Quality and Student Learning Communities: Doing does more
You can’t make a tomato bigger by weighing it and you won’t make kids smarter by constantly measuring a few of the things they may have learned through tests.
Education must do a better job of speaking to the why and how changing our schools and classrooms into QSLC’s – Quality Student Learning Communities through the creation of a positive and student-centered learning environment. This is perhaps more essential now than ever. The educational discussion needs to be about how educators will be encouraged to change their school and classrooms, as well as their own teaching focus. The focus needs to be on the quality of support, type of work, guidance and student engagement by using the curriculum and curriculum content as the raw material that will help everyone accomplish school and societal goals. The educational discussion must fosters the ideal of a more engaging classroom that will help each student learn to learn at all levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, but especially at the highest cognitive level of evaluation which will only be accomplished by making a major shift from lecture / teacher talk as the dominant methodology to a more active use of and engagement with the content / curriculum, democratic processes, and students engaging in participatory discussions and activities / work with their peers through the use of a variety of grouping arrangements. Finally, the education discussion must offer ideas and suggestions of what educators need to do to enhance the learning that goes on in each of their classrooms by becoming more focused on How each student learns best through daily and on-going assessment rather than What each student learned through the use of quizzes and tests.
Dewey Quote: I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform. All reforms which rest simply upon the law, or the threatening of certain penalties, or upon changes in mechanical or outward arrangements, are transitory and futile…. But through education society can formulate its own purposes, can organize its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to move…. Education thus conceived marks the most perfect and intimate union of science and art conceivable in human experience.
John Dewey, My Pedagogic Creed, 1897
This post was submitted by Lucian Szlizewski, Ph.D..
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