This afternoon I was one of a few teachers supervising 300 sixteen year old students during a talk by a great speaker in the assembly hall. He was funny, interactive and engaging. As I watched the boys interact during the presentation I discovered something that’s taken 6 years of teaching to vocabularise.
I discovered that in general, 13-16 year olds…
- need to externalise their thoughts immediately
- aren’t capable of coping with lecture theatre settings for learning
- won’t cope listening to a speaker properly for longer than 1 minute
- the better (funnier, more engaging) the speaker, the less of the student’s attention you’ll have (this might seem weird, but when a speaker makes a joke, the first thing a 16 year old* will do is verbalise how it relates to them or their mate next to them).
After this I realised that loads of schools in NZ are using the lecture/university style of teaching in a kind of preparatory way as though setting their students up for university. Here’s the thing, it doesn’t work. A whole bunch of teacher’s could save themselves saying ’sshhhh’ every day by simply embracing noise in the classroom.
Every day it takes many minutes to bring kids back to attention my world so they can learn listen. This goes completely against how they’re wired up. They’re wired for action; …doing, trying, experimenting, breaking, melting, changing, correcting, learning. They didn’t learn how to use their ipod by reading a manual. They tried it out and got there in the end. Maybe they asked a friend that already knew, and thus saved time. Gee, maybe they’re smarter than their teachers?
The majority of students at secondary schools in NZ are not wired up for text book type learning. Let’s be honest, life after school in terms of academia pointing careers, involves knowledge accumulation in whatever form. The difference is, if that knowledge needs to be searched for a second time, that’s ok (there probably won’t be a 3 hour time limit or a test at the end either).
School has to be completely redesigned. Kids deserve to hear the truth. School has to be a place where things are mainly done, not where things are mainly theorised over. Leave that until a couple of years down the track. Kids need to have conversations, not listen to sermons.
There are some ideas already forming.
Do you have any thoughts on how you felt at school and how you think it could’ve been better? Can you suggest some ways you may have been able to learn more effectively?
I’m starting a list of things that could be done to bring learning up to speed in NZ schools with minimum government intervention delay:
- Every class/subject should have a blog
- Smaller class sizes
* at times my reference to 16 year old’s may also mean the general age of a secondary school student.
