Content in a Community Context
Weaving Community
Nationally and locally, for a wide variety of reasons, we are again focusing on schools as foundational members of our community. Schools, public and private are a portion of essential glue that binds use together, reaches through time into our hopes for the future and our shared maturational experiences. For young people the very social fabric is woven from schools, social relationships and family. A school’s culture and the experience of learning drive the experience of enfranchisement of young people. Yet something is wrong.
We see symptoms of students’ disconnection, and ask ourselves questions about the role of schools in the greater community. Some of these roles, while seemingly obvious, have languished, for another variety of reasons, reasons such as tax reform, a focus on achievement and content reforms, increasing class sizes, and the disconnect of adults from many volunteer activities including, but certainly not limited to, their local schools. We ask questions about the importance of a school’s sense of community, beyond the traditional view of “school spirit,” driven by sports and a select few activities focused on the already successful students, the stars. How are schools perceived as members of our social fabric? What is the experience of a student in the school’s community? What examples do we share of the culture of school? What are our expectations for success in the culture? Even as national reforms have shifted to include support for after-school programs, lowering class sizes; we should be asking more fundamental questions. Only through the asking, and answering, these questions will we get a sense of what’s wrong, what needs to be re-woven into the community cloth. Of course the overarching concern exemplified by horrific acts as we’ve seen in too many schools.
On a positive note we are seeing ever increasing, strong evidence that learning within a “real world” context is a key aspect of life-long learning and serves as powerful motivation for both students and teachers. We know that content in context is more easily remembered, increases the quality of thought by leading to higher order evaluation of materials and increases a student’s sense of value in their participation in education. Perhaps it is no surprise that one of the reasons noted by students for their disconnect is a sense that they are “in storage” at school waiting for the real world on the other side of the fence. It should also be no surprise that they are angry at being locked out of what they perceive as important experiences and rail against these barriers. Here we are with a central dilemma: do we learn and make changes or simply move on.
If this understanding of learning and education is as powerful as it appears then we must reflect on student’s views on the culture and context of their experience. We must acknowledge this need for a cultural context and work to create clear links between their learning, growing and maturing and their role in the community as a whole. We need to be very aware of the powerful messages we send, intentionally and unintentionally, to children about their worth, the value of their voice and their role in the future of the community.
It is through connecting these two considerations that we begin to see the power to make a real difference. We see the power of a community context in schools as all participants hold a clearer idea of their role in the creation of the communities. In this way the school becomes a direct reflection, albeit a more nurturing community, of the society of adults. Students understand better the role of their education and teachers are better able to find contextual learning situations for their students. This sensible role for education, a clear idea of its connection and purpose, does lead to numerous conflicts with basic organization of schools, conflicts in responsibility for learning, and increasing the role of adults/parents in schools.
Context vs. Content?
All these issues revolve around one central theme: the role of Content, Context and Community in creating successful schools. We need to develop and codify a set of understanding for this role, particularly as it directly relates to considerable prior developments focusing on the creation of specific behavioral standards and outcomes for learning: Content Standards. Unlike most, I see these standards as minimum competencies and further, as ideas to be infused into a higher order ethics of teaching. First, I see the role of focusing on behaviors as a reasonable set point in the process of educational assessment, “Students will...,” but not as a foundational first step. “Students will memorize these facts before they can apply them in a problem solving/assessment,” is backwards to human reasoning. What are the foundational aspects in initial curriculum design?
Students come to school with inherent and foundational abilities along with learned skills and expectations about learning. These include problem solving, the desire to have fun, to enjoy their work and to learn. Further, built upon these abilities lies a student’s sense of competency and upon which hinges motivation. We need to build a foundation on these skills and competencies, resting upon are content and other specific associated content competencies. We must not lose sight of the innate human aspects of learning. We are, after all, programmed to play, to enjoy learning, to try new things, to practice skills. We learn and love language and find both joy and humor in our ability to communicate. Each child has an intrinsic motivation to learn: we call play. One of my colleagues posed the question about student’s motivation and related it to basketball practice. He said, “Why will students shoot hoops with a success rate of something like 10-50% and once they get proficient they will invent a harder shot, perhaps missing ten times and practice this at all hours of the night. Their Mom’s have to yell at them to come inside. All the while left to their own devices...but I can’t get them to do 30 minutes of homework even if I punish them if they don’t.” I think we need to realize that students are motivated by certain things, not others, and we need to do a better job of understanding the attributes of these types of learning. Certainly the basketball practice example is true for some children but not others. Some children do learn to create their own motivation by inventing games, thinking of challenges, all the while creating ever more difficult problems to solve. I would suggest that each child has something that fits into this example.
As a science teacher, I have seen similar issues played out too often in the classroom. Students, for example, are asked to memorize the parts of a cell before they understand the role of processes and functions in a cell. They then look at a cell in a microscope and learn about a variety of famous historical scientists whose work went into our ability to see the cells but not why the scientists cared to begin with. In a contextual sense these activities play little upon students’ context. Further, we will then jump to something like teaching the KREBS Cycle, memorizing a very complex set of electron jumps, and to what end? As I noted, all these steps in content are crucial to understanding a piece of the puzzle but what might we design if we looked instead at building upon skills and context?
One procedure is to notice these issues and take a step back to look at what each student brings to the experience. What generalizable skills they bring and which do they need more experience? How am I supporting their foundational abilities? The next phase is to look at what is the context into which the materials make sense. For example, if we look at the materials through the lens of “Science literacy” what is the needed level of understanding, how does it fit into the needs of the students, into their understanding of the use of data, the politics of problem-solving. If we look at “Science process” then we are asking questions about related topics such as research skills, communication, problem solving strategies.
In our specific program context we try to relate materials, find the contextual connection, in a variety of ways. For example we ask a number of questions: Why is this important?, What are the real world contexts?, What careers and people use this material?, How does this relate to a current issues/topic of general interest? Each serves to bring the material into a societal context, to make the material more vivid in terms of a student’s frame of reference.
A number of outcomes emerge as we build connections. For example, we are able to find connections to community members whose jobs relate to a topic. The key is to give them something they in turn can relate to and to bring that to the classroom. Both the students and presenters feel stronger about their role, teachers then become facilitators, and students are given a concrete context upon which to build.
Of course underpinning these ideas are to concrete outcomes. One is that students are clearer about their role and responsibility and therefore more motivated. Learning is embedded within a context from which the data/ information can often be derived. Students develop a set of generalizable skills that are applicable across disciplines, which serves them as life long learners. They learn that content, fact based information only makes sense in a context that then serves as information, and from which, along with experience, we can derive wisdom.
Perhaps, like the youngster practicing their basketball, we begin to depend on their intrinsic ability to make things make sense. One of the aspects of successful students is that they often create their own independent context within which learning makes sense. We need to build on these skills.
Designing Content
Even given the overall goals of program, we understand that all of us hold set ideas about education, teaching and the role of teachers and students in a community. We understand that it is difficult to step back from this long enough to create the needed changes, to recreate a “new” system out of whole cloth. It is difficult to design something "new" and yet we are trying to re-find aspects of learning and education to assure the success of all participants in the learning arena. One key step in beginning the process is that we must include ourselves in this learner’s arena. Another key is to focus on process, and standards that serve to build the foundation.
We must all refine our own sense of being learners. Teachers who are not excited about their own learning, even if in an area different from their content expertise, are not able to relate to the context of motivated learning. The meta- message is that we must do this, learn this, even if it is awful and boring simply because we must. Further we then become tempted to make it easy, dumb down the materials to simple concepts that we can memorize and move through. Life-long learners, problem-solvers look for challenges, seek new area, again like our basketball player, invite impossible shots, and make them.
Perhaps most important, we need to plan programs that matter, that really stands out in their vision of pride and excellence. In turn, we need to make previously hidden content and outcomes more explicit so that we understand all the agendas of our design.
We need to bring to the fore our thoughts about outcomes that are foundational to the experience. Outcomes such as, "How will students feel about their ability to learn?" We need to begin to connect the role of previously hidden outcomes. For example, "What else do I teach students by the way I judge or critique their work?"
We ought to pay attention to all the outcomes of our teaching. For example, "What do students learn when they can't feel a part of the classroom due to a cultural bias?" For example, we need look no further than our knowledge that some students do better in a cooperative community when compared to a culture of competition. What were our assumptions when we created a competitive atmosphere in our school’s and community? If the culture of learning creates a climate that is not conducive for a child to feel safe and supported, to be smart, then they are learning a implicit lesson about their vlaue and abilities.
We will define success differently as we look at tools needed to succeed rather than just test and judge by learning content. We will build a sense of community, charged with the role of challenging, motivating, involving students with a caring and compassionate manner of teaching. We will forge partnerships with all learners, built upon a mutual understanding of the goals for education, and establish respect for all our roles and responsibilities.
Setting Goals, Making Changes
How do we use these wonderful goals to create a program?
Are they in opposition or in concert with content?
Whose role is it to create these wonderfully successful programs?
To Paraphrase, “I can’t define it but I know it when I see it!”
To make changes in our teaching, and in associated planning , we need to think “Outside the Box’ about education. To help this I’ve prepared a list of words to reflect upon. In particular, to reflect on what education would be like if these worlds were in common usage in our defining and describing teaching and education. Reflect on these for a moment:
Caring
Celebrate
Challenge
Charge
Charter
Cheerful
Cherish
Child
Choose
Citizen
Clear
Clients
Climate
Cognition
Coherent
Colleague
Comfy
Comic
Community
Compassion
Competence
Compliment
Compose
Comprehension
Connections
Consensus
Consequential
Considerate
Consideration
Content
Context
Continuity
Contribution
Conversation
Cooperative
Cosmic
Council
Courage
Cozy
Craftsman
Create
Culture
Crystallize
Cultivate
Cumulative
Curious
Custom
Cyclic
Obviously we all hold a variety of thoughts about these words. One teacher reflected that they represent why they went into teaching. A couple seem to be the antithesis of teaching these days, comfy comes to mind as does Cozy.
What would education be like if we stared with cozy, comfy, curious, creative, consensus, culture or choose. Would we create a climate of learning that is very different or similar?
I’ve then pulled what I see as our three keys to the process, “The Three C’s,” whose role we have discussed but need to re-define so that they reflect our understanding of their role in effective education. I’ve titled this as:
The Three C’s: Designing Successful Programs
Content
What is it you really wish to teach? What are we, in fact, teaching?
• what about compassion, caring?
• what do the "clients" wish to learn?
• how can we challenge and motivate?
We need to think beyond the traditional fact-based content
Context
How do you build meaning? What is the role of cognition in teaching?
• how are participants in charge of building understanding?
• how do we present a transparent coherence of meaning?
• how do we create a climate of competence
We need to build connections
Community
How are students and teachers alike in their membership? How are involving students that makes sense?
• what is the sense of common interest, fellowship?
• how is there a continuity of thought and experience?
• how do we involve a culture of learners that cherish investigation?
• how do we share a clear role and sense of empowerment with students?
View learning as a cooperative process to reach mutual goals
So we use see the “C’s” of education as a method by which we can grow teaching into a contextually enriched, vivid sense of a role for learning. We thereby create a partnership for learning which, in turn, creates a very different relationship between teachers and students. I have often wondered what schools would be like if we made school so inviting that we had trouble keeping students out rather than keeping students in. Imagine they kept the enthusiasm for learning throughout their lives, that schools were places students would chose to be at, at all hours of the day and night, to learn, socialize, play and find their special contribution to a society that valued their energy and contributions. Where we had to lock them out rather than lock them in. Imagine teaching where the lessons didn’t focus on “classroom” management but on learning facilitation. Where teachers could teach, coach, facilitate and students could visit, check in for a lesson, work in the library, play some basketball, study. Where parents would know their children were safe and who felt responsible for spending time in the building, even perhaps taking classes and teaching a few themselves.
Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom and wisdom is not beauty. Beauty is the best. It is through beauty that we get art. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What would teaching be like if we started with art? Perhaps we’d get students who learned to create with caring and compassion.
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Culture
- Create to rules by which we operate as a culture to support students, life-long learning and bemove or reduce barriers to life long success.
- We create a culture that fosters learning, supports risk taking, and gives each participant the sense they belong to something that buoys their success.
- We form relationships. Provide aplace for belonging and participation.
- Help students overcome barriers: intrinsic barriers to success and the skills to overcome external barriers that will be placed in their way.
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