Part II: How To Get Students Excited About Learning

Want to check out the entire “50-Year Fight” series? Visit our landing page.

With Meghna Chakrabarti

Rapping Shakespeare? Origami in math class? Out-of-the box ideas to get students excited about learning. Our special series, “The Fifty Year Fight: Solutions for Closing the Achievement Gap.”

Guests

Pedro Noguera, founder of the Center for the Transformation of Schools at the University of California, Los Angeles. Distinguished Professor of Education at the UCLA Graduate School of Education. (@PedroANoguera)

Matthew Riggan, co-founder and executive director at the Workshop School. (@RigganMatthew)

Keene Walker, social studies teacher at South Atlanta High School. (@keenewalker)

Results From The ’50-Year Fight’ SurveyFrom The Reading List

New York Times: “Opinion: High School Doesn’t Have to Be Boring” — “When you ask American teenagers to pick a single word to describe how they feel in school, the most common choice is ‘bored.’ The institutions where they spend many of their waking hours, they’ll tell you, are lacking in rigor, relevance, or both.

“They aren’t wrong. Studies of American public schools from 1890 to the present suggest that most classrooms lack intellectual challenge. A 2015 Gallup Poll of nearly a million United States students revealed that while 75 percent of fifth-grade students feel engaged by school, only 32 percent of 11th graders feel similarly.

“What would it take to transform high schools into more humanizing and intellectually vital places? The answer is right in front of us, if only we knew where to look.

“When the two of us — a sociologist and a former English teacher — began our own investigation of this question several years ago, we made two assumptions. Both turned out to be wrong.”

Philadelphia Public Schools, The Notebook: “The evolving Philadelphia high school” — “With the sound of drills and nail guns in the background, two ninth-grade boys tried to solve a math problem.

“‘How many 2-by-4, 8-foot planks am I going to have to buy when I go to Home Depot this afternoon?,’ asked Jared Lauterbach, the students’ teacher, ‘and how many 6-foot planks?’

“This is what studying Shakespeare looks like at the Workshop School, one of seven (soon to be eight) schools in the District’s Innovation Network. They are part of a growing national movement to reinvent the high school experience by re-aligning learning with skills students actually need to lead successful and productive lives.

“Two 9th-grade classes at Workshop, which grew out of West Philadelphia High School’s Automotive Academy, had spent the prior several weeks reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“Together, they wrote their own version of the play, set in West Philly in 2017. Called The Summer That Changed Everything, it featured teenage love triangles, betrayal, misunderstandings, and a psychiatrist who hypnotizes people with classical music. The antidote to the trance is a dose of R&B. Big themes include class and family identity.

“To produce the play, the students divided into groups based on areas of interest. One group was in charge of the acting and direction, one handled ticket sales and publicity, and another designed the costumes, lighting, and sound.”

American RadioWorks: “Inside Expeditionary Learning at the Springfield Renaissance School” — “One of the first things I noticed when I walked into the Springfield Renaissance School is something written in big blue letters on the wall. It says: ‘To start a school is to proclaim what it means to be human.’

“It kind of startled me.

“I visit a lot of schools in my job as an education reporter. What I often see on the walls are test scores and college banners. The message seems to be: Tests scores are who we are, and college is where we’re going.

“But at the Springfield Renaissance School, the walls are not adorned with college banners or data sets. Getting kids to college and making sure they do well academically are absolutely essential, says Stephen Mahoney, the school’s founding principal. But those things should be seen as the results of a good education, not the definition of it, he says.

“‘How to be a responsible citizen, how to be a good human being, that’s as important a focus for a school as the Pythagorean Theorem, as supply and demand curve, as stoichiometry,’ says Mahoney. ‘Knowing academic things is really important, but academic knowledge is a ticket into the world. If you are not equipped to be a good, productive person in the world, then all that academic stuff is … academic.’ ”

Learning Policy Institute: “Deeper Learning: An Essential Component of Equity” — “Often, when people think about equity, they think about allocation of resources. Why is access to deeper learning also a critical equity issue?

“We’ve known for a long time, thanks to Jeannie Oakes and her work on the tracking of students, that kids who are seen as less able or “not college material” are often in classes that don’t challenge them. Because we assume that kids who are in need of remediation are not smart, these students are left doing low-level work that doesn’t tap into their higher order thinking skills. This is a false assumption that exacerbates the equity issue because what it often means is that these students aren’t being challenged and encouraged to think deeply, and they are not developing the skills they are going to need for college and for work. This is the primary equity issue. It is as important as whether or not they are in a school with adequate resources, because if they are in a classroom where they are not really learning much, it is going to impact their education and their long-term outcomes.

“How do we support schools and districts to build their capacity to support deeper learning?

“In part, we have to provide very clear models. We also have to challenge beliefs, which can be a huge obstacle. It is often helpful to give examples of places where deeper learning is happening, so you can show educators that it’s not just a theory that has been hatched in the university, but it actually is working in many places. And then you have to give guidance to the educators—the teachers and the people who lead the teachers—on what kinds of learning activities elicit deeper learning. It can’t be an abstract conversation. It has to be connected to the work that schools do. In many districts, professional development is ineffective because it isn’t connected to practice.”

Grace Tatter produced this hour for broadcast.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org. [Copyright 2019 NPR]