Last week, we started an interview of Jackie Swanson, an 8th grade writing teacher at North Middle School, in Rapid City, South Dakota. During the interview, Jackie told us how she started using The Writer’s Workshop as a model for teaching her students. This week, we get to see the actual students, as Jackie interacts in class. It’s amazing to see, and I hope that this could be come one of the ways to transform our educational system. Next week, a short piece on what it would take to actually change the way that our children are taught. But this week, let’s just be inspired.
We went to a wonderful workshop last week with Dr. Ed Zlotkowski from Bentley College in Boston. Ed is the senior faculty fellow at Campus Compact, an organization that promotes Service Learning. This piece is a short clip of Ed talking about “Kolb’s learning cycle” and why so many students in America are basically left out of the education process.
According to an article on the web, “Kolb’s learning cycle is typically expressed as four-stage cycle of learning, in which ‘immediate or concrete experiences’ provide a basis for ‘observations and reflections’. These ‘observations and reflections’ are assimilated and distilled into ‘abstract concepts’ producing new implications for action which can be ‘actively tested’ in turn creating new experiences.”
Most students in America are forced to begin learning by entering in 3rd stage – the “abstract concepts” stage, which really means that as a student, you began to learn a topic by reading a book. And because most people in America do NOT learn that way, higher education becomes “education by selection”.
This is part of a series of interviews that I’ve done on learning, and how so many of our schools are failing. Our intention is to open a dialogue about the educational system in America, and to create a new model of education that actually works for students.
Back in the 60’s, Dr. Rita Smilkstein found herself in a situation where she needed to take a job as a substitute teacher. And as we all know the substitute is on the bottom of the academic heap. What she didn’t know was that this would be the beginning of a journey that she’s been traveling ever since. Through her career as a teacher, Rita discovered that we are all natural born learners and that when given the opportunity, everybody can learn using the Natural Human Learning Process. In fact she discovered that in reality, NHLP was something that we all do everyday in our regular lives. The only place where it seems to be missing is – in school. This is the first of many pieces that I’ll be sharing showing you how the Natural Human Learning Process (NHLP) works, and could be the future of education in America.
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