There is so much information and talk about students, no matter what grade they are in, and about the way they are learning in school and how kids aren’t learning the right way and how they aren’t as focused because they don’t see the point in it. The key to making a solution for this is to teach and learn creatively. My sister is dyslexic and has gone to two private schools in Massachusetts and the way they teach is completely different compared to many public schools. It might seem that they teach in a imaginative way because they are teaching dyslexics and that is absolutely true but why can’t students in public schools be taught the same way? There is nothing wrong with this way and it will defiantly improve the students’ attitude towards school. The teachers at these schools get their students involved in the class more and think of creative ways to make the students understand and absorb everything. My sister is 2 grades below me and all of her subjects in school have all gone past what I learned this year at least a year ago. The students don’t feel like they are pounded with work because of the creative way they were taught and they get through the material faster because they are not going directly by textbook. Even though they have to teach the curriculum, they do it in a way that the students understand and remember and this helps them get prepared for college and jobs. Companies are looking for the most creative people, not the people who know everything. They stress communication in the schools she has been through and they want to make the students feel that they are the most important people in the building, not the teachers and staff. Creativity is defiantly an important feature in education and should be stressed in schools today.
Hi Erin - Great post! I agree with you that public schools tend to fall short in their teaching of creativity. Maybe it's because that all of the standardizes tests that we dwell upon like MCAS don't focus on creativity? Why don't we use some of the strategies that are used to help students like your sister?
ReplyDeleteI would love to hear more about specific things they do at your sister's school. Would she ever write some of her thoughts on it?
The first major difference, which you like the most, is that they all sit in circles or half circles in class and at one of her schools, they all each have laptops(MacBooks) that the school lends out to each student each year. Another difference is that whenever it is a nice day outside they have classes outside(but that is really up to the teachers at most public schools).They also do a lot of fun hands-on activities in the classroom to help understand each topic as well as class discussions. This all makes the classes go through the material so much faster because they know it the first time they learn it because they learned it in a fun way and remember it. Every time, the day before they have a test in a class, they play a review game to make sure they are all ready for the test. Even though all of these things are almost all up to the teacher instructing the class, she says it makes a big difference. She also said that homework is so much easier because they all know the information well and it is just a review of what they did in class.
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