For all the yammering about the fiscal cliff, another cliff might present a more perilous danger — what the folks at Gallup call the “school cliff.”
Never heard of that one?
Take a look at chart below — and you’ll grok it immediately.
As this Gallup blog post explains: “[Our] research strongly suggests that the longer students stay in school, the less engaged they become.” Primary school kids begin their educations deeply engaged — but by the time they get to high school, more than half are checked out. And the problem is even worse for our most entrepreneurial students.
Brandon Busteed, Executive Director of Gallup Education, points to several factors for the decline. An “overzealous focus on standardized testing.” Not enough project-based or experiential learning. Too few pathways for students who won’t, or don’t want to, attend college.
But whatever the reasons, he says, “The drop in student engagement for each year students are in school is our monumental, collective national failure.”
This excerpt was posted in Dan Pink's blog the other day. For years I have talked about the excitement that students have in kindergarten. When the teacher asks a question hands go up with such zeal as each student wants the teacher to call on them. By the time they come to high school however, they seem all worn out. Seniors are barely keeping their eyes open and you can tell that most rather be anywhere except your classroom.
What happens during the course of time. Many of my students claim that school gets harder but they probably have forgotten how hard it is to learn how to read. They also state that they no longer like to learn but I know this is not true, just give them a computer game and watch them attack it. I am not even buying the standardized testing reason for this was happening in high schools way before high risk testing.
If we engage our students test scores will take care of themselves. So how do we stop from falling off the edge of this cliff
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ReplyDeleteHaving a little brother is a lot like watching my life in replay, as I watch him grow up and go through the same things I've experienced. He once vowed that he would forever love going to school, while my older sister and I complained about it all the time; as a 5th grader now, it's hard to believe that a kid once so eager to go, now dreads it with an equal passion. I don't know when it happened or why it happened-all I do know is that it's a sad fact that many kids go through. I don't dread school (beyond the fact of having to wake up and make it on time by 7:45), but I definitely am not as excited as I was in my Pre-K days; it's almost if I am apathetic towards it, and I'm not sure which is worse. Of course some classes and some days can be exciting, but being stuck between a chair and a desk for 6 hours day after day makes most things unappealing. My favorite days are when teachers switch up the routine with more hands-on activities--they're memorable and I tend to remember the material later on because of that.
ReplyDeleteI think the first week of school is so crucial in engaging students. First impressions can make or break student-teacher relationships, especially in high school. If we like the class and the teacher from the get go, it definitely makes us more interested. What teachers can do is stimulate an interest; it's the student who then can further develop a curiosity and passion for the subject both inside and outside of the classroom.
I'd be quite curious about how that PEW survey graph would look in Finland or Korea or Japan.
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