Dr Denis Littky is the
co-founder and co-director of Big Picture Learning. He has over 40 years in the
education field and is known for his innovations in secondary education in
rural, suburban and urban settings.
I have been studying Dr
Littky’s work for this project. I saw an excellent talk by him online, at the
New York Education TED Talks event where he spoke about the work he is doing
and his passion for education.
Watch the TED Talk here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbpqVPtUIFQ
Watch the TED Talk here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbpqVPtUIFQ
He starts the talk saying,
‘Every thirteen seconds, there are eight hundred students dropping out of
school.’
I think about what the numbers
are around the world and it scares me. The question to ask here is not why students are dropping out but why are they
not being engaged enough to stay in.
‘If we did not know there was
such a thing as schools what would it be?’
He further adds and I
paraphrase, “Think about it. If you were teaching your own kid at school, you
wouldn’t sit him down in the living room, teach him a subject, then ring a
bell, then call him back and tell him to do science again. You wouldn’t do it.
Its ridiculous.”
They interviewed over 100,000
students across high schools in America and asked them what was the one word
that came to their mind when they thought about school. The answer in most
cases was ‘boring’.
So he and Eliot Washer
decided to start a school with different mission. A school that was not boring,
that would empower kids. They wanted to see what was best for students’ one
school at a time.
Picture Credit - www.edu.blogs.com
Every class in these schools
has about fifteen students. The first questions they ask the students are,
‘What is your passion? What is your interest?’
Then they call the every
individual student’s parents in and they an individual plan for each student.
If the student says his passion is animals. The school then tells the student, that is good and they
will work on that.
Now all the education that
happens at these institutions is done from the perspective of a student’s
individual passion. As Dr Littky says,
“We are going to teach how to read and write through your passion.”
Student Stories
For example there is a fourteen-year-old
student in the ninth grade that is passionate about some field. The school will
arrange for the student to put into the community with somebody that has the
same passion. If they are passionate about writing, you spend time with a
published author or a regular columnist.
Now the school looks at this
experience that the student goes through as a very important aspect of his
overall education. When the student comes back to school, they don’t tell the
student that they have met somebody in their field and now they must come back
and do science, math and English properly. Instead they integrate all the Math,
Science, English with what that student has learned on the job.
They exhibit their work as 9th
graders at the end of a particular semester or term to friends, parents and
teachers. These people look at their work and give them constructive criticism
and encouragement based on how the students have presented and worked on their
individual projects.
Dr Littky states how students
cannot cheat in this model. They are speaking about something that is close to
their heart and they do all they can, to ensure they do it right.
Met School Students visit the City Archives. Picture Credit - www.providenceri.com
Example of a Met School Student
One student
from the Met School was passionate about Vietnam. This is how he works on this
passion then,
· He gets in touch with a veteran that is building a
memorial and goes out interviewing people.
· Takes a class at a college nearby called Providence
College about the Vietnam War.
· Takes another class at the Brown University nearby
where an individual was teaching a class about how they could teach other about
the Vietnam War.
· Dr. Littky had visited Vietnam earlier and done a
presentation there. This student asked Dr. Littky for his slides.
Why was the student so passionate about Vietnam?
His father had fought in the
Vietnam War. Growing up he would ask his father every single day about what
happened in Vietnam.
What did he do with the knowledge he
received?
· He created a website about how to talk to your family
about the war.
· It helped him re-connect with his father. His father
soon opened up to him seeing the work he was putting in.
· The student went on to become a History Major.
That student has come back to
the Met School and is now a teacher at the school. Dr Littky mentions how this
happens very often with the students from the school. They often come back to
teach.
Some of the statistics that
Dr Littky provided in the talk further convinced me about how effective this
method actually was. The school had a 98% attendance rate compared to the
city’s average of 48%. It had a 97% graduation rate compared to the city’s
average of 47%.
Interest in the Model from the Gates Foundation
Picture Credit - www.youthworkers.net
The Gates Foundation, which
is one of the largest charitable trusts in the world, started showing some
interest in the model. They sent a representative from the Education department
to study the work being done at the school.
How are the students at MET School different?
He loved the students at the
school because they were talking about a passion. They would talk to him about
something they loved. They did no just speak about history, science, math and
other subjects. They spoke from their heart about something that was very close
to their hearts.
The students at this school
do not talk about homework, they talk about they work they are doing with
regard to their passion to actually make the lives of the people of their
community easier.
Support for Expansion
The representative from the
Gates Foundation discussed what was happening at the school with his team. Soon
they got a five million dollar grant from the Gates Foundation and were told to
start these schools all around the country, They have opened over twenty
schools around the United States of America up to now.
He soon got twenty five
million dollars to start 40 more of these schools around the U.S.A. Today they
have over seventy schools and groups using the same model in places like
Netherlands and Australia
College Unbound
This statistic worried Dr.
Littky. But like every other radical innovator Dr. Littky decided to take
personal responsibility for this situation. He decided to start a college
called, ‘College Unbound’
Plan for College Unbound
He hired a house next to his
school and told the first batch of students to stay there.
One student in the group was
passionate about Sustainability. So Dr. Littky found two of the top architects
in the city and the students is now working with them.
What is the model of College Unbound?
1) Ask the student what their passion is about.
2) Let them work on it.
3) Around the passion they conduct seminars and teach
skills.
Dr Littky calls himself a
Radical Educator on his Twitter page. The world needs more people like him.
Education needs more people like him.
As he famously said, “We
can’t afford to tweak across the stages. If you’re not standing on the edge,
you are taking up too much space.”
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