A few years ago I visited a large, modern high school in a southern state. The staff members were proud of their facilities, which included a well-equipped television studio. I was told that, among other things, students used it to produce a daily news broadcast about school events.
At the time I visited, no one was using the equipment. Instead, some 15 students sat in school desks arranged in rows in a corner of the studio reviewing a worksheet on which they had been matching technical terms with their definitions. The teacher was going over the list in familiar fashion: “Okay, let's go on to number 13. What's a cue card?”
I worked in a television station when I was in college. That was a long time ago, but even then we seldom used cue cards. The point, though, is that nobody ever asked me to define a cue card or a teleprompter or anything else; we just used them to accomplish real purposes.
I don't mean to criticize a teacher who generously permitted me to visit his class, and I certainly don't propose to judge a whole course on the basis of one brief activity. I couldn't help thinking, though, that what I saw was characteristic of how we do things in schools. All too frequently we turn what could be concrete activity into abstract exercises.
But not always. In this issue we offer a sampling of school programs designed to be more like life outside school, and therefore more powerful. For example, William Stepien and Shelagh Gallagher (p. 25) describe how the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy uses Problem-Based Learning, a process pioneered in—of all places—medical schools (see Aspy, Aspy, and Quinby, p. 22). Rather than listening to lectures and memorizing vast amounts of information to be reproduced on tests, students work in groups on realistic problems, picking up new knowledge and skills in context. Similarly, David Kobrin and colleagues (p. 39) have their high school students in Providence, Rhode Island, read original documents and write history themselves, rather than only having them read their textbooks.
Some might think such activities are possible only with older students, but several articles describe programs in elementary and middle schools. Jackie Williams and Terry Deal Reynolds (p.13) tell of a visit by their North Carolina elementary pupils to a school in another state impaired by poverty and pollution. Brian Bottge and Ted Hasselbring (p.36) take another approach, working with 6th graders who, remaining in their classrooms, develop solutions to realistic math problems portrayed on videodiscs.
But are these programs necessarily better than more conventional ones? No school would say its curriculum is artificial and irrelevant. On what basis do these qualify as “authentic”?
Several authors offer guidelines for estimating the authenticity of instruction, including Fred Newmann and Gary Wehlage (p. 8), who describe a scale they are using in a national study of restructured schools. Their scale is based on three criteria: construction of meaning, disciplined inquiry, and production of discourse, products, or performances that have value or meaning beyond success in school.
Demanding standards, not easily attained, but worthy. Keep them in mind as you read these stories—and as you think about the schools you know.
