Once and Future School: Exhibit A
I have written in
a previous issue about the Once and Future School.
Now I want to show you what I have in mind.
Spencer Dicks is
a Middle School history teacher who, along with Upper School chemistry teacher
Becky Sundseth, was accepted in 2011 into the first class of the Virtual
Independent School Network’s (VISnet) Master Teacher Academy. And this year, Mr. Dicks has added to his
teaching responsibilities the role of part-time Instructional Technology
Coordinator for the Middle School. Mr.
Dicks is what we call an “early adopter.”
We can’t all be early adopters, but I am thankful that some of us
are. They lead the way for the rest of
us and help us find our way through these enormous challenges.
Here is a link to a video of one of Mr. Dicks' lessons.
The Once
This is a
liberal arts educational experience, well-designed for Middle School students.
You will see
here that Mr. Dicks has designed a lesson that helps students enter into
fundamental political and constitutional questions. In the spirit of our classical education,
students are expected to read, understand, analyze, debate, and write about
Alexander Hamilton’s argument for the electoral college in “Federalist Number
86” The lesson is designed to demand of
students a mastery of the grammar of history (starting with definitions and key
disputed elections). Once the students
have understood the basics, they move on to read carefully and analytically
both primary sources like the Federalist
Papers and also incisive opinions by important contemporary thinkers. The analysis and subsequent debate requires
students to think critically and to employ the tools of logic or dialectic at
their disposal. Finally, they close out
this lesson by writing a letter in which they state their position, with
reference to the sources they have read.
Mr. Dicks is introducing these students to a conversation that is part
of the Great Tradition we want our students to enter into.
The Future
We need to be
careful about the claims we make about the new technologies and new ways of
learning that are available to us these days.
They will not, as some claim, completely revolutionize learning. Learning will still need to be rooted in the fascinating
but elusive human quest for knowledge and understanding. Learning will always be challenging—there is
no royal road to learning, not even a royal digital road. But the tools that you see in this video do
afford Mr. Dicks and his fellow teachers some new pedagogical moves. Think of teaching as a workshop. These new tools do not supplant the essential
role of the teacher-craftsman. But some
of them are very powerful, and we are excited to explore them. Here is what we are learning, what you can
see in Mr. Dicks’s class:
·
A learning
experience that maximizes student engagement.
Note that the students are doing the work, not Mr. Dicks. (His work is in the lesson design, in the
coaching and guiding of the students, and in the assessment.) You can see from the video how involved and
invested students are.
·
A
corollary of this engagement is that students are intrinsically motivated to do
well in this lesson. Students know that
they will be expected to debate in the fishbowl format, and they know they will
be writing a letter. Mr. Dicks does not
have to badger or coerce them to learn.
He has crafted a lesson that is fundamentally interesting and
engaging.
·
The
learning in this class is highly individualized and adaptable to different
kinds of learners. Some students move very
quickly through texts and understand the material straight away: they can move
right to the analysis and argument.
Others need time to ruminate on the texts, and they have time to do that
at their own pace. Some are auditory
learners and can listen to the historical introductions as many times as they
need to.
·
The
teacher’s role is as the designer of learning experiences for the
students. Sometimes this involves
delivering content, but with global connections and digital networks the
teacher more and more becomes the curator of the content, setting students up
to learn from great books and rich digital content.
The Once AND Future
What I most love
about this kind of lesson is that it is not radically new. That may sound odd to some, who want a
revolution in learning that overturns all we have done before. But Trinity School was founded on the notion
that there is much wisdom in the past and that we ignore it at our peril. The best twenty-first century learning is
learning that transposes the pedagogical wisdom of our forefathers and
foremothers into a key that this next generation of learners
can understand and grasp.
Nearly three
quarters of a century ago, Dorothy Sayers wrote her seminal essay, “The Lost
Tools of Learning,” in which she argued for a focus on the liberal arts (the
Trivium) instead of a sterile and futile focus on subjects. She concluded her essay with these remarks:
What use is it to pile task
on task and prolong the days of labor, if at the close the chief object is left
unattained? It is not the fault of the teachers--they work only too hard
already. The combined folly of a civilization that has forgotten its own roots
is forcing them to shore up the tottering weight of an education—a structure
that is built upon sand. They are doing
for their pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought to do. For the sole
true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves;
and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain (italics added).
What you
see in Mr. Dicks’ lesson is a class that is doing the work of learning
themselves. You see students learning
how to learn. This is a class that has
the “chief object” of learning in its sights, and we find it inspiring and
motivating. It is the kind of education
that good teachers have been offering since Socrates plied his questions in the
Agora of Athens. It
is the sort of education that will keep Trinity relevant as we move into the future.
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