Creating an Environment to Learn

In the conference in Nebraska focused on Rethinking the High School Experience there were a number of conversations about experiments – and how people learn. This morning I was sent a link to an article in the Omaha World Herald entitled – Rocking the boat in class (requires a free account to read it online).

The following is my response back to the person that sent the article:

Thanks for sending this along (I read the article on the online version of the paper).

From my perspective this article frames one of the major challenges to be faced in ‘rethinking the high school experience’.

Here we have a man that paid attention to his experience – that students were bored and not connected to the ‘curriculum’ – and he found a way to both connect them to the curriculum AND get them interested in it. He took the risk to ‘try something’ (he did an experiment) and it seems to have added some value.

The environment he is in is not supporting his risk taking, his experiment nor are they paying attention to the results (there isn’t a lot of information in the article about the student’s experience but it implies the students are more engaged and that his experiment is working). Imagine what the resulting impact on the students will be if he is not allowed to teach in the way that gets them interested and connected. Imagine if the students see someone modeling a behavior they like and the ‘system’ shuts it down.

So, herein lies the challenge. Once you allow someone to take a risk and start doing things differently if you stop it, squelch it, or in some way inhibit that behavior there is potentially a backlash that is harder to recover from then if you didn’t open up for risk taking in the first place.

So, I’m saying if you are really serious about ‘rethinking the high school experience’ than the ESU’s and the state department have to be ready to fight the battles that will surely come from people ‘trying something different’…

One way to mitigate these potential battles is to educate people about what the intention is and what the potential results are – in trying new things. This can be accomplished in the traditional fashion – professional development, workshops, forums, community meetings, PR, marketing, public service announcements, etc. – but another way to educate people is the one we talked about in the conference – dialog. Getting people into these conversations about the purpose of education, why we do things the way we do them, what we might do differently, etc. – will go along way in creating an environment that will support further dialog and the safety necessary for people to both be open to new ideas and to try them.

Teach According to the 'Rules'