environment.  No work is being graded, no teachers are keeping an eye on them, and parents don’t have any feedback from the school that they can use to reward or punish their children.  The extrinsic motives and constant supervision are removed, so the keeners’ motivation withers and dies.

So how is this independent study beneficial to the keeners?  For one, it’s often hard to judge whether someone is extrinsically or intrinsically motivated to learn… that is, whether they are a “keener” or a “natural learner” like those who thrived in the independent environment.  When the keeners tried to motivate themselves to learn, they discovered their own limitations.  This could either help them to choose more wisely in higher-stakes circumstances in the future, or to identify and overcome their own limitations.  Self-motivation can be learned, and the earlier a student realizes that he has been relying on others for motivation, the sooner he can begin working to correct that difficulty.  I suspect the long-term consequences for the keeners’ grades were minimal, while using the independent study as a type of diagnostic exercise could have significant benefits.

To be continued…

As I warned you earlier, I can’t possibly fit all my thoughts on this independent-study program into a single reasonably-sized post.  Coming up next:  the “natural learners” like Mr. Pollard’s friends, and the “unmotivated slackers” whose motivation could be rescued by a program like this one.

The full text of this post, including the excerpt from Dave Pollard’s essay, is licensed under the CC-by-nc-sa 2.0.