Team-based learning
Traditional stand-and-deliver teaching, where the teacher stands
and the students deliver, is no longer relevant, says Dr. Ellen
Weber, a veteran teacher and co-founder of the Multiple
Intelligence Teaching Approach.
In an age in which information has expanded exponentially, she
says, "Answers are almost obsolete. Teamwork allows room for
multiple approaches and unleashes different abilities and talents."
One student might excel at online research, another may have visual
skills, a third might be good at writing reports. Everyone's brain
is put to work.
Teamwork, or "collaborative learning," as it's often called in
education parlance, is the cornerstone of the schools in Union
City,
New Jersey. This inner-city public school system has become,
through the success of its reform efforts, a virtual education
mecca, the place where all ailing educators make a pilgrimage
(including, incidentally, the principal of
Chicago's Wadsworth
Elementary). "We were in terrible straits in 1989," says Union
City's Fred Carrigg. Test scores had cratered and the drop-out rate
was soaring. "We sat down and said, Why do urban school districts
fail?"
The surprise, says Mr. Carrigg, "is not that we accomplished what
we intended - to prepare students for the working world - but as an
unanticipated byproduct, they began to do better on traditional
tests like the SAT." The number of students taking this college
entrance exam has grown 44 percent over the last three years, to 73
percent of the school system's eligible students, and the number of
students scoring over 1,000 also has risen, to more than 11 percent
of the students who take the test.
No Textbooks
In its self-overhaul, Union City also tossed out the idea of
textbooks, partly because the school system couldn't afford them,
and partly because they were seen as outmoded. "So we got off the
bandwagon of using national textbooks. We said, we're going to
build a curriculum truly based upon teaching skills and abilities,"
Carrigg says.
But if not textbooks, what? Union City stocked classroom libraries
with regular books, the kind real people read, and, as they became
available, CD-ROMs. Students at the Metropolitan Regional Career
and Technical Center in
Providence,
Rhode Island, rely on Internet
research; interviews with real people (a student learning about
finance talks to a banker, for instance); resources at local
businesses and institutions, such as a courthouse law library; and
what one student calls "real books."
Students at High Tech High use classroom texts that range from
novels and works of philosophy to Web pages and streaming video.
Instead of relying on teachers alone to point the way to relevant
works, students often are expected to find the appropriate research
on their own. It's part of the school's credo that students learn
how to find answers for themselves, how to think, how to learn. "We
still have the basic, core things, but the learning environment
here encourages students to work independently," says CEO Larry
Rosenstock, who in any other school might be called the principal.
"The kids here want to think; they want to be able to work
independently. We give them a deadline and say, 'Go do it.'"