Post date: Sep 17, 2014 3:34:17 AM
Now that I have read half of Dewey and all of Smith, I am feeling a sense of accomplishment! Wow! I have a strategy for finishing Dewey without getting bogged down in his dated literary language. Anyone interested in my strategy, can contact me by email. I won't detail it here. I am actually, quite happy with the Dewey book. I lot of my personal opinions about teaching and what I hear in recent ideas about teaching agree with Dewey's ideas of 100 years ago. Students learn better when participating in a task that is relevant and not contrived. I have seen this in action! Dewey's ideas supplement this by saying that learning automatically happens in social contexts that involve what is needed to be learned. I like the idea of Education as Reconstruction, "the ideal of growth results in the conception that education is a constant reorganizing or reconstructing of experience." What we want as teachers (at least for me in my math and science classes) is for my students to experience and learn and then take what they learned and be able to pull that memory of use out of their brain's filing cabinet and use it again when they need it. I believe and I think that Dewey would agree that students need to share and discuss what they are learning/doing with others and talk about it to really be able to understand it. Then, having that experience in their memory, they will more readily access that information at a later date. Dewey asks an interesting question on page 105, "Is it possible for an educational system to be conducted by a national state and yet the full social ends of the educative process not be restricted, constrained, and corrupted? I think that if a national state takes on the task of educating it's populace, a certain framework will be imposed upon the educative process for ease of management. Corrupted is not a word I would choose to describe our education system. I would prefer the term, complicated, too much focused on assessment and test scores. This is something I am concerned with. Yes, I want students to learn, don't get me wrong. But I am concerned that the only means at which our children's learning is assessed is by a one size fits all test. Hopefully, I haven't digressed to far off of Dewey and onto some other topic...
A couple of comments on Smith: At the end, he answers the question, "What would your ideal school be like?" He says, "They would be liberated from the official theory of learning and wouldn't be standardized." Excellent though! He says it would be a community filled with "collaboration , initiative and enterprise", p101. "There would be an absence of mindless exercises, punitive tests, segregation, pointless competition, labeling of individuals, and restrictive timetables"p101. Thank you Frank Smith, I agree. Teaching and learning would be an entirely different experience if the above constraints were gone and creativity, collaboration, and experience learning were the norm. Smith takes a tone on page 65 that also concerned me, "The official theory of learning and the prejudiced practice of achievement testing have advanced in influence together." He supports this opinion well in citing evidence such as students of low tests scores being segregated into groups taught differently. I never thought of it as prejudiced though. In fact, I often felt it helped to see who scored lower so that I could support them where they needed to be supported. Do this, I have differentiated in my classroom based on my students needs. Can't there be a happy medium? Ultimately, I want students to learn what they need to know to be successful after they graduate. Providing students with more relevant experiences is the way to go.