Week 3 - Shifting Ground

Chris Lehmann has a lot of enthusiasm for communicative technologies and education. He is idealistic about the potential that new tools have to transform education into a student-orchestrated pursuit of knowledge. His perspective is perfectly reasonable given that he is the principal of an inquiry-based private school for high-performing students. Alas, some of his rhetoric is a little to utopian for me when I think of my school. 

Lehmann's notion of empowering students to direct the course of their own academic journeys rather than simply engaging them in the teacher's version of essential facts is an admirable concept, but this could only ever work with highly motivated students. Granted, the whole concept of empowering students should, in theory at least, lend toward the overall motivation of students to learn. Such a theory is great for elementary school teachers, almost none of whose students has already had the innately human desire to learn drilled out of them by boring lessons or patterns of academic failure, but for secondary school teachers who work with already unmotivated students, Lehmann's notion of empowerment is lofty at best if not utterly fantastic.

Perhaps, I am especially skeptical because the holiday break is approaching, so getting my students to invest in any sort of learning seems nearly impossible. Alternatively, it could simply be that my students are quite different from Lehmann's students. I also work at a private school, but unlike the students at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, my students did not apply with excellent grades and letters of recommendation attesting to their zeal for education. Instead, area public schools send most of the students to my school because they do not perform well in traditional classroom settings.

My students have a variety of special needs. Some have learning disabilities. All present behavioral challenges that exceed the “typical” high school student. I believe my students can benefit greatly from using interactive and collaborative tools, and I agree with Lehmann that an inquiry-based approach to learning can be beneficial, but most of my students are not apt to embrace an educational approach that requires them to direct their own learning. I have a hard enough time getting my students to select their own topics for projects or their own projects for given subjects.

Most of my students want to be told what to do so they can either choose to do it or reject it. They do not want to take responsibility for the idea. It is too much pressure, requires too much thought and creativity, and is just too risky. I am encouraged to see that there are educators like Lehmann who believe in putting students in charge of their own learning, and I must admit am a little envious of his perspective, but it is not for everyone. Some students need, and will always need, more direction.