I know this is typical for the US so this is more for US people to respond to. I wouldn’t say that it is the best system for work, just wondering about the disconnect.
I know this is typical for the US so this is more for US people to respond to. I wouldn’t say that it is the best system for work, just wondering about the disconnect.
There are a couple of flaws with this. I spend a great deal of time structuring lessons to get students working with each other. I have met, and taught, too many people who have said that the only reason they stuck out through high school was the relationships they developed with thier peers and staff. We’ve seen what happens when students only do solo computer work, and it isn’t pretty.
There’s no requirement to be socially ostracized. You can still have groups, clubs, online and offline connections.
I suspect most students will likely find they have more spare/social time. When they can learn at their own pace with individual attention.
You may find that less kids feel like they are toughing it out, under these scenarios.
I use the Modern Classroom Model for my classroom for the last couple of years which is a self-paced system. In 2020 during our zoom school year I was also fully self paced. Here are a few things I’ve found.
A handful of students will shut down with self-paced learning. They have low self-efficacy and are failure avoidant.
Another handful of students will hand off their chromebook to “the smart kid” in a different class and have them take the mastery checks for them. They will end up bombing the mastery assessment, but teenagers are not known for their executive function.
A different handful have limited capacity for additional cognitive load. It is hard to do school when you don’t know where you are sleeping that night or some other chronic trauma. They thrive when being told explicitly what to do, how to do it.
Yet another handful will fly through the curriculum because they long ago figured out the game of school. Yet when I check in and ask deep, meaningful questions to see if they really understand the topic, they can’t.
Young gen Z and gen alpha really need to work on social skills and work ethic. Solo-self-paced experiences don’t cover it.
I disagree on the work ethic point, but that could be its own whole rant about how the concept of “work ethic” is fundamentally flawed in a society where many jobs simply aren’t fulfilling and are only done for the carrot on a stick of being able to buy food and a roof over your head.
But on everything else, I wholeheartedly agree as somebody who came to hate the school system but loves to learn. It’s not just a Gen Z and younger issue, though I imagine they have it even worse considering the pandemic. I think it’s a flaw in how the school system is designed. School focuses on solo work almost to the exclusion of collaboration, and life just doesn’t work that way. Society is a collaborative effort, and even working at a cubicle farm on a solo project, it’s not like you can’t talk to your fellow workers to help solve problems. Plus, the pass or fail mechanism of the grading system ends up punishing mistakes and either creates risk aversion outright, kids who don’t bother because they’ve failed so many times that they believe it’s not worth even trying, or those kids who do well without trying until they get to later grades and have no study habits, who then learn that if they’re not instantly good at something, then it’s not worth putting effort into because they don’t know how to be bad at something long enough to get good.
I’m certainly no teacher, but I think the issue is that the foundational framework of our current school system was designed to create workers who could be expected to work on a factory line. People who could be given a short and simple list of repetitive tasks to follow, without the need for collaboration or anything more mentally demanding. Add in that many school subjects (at least when I was in school 15-20 years ago) lack any real-world context to their purpose, just “learn this because you have to,” and I’m not surprised that kids also have no drive to dig deeper than a surface level understanding. I remember the mentality of “just remember it long enough to do the test, and then dump it for the next set of things you have to learn.” It got me through high school.