Re-Imagining the PLP: A Systems Approach to Increasing Student Ownership
At last week’s Standards-Based
Learning Symposium at
St. Michael’s college, I orchestrated a workshop that
shared this blog’s title. Not having any particular expertise with PLPs (but
committed to making our schools more learner-centered and brain-friendly), I
sent out an email to a swath of colleagues whom I knew had the PLP expertise I
lacked. I asked them if they would help me prepare for this PLP workshop by
answering these questions:
1. As you look out over
the Vermont learning landscape regarding PLP, what are some of the bright
spots--successes worth celebrating and emulating--you've encountered?
2. What are some of the
most pressing questions educators and their learners are posing (or should be
posing) about PLP?
3. What
resources--texts, conferences, websites, human, other--do you recommend to
educators looking to make PLP more robust and meaningful for their learners?
4. What other ideas /
tips do you have that might help me become wiser about the ways--real and hoped
for--of PLP?
I edited / organized the
responses I received into a google doc (Our Collective Wisdom about PLP),
and I invited participants in last week’s workshop to add to this document.
(I’m sharing it here with editing rights in hopes that you, Dear Reader, might
also add ideas / resources that contribute to our understanding of PLP.)
Here are the slides from the workshop,
which I annotate here in hopes that they might be of help to others.
Slides 1 - 4
As participants arrived they were greeted by Bob Dylan’s Gotta Serve Somebody, which forecasted the workshop’s organizing question: Whom do we serve, and how might PLP help?
Slides 5-10
I then posed the
obvious-yet-often-missed point about personalizing instruction: When we know and understand our
learners, it’s a whole lot easier to personalize learning. I then shared a
few photos and anecdotes about a few young people that I know well, making the
point that when we really know and understand others, personalizing instruction
becomes a natural response to their ways of making sense of the world. Participants
then identified a young person they know and understand well, and they
partnered to introduce those young people to each other, making sure to
describe the young person’s distinct personality / nature.
The takeaway of this set
of slides: the depth and quality of a PLP depends on the depth and quality of
our relationship with, and commitment to, our learners.
Slides 11- 13
We then pivoted to the
field of cognitive science, exploring the central thesis of Thomas Armstrong’s The Power of the Adolescent Brain: Strategies for
Teaching Middle and High School Students.
Armstrong argues that schools, in a well-intended effort to manage the
challenges that adolescents pose, inadvertently create conditions that suppress
the miraculous learning powers of the adolescent brain. Adolescents need
learning experiences that tack with the stormy-yet-predictable winds of their
adolescent brains and bodies, working with their biological pull for risk
taking, sensation seeking, peer to peer meaning making, and reward seeking. How
might PLP rooted in the reality of who our students are be part of a systemic
effort to create conditions that tack with the winds of the adolescent brain
and body, rather than creating seemingly-safer, but stultifying, harbors?
We also explored a
central idea from Daniel Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth about What
Motivates Us. Pink shows how humans are motivated by conditions that feed
our need for mastery (getting really good at something), autonomy (owning what
& how one gets good at something), and purpose (feeling the personal
relevance and importance of the work). How might PLP help more students
experience greater mastery, autonomy, and purpose?
Slides 14-20
We then looked at
a short excerpt from a NYT article, How Measurement Fails Doctors and Teachers,
which quotes a “towering figure in the field of quality measurement”,
Avedis Donabedian, who pronounced, “The secret to quality is love.” And
then to the wisdom of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “If you want to build a ship,
don’t drum up people to collect wood and assign tasks, but rather teacher them
to long for the sea.”
But how can this work in schools where students are taking 5-8 disconnected classes? How can students be expected to long for so many different and seemingly-separate seas? And how can teachers be expected to elicit longing for their disciplines when they don't have time and space to really know and understand their learners? We then reminded ourselves of what great teachers do, and how PLP could do what great teachers do.
But how can this work in schools where students are taking 5-8 disconnected classes? How can students be expected to long for so many different and seemingly-separate seas? And how can teachers be expected to elicit longing for their disciplines when they don't have time and space to really know and understand their learners? We then reminded ourselves of what great teachers do, and how PLP could do what great teachers do.
Slides 21-22
We then did a Think, Pair,
Share in response to this prompt: When
you’re asked “Why are we doing PLP?” what are the reasons you give? After pairing / sharing, we considered
the question: Did anyone write
down, “Because our mission makes it clear that we must”? No one had. We then studied a
document, which showcased the mission statements from all of the attending
participants’ schools / school systems. We paused to read through these mission statements,
considering the question: What
do these have to say about the need, or not, for PLP?
We considered how
leaders and educators have messaged the PLP, and whether there’s been proper
attention to the why, before settling into the what and how. We also returned
to the question posed by Dylan’s Gotta
Serve Somebody: Whom and what are we here to serve?
We also considered the
brain truisms, Practice
predicts performance and We become what we do over time.
Are students practicing, or just preparing for, what these mission statements
describe? How might PLP be a way to get students engaged in practicing what
these mission statements describe, so when students graduate, they are skilled
at the performance that lies before them?
Slides 24-25
We then turned to a list
of Principles and Practices for designing and implementing PLP in ways that can
leverage the power and potential of our learners. All of these principles and
practices, though, are rooted in the questions: What would happen if we flipped
the notion that “students come to school to study” to “students come to school
to be studied”? Rather than seeing school as a place to prepare students for
their future lives, what if, as John Dewey continues to urge us, education
became about life itself?
Slides 26-28
We read through and
discussed Cecil W. Morris’ poem, Teaching Dreams,
a great poem that raises many questions about teaching and learning, in
particular, the way the human brain often learns best the unintended lessons
schools and educators impart. Our brains, outside of our conscious awareness,
pick up on implicit messages that our environments send us. How might we be
more intentional about the implicit messages our schools send students,
creating conditions that invite learners to describe matters to them
and what they really are learning throughout their years of school, rather than
“covering” the learning?
Slides 29-30
I then described my own
experience in the last few years, as part of a team that designs and
orchestrates What’s
the Story? (WtS),
a credit-earning, flexible pathway that personalizes a proficiency-based
experience for middle and high school students. This blended learning
environment, as well as I’ve ever seen, brings out the best in adolescent
learners because the designers, instructors, and mentors tack with the winds of
who their learners are, while leaning on the rudder of proficiencies to target transferable skills. Recently our current cohort of students wrote blog
posts about what WtS is and means to them so that prospective students can hear
it from the students themselves. Here’s a link to one of those blog posts,
and here’s where you can access the rest.
Just listen to these voices! Are they cooped up in a harbor, or out sailing the
seas they long for?
Slides 31-34
To wrap things up, we
read this excerpt from Adrienne Rich’s Stepping
Backwards,
So I come back to saying
this good-by,
A sort of ceremony of my
own,
This stepping backward
for another glance.
Perhaps you’ll say we
need no ceremony,
Because we know each
other, crack and flaw,
Like two irregular
stones that fit together.
Yet still good-by,
because we live by inches
And only sometimes see
the full dimension.
A re-imagined, systemic
approach to PLP might help end the fragmentation and disconnectedness that mark
our current students’ experience as they make their way through our school
systems, and help replace it with a coherent and connected system whose mission
is to help each of our learners realize and bring their very best selves to
each other and our world.
I then shared some
mind-boggling photos from an incredible book Overview, which Amazon’s
describes this way.
Inspired by the
"Overview Effect"--a sensation that astronauts experience when given
the opportunity to look down and view the Earth as a whole--the breathtaking,
high definition satellite photographs in OVERVIEW offer a new way to look at
the landscape that we have shaped. More than 200 images of industry,
agriculture, architecture, and nature highlight incredible patterns while also
revealing a deeper story about human impact. This extraordinary photographic
journey around our planet captures the sense of wonder gained from a new,
aerial vantage point and creates a perspective of Earth as it has never been
seen before.
How might a systemic approach
to PLP provide an “overview effect” that helps educators diminish our learners
living by inches (experiencing separate, discipline-centered approaches and
disconnected grade levels) and enable our learners to experience the full
dimension of themselves, others, and the world they live in?
Slide 35
One of my favorite
slides, conveying the latin derivations for the word education.
Summary of the Entire
Workshop
The health and vitality
of PLP depends on our school systems’ unstated-but-practiced missions. In
school systems committed to the traditional factory model of
discipline-centered learning, PLP will be marginalized and become an irritation
to most educators and students. In school systems committed to creating a 21st
century model of student-centered learning, PLP, will, over time, thrive.
Finally, a big thank you
to all of you who responded to my initial call for help, and a huge thank you,
in particular, to Don Taylor (Main Street Middle School, Montpelier), Chris Palmer
(BFA, Fairfax), and Life LeGeros & Susan Hennessey (Tarrant Institute for Innovation in Education),
who provided information and resources that made this workshop work.
Comments
Post a Comment