Choosing+to+Learn

Students in all classrooms have always had the power to make the most basic choice about their learning: they may choose to engage in learning or to disengage. Our goal, the authors point out, is to inspire them to choose to engage. In short, we want students to choose to learn and choose in order to learn. HIGH SCHOOL English and Spanish teacher Susan Moon stood near a thick pad of chart paper. Her class of juniors and seniors sat casually around the room. On the chalkboard were the state curriculum mandates. They had been through this process before, so they were prepared. "Okay," Susan said, "this is what we have to demonstrate that we know. Any ideas how we are going to do that?" With almost no lapse, the kids began to throw out ideas and to argue the merits of each proposal until they identified a project they believed would permit each student to meet the state requirements. Once Susan felt confident that their choices would allow them to do well, she asked, "Okay, you're going to need money to do this. How are you going to get it?" Once again, the kids took over. Before I left, they had identified how they would meet or exceed state mandates, raise money to support their plans, and demonstrate what they had learned. They were energized. I was exhausted from trying to keep up with them. Will they meet their goals? If their history bears out, they will. . . . Typically, kids in Susan's classes score in the 90th percentile on state achievement tests. And this is no wealthy suburban school district. It is a rural school serving a population in which teen pregnancy and dropout rates are high. It is a school where one might not expect to find this kind of teaching and learning going on. We know that access to educational, economic, and career opportunities is more available to those who have mastered a set of basic academic skills in such areas as reading, writing, speaking, math, and science. Therefore, teachers have a moral and ethical responsibility to ensure that students acquire these skills and develop the traits that provide access to a broad array of choices. Teachers who include their students in devising a learning plan for the class that ensures that all learners achieve academic success are integrating these two core practices. Through the experiences of such teachers, we have learned that, taken together, these practices contribute to the development of independent, self-assured, and self-directed citizens with the intelligence and personal power to think and act independently, both as individuals and as members of a larger community. "Taken together" is both the key and the challenge. One without the other diminishes the richness and possibility of education. To permit learners to make choices that deprive them of the opportunity to build the skills they need in order to obtain access to learning opportunities is to act irresponsibly. To slight students' development as good decision makers or as self-governing young adults is just as irresponsible. In the sections that follow, we examine the concepts of learner choice and academic integrity as teachers and learners who use the Foxfire approach have come to understand them over the years. Using excerpts from the logs we have kept of our school visits as well as the published remarks of teachers using the Foxfire approach, we hope to show that learner choice and academic integrity are by necessity interwoven concepts. Learner Choice "I think Foxfire is great, but the choice thing just doesn't work with these kids. Foxfire says kids should be allowed to make choices, and I agree with that, but these kids make bad choices. . . . "The other day I was working with a reading group, and I told the rest of the children they could choose what to do. One boy chose to crawl around the room and make loud whooping noises. We couldn't get our group work done because he was making so much noise. But it was his choice, so I couldn't do anything about it." I was stunned. - Trip Log, September 1996 The most damaging misinterpretation of the notion of learner choice is that adopting it leads to an "anything goes" classroom. Of course, such an interpretation invites anarchy. If students are permitted to make decisions without boundaries, without coaching, and without respect for the rights of others, effective learning, the development of democratic principles, and the developmental progress of the students are seriously impaired.  Still, the confusion about the difference between democratic principles and anarchy is not unusual. It may be difficult for those with limited experience participating in environments shaped by democratic principles to see the differences between freedom and license and to see the need for boundaries within which choices must be made.  Potential "dead places" litter the path to learning. They may be the seemingly endless revisions before a piece of writing meets the author's standards, or they may be the necessary but often tedious and frustrating struggle to master skills necessary to accomplish a task. Clearly, neither Dewey nor teachers who use the Foxfire approach are saying that everything students do must be solely their choice. Both acknowledge the significance and reality of dead places. Diane Sanna describes a child whose personal interests and desires carried him through these places: I was having a difficult time finding a way to reach Craig. Then it happened one day; Craig found something that was uniquely meaningful to him, the spark that would launch him forward academically. . . a children's book about the Titanic. . . . Although the book was at a reading level that was challenging for him, Craig stuck with it for two days, reading every chance he got. . . . Eager to discover the magic the book had for Craig, I asked him why it was interesting to him. He told me he had once watched a TV program about the Titanic with his father. Craig was connecting life in school to his life with his family. He connected something that was interesting to him to his life outside the classroom.6 This is all well and good, but professional wisdom and humility require us to concede that we cannot know what engages the interest of each and every one of our students. Nor can we presume to know what life has offered or demanded of each student in our increasingly diverse classrooms. Well-meaning attempts to anticipate students' interests and purposes with Flash shy teaching units on dinosaurs or teddy bears or poetry introduced through rap music often miss the mark. If we hope to arouse and engage students' interest, we must help them discover and pursue what they care about, what excites them, and what arouses their curiosity. We cannot guess it for them. This point can best be made by taking a close look at Harold Brown's sophomore English classroom. He has carefully prepared his students, and, although he remains outside the discussion reported here, he is a fully attentive and active member of the decision-making activity. This is a big day in Harold Brown's sophomore English class near the California-Mexico border. It is the day he turns over decision making to his students for the first time. Harold spent a semester preparing the students for this day - helping them learn to make good choices, providing opportunities for them to assess their work, creating a learning community, setting high standards, and making the curriculum mandates explicit. Standing in front of the room, he begins. "These are the givens," he says pointing to a long list. Moving his hand down the list, he continues by identifying those requirements mandated by the state and school, those determined by his teaching team, those he will require, and those that the class has developed. "Now the question is," he says, "how are we going to make sure that we meet these requirements in the next nine weeks? Your job today is to figure out how we do that." Before moving their chairs into the discussion circle, the students briefly review the class norms for discussions. Finally, Harold explains that he will not participate in the discussion. "You will need to talk to each other to solve the problem," he explains. The students are silent. This is a bigger challenge than Harold has posed before. Some seem skeptical that they will really be given so much responsibility. - Trip Log, January 1998 During the period of our observations, Harold and his students will revisit the plan periodically, assess its effectiveness, and make revisions based on the plan's success in meeting objectives. Issues may arise that challenge the ability of teachers and learners to implement their plans. Whether students are dealing with unforeseen obstacles (e.g., school closings that make deadlines unattainable) or management problems (e.g., inappropriate or nonproductive behavior disrupting others' efforts), any issues that affect learners will be solved collaboratively. Throughout the planning and implementation of learning activities, emphasis will be placed on providing opportunities for learners to make individual and group choices about how they will address curricular mandates. Through this process, learners will construct experiences that build on their preferred ways of learning and on personal and group concerns and interests. Such carefully constructed experiences lead learners to assume responsibility for their learning and to see a clear purpose in all they do. As they see that they can make good decisions and that their participation in planning and implementing learning activities is valued, learners become more active and more connected to the content. Through this process, they become ever more capable of participating in the development of learning activities. By assuming more ownership, their commitment to meeting curricular objectives rises, and their sense of personal power and their concern for the group increase. As a result, it becomes possible to build a true community of learners. Learners will often not bring with them well-developed decision-making skills. They may see decision making as the responsibility of the teacher. Nevertheless, learners can develop decision-making skills, though it is important for the teacher to assess the developmental levels of the learners and to match the complexity of decisions to be made to the learners' abilities. Just as teachers work to move curricular skills to higher levels, so do they work to build and move to higher levels individual and group decision-making skills. In spite of Susan Moon's success and the success of her students, the lingering suspicion that Spanish should be learned by covering chapters plagues her. She struggles against a taken-for-granted notion that good teaching and learning must rise from one of two choices: either "soft" liberalism or "tough" conservatism. For some reason, there is a persistent notion that to fall into one of those camps ensures "good teaching" and to fall into the other ensures failure. We believe this notion is false; effective and ineffective teachers reside in both camps. We propose a discussion of academic integrity that transcends the black-and-white definitions. Simply stated, we believe that teaching and learning with academic integrity can only mean that students achieve at consistently high levels, meeting and even exceeding mandated goals. Regardless of the approach used, teaching that does not provide learners with the skills they need to make choices for their futures or prepare them to be fully participating citizens is unacceptable. To teachers who use the Foxfire approach, merely fulfilling curriculum mandates is not enough. They believe that education requires more. They recognize that the rich experiences they create open doors to a wide variety of learning opportunities that build strong, assertive, and self-directed learners who know how to learn and how to use what they learn. Early in the century, Alfred North Whitehead warned against an education that presents learners with "inert ideas" handed down by teachers in small disconnected portions, a theorem here, a historical fact there. Life, he argued, is conducted each day as a whole, drawing on skills and knowledge from various subject areas simultaneously. And life - the here-and-now lives of learners - should be the context, motivation, and proving ground for learning. Whitehead argued that expecting learners to participate in studies for which they can imagine no purpose in their immediate experience cannot lead to true and lasting learning but merely to the performance of meaningless and trivial "intellectual minuets."9 Teachers and learners share responsibility for meeting and exceeding curriculum goals and for connecting the curriculum with students' lives and across disciplinary lines. Learners experience the difference between freedom and license and learn to assume responsibility for decisions they make. These experiences support social and emotional growth and create the basis for the development of skilled, active, and responsible membership in society, be it the society of the school, the community, or the country. Keeping the Faith In spite of research that documents the broad gains students make when they are given power to make choices about their learning, a group of learners lacking decision-making skills can create a dilemma for teachers. Sometimes teachers feel they must "play it safe" and revert to more teacher-directed practices. But teachers who use the Foxfire approach testify to the importance and the rewards of "keeping the faith." Judy Bryson's story provides a final example of how involving learners in the decisions that affect them, even if slowly at first, leads to significant educational gains, along with growth in responsibility, involvement, creativity, and attitude. And, coincidentally, it improves test scores. When Eastern Kentucky teacher Judy Bryson faced her fourth-grade class, she had been using the Foxfire approach for seven years. But this was an especially difficult group, and she wondered whether they would ever be able to learn to choose or choose to learn. Kentucky's state testing requirements are rigorous, and schools are judged by the performance of students on a battery of performance and portfolio assessments. The fourth grade is a key year for these tests. If schools don't meet expectations, a series of punitive measures can be imposed up to and including the state taking over the schools' operation. "We began with small decisions which grew larger almost every day. Once the students became confident that I truly valued their ideas, they tried even harder to come up with bigger and better plans." Finally, the students were challenged to consider ways they might meet science, social studies, writing, and math requirements. They took up the challenge and decided to study a nearby old-growth forest. By the end of the year, students had completed an impressive array of learning projects, all using the forest as a basis for study. They had met their science, social studies, and writing requirements. But the final evaluation of Judy's move to create a community of decision makers would come when her class faced the state tests. "Our overall writing scores were up. . . . The proctor was impressed with the way the group of students attacked their group [performance] task, [how they] distributed jobs within their groups and worked together to find solutions. . . . Beyond all of the wonderful student-initiated learning, I believe the changes within the students themselves were the most remarkable." Student attendance was up, there were few discipline issues, every student could find important and meaningful ways to contribute to the group while doing work appropriate to her or his own academic and social needs and strengths. "At the end of the year I was as proud as a mother hen with a brood of chicks under her wings. This group had been, without a doubt, the most quarrelsome, most frustrating, hardest-working, and most productive class I'd ever had."10 Students in all classrooms have always had the power to make the most basic choice about their learning: they may choose to engage in learning or to disengage. We cannot remove that choice. Our goal is to inspire students to choose to engage. When they do, we know that they can and will make good choices about how they learn, how they use what they learn, and how they assess their learning. And we can help them exceed all expectations. In short, we want students to choose to learn and choose in order to learn. BOBBY ANN STARNES is president of the Foxfire Fund, Mountain City, Ga. ( foxfire@foxfire.org ). CYNTHIA PARIS is an associate professor of education at Rider University, Lawrenceville, N.J. ( parisc@rider.edu ). (c)2000, The Foxfire Fund, Inc. The Foxfire Core Practices 1. The work teachers and learners do together is infused from the beginning with learner choice, design, and revision. 2. The role of the teacher is that of facilitator and collaborator. 3. The academic integrity of the work teachers and learners do together is clear. 4. The work is characterized by active learning. 5. Peer teaching, small-group work, and teamwork are all consistent features of classroom activities. 6. Connections between the classroom work, the surrounding communities, and the world beyond the community are clear. 7. There is an audience beyond the teacher for learner work. 8. New activities spiral gracefully out of the old, incorporating lessons learned from past experiences, building on skills and understandings that can now be amplified. 9. Imagination and creativity are encouraged in the completion of learning activities. 10. Reflection is an essential activity that takes place at key points throughout the work. 11. The work teachers and learners do together includes rigorous, ongoing assessment and evaluation. COPYRIGHT 2000 Phi Delta Kappa, Inc. COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning []
 * Choosing to Learn **
 *  [|Phi Delta Kappan], [|Jan, 2000] by [|Bobby Ann Starnes] , [|Cynthia Paris] **