Last night at Ottawa’s Gloucester High School, OPERI presented the following. Between the lines is the message that real change is not difficult once people understand what it means to be unleashed to learn.
Secondary School Reform
Eliminating the bells
- Larry Rosenstock, co-founder of High Tech High, which is considered to be one of the most engaging 21st century schools, considers the traditional school schedule, the regimented fixed chunks of time, to be the single greatest impediment to education innovation.
- Sir Ken Robinson puts it this way, “If you were running a business with a thousand employees, and every forty minutes everybody had to stop what they were doing, go to a different room entirely, and do something else for forty minutes that they weren’t so interested in, and then rinse and repeat six times a day, you’d be out of business in a week.”
School creates the misconception that young learners will be lazy timewasters who will not learn what they need for life unless coerced by adults. This is not supported by evidence from democratic schools, unschoolers, and pre-schoolers. These students are seen as highly engaged as they determine what they need and want to learn with the help of adult facilitators.
OPERI is encouraging school boards to undertake small pilot programs at the secondary school level that eliminate the bells and give students more control over their learning. Simply put, it wants boards to create schools-within-schools, approximately 25 students per school, where students acquire four Ontario ministry credits managing their own learning with the teacher acting as facilitator. Students would opt for these programs. They provide choice that is as equally visible and accessible as traditional education, and it has another characteristic of real choice – they can opt out of it as easily as they opt into it.
These programs cause an immediate switch of emphasis. The primary curriculum becomes the skills needed for independent lifelong learning which when applied to the ministry course material becomes a win-win. Students develop key 21st century self-management skills and gain ministry credits. These programs also create wonderful opportunities to establish learning communities where everyone is a teacher and a learner. Relationships also improve with teacher/facilitators having a helping role as opposed to a coercive role, and where individual differences are celebrated as opposed to making some students targets for bullying.
Monument Mountain High School, featured in the film Beyond Measure, which OPERI hosted in Ottawa in January, provides an example of a student initiated school-within-a-school that gave disengaged, unhappy students a new life.
At least two other groups are planning to host additional screenings of Beyond Measure in Ottawa. To be notified of the screenings and to be kept abreast of innovative happenings in education, get your name on the OPERI mailing list. Write or phone info@operi.ca; 613-747-5689. You can also visit the OPERI website at www.operi.ca.
Encourage your school board to host a screening of Beyond Measure and
take follow-up action.