As I was flipping through Time Magazine this week, I came across the 50 greatest inventions of the year. One of them was school related and the name of it was School of One. School of One is a pilot program some schools are trying. It is a groundbreaking way of school instruction in which each day, students in the school are given a unique lesson plan, a "daily playlist" taylored to their learning style and rate of progress that includes a mix of virtual tutoring, in-class instruction, and educational video grames. Its learning for the xbox generation.
I'm thinking this might be interesting to add to the group project based on the main question of the paper which is what is the future of learning. What do we think about this kind of setup in schools? What about the social aspects of learning? Those are some things I think we need to look at when seeing if this program would be effective.
Here is an article about it in the NY times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/education/22school.html?_r=1
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Carole,
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing this. It is very interesting. A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with a friend of mine about 'what if we had a schools with no grades...students progress was content based. If a student learned the material, they would move on, if not, they would not." A big part of our conversation was how a school like this might actually function. This might be one possible solution. Thanks again!
Carole,
ReplyDeleteInitially, I wonder about this logistically--but this is only because I have no preccnceived idea of how this would work. Once I get over my own fear of organization, I love love love this idea. You know we keep hearing that our current system of education isn't working, and that we need to adapt our school structure to better meet the needs of students so they can do better on ACT/PSAE. In our district, this amounts to meetings and brainstorm sessions and curriculum writing and grants to invite certain foundations to come evaluate our district. The problem is, despite all of the input, despite all of the brainstorms and professional foundation advice, we are still pretty much doing the exact same thing we've been doing for the last 6 years. I mean, I think that in the English department, our content teaching has been getting a lot better, ut at the end of the day we're still in classrooms trying to differentiate instruction for 32 kids at a time. Honestly, I don't know if I do a very good job of it.
To think about something so completely different, so completely innovative as the School of One gets me really excited. What a neat possibility to try and shake up the way we teach by custom tailoring what students need. If you haven't already, check out Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis. She pretty runs a totally student centered classroom--so much so that in a recent post she mentioned feeling disconnected from her students since they are so independently engaged. Very cools stuff.
Thanks for the link and the information about school of one!!
Luke