What Money Can't Buy
| Autor: | Mike Schmoker |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2009 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Phi Delta Kappan. 90:524-527 |
| ISSN: | 1940-6487 0031-7217 |
| DOI: | 10.1177/003172170909000715 |
| Popis: | "Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious." --George Orwell States are in a fiscal funk. This means, as we are told in Education Week, that "ambitious education initiatives" are being scuttled (Jacobson 2008). Sounds grim, but there may be an opportunity here. The current downturn could force us to see how much can be accomplished by attending to some long overlooked, incontrovertibly effective actions and initiatives. Best of all, these are largely free. It's not that funding is irrelevant or that money couldn't help us institute these changes. But the simple, fundamental actions I recommend could all be done with existing resources. In combination, they would have more impact on learning, on the achievement gap, and on civic, college, and career preparedness than anything we've ever done. This might sound far-fetched. So before you weigh their merits, know that each of the following suggestions has been tested on hundreds of educators, including members of state and national education organizations. Overwhelming majorities of these audiences have strongly agreed with these proposals, as well as the problems--the brutal realities--which they address. Stop wasting time by using worksheets, movies, and the like as if they were important instructional tools. Virtually every audience I have spoken to will admit to the inexcusable proliferation and abuse of worksheets, movies, and other time-consuming activities that only masquerade as instruction. Even teachers and administrators in high-scoring or award-winning schools openly acknowledge this. Most of them agree that, with exceptions, low-quality worksheets consume as much as 25% or more of class time in most schools. Replacing these with worthy learning experiences (which I describe below) would be like adding two months to the school year--enough to have a breathtaking impact on learning. And then there are ... the movies. When I walk the halls of schools, from high-scoring to low, I routinely hear the blare of movies emanating from too many darkened classrooms--in science, history, and English. For most of these (often recent release) films, we hear the same flimsy justifications, year after year. Most of these movies consume about three entire class periods. Then, there is the ubiquitous coloring, cutting, and poster making, the collages and arts projects--in subjects like history and English, from kindergarten to senior year. In a rank perversion of "active learning," "differentiated instruction," and "multiple intelligences," collages and mobiles have emerged as unit assessments for gauging student understanding of To Kill a Mockingbird and the Great Gatsby--even in honors classes. Something is amiss when high school students spend weeks building a medieval castle for World History, a course in which time is so clearly precious. All this starts in the early grades, when many children's academic futures and their college prospects are made or broken. That's when many students discover that "reading" class means lots of coloring, cutting, and pasting--about two-thirds of classtime, according to Ford and Opitz (2002). Add it up. These various diversions translate to several months per year of precious instructional time. As bizarre as these practices might sound to the average person, educators admit that they are oh-so-common in every kind of school, even as they diminish kid's futures. Fixing this is not a matter of money. Like all of the following, these problems will be solved only with candid, courageous dialogue. It's time to break the silence on these insidious, indefensible practices. But what will replace these activities? Simple, powerful lessons and activities that are affordable within most school's budgets. Dramatically increase the amount of purposeful reading, writing, and discussion--in as many subjects as possible. … |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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