I can’t recite my school’s shared vision from memory, but I remember the first half of the first sentence: Gray-New Gloucester High School is a student-centered... It seemed strange then that students would vote overwhelmingly that they did not feel like they had the opportunity to make choices regarding their learning. Or, that more than 80% of teacher respondents said they didn’t have sufficient training to help students own their learning. After a staff meeting regarding these and other survey results I started thinking about my own classroom. How much choice do my students have in their learning? How much ownership? How much did they really want? How much do they need to be successful in the “real world”?
In my classroom this year I have tried to give students more choice when it comes to how they do experiments, but outside of this small concession I haven’t really given them that much choice in how they learn. For instance, when studying rock formation, everyone saw the same sediment settling demonstration, everyone read about the Naica crystal cave in Mexico and everyone saw the same slide show. It seems obvious then that everyone’s response to the unit question would be very similar. Is this student-centered? Certainly not to the degree I’d like it to be.
In my next unit I’ll be teaching astronomy with the essential question “Will humans ever meet an alien?” What if I give the students the reins? They get the unit questions and enough data to figure out the answers. Then, they map the path to figuring out the solution. As an example, the first unit question is “How long would it take to reach your star at the speed of light and at the speed of the fastest human-made space rocket?” The students would be given the parallax angle of a star. With the question, and the available information at hand they would be responsible for 1) creating a plan of action to find the solution and 2) setting out to figure out the solution. Of course the students wouldn’t know that a parallax angle is the distance a star appears to move as the Earth revolves around the sun or that light moves 186,000 miles per second, but the internet does and it is right there at their fingertips.
In my mind I can picture it and it seems wonderful, but I have been warned. I surveyed 2 classes worth of kids and asked them if they could have figured out a similar question from last unit without the direct instruction I offered and got mixed results: some were confident, others not as much. I’ve also asked fellow teachers their advice and they responded in warning tones: students don’t want that type of choice, high school students don’t learn that way. There is the voice in my own head, too: You’re veering too far from traveled ground. So maybe the vision is as reachable as the stars my students will soon be studying, or maybe I’m just interpreting it wrong. Or maybe, just maybe these students will reach for the stars and arrive at their destination.
