Dropout Summit pt. 1
On Friday Feb. 23 Dana, Kathryn, Laura and Noah and I participated in a summit on the high school dropout rate at Baruch college. A lot of interesting ideas were presented about how to reduce the dropout rate in regard to what goes on inside th classroom. Here are a few that I found especially interesting.
These were created in response to a Gates survey which cited boredom as the highest cause of high school drop outs nation wide.
IMPROVING TEACHING
In the business-model for education there is a lot of emphasis on test prep, lectures and mounds of homework. These are important for students to succeed on standardized tests and have been thought to increase graduation rates but as we have seen this is not the case. The negative, isolating effects of these methods could very well be the cause of students feeling that they can’t go on with going to school every day. The issue of making classes more accessible to students is an important part of the Campaign Against Student Apathy.
Some solutions to this problem that were offered at the summit included:
-Interactive Teaching methods
-More project based learning, less test based learning
-more discussion, less lecture
- simulations
-presentations
-learning through experiences (i.e. seeing how what you are learning affects the real world)
AND MY FAVORITE SOLUTION OF ALL:
-Make class time work time: Less reliance on homework.
This way teachers can help students work through problems and ideas and really help teach them how to learn and how to solve problems rather than throwing work on top of them and MAYBE commenting when they are done. I’m a junior getting ready for the English regents and I’ve got to say, I still get really nervous when I have to approach an essay.
This entry has gotten a little dense so I’ll leave it at that for now.
Hopefully dissecting these issues will help us come up with a comprehensive plan for CASA.
More to come on Guidance and extra-curricular solutions to the dropout problem.
–Seth Pearce
2 Comments so far
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Seth,
I think the key to eliminating the drop-out rate is to find a way to engage students and empower them by making them responsible for their own education. It’s obvious teacher led direct-instruction is no longer “cutting it” (actually, I don’t think it was “cutting it” back in the 60’s and 70’s when I was in school). “Learning is in the doing” and student-centered project-based learning needs to be impelemented in our schools now!
I first witnessed the power of project-based learning four years ago when I was part of a training team for a management tool being implemented in a PBL school in the inner-city of Milwaukee, WI. While our training session was delayed due to a classroom knife fight, I spent enough time to see how the students were engaged in projects that were relevant to what interested them, what they may want to do in the future, and learning how to research and find those resources (via the internet and library) to complete a successful project. In these brief interviews with each of the 5 students in my group, I heard knowledge and passion about project subjects that I find hard to believe that they will ever forget. When I walked out of that school at the end of the day, I tried my hardest to try and remember one thing I learned about in high school thirty years ago. I couldn’t remember one thing!
If you’re looking for solutions to student boredom, please check out the Buck Institute for Education (bie.org) and my company Project-Based Learning Systems (projectfoundry.org). Buck is one of the best as far as teaching the PBL methodology and Project Foundry has digitilized this “paper intensive” process.
Good luck.
Kevin Kirkland
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article , but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.