An Excellent Adventure

On Monday and Tuesday Mr. Inglese and I traveled with a group of western Pennsylvania educators to Downingtown School District to visit one of their schools.  The school is a S.T.E.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) magnet high school.  The purpose of our trip was much more than to look at a STEM school.  As a matter of fact the STEM aspect (although interesting) was secondary to our purposes.  What we found fascinating was the instruction that was occurring in the school.  Teachers are instructing the kids using an inquiry-based instructional model.  There are very limited amount of lectures and most of the instruction revolves around students working in teams to solve a problem posed to them by their teacher. The school does not subscribe to the “show up and throw up” method of teaching where teachers pass their knowledge to students through a lecture and then the students regurgitate the information back to the teachers in the form of a test. During the course of solving the problem, students will discover and learn the necessary parts of the school curriculum.  We found that not one classroom teacher had students arranged in neat rows.  Rather, students worked in groups either in the classroom or in the hallways.  The library had a miniscule amount of books.  Actually, the library was not even called a library; it was called a “Knowledge Commons”.  The purpose of the Knowledge Commons was to provide a space for student collaboration.  The teacher in the Knowledge Commons helped students work together and gather resources from all sources, not just from books in the library.  This model of schooling is slightly on the outside of the box and offers an alternative way of looking at how students can (and should) be educated.  

Another fascinating aspect of the school was their motto: “Effort creates intelligence”.  The motto is embedded into the beliefs of the students and staff and is reflected in school policy.  For example, when I asked a student about what the motto means to her she told me that, “It does not matter [at the school] about grades…it is the understanding of the content that is important”.  I asked another student how she felt about the fact that homework was not graded.  She told me, “Removing grades from homework increased the value of homework for me and my friends”.  Very interesting indeed.  The staff believes that pedagogy and a belief in the student’s ability to understand the curriculum was more important than content knowledge of the teachers.

As Penn-Trafford moves forward to meet the non-negotiable goals of the School Board, classroom instruction that challenges students to analyze, collaborate and explore content knowledge is essential.  PT must make sure that no student becomes an accident of geography where students receive different levels of excellent instruction based on what classroom they walk in.  We must assure that all students are faced with instruction that allows them the opportunity to become critical thinkers.  Knowledge is not something that is transferred from the all knowing content specialist (the teacher) to the “empty vessel” of the students.   One of the things that I have learned throughout my life is that the more I learn about a subject, the more I realize how much I do not know about the subject.  We cannot expect teachers to know everything about their curriculum.  What is more realistic for teacher’s is that we recognize that they may have more knowledge than the students but that their job is to facilitate understanding about the subject for the student. I believe that an inquiry-based (or project based) instructional focus allows a better opportunity for this understanding to occur.  Let’s not concern ourselves with “covering” the material; let’s worry about making sure students understand the content.