Howard Gardner talks about "a performance of understanding."
He calls for performance tests, not quick responses or multiple choice or short-answer tests. He calls it “a performance of understanding.”
Thanks to hundreds of studies during the past few decades by psychologists and educators, we now know one truth about understanding: Most students in most schools cannot exhibit appreciable understanding of important ideas.
A student demonstrates or “performs” his understanding when he can examine a range of species found in different ecological niches and speculate about the reasons for their particular ensemble of traits. A student performs her understanding of the Holocaust when she can compare events in a Nazi concentration camp to such contemporary genocidal events as those in Bosnia, Kosovo or Rwanda in the 1990s.
Page 160 to 161 Intelligence Reframed (1999) by Howard Gardner
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Time is a variable
Students work at their own speed
Edmentum allows students to put in more time or less time. The student who needs more time can compete with the students who process information more quickly.
The student is the class
Each student has his or her lesson plan. In each class of 25 students, there are 25 lesson plans. Each student is in a class for himself or herself.
You have to go deeper with projects and discussions.
Any system has the goal of transmitting basic information (even through lectures). But we show our actual understanding only when we do something more than take a multiple choice test.
Personalize the experience of high school for each student
Projects can be selected to fit the interests of students.
Learning should be fun for the learner and the teacher
What is school for many students? “Boring.” But school can also include projects that connect with our dreams. What is challenging?
What is interesting?
I want to do something related to my goals in life
I want to do something that means something to me.
I want to learn about something that is important to me.
That is when school becomes fun.
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Fischler wrote about Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI)
There are three modes of instruction: 1) self-paced or CAI, 2) project or problem-solving and 3) discussion. The teacher can pose a project or problem that is relevant to the student. Once the problem is defined, the class can be broken down into groups of 4-5 students in order to research the solution to the problem.
Students working in groups learn cooperation, shared responsibility and communication (face-to-face as well as e-mail) to produce a written solution. They can then present the project to the class for discussion.
KEY IDEA: To get deeper learning, students need to do projects and discussions.
Teacher: Students don’t want to take time to do a project because that will slow down their progress through the course. Part of our problem is that the reward system is based on how many quizzes the student can complete in a day.
Fischler: Those quizzes measure very simple levels of comprehension.
There's not much analysis, there's not much synthesis. There's not much debate and argument.
The computer system instruction is the easiest level.
We learn the new information for a quiz through the self-paced CAI.
By adding projects and discussions, the students go back and deepen their learning
One of the challenges we have is that students are at different levels for the discussions
As the teacher, you purposely form the group and through the project you accommodate for the variations of where the students are. You differentiate through the responsibility that you give to each student in pieces.
Someone who is a good reader could head up the research part of the project. If someone is a poor reader you don't give him so much reading. You give him something simpler for him to contribute, to bring back to the project so you differentiate responsibility.
Some groups for some projects are a little larger and there's always room for the student at the bottom, so that every student can participate in the interactions.
I call that “developing the soft skills.” How do we prepare students for life? Projects and discussions. When students get out of here, they're probably not going to work by themselves. They'll be working with a group doing something.
What kind of projects do they do at school? That's where the creativity of the teachers and the students comes together. You can't have the students sitting 4 hours a day, just sitting with computer assisted instruction. I call that the Model T Ford, like the first car factory.
The Model T car runs, but it's not going to get you very far. In the same way, students need more than simply computer assisted instruction.
We need to combine the CAI with other groupings to help students see how “what they are learning” is related to “what's going on” in the world. That's where the creativity of the teacher comes in.