Doing Good Work - the Ron Berger Interview

all of this is right outside of shoots berry so we're going up Moosehorn Road and this is this is rural western mass this is beautiful and this is where the future of education is at the time there were new textbooks used in the school everyone was inventing curriculum that was based on real life connections so that was how I learned to teach through that and because the school is so small with only five teachers and one school committee as long as the kids were doing well people sort of loud that to happen so for 30 years we use no textbooks because our curriculum around connecting kids to the world and we also were in this small town where there were pretty much the town is run by volunteers so the kind of things that people are paid to do in a normal town a big city like check for radon or check the quality of water or do demographic studies or do census work we could have students do all that work that's a service but if I were meeting with a superintendent or the legislature the first thing I would do is pull out graphs of test scores and when you go into an urban superintendent or a legislature or urban principals what they're worried about is what they're accountable for right now and you have to address that first and if they say wow this you know the schools that you're working with are doing really well on tests how do you do that then I can pull out this stuff and say well we have a really different approach it's a project-based approach that trusts kids to create great things so project-based learning the way Ron does it the project is how you learn or as a central part of how you want it doesn't mean that there's not other pieces but it's a very central to the unit spending your time memorizing stuff for people in pencil tests it's not the way to get ready for the world it's the wrong use of we would you know we'd do an assignment and then we'd get together on the weekend and we look at every student's assignment and we would decide for that child was that assignment worth a check or not and the very first assignment that we evaluated that way we made sure that nobody have a check so you set the bar high by having making sure that not anybody succeeds on that first night everybody could do something to make it better and then using his culture of drafting and critique you're just constantly bringing work up in front of a group and bringing work up in front of a partner and getting feedback and making it better you look at this kind of work if you think oh well that must be really hard for kids to do but that's cuz if you look at the whole process you think this is the process that adult professionals do when they design anything they go through lots of drafts and get lots of critique and it's public they get critique from the group they get critique from professionals you work so when kids go through this process this is what makes them engaged and accountable it's not because they're gonna get a test upon it it's because they're trying to create something beautiful and important I kind of feel like in the early 70s when there were all the people in one really small sector of the country were recycling and other people kind of made fun of them like what a ridiculous thing to waste their time sorting bottles out of your trash and all that it was almost a joke the whole recycling movement and it was just a few hippies and environmentalists who did it back then it was it's sort of unimaginable that nationally everyone would of course recycle all the time it would be sort of the way the country works but now that's the way it is every city in America is like recycling it has to be the way it is I feel like 21st century skills in education or exactly that by I think people are asleep about the fact that the old version of how to teach is and they haven't woken up to it yet if the standards are the broad concepts of disciplines so if the standards are kids will learn to think as scientists to learn experimental technique he would have done astronomy and he would have learned what do astronomers do and how do you stay with the topic long enough to actually imagine yourself being a person in that field a lot of people feel like trust in young kids with real original research is something that they wouldn't do and what I learned is that very few undergraduates in college or even trusted to do real research what I loved about John Reid is that he took his freshman college students and brought them out into the field to do geological research and they publish papers together where the kids names were on the paper time they were a sophomore in college they already had published papers in geological journals and he turned to so many kids into geologists by that process of putting them on not making them learn the basics in the hope that in 10 years when they get their PhD they can do real research but having them learned the basics as they're doing real research that they're gonna publish and and I thought well why not get my sixth graders doing research with his college students and so it was I have lots of great mentors and my son's and environmental studies now in college and he says it's because of the field trips that he took in fourth grade with you and you can and then when he got in sixth grade and he went on these trips they drove three four hours to go dig rocks in the ground you know like and so last year he was a freshman at UVM and he called me said Tom this is just like forth and when we studied architecture they they did the work of architects they design they do they did a blueprint for a house and they had architects come and talk to them and they you know there's just so much that this piece that like you take on a vocation and you learn a lot about everything you need to do to have that vocation and this goes to this goes to multiple drafts before it gets like curtains yeah peer-review I don't think I've ever met kids in any neighborhood in any school in America where they don't look at these and immediately want to start designing our own house right click all it takes is looking at at things like this and immediately kids are like oh I already have ideas of what I want in my house that the best way to motivate people to bust their butts to study hard and learn things and create great stuff is to have a reason for it where they're creating something that they're going to be proud of and eyevac gets kids or teacher study hard so that experts are learning the reason I love working for this organization is that when we do teacher development we do the same things with and he wanted to make sure it wasn't just gonna be the families who had kids here it was going to be sort of the history of the town accountability stops being being on page 32 in a textbook and the accountability is the kind of quality of work your kids are doing the kind of people that they are in addition to the test scores that they do but all three of them the teachers and schools should be accountable but this should be accountable for the results not accountable for following the script and of course to stop all dressed up funny and you know made it a fun game the sixth graders won and we had a student in our class that year who who had had a very challenging year before they sort of transitioned back into our school and had a one-to-one

Channel: DoingGoodWork

Views: 8,617

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Ron Berger, Expeditionary Learning Schools, School Reform, HGSE, education, Harvard

Id: THfL7SYRcDU

Length: 8min 31sec (511 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2009