Integrated Learning
July 1, 2016
One of the positive aspects of life that school sports and other after-school activities do better than most everything else is to build a sense of community. Another is to teach teamwork. And both are mostly missing in the world of individualized, online learning.
It sounds good to advocate for personalized, learn-at-your-own-pace “curriculum” (one can hardly call it “instruction”), but that model misses so much of what education is supposed to help a civilized society accomplish.
Benjamin Riley, founder and executive director of Deans for Impact (deansforimpact.org), makes this point in his May 18, 2016, Opinion on EdSurge (edsurge.com), “Bursting the ‘Personalization’ Bubble: An Alternative Vision for Our Public Schools.” Mr. Riley advances four principles:
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Teachers – not technology – should be the primary designers of students’ learning experiences.
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The experiences that teachers design should emphasize the social aspect of learning.
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The experiences that teachers design should be informed by learning science.
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Teachers should primarily use technology to identify social learning opportunities.
Mr. Riley concedes that these four principles are just a sketch – an outline for a different conversation than that which currently dominates education reform. “But there is one point on which I’m unyielding,” Riley writes: “We begin to forge the character of our country in our public schools. At a time when I feel our nation pulling further apart, I hope we start thinking and talking more about how we might move closer together, and promote the integration – rather than the personalization – of our learning experiences in public education.”
It is not Mr. Riley’s point, but it is mine, that school sports – including the requirement that participants be full-time students in the schools they represent on interscholastic sports teams – promotes the integration of the learning experience which is critical to shaping the character of our country.
The integration we speak of is developing the whole child through direct interaction daily with a diverse student body and a wide variety of curricular and extracurricular activities. This builds students, schools and society.
Tough Love
October 9, 2015
A young Korean woman has lived with my wife and me for two years and will for two years longer. Grace is a graduate of the international school in China where our son and his wife were her teachers; and since living with us, she has graduated from Lansing Community College and moved on to Michigan State University.
Having this student in our home and a son and daughter-in-law as educators in China, living with my wife who once was in charge of refugee resettlement for a large agency in mid-Michigan, and my serving for seven years as president of the board of the Refugee Development Center in Lansing, makes me understanding of and sympathetic to international students.
However, I expect that is not the reputation I enjoy among those who work for student exchange organizations and even among some in our schools who work with the increasing number of international students who are enrolling in Michigan’s secondary schools. They probably view me as an advocate for more restrictive transfer rules for international students, especially regarding F-1 visa students and nonpublic schools.
Guilty as charged. Indeed, I do advocate for higher standards for exchange programs, more vigorous oversight of student placements and more equal application of rules, regardless of the type of visa the student has or the type of school in which that student enrolls.
It is because I see great value in our interaction with people from other nations that I want to assure international student exchanges remain popular in our schools. Nothing jeopardizes the future of international student exchange more than sloppy or shady placements of international students, including last-minute dumping of students by agencies, athletic-related direct placements by agents, and school districts loading up on international students as backfill for declining local enrollments.
As some youth escape brutal hardship in war-torn or impoverished countries and more well-off foreign students stampede to the U.S. to attend U.S. secondary schools, colleges and universities, it will require high doses of tough love. If problems related to athletics increase, so will the chances that all international students will lose all opportunities to participate in varsity level sports in this state.