School Reform
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1/13/2008
Successful schools focused on reform are engaged in “new” ways of thinking about the real nature of their business. Schools in transition address multiple intelligences, and require rigorous, pliable learning processes.
Teachers design workflow models and teach problem solving strategies for information gathering, organizing, analyzing, synthesizing, and processing, thus enabling learners to create knowledge. Rigorous, pliable learning processes, workflow models, and problem solving strategies must be tied to student interests. These structures and processes enable students to develop abilities that enable them to be lifelong learners and contributors to their families, friends, and communities.
Kohn (1999) recognizes that school reform requires a fundamental shift in the educational process itself. He states that there is a “distinction . . . between inviting kids to play an active role in constructing meaning, on the one hand, and treating them as passive receptacles to be filled up with skills, on the other” (p. 163). To become lifelong learners, students must develop a mission that incorporates an intrinsic desire to know with a method or process for their engagement.
What is needed are a set of strategic processes that support and feed students’ natural curiosity and desire to learn, allowing students to construct knowledge from information.
Dan | Portland, OR