I was listening to a very interesting podcast this afternoon by Alan November as he interviewed Professor Angela McFarlane http://nlcommunities.com/communities/alannovember/archive/2007/05/08/134650.aspx
She believes that some of the students who are the most digitally literate and in the past would have been our high achievers and successes of the school system are no longer prepared to accept a curriculum which they see as inauthentic, of no interest to them and one which will not further their own needs in the future, and they are walking away and flunking out of school. I know of such instances myself however would be interested to hear if others have also found this to be the case.
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A blog to record my exploration of Web 2.0 and its application in educating high school students in HSIE (Human Society and Its Environment)
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2 comments:
I believe that we have let students become the boss. Why have we suddenly decided that kids know best? Brain research has prooved that the reasoning, planning and risk taking with consequences parts of their brain are not fully formed until the mid 20's but we continually think they know better about what they will need in the future. This is not always/often the case and they make large decisions like this because we have lost the confidence to tell them so.
I understand what you are saying and I agree that we need to guide our students and discourage them from taking the easy options but I don't think that this podcast was referring to those students. Having teenagers of my own I know that while you can guide them you certainly can't force them to do work if they don't want to. My studies into gifted students, and especially 'underachievers' has led me to recognise that there are students who would rather walk away from an inauthentic curriculum than stay and endure it.
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