ISDTOS Video Response

I've heard of students becoming "principal for a day" at their school, but this was definitely the first time I had been introduced to the concept of students actually designing their own school! I initially pictured a rundown building where PE and lunch were the only "subjects" provided for the students, there were no teachers and the children ran wild all day long. Instead, when I watched the video, I saw a typical high school, much like Fraser Heights itself. There were adults supervising, but not directing. There was homework, projects, and class discussions. The students were focused, on task, and all of them seemed to know exactly what they should be doing at any given time, even if there was no teacher instructing them.

The promo video we watched was about the second pilot year of a new program called "The Independent Project". In this program, students design and plan their own individual, as well as group projects - without the influence of teachers. It runs for one semester, and is divided into three parts. Every Monday, the students each come up with a question he/she is curious about that is related to one of their core subjects, and spend the rest of the week researching that question. On Friday, the students give a formal presentation to share what they have learned with the rest of the class. These questions take up about half the time at school, and the rest of the time is spent on their own personal projects, or "Individual Endeavors", which run for the duration of the semester. The last three weeks of the semester are also spent on a group project called the "Collective Endeavor".

Basically, the video was telling us that we need to step away from the standardized way of teaching, and explore different methods. Education is always changing - the way students learn today is SO different from how our parents and grandparents learned when they were in school! Students need to, well, learn their own learning style. Marianne Young, the principal of the school, said that she wanted to "stop trying to move every kind of human being through the same gate".

Personally though, this method of learning would not work at all for me. It is hard for me to be self motivated and disciplined at times, honestly! I often need a teacher there to guide me, keep me on track with my work and set guidelines for me. I like due dates, because it gives me a time frame to work with. I like tests and quizzes because they give me an idea of the concepts I need to work on, and the things I could improve in various areas. Also, even though they try to keep the projects related to the student's core subjects, I feel that a lot of students would benefit more learning the standardized way in certain subjects than doing a project about them. This was a very interesting video, and I enjoyed watching it. However, I must say that the learning style displayed in the video is not for me!