Student Empowerment

This week’s article summary is  When Educators Make Space For Play and Passion, Students Develop Purpose.

It’s a quick primer into the ideas of Harvard education professor Tony Wagner who has been  challenging schools for over a decade to focus more on the needs of today’s Information Age where knowledge is a ubiquitous commodity only a click away on an iPhone. (Who played in an won the 1948 World Series: Cleveland Indians beat the Boston Braves.)

At our first faculty meeting this year—and at both back-to-school nights—I talked about the historic tension in schools between Knowledge Acquisition and Student Empowerment: while most of us were educated with Knowledge Acquisition being the primary goal, today schools are trying to allow more time for student empowerment.

Especially with Trinity being an elementary school, we develop in our students both knowledge (proficiency in essential skills as well as exposure to a wide base of general knowledge) and empowerment (voice and choice, intrinsic motivation, imaginative problem solvers). 

Wagner is clearly a proponent of schools fostering empowerment in their students because today’s world is less about what you know than what you can do with what you know.  He is especially critical of high schools which all too often lean heavily toward Knowledge Acquisition, e.g., a litany of lists in an 11th grade American history course. (I actually had history teacher who made me memorize all the federal program acronyms of the New Deal—I still cringe when I think about the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)!)

The article, which also has a link to one of his talks to teachers, lists qualities teachers demonstrate who inspire students as young learners: qualities like developing student intrinsic motivation and confidence and encouraging students to create not simply consume information.

The key for all of us as elementary school teachers is to make sure we are providing a healthy balance of both knowledge and empowerment in our students, and recognizing that they are not mutually exclusive—in fact, knowledge acquisition and student empowerment are complementary—as next week’s article summary on the art of questioning will attest.

Enjoy the holiday weekend!

Joe

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Harvard education specialist Tony Wagner has been advocating that we reinvent the education system to promote innovation for years.

He’s clear that content should no longer be at the center of school.

Instead, he says a teacher’s main job should be to help students develop key skills necessary for when they leave school.

He contends there are seven essential things young people need to be successful lifelong learners:

Formulate good questions

Communicate in groups and lead by influence

Be agile and adaptable

Take initiative and be entrepreneurial

Effective written and oral communication skills

Know how to access and analyze information

Be creative and imaginative

Wagner worries that unless the U.S. starts focusing on cultivating these skills, the nation will no longer produce innovative people who drive job growth.

He interviewed dozens of innovative young people and asked them about their experiences in school. One third of those he interviewed couldn’t name one teacher who had impacted them. The other two thirds named teachers, who upon further investigation, were outliers in their schools. Their teaching styles and approaches were at odds with the dominant school culture.

Wagner found that all of these tremendously influential teachers ran classrooms that emphasized the following:

Interdisciplinary learning

Real team collaboration

Risk taking

Creating learning as opposed to consuming knowledge

Cultivated intrinsic motivation in students.

These teachers made room for playful exploration and student passions in the classroom, helping their students to develop the purpose that drives them.