Leading Progressive Schools and Fostering Adult Learning -PITP
Chris Wakefield
What does Progressive Learning look like?
When I was in high school I remember being tasked with writing a biography of someone important to me. As a 16 year old student, I found this task to be supremely boring. While many students chose great people like Martin Luther King Jr or Maya Angelou, I decided to choose an old school basketball player from my hometown Washington Bullets, “The Big E”, Elvin Hayes. To write this biography I had to go to the library, search the card catalog, then find the 920 Dewey Decimal System section of the library and then read an entire book to extract important information like where he went to school, who were his biggest rivals, and why was he so important to the Washington Bullets. I read the entire book, wrote my two page biography of The Big E, then dutifully turned in my paper to the teacher. Two weeks later all of the students in class received their papers back with marks and evaluation from the teacher. I was stoked to earn an 87% on my paper. I looked at some of the comments the teacher made and then shoved it into my backpack never to be seen again. That was the extent of “projects” at my high school.
When I wrote that biography I had never heard of email and had never been on the internet. Now, almost every high schooler in the country can find all sorts of information about The Big E from their cellphone. Information is now a commodity. In the early 90’s and before teachers were all knowing beings who stood in the front of a classroom transmitting knowledge to students who did not have access to information. Now that information is everywhere, schools need to shift their focus and adapt to the new paradigm of information being easily accessible.
Progressive educators understand that school is not about transmitting information that can be regurgitated on multiple choice examinations. Progressive schools are places where students access information, process that information and produce beautiful work by working in teams to solve complex, real world problems. Progressive schools need to be interactive and hands on. In my experience, people who train other people usually stick to Powerpoint and video.
For my Put It To Practice (PITP), I decided to work with a group of administrators who were unfamiliar to Project Based Learning, but wanted to learn ways to improve their already successful schools. I led a workshop from 3:30pm-6:30pm on a Thursday before a three day weekend with administrators from schools in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada. Knowing that this three hour workshop was late in the day and near a three day weekend, I made a conscious effort to model progressive teaching by making each part of the workshop interactive, real world, and hands on. I knew I couldn’t show them everything, so I decided to inspire them to think deeper.
Significant Learning Activity
In order to get administrators to think progressively, I needed a way to get them to think about a time when they learned something of value. In this activity, I asked each person to free write for five minutes about when they learned something significant to them. After a brief discussion they came up with this list of attributes of what makes learning significant.
-Challenging -At my own pace
-Something I wanted to do -use technology
-Fun -Worked with Experts
-Real world -Out of comfort zone
-Okay to fail (safely) -Role model
-Repeated attempts -Learning was messy
-Deadlines -Adapt to change
-Connections to other stuff -Practical application
-Overcame an obstacle -Problem solving
-Personal goals -Competition
-Increased confidence -laughter
-Worked with others/collaboration
-Public display/ publish /exhibit / show
From that list, we began to discuss why teachers are teachers. When I asked the administrators why they got into the profession there wasn’t a single person who said they got into teaching to help students pass exams. The field of education is full of passionate people who begin teaching so they can help students. Unfortunately, in many school districts, the impact teachers can make is limited by regulations like standardized tests, curriculum pacing guides, and rigid structures that do not allow teachers to try new things to engage students.
After the Significant Learning Activity, I led teachers through activities where they examined student projects for deep learning. After that I took an hour to go deeply analyze how teachers can use critique to push student learning.
My notions about progressive schools were reinforced. Teachers want to inspire students. In order to help teachers inspire students, school leaders must be structured enough to support and coach their teachers, but also allow flexibility for teachers to work together and try new things.
At the end of the three hour workshop the administrators felt energized and ready to inspire their teachers. One participant from my workshop emailed me two days after the workshop, “...I haven't felt the need to to personally thank someone for a Pro-D in a really long time (like 8 years).” The one major complaint that I received was that my participants wanted the workshop to be longer. I feel my biggest success in this workshop was getting teachers inspired to try something new. Another participant emailed me and said, “the dialogue seems to have shifted here at work (and that is a good thing) and I look forward to seeing more of where this can go!!”
I hope that schools in Kamloops will be inspired to push forward to make their schools more progressive. Hopefully I can help show them some of the tricks I have learned from other teachers and administrators at High Tech High.
The following day after my workshop with administrators I was able to work with 40 teachers from Sa-Hali Secondary School in Kamloops. By the end of the workshop there were two groups of teachers who were able to design a project and get feedback from other teachers during Project Tunings. If I can inspire a group of teachers to design a cross curricular project in one day, I can’t wait to see what I can do if I was able to work with those teachers for several days in a row. The teachers and administrators in Kamloops know why it is important to be progressive. Hopefully I can help show them ways they can make that happen at their schools.
Here is a link to a video of me presenting on critique for deep learning with administrators from Kamloops, CA.