Classroom by Marlith

However, middle school serves high school more than it serves the developmental characteristics of its learners. It is especially ill-suited, by design, to handle boys – or girls, or learners - for whom middle school unfolds as a Dickensian serial of disappointed expectations and chastisement. Furthermore, middle school does no better than any other level of schooling in serving the under-served.

I cite data here only to show that middle schools don’t succeed in what they are designed to do – assimilate children into high school culture. I can think of no better argument for utterly transforming both middle and high school.

There are many way to approach the middle school problem. We need a more diverse teaching corps. We need to put learning before teaching. We need to align standards to kids’ passions and questions. We need to schedule in such a way that doesn’t scatter what little relevance there is in most curricula across falsely-schismed content area fiefdoms.

I think we also need to redesign middle graded education based on what we can learn from schools like the PCA and NWPHS. These schools welcome students where they are and work with them so long as they want to learn until students are ready to graduate or must exit high school by law.

Why insist on a 3-year middle-grade experience based on mimicking high school?

Because high school is the “real world?” Hardly; though it paints over our eyes the smarmy veneer of the capitalist viewpoint our corporate culture wants students to have.

Because we’re setting kids up for failure by not teaching them to pass the tests? Only if you agree with vendors that students and teachers are best measured by rigged numbers. Only if you agree that the tests are, indeed, our schools raison de etre.

Because that’s what their high school teachers expect? It seems to me that our expectations are unsound, obsolete, outmoded, divisive, and harmful. Let a new breed of middle schoolers and their parents confront the old breed of high school. Let educated consumers demand their rights to learn by producing.

I don’t see any learning- or student-centered reason to maintain the status quo. Let kids learn rotely, but let it be in service of personally meaningful work – don’t accept rote learning as the end of schooling. Let students graduate, but help more students graduate by creating more personally meaningful schools.

What, then, should we do to change things for the better?

Why not look at middle school as a 3-4 year experience of project-based learning through teacher- and student-designed electives aligned to state standards? Why not do away with the idea of separate 6th, 7th, and 8th grades in favor of grouping students by choice of electives and academic readiness? Why not let students either begin or end with a year of intensive math and reading tutorials meant to catch them to peers reading, writing, calculating, and problerm-solving at the “norm?” Why not let that year of tutorials float until a student chooses it and brings his or her own purpose to remediation without being ostracized by teacher-juried retention?

I think we should radically alter middler school to offer standards-aligned electives that students choose and help develop. I think we should radically alter middle school to do away with grade-levels and group students by interest. I think we should radically alter middle school to provided struggling students with a floating year of tutorial support and project-based learning free of all other curricular and testing mandates apart from increasing those students’ reading and math skills.

I think middle school students, boys and girls alike, should be on their curriculum committees along with educators, experts, and community leaders. All of those adults should listen to the students and help them achieve their vision. There is little that cannot be translated into learning if we adults will let go of teaching.

What do you think? Could you do this in your school? Could you start a program like this? Would you?

How else would you better re-design middle school to do its part in dropout prevention and recovery?

When you check-in, you can leave a comment and/or post a photo with a comment. You get a stamp on your virtual passport for checking in, and you get pins for various accomplishment like taking a certain number of pictures or checking in for the first time in a new state. At some locations you can get items left there by other users or by Gowalla or its partners.

You can drop your collected items for others to find at the same spot. You can vault your collected items into your permanent collection and then carry around extras to trade or drop when you create locations.

Gowalla also lets you create trips of up to 20 locations for others to follow. Gowalla’s partners have also made trips and left items redeemable for real world rewards.

The app lets you friend your friends and it sends out push notifications to them whenever you check in at a new location.

It’s a fun app. I also think it’s a great tool for education.

Imagine a school full of friended users checking-in at the end of each class with an observation or question about the lesson. Imagine if they took snap-shots of themselves smiling, stone-faced, or frowning to give their teachers visual feedback about their understanding of the day’s learning objective, or if they took a picture of their work for parents following the class.

Imagine delivering – or co-developing with students – schedules via Gowalla. Imagining analyzing student check-ins to find emergent schedules.

Imagine an inquiry-based school with decentralized apprenticeships. Imagine community partners setting up trips for apprentices to follow in completing their hours. Imagine those partners leaving pins and items for students finishing their apprenticeships in good standing. Imagine those partners giving students items for redeemable for real world services that students could share with folks in need through service organizations. Imagine students creating their own trips recording their inquiry learning and leaving those trips on the Gowalla servers for like-minded students to follow in later years. Imagine items redeemable for gifted texts and projects that help learning along the way. Imagine a cohort of mentors and friends watching one another learn and sharing the locations of powerful learning opportunities outside the classroom before, during, and after school. Imagine Gowalla as a mobile, social, student-sourced course content container, albeit one that needs some voice and sketching functionality.

Gowalla is about community and place and how a networked community overlays and interacts within a virtual geography vaster than any territory that “belongs” to an individual member. This is a powerful model for teaching and learning – for sharing ourselves over time and space with people we can help, as well as for leaving a record of how we learned. These curricula of place can serve as gifts to others and as a testament to how hard we tried to move learning out of the factories.

Friend me at chadsansing. Let’s start cacheing our learning outside the classroom.

Techno-Teenagers by Leonard John Matthews

What’s the goal of differentiation? Mastery of a curriculum? Inquiry-based life-long learning? Relationship building?

Can we ask the question another way: what is school?

Is it 1:1 learning? Is it 1:1 curriculum? Is it 1:1 access to “the best of what’s been thought and said?” Is it the 1:1:1:1:1… replication of workers or citizens?

We have the tools and access to information about learning to differentiate school for students. We can provide 1:1 rigor, relevance, and relationships. We can go F2F, blended, hybrid, dual-enrollment, CTE, charter, magnet, specialty center - we can go anywhere we’ve made something. Can we go anywhere students want? Should we in public education customize teaching and learning? Should we student-source curriculum?

I think so. The faster the better. Why keep spending money building things and places that some students will use? Why not build an infrastructure all students can use to learn a 1:1 curriculum and produce a unique product – an app, a book, a business, a charity, a machine?

Could we save money and increase learning opportunities by adopting an inquiry-based, electronic, student-created and/or micro-transaction secondary curriculum and creating an “All-But-Graduated” (ABG) designation for students who assess out of class requirements for credits? If a 14 year old can learn to write/produce about what he or she loves and score a 5 on an AP exam, should we ask that 14 year old to take more HS classes when the AP results net college credit? Could ABG students be funneled into “primary” school volunteerism, professional CTE, entrepreneurship & service labs, community colleges, local universities, work experiences, and/or internships? Could we save money by housing