Lifelong Learners

Just a couple of months ago, my daughter, Annie opted out of traditional high school to attend a charter school. It’s a great local charter school through which students learn at home: a sort of public school and homeschooling hybrid. Today she and I both have far more control over what, how, when and where she learns.

Annie’s advanced algebra class is based on a rigorous online system. She accesses it by sitting on her futon, keyboard in lap, facing the large-screen television that we have adapted for use as an oversized computer monitor. She can read her English assignments in book form or on her new e-reading device. She keeps up with her Spanish by reading the AP (Advanced Placement) recommended Spanish reading list, and she takes courses in history, anthropology, and PE.

Annie is considering a local college course in biology next semester. And she’ll take some classes at the local art center as well. But for most of her work, her classroom is now anywhere and everywhere: the local Starbucks, public library, living room couch, a nearby park. She is reading more and learning more than she was when she was attending the local, traditional high school, and yet she has more free time now. (Annie enjoys playing club waterpolo, volunteering, cooking, playing flute, and knitting.)

At first glance, it doesn’t add up. How can Annie be getting more learning done in less time? The biggest change seems to be the reduction in time spent on testing. We don’t focus on getting her ready for the next state-mandated standardized test. Instead, we follow her interests as much as the state standards. And this makes her a very happy student – happier than I have seen her since elementary school.

Annie has always been a straight-A student, and she was paying an increasingly large price. The higher grades seemed to be increasingly focused on testing, to the point that Annie spent most of her time getting ready for the next one. She was constantly “studying,” constantly anxious about multiple upcoming tests. And with college rapidly approaching, she felt the pressure of needing to get an A on every single test.

We’re done with all that now. Now, Annie is focused on learning. She has become excited about anthropology, and loved reading To Kill a Mockingbird and Lord of the Flies. She is looking forward to more courses in the sciences, and she excels at math. She is fluent in Spanish and will soon be starting to learn German.

Her goal is Columbia University’s pre-med program, with Berkeley and Harvard as possible back-up plans.

I have no doubt that Annie will reach her goals because, in addition to learning all the subjects I’ve mentioned, she is learning to take control of her own education. Gone are the stresses of trying to guess what will be on tomorrow’s test. Instead, she has time to read more widely, write more frequently, and think more deeply. What’s more, she has a head start on choosing a college major because she’s already in the practice of asking herself what she’s interested in. She is becoming increasingly self-directed.  She sits in on lectures at a local college and listens to Harvard and UC Berkeley lectures online.

While Annie’s new school is extraordinary, the situation that led us here is common. Today’s college-bound students are experiencing unparalleled pressures as the emphasis on testing in traditional public schools continues to grow. This pattern has been so gradual that I think most parents haven’t noticed. However, the radical change that Annie has experienced these last few months has made it crystal clear to me: too much testing gets in the way of learning. It takes up our students’ time – not just the time it takes to actually take the tests, but all the time that students spend preparing for the next one.

Too much testing does not serve anyone. In addition to the direct effect this has on students, it forces teachers to focus on test prep, administering tests, and grading, instead of actually teaching. Teachers are increasingly pushed to narrow their instruction – reaching the most extreme position possible when test preparation becomes the instruction, with instructional materials mimicking the formats and exercises that appear on the tests.  This isn’t teaching. It isn’t learning. It’s madness!

I don’t know exactly how much of my own daughter’s time had previously been taken over by tests. But I can tell you that removing those artificial pressures, and replacing them with a program focused on her learning experience, has been nothing short of life-changing.

Most parents are familiar with the saying that “parents are a child’s first teachers.” But what about being your child’s primary teacher – not just for life skills and values, but academics as well – at age 8, 12, and 16? That’s a different idea completely. And it’s catching on.

I often hear from many parents who either homeschool or participate in an independent study charter school where they serve as their child’s primary teacher. More and more, I’m also hearing from parents who are considering these options.

These parents have very different needs and questions from those who are trying to make traditional public school work for their children. Parents-as-teachers are asking for curricula advice, learning resources, pacing guides, and information on the wide variety of educational approaches out there.

A good place to begin is with educational philosophy. And the good news is that there is a wide range of educational philosophies and approaches to choose from.  These include:

Montessori
The three Montessori principles are Observation, Individual Liberty, and Preparation of the Environment to “control the environment, not the child.” Montessori methods include the provision of appropriate materials and tools for children to use in mastering age and state-appropriate skills.

Unit Study
The Unit Study approach integrates the typical school subjects into units based on themes, and are useful for multi-level teaching.  There are many unit study curricula available, but you can also create your own. Themes might focus on character building studies, history based studies, literature based studies, or science based studies.

Unschooling
Unschooling is focused on following the interests of the child, and allowing learning to occur in a natural way.  Parents facilitate rather than “educate” their children. Academic subjects are incorporated into everyday life.

Waldorf
The aim of Waldorf schooling is to educated the whole child; head, heart and hands. There is a strong focus on imagination and fantasy play. Competition is discouraged, and reading is not taught until much later than it is in traditional public schools. Students are encouraged to follow their own interests, and the unit study approach is often utilized as well.

Charlotte Mason
The Charlotte Mason philosophy encourages reading good books from original sources as well as the incorporation of nature study and enjoyment. Music, books, and art are emphasized.

Classical / Trivium
This model is often (but not always) tied to Christian content, and it is based on elements drawn from ancient Roman teaching methods. The Trivium contained three areas; Grammar (factual knowledge), Dialectic (reasoning), and Rhetoric (expression and application). This approach often connects these three areas of the Trivium to different stages of cognitive development.

Eclectic
Most homeschooling and parent-led learning takes an eclectic approach that may borrow elements from one or more of the approaches above. Methods and curricula are most often chosen to meet the particular needs, strengths, and desires of the individual child.

Parent Driven Schools has long advocated for parents’ choice in the education of their children. After all, who is most motivated to make our educational systems the best they can possibly be? It’s not the educators, the administrators, or the politicians. It’s the parents!

Parents vote with their feet. They move their families to cities and neighborhoods where the schools are known to be good. They seek out charter schools that are a better for their child than the neighborhood schools. They home-school, too, in ever-increasing numbers.

Here at Parent Driven Schools, we are strong supporters of parent choice in the education of their children. We recognize that there’s no one right answer for all children, and we know from experience that parents are in the best position to make educational decisions. That’s why we want every family to be informed and empowered to make the best possible decisions. Following are a few tools and web sites that can help:

• Greatschools.org publishes annual School Chooser guides and distributes them at no cost to thousands of parents so they can make more informed choices about where to send their children to school.
• The US Department of Education provides a webcast called New Tools for Parents: Getting Informed & Getting Involved.  This webcast highlights the benefits of The No Child Left Behind Act, which provides parents with access to a greater range of educational options, including free tutoring programs, charter schools, and scholarships for low-income students. Another US Department of Education webcast, Charter Schools and School Choice, provides a more in-depth look at charter schools. The US Department of Education publicly states that “charter schools, in particular, have become increasingly appealing to parents, and for good reason—as laboratories for new educational strategies, these flexible schools improve education for everyone in the system and offer innovative places for children to achieve at their highest possible levels.”
• The homeschooling movement, while strong, is somewhat more diverse. Some resources for parents considering homeschooling include the Homeschooling section of About.com, Homeschool.com, and Classical Christian Homeschooling.
• Independent study charter schools are yet another option, offering benefits of both charter schools and homeschooling. For examples, see Innovative Education Management (IEM) Charter Schools, Sky Mountain Charter School  and Ocean Grove Charter School . IEM has been successfully developing and operating California charter schools for many years.
• Call our free HelpLine anytime during business hours. Our support specialists provide free information, ideas and resources for parents making educational decisions or experiencing difficulty working with their child’s school. The HelpLine phone number is (800) 893-6199.

Why is Individualizing Education So Important?

In today’s public schools, standardized tests are given annually. All of the children in the same grade are expected to perform well. To make sure they do, teachers are focusing more and more on teaching to those tests. The goal is to spend the most time possible focused on the topics that are addressed in these tests.

Increasingly, brain research is showing that this approach is misguided. Take, for example, the National Institutes of Health study published in Neuroimage in 2007. This study found that boys’ and girls’ brain structures develop in different sequences. Specifically, these researchers found that while areas of the brain involved in language mature about six years earlier in girls, areas involved in spatial memory mature about four years earlier in boys. Could this be why we hear teen-aged girls complain about math being so hard? And teen-aged boys complaining that poetry is girls’ stuff? It seems so.

However, we are not likely to see public schools separate students into classes by gender. But the more you look at the data, the more it really would make sense to do so. Then again, there are many more kinds of learning differences in any given classroom. For example, we have many  children who have been identified as having learning disabilities, and more who seem to be significantly challenged, although we’re not sure why. Even in the same child, we may find giftedness in regard to math and difficulty keeping up with reading, for example. We have children who do well as long as everything is presented in an auditory fashion, or with opportunity for hands-on exploration. Children who seem to need to move, and children who need quiet to think. The variety of unique needs to be met in each classroom is fairly astounding.

It’s a shame that our public schools are so bent on standardized testing. We can only imagine what heights our children might reach if, rather than teaching to the test, we pitched our lessons in the ways that are best suited each child’s unique profile of interests, strengths and challenges.