Playing with Fire

An impassioned essay that reminds us what we are all about and why we teach:

Playing with Fire

If Students Designed Their Own School

     This is an interesting pilot program that I learned about from 'The Learning Pond', the Grant Lichtman blog that Jason pointed us towards earlier:  http://learningpond.wordpress.com/ The 14 minute documentary, created by one of the nine students in the pilot program, discusses how these nine students created their own 'school within a school'.  The students choose/create a 'Weekly Question' to present to other students each Friday, develop a 'Personal Endeavor' that they pursue over the course of a semester/year, and work with the other students on a 'Group Endeavor' that also involves a long-term group learning project.

     The students emphasize the self-directed nature of their learning and how the program forces them to take ownership of their learning in a way that the traditional schooling model does not.  I thought this would be an interesting possibility to explore for a small group of our students next year as our own 'pilot' or the model could also be applied to professional development with a small group of faculty who could use the self-directed learning model to create their own personalized and group learning opportunity.

  

Check it out.