WHAT KIDS CAN DO.

Author: WOLK, RONALD A.

Independent School. Spring2012, Vol. 71 Issue 3, p86-90. 5p.

Assumption: Students will learn more and remember more of what they learned if they learn in real-world contexts, which also reduces boredom and disciplinary problems, stimulates more parental involvement, inspires self-confidence and responsibility in youth, and motivates them to learn.

Education in real-world contexts is not a new idea. Aristotle wrote, "For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them." Centuries later John Adams echoed the thought when he said, "There are two types of education: One should teach us how to make a living and the other should teach us how to live." Our current education system is doing neither very well.

Arguably, the best model of education in history was the apprenticeship, where the novice learned from the master. The novice learned by doing, by being corrected and tutored by the master. There was no written test, no grade; the success of the apprentice was based on his work as judged by the master.

Real-world learning, often known as experiential learning, was central in the thinking and writing of philosopher John Dewey and his disciples. In his book Experiential Learning, Dewey disciple David Kolb (1984) describes learning as a four-step process: ( 1) watching, ( 2) thinking, ( 3) feeling, and (4) doing. Experiential learning advocates believe that education should engage students in meaningful work seeking answers to their own questions, not just memorizing facts and filling out worksheets.

Joseph P. Allen and Claudia W. Allen, both psychologists, are the authors of Escaping the Endless Adolescence: How We Can Help Our Teenagers Grow Up Before They Grow Old, published in 2009. In an article in Education Week, they state that academic motivation begins to decline in the fifth or sixth grade and declines through the teens. Although the decline is often based on the well-known problems of adolescents, the authors believe it lies "in a profound mismatch between teenage biology and school structure." They further write:

Modern brain research increasingly confirms what those who work with teenagers have long known: Adolescents are primed to action, stimulation, and relevance. They seek action as they hit peak physical capacities and energy levels; they seek stimulation as the reward centers in their brains develop; and they seek relevance as they gain the capacity to take on adult-like tasks, both mentally and physically. Yet these normal (and healthy) adolescent traits collide head-on not only with the fundamental structure of secondary schooling, but also with evolving societal trends extending the length of the teenage "waiting period" to truly enter and act on the adult world.[ 1]

If the primary objective is to help students develop reasoning and problem-solving skills, students should be immersed in a total learning situation. They should be encouraged and taught to formulate a hypothesis, plan how to test that theory, carry out the plan, and be able to understand, assess, and explain the results.

An impressive body of research supports real-world/experiential education, but perhaps the case for real-world learning is best made with examples. As I was writing this chapter, NBC Nightly News carried a story on the only ambulance service in the nation run entirely by high school students.[ 2] Student volunteers in Darien, Connecticut, operate the city's 24-hour ambulance service every day of the year. Recruited in their freshman year, some 20 student volunteers participate in a three-month training program and, after 150 hours of training, are certified by the state as emergency medical technicians. Operated by Boy Scout Explorer Post 53, the service responds to more than 1,400 calls a year -- some of them involving life-and-death situations. Students work with patients, monitoring their vital signs and stabilizing them as much as possible.

Whatever else the young people may remember about their high school days, I have no doubt that their most indelible memories will be their experience with Post 53. They learn something useful and apply it in ways that contribute to the health of their neighbors and the community. And in the process, they develop skills and attitudes rarely learned in classrooms. As one participant said, "When people look you in the eye and say, 'thank you,' it really makes you realize that what you're doing is worth it."[ 3]

WHAT KIDS DO

A decade ago, I became involved with a nonprofit organization called What Kids Can Do. Its founder, Barbara Cervone, formerly with the Annenberg Institute, was troubled that young people are so often portrayed by the media in the worst light. She believes that there are countless examples of youngsters doing important and positive work. And she decided to seek them out and make people aware of them.

The seaside community of Lubec, Maine, provided one of the first and best examples of what she had in mind. Lubec was troubled by the declining health of the fishing industry that had supported families there for generations. All but two of the 40 sardine factories in the area has shut down. Students at the local high school discussed the situation in their science class and a handful of them and their teacher held a town meeting to discuss whether aquaculture might help reverse the problem. Few people showed up.

So the students took matters into their own hands and converted an abandoned water-treatment facility into a state-of-the-art wet laboratory where they farmed mussels and raised salmon and trout in purified water beefed up with a homemade brew of nutrients. In their classrooms, the students, with the help of their teachers, devised an experiment that was yielding important data about the best diet for enhancing the roe of sea urchins -- an expensive delicacy in Japan. Their work attracted the attention of national aquaculture companies, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and area biotech entrepreneurs. A third to half of the Lubec high school students soon were involved in related projects, from monitoring toxic algae to designing a way to protect Lubec's vulnerable marina from the ravages of Atlantic storms and seeking a federal grant to fund construction planning.

Cervone had no trouble finding other examples of students learning in real-world situations. A team of teenagers in Oakland designed a plan to revitalize the block around their local subway stop -- and learned economics and design principles in the process. In rural Alabama, students published newspapers for communities that had no source of local news. They conducted research, learned to write and edit, and met deadlines. In an animation program in one California high school, students turn out professional-quality productions for which they conceive the story, write the scripts, and draw and photograph the scenes. These youngsters are learning by doing, and what they are doing has real value to the community and a lasting positive effect on each of them.

LEARN BY DOING

The Met School in Providence, Rhode Island, exemplifies real-world learning perhaps more than any high school in the nation. As it states on its website, "The Met is grounded in the philosophy of educating 'one student at a time,'" and the conviction that "true learning takes place when each student is an active participant in his or her education." Students are encouraged to pursue their interests -- "find your passion" is the mantra.

The Met's commitment to real-world learning is based on the belief that "for students to apply their knowledge in real situations, they need to learn in those situations." Almost everything Met students do is in that context. Students gain real-world experience especially through internships that span at least a semester but could run a year or longer, and through individual projects that they design and carry out.

Each student spends at least two days a week out of school in a Learning Through Internship (LTI) program, working with a mentor on site. The internship is the core around which each student's personal curriculum is built. Each student meets with a parent, an advisor (teacher), and a mentor to plan the curriculum. A student who is interested in getting into real estate will have to learn math, how to read maps, and people skills; one who wants to build boats must learn math, physics, and carpentry; a student who interns in a restaurant because he wants to become a chef and one day own a restaurant will have to learn chemistry (how heat affects food), nutrition, and business management.

One young woman decided in her first semester that she wanted to be a secretary, so she interned in a physician's office as a file clerk. She became interested in medicine, so her next internship was with a physical therapist; then she spent a semester working in a hospital emergency room. She needed to know science, so The Met arranged for her to take courses at nearby Brown University.

Another student did her LTI with a Providence police officer, and her main project was to help the department improve relations with teenagers. (She also spent time in a squad car and was involved in responses to everything from domestic disputes to homicides.) With help from a Brown University sociologist, she developed a survey and gathered responses from the 120 students in high school classrooms. Two of her findings contradicted the police department's prevailing beliefs. First, many students reported positive attitudes toward the police; and second, students reported that their contacts with police occurred more often in schools and community centers than on the streets. Based on these findings, her final report challenged the department's emphasis on community policing as the best way to improve relations with teenagers. She suggested that the police should increase their positive presence in schools and community centers instead.

Met students design projects that let them explore their interests more deeply. For example, two young African-American women (sopho-mores) followed Martin Luther King, Jr.'s footsteps on the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery. They spent weeks preparing, reading books and contemporary newspapers and magazines. They interviewed people who had participated in the march.

Shortly after they got back to school, they were part of a panel at a meeting at Brown University that I attended. I asked them what they had learned. One of them looked me in the eye and said, "The most important thing I learned is that people died so I could vote. I will never ever miss a vote." That is not a lesson that is likely to fade away with the passage of time, nor one that is absorbed so completely by sitting in a civics class.

Another student wrote a play as her senior project. Her advisor and peers urged her to produce it, so she did. She recruited a cast, directed the production, acted in it, and, in addition, she rented a hall, printed the advertising, and sold the tickets to the show. Think about the variety of real situations in which she learned.

To graduate, each Met student must write an autobiography. When Met students receive a degree, their advisors make personal comments about them -- like honorary degree citations. At the first commencement ceremony in 1997, the advisor presented the diploma to one student with a comment that went like this: "When Hector came to the Met and learned he'd have to write a 75-page autobiography to graduate, he said he'd never make it -- couldn't write and didn't have anything interesting to say. Well, he turned in his autobiography last week; it wasn't 75 pages, it was 100 pages. And he thanked me for making him write it, saying, 'Until I wrote that, I didn't know who I was.'"

THESE YOUNGSTERS ARE LEARNING BY DOING, AND WHAT THEY ARE DOING HAS REAL VALUE TO THE COMMUNITY AND LASTING POSITIVE EFFECT ON EACH OF THEM.

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