Why We’re Doing School All Wrong
By: Steven Hopper
Tags: Future, Education, Life, Schools, Students

Image by Wokandapix on Pixabay

The world has changed greatly ever since the school system first came to be. Although we’ve modernized the tools we teach with and the environment we teach in, we’ve neglected to re-design the overall structure and outcome of the typical school day. As a high school teacher, I believe we’re doing school all wrong.

There are days, for example, when I hate myself for what I’m teaching — such as drilling verb conjugations — because I know that it doesn’t correlate with any real-world skill that my students will use in the future. Memorizing content is the not the way of the future, so why do we still focus so much school time on rote learning?

All the while, I hear from students every day about how stressed they are when it comes to memorizing so much information for upcoming tests. They constantly check their grades and stress about their GPA, when right after the test is over they can’t remember half of what they were “taught.” And don’t even get me started on the stress that standardized tests contribute to this mix.

Take Advanced Placement (AP) classes as an example. I remember taking them when I was in high school and now my anxiety-ridden students confirm that nothing has changed about the “rigor” of these courses —cover as much content as possible, but in no real meaningful way. I couldn’t agree more with this opinion piece from the Washington Post on why some schools are eliminating AP courses, because “the truth is that college courses, which demand critical thinking and rigorous analysis, look nothing like AP courses, which stress breadth over depth.” We’re failing as a society if we think that forcing students to take copious notes and prove they can memorize them is good education.

Moreover, all of these pressure-based educational measures have created unproductive learning attitudes in our students. Students care far more about how many points an assignment is worth or knowing what format the test will be (let’s all remind ourselves that multiple choice tests don’t exist in real life!) instead of focusing their attention on the material.

They spend more time hacking the system, such as finding CliffsNotes or, in my class, using Google Translate, rather than spending that time to learn a new skill or produce original work. Research Professor of Psychology Peter Gray talks about this epidemic in his TEDTalk entitled “How Our Schools Thwart Passions”. He has studied how the increased focus on college admissions in high school has made students overly stressed and at the same time diluted creative thinking and problem-solving.

And I would argue that many teachers don’t alleviate this situation either. I’ve repeatedly heard colleagues complain about student apathy and disinterest. They blame students’ poor performance on these traits, absolving themselves of student failure, saying the students simply didn’t study hard enough. Some teachers even enjoy having a reputation that immediately strikes fear in students (which is bizarrely sadistic, if you ask me). This reputation, by the way, stems from testing way too much content that the teacher cannot effectively teach in a given class period.

Whenever a teacher begins a complaint with the phrase “Kids these days…”, I shudder knowing that these teachers are themselves a product of the unchanging educational system. They just want class to look exactly as it did when they were in school, even since replacing textbooks with computers or chalkboards with interactive whiteboards. They fail to think outside of the traditional curriculum and what modern-day, deep learning means.

Recently, I was in my classroom teaching when all of these problems with school came to the forefront.

A student was telling me how excited she was about purchasing a new iPad so that she could create digital art and potentially sell it for commission. Now, this student creates art all the time in class while she’s taking notes and when she’s finished with her work and she’s quite good at it. But when she mentioned that she would start making art as a side hustle — and she’s only eighteen years old — it got me thinking that this entrepreneurial spirit is something that we should be teaching in school.

Students need to learn content knowledge, yes, but what about giving students time to not only hone their skills but also connect it to the real world?To accomplish this, I immediately thought that some parts of school have to change.

The first thing to go should be studying subjects in isolation of each other.

In the real world, math is not something you do in isolation of science, history, language, art, cooking or woodworking. Instead, let’s teach fractions to students as they bake a cake. You could even make them learn unit conversion by using a metric recipe and maybe in a foreign language at the same time. Let’s not forget the chemistry of baking as well as the nutritional guidelines. And we could even compare different cake recipes from around the world to demonstrate cultural differences and influences on cuisine. The end “test” could require the student to write his own recipe through trial and error or maybe based off a set of surprise ingredients, much like a cooking competition tests competitors’ skills. It’s not a timed event, nor is it only offered one time.

My second major change with school would be this: let’s stop grading rote memorization and instead assess soft skills.

Soft skills are personality and emotional intelligence traits that help people interact well with others — such as collaboration, communication, punctuality, and leadership.

In fact, LinkedIn released a report recently titled “2019 Global Talent Trends”, which captured the soft skills that employers are desperately seeking in new hires. The report highlights the shift in hiring trends as automation and artificial intelligence take over the work place and soft skills are now what differentiate job seekers more than their technical ability. In addition, the World Economic Forum concluded that by next year,

“Overall social skills — such as persuasion, emotional intelligence and teaching others — will be in higher demand across industries than narrow technical skills.”

Currently in school, the “smartest” students are the ones who are good at memorizing information. Meanwhile, school ignores other soft skills that some students have and that these supposedly “smart” students actually need to develop — such as creativity, problem-solving, and presentation skills — which are far more valuable than recalling the Pythagorean theorem. In the real world, soft skills matter way more important than how much knowledge you have memorized — which is why the old adage “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” exists — so why shouldn’t school reflect this reality?

Unfortunately, if someone did an audit of the American education system I guarantee that test after test after test that students take focus chiefly on memorized content knowledge and neglect to include measures that assess soft skills.

That’s why in recent years I’ve shifted more of my own focus to performance assessments, in which students must not only apply what they’ve learned in my class, but also demonstrate soft skills. And although I’m new to this and admit I’m no expert, by putting soft skills on my rubrics I have seen success in helping students gain real-world skills. Unfortunately, current time and curriculum constraints together with traditional grades make doing these types difficult.

Which brings me to my last problem with school: it’s time to throw out the American grading system altogether.

There is nothing useful about giving students letter grades, because it reduces learning to getting the “right” answer and moving on. Teachers have known this for years, yet nothing has fundamentally changed about how we evaluate our students. Sure, there has been a positive movement toward standards-based grading. But ultimately, when I use this system in my classroom I still have to convert the feedback into traditional letter grades, which devalues the meaningfulness of such feedback.

So now let’s imagine how ridding the school system of these antiquated practices could help my gifted art student who inspired this post. Imagine if she were allowed to pursue her passion for art as a continuous project of learning in school?

In order to become a successful freelance artist she would need to learn about art history and modern trends, business and marketing, finance and math, and computer science and technology skills all through creating art on her iPad, marketing herself as a freelancer, and tracking her business expenses. Such a project is highly involved and requires a lot of trial and error as well as feedback and adjustment. Of course, she would also need soft skills such as communication, time management, creativity and flexibility. Instead of using grades to determine her success in this endeavor, a teacher could evaluate her growth in developing these soft skills and how well she achieved her initial project goal.

Every student has a passion to learn in this way. Adults learn like this in their jobs and in their own personal hobbies. It’s what engaged, deep-learning looks like, yet school in its current state does not resemble this type of learning at all. Sure, there are examples of schools out there that foster experiential learning for students as I’ve described here, but these are often very small charter or independent schools, instead of mainstream educational institutions.

Imagine also what such a system would do for teacher retention and burnout? Instead of focusing so much on teacher effectiveness via test scores, teachers could again become purveyors of learning with the freedom to act more as mentors who guide students in achieving their learning goals while also challenging them to grow in their learning deficits. As soon as I thought about my art student’s passion project, I got excited to think I could help her in pursuing such an eduction.

Now, I’m not saying that my ideas are a simple fix to the current education system. Obviously, if it were so easy it would have been done already and the U.S. would have some of the best education in the world. Unfortunately, as a high school teacher, I also know there are other everyday realities that make implementing bold and innovative education reforms very difficult — poverty, education funding, teacher education and evaluation, statewide testing and education policy, just to name a few.

I cannot say, for example, what will happen to schools if they adopted such a different approach to learning. My guess is that it’s precisely this fear of the unknown that prevents parents, educational leaders and education policymakers from enacting such sweeping change.

And I’ll admit that I had this same fear in my first few years as a teacher. I used traditional methods and held a traditional view of my role in the classroom. But the longer I teach, the more I realize that I’m doing my students a huge disservice if I’m not inspiring their passions in my subject as well as others all the while connecting this to skills they will need in the real world after they graduate. That’s why I care so much about this one student and her passion for art — even though I know nothing about art and I myself am a terrible artist.

What I do know, however, is that her idea aligns perfectly with what employers demand from high school graduates and job seekers. If I want the best opportunities in life for my students, then I want to try something new so that I don’t ever feel as though the day’s lesson I planned is a waste of time. After all, no one in the future will ask my students to list the conjugations of the verb “tener”. That’s not how language in the real world works.

So it’s time to re-think the way we do school and put students’ future back to the forefront of learning.