This post grew from a very spontaneous and enjoyable encounter with Buffy our School V.P. and Andrew our School Music Department Head. We were speaking about the pros and cons of a semester system vrs. a full year schooling system. I was struck by Andrew’s confession that he grieves when he loses his students prematurely. He feels strongly that their learning needs (and developmental needs) are not met adaquetely through the semester system.

Buffy mentioned an outstanding presentation she took in over the past few days which addressed brain development in adolescents. As she and Andrew spoke about their experiences and insights, I recalled the many papers I reviewed by John Abbott from the 21st Century Initiative and Bonnie Benard WestEd – excellence in research, development and service.
The conversation moved me to gather these writers and researchers into a blog post.

For the Love of Learning – Report The Ontario Royal Commission on Learning, written in 1995 provides key recommendations for the future of education in Ontario.
One excerpt reads ” We believe smaller schools-within-schools make great sense. We believe every student should have a teacher who acts as a personal steward for several years in a row. We believe teachers and students should have more influence in how schools are run, and that parents must be welcomed by every school in the province and given thorough advice about how they can support their children’s learning.”

Bonnie Benard has an extensive history of major research publications and is impacting all levels of the education and youth development community with her research on resiliency.

The California Health Kids Survey is a major research project that demonstrates the strengths and sucesses of the youth development or resiliency framework. The resiliency framework is a key starting point for programming at the Community Resource & Learning Room.

“The major tenet of the youth development or resilience approach is that resilience is a capacity for healthy development innate to all people. Resilience is more specifically defined as an inborn developmental wisdom that naturally motivates individuals to meet their human needs for love, belonging, respect, identity, power, mastery, challenge, and meaning. When young people experience home, peer, school and community environments rich in the developmental supports and opportunities of caring relationships, high expectations and opportunities for meaningful participation, these needs are met.”

John Abbott is a leading thinker, researcher and speaker in the international educational world. He has spent considerable amount of time in Canada at major conferences with educators and government groups. Here are a few of his articles (with brief excerpts) that I enjoyed.

Battery Hens or Free Range Chickens – What Kind of Education for What Kind of World?

“Education is floundering for lack of really clear thinking. By default, we will end up in the world of the battery hens who hardly know how to stand on their own feet when their cages are removed. But those reassuring cages that support us now won’t be around in 20 years time. The survivors will surely be the free-range chickens.”

Learning to Go With the Grain of the Brain

“Researchers in the 1990s have uncovered a massive amount of evidence in the cognitive sciences, and in neurobiology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, and even archeology and anthropology which shows us in great detail how it is that humans actually learn. We now can see why learning is much more than just the flip-side of good teaching and schooling. Much of this evidence confirms what many people have always intuitively thought; learning involves far more than schooling. People are quick to recognize that many successful public figures were either school failures or removed themselves from formal schooling at an early date. Conversely many successful people in school seemed to have disappeared without a trace.”

Constructing Knowledge, Reconstructing Schooling

“It is the territory between the schools and the community where the difficulty for so many policymakers and the general public lie. Yet increasing numbers of people are starting to recognize that for a more dynamic form of learning like constructivism to succeed it will require strong partnerships among all those who make-up the environment in which children learn and grow.”

Biological Roots of Learning

“The brain is revealed as a more flexible, self-adjusting, biological system that grows and reshapes itself in response to challenge, or withers through lack of use. The mass of evidence now emerging about learning and brain development has spawned a movement towards educational practice that confirms that thinking skills (meta-cognition) and creativity can be learned. The brain is now seen as a collection of specialized and complex systems, each engineered by natural selection to aid our species in decision-making. Humans are predisposed to learn from and adapt to their environment.”

“Lieutenant Peter Puget, the grain of the brain and modern society’s failure to understand adolescents”

“Remember that line of Confucius’s epigram? “Let me do, and I understand”. That’s what our young people desperately need. If our elementary education is as good as we think it is, then why do we hold on to our teenagers in secondary schools as if we didn’t trust them? If Peter Puget or Horatio Nelson could come back and sit in some of our classrooms as 13-year-olds I guess they would give us hell! They would be so full of questions, and so impatient to get on and do something, that it would be a tight call between them walking out on us, or we expelling them.”

Growing up Digital – How the Web Changes Work, Education and the Ways People Learn by John Seely Brown is an article that describes the current and future landscape for learning with digital technologies.

“John Seely Brown, Chief Scientist at Xerox and director of its Palo Alto Research Center, hired 15 year olds to design future work environments and learning environments. He observed that the students did not conform to the traditional image of learners as permissive sponges. It requires us to rethink and redesign education for the Digital Age”.
Interested readers can peruse at will by visiting the links and downloading the many word docs, slides, power points and various research publications.

These researchers and writers have greatly contributed to my learning. In turn, the programming at the Community Resource & Learning Room (at my High School) has been enriched by these educators and researchers.

Brent Uncategorized