Becoming Self-Directed Learners

312 Pages·2014·5.142 MB·\312

by  James Bellanca

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“The Stories Renew our Faith in the Human Drive for Self-Fulfillment”
Becoming Self-Directed Learners is an amazing collection of testimonies,
memoirs, and reflections from graduates of a school intent on fostering self-
directed learning, providing a longitudinal study of the positive and long-lasting
effects of instruction in which students must self-manage, self-monitor and self-
modify. Graduates who have excelled and achieved prominence in a variety of
fields—politics, the arts, science, and international relations—provide compelling
evidence of the positive effects that self-directed learning has contributed to their
success.
What these stories disclose is that humans learn best what they want to learn.
They demonstrate that learning derived from a carefully structured program of self-
directedness does not fade away after the test or even in several months. Rather,
it lasts for a lifetime.
As you read the stories in this book, three recurring patterns emerge. It
becomes evident that these Center students demonstrated they were self-directed:
They have dreams, aspirations, desires, and ideals and, because they
are effective, they translate those dreams into action. (Self-managing)
They are keenly aware of themselves, their beliefs, internal states,
emotions, their strengths and gaps. (Self-monitoring)
They are open to and seek feedback in a never-ending desire for
adaptation, change, learning, and growth. (Self-modifying)
These stories show how our perceptions of “being educated” need to shift from
educational outcomes that are primarily an individual’s collections of sub-skills to
include successful participation in socially organized activities and the
development of students’ identities as conscious, flexible, efficacious, and
interdependent meaning-makers.
We must also let go of having learners acquire our meanings and have faith in
the processes of students’ construction of their own and shared meanings through
individual activity and social interaction. This will cause great discomfort because
the individual and the group may not construct the meaning we want them to: a
real challenge to the basic educational framework with which most schools are
comfortable.
The stories in this book, however, renew our faith in the human drive for self-
fulfillment. When we know what we consist of and what our ideal self could be,
then we can achieve our greatest potential. The evidence of this on these pages is
clear, strong and lasting.
Arthur L. Costa, Ed.D. is Professor Emeritus, California State University,
Sacramento; Co-founder, The Institute for Habits of Mind, Past
President of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum
Development (ASCD), and author of many books that promote thinking
and problem solving.
“The Center’s Contribution to Curriculum was Substantial”
Becoming Self-Directed Learners highlights a critical chapter of American
educational history. Its emphasis on the individual experiences of participants in a
great experiment is exemplary and necessary. Increasingly the most productive
educational literature will be composed of systematic studies of individual learning
experiences. After all is not each learning experience individual? As Jim Bellanca
suggests in his introduction, apart from the individual student, the teacher, the
learning goal, and the conditions of their encounter, there are no axiomatic “best
practices.”
You will not find anything dated in this chronicle from the last century. The
problems, challenges, and struggles for solutions faced by the New Trier Center
for Self-Directed Learning are real and credible in our contemporary educational
environment. Indeed in many ways educational institutions are growing
increasingly oppressive for all involved and so the need for alternatives becomes
all the more compelling.
The New Trier Center’s contribution to curriculum was substantial. Mainstream
education has historically focused on attainment of concepts as a primary indicator
of success in school. This is in large part because it is seemingly easier to
construct tests to measure concept attainment. Because critical life skills and
dispositions are typically not measured they are likely to be neglected in program
evaluation. The New Trier Center was a leader, a forerunner, in going beyond
simple concept attainment. Its primary learning goal was self-directed learning , a
disposition of lasting significance and one of the most fundamental attributes of an
educated person! Moreover, ongoing assessment of competence was a central
feature of their program. Standards of assessment were themselves subject to
ongoing review and refinement over time. This was true formative evaluation
directed to building community as well as to supporting teaching and learning. New
Trier was indeed a “lighthouse.”
Readers of this book will be interested to know that self-directed learning is
alive and advancing. Kenneth Danford’s North Star program of self-directed
learning for teens and its sister centers have been proceeding carefully to grasp
the demands of contemporary social institutions and find ingenious ways to re-
direct existing systems to serve the best interests of learners. More lighthouses
are appearing.
What are the educational programs of our dreams? To bring them to life and
sustain that life we must demonstrate their worthiness and importance. This
chronicle of the struggle to develop self-directed learners in the 1970s, told “from
the inside” through the experiences and reflections of participants, will be a
profitable companion to anyone who would take on such a challenge in our
contemporary educational climate.
Paul Zachos directs ACASE, a professional association of scientists and
educators founded in 1991 and dedicated to develop the scientific
capabilities of educators, secondary and college students, and the
general public.
“This Collection Contains Much Wisdom”
Many of the pieces in this collection are riveting, some are rich in humor, a few are
downright moving. Taken as a whole these student and faculty recollections
provide a multi-dimensional, detailed record of a brilliantly crafted experiment in
alternative education, wonderfully executed by a highly motivated faculty devoting
an incredible amount of time and commitment. The faculty called themselves
facilitators; they sought to be treated as co-learners rather than teachers. Students
were central to decision making, which was by consensus not majority rule. They
learned a lot about building consensus and a lot about community.
As a Center alumna summarized the Center’s approach to self-directed
learning: Decide what you want, figure out what you need to learn to get there, and
follow through. Make a mistake? Pick yourself up and start again.
Many students who opted for the Center had been well-adjusted strong
achievers in the parent school. Others, however, had been chronic
underachievers. Of these, some, bored by school, lacked motivation; some felt
socially isolated; and some had issues such as learning disabilities, dangerously
low self-esteem, or drug addiction that got in the way. Many of those
underachievers report that they soon blossomed after transferring into the Center.
In addition to the turnaround in their high school experience, many credit the
Center for setting them on a path to adult success. There are some striking
examples: a psychologist who overcame severe learning disabilities (first
recognized by the Center math facilitator) to earn her Ph.D. in psychology and a
clinical and teaching career; an actress nominated for a Golden Globe and an
Academy Award.
In my view (both as the parent of a student who opted for the Center at its
outset and as a reader of this book) the Center was an unqualified success. For
educators, parents, school boards and (dare I suggest it) government officials and
legislators, this collection contains much wisdom. I would certainly recommend it to
those thinking about founding charter schools. I would even recommend it to high
school students.
How many adults in their 40s and 50s consider their high school experience to
have been life transforming? How many would be moved to say so in fact-rich
memoirs that leave no room for doubt as to their sincerity?
The book is a gem.
Ray Greenblatt served on the School Board of the Winnetka Public
Schools (K-8) from 1969 to 1975, and during that time his son, Walter,
was a student in the Center, class of 1974. From 1956 to 1994 he was a
partner at Mayer Brown LLP, a large, Chicago-based, international law
firm. From 1994 to 1998 he was a volunteer teacher at Providence St.
Mel School, an inner-city Chicago private school, where he taught high
school economics, started a Debate Club, and read and wrote poetry
with first and second graders.
“The Experiment was Clearly a Success”
Progressive education in the United States has waxed and waned over 100 years,
finding its roots in the philosophy of John Dewey and being known for a focus on
the “whole child.” In the 1920s and 1930s, progressive education was at its height,
spawning the biggest curriculum experiment in history known as “The Eight-Year
Study.” But at times it has also fallen victim to shifts in society towards more
positivistic beliefs about schooling like the focus on math and science during the
Cold War or the “Back to Basics” movement of the 1980s. Historian Herbert
Kliebard has called this “the struggle for the American curriculum.”
Becoming Self-Directed Learners offers a glimpse into a progressive school
program in the 1970s. The Center for Self-Directed Learning was founded as a
“school within a school” at the much larger and nationally known New Trier High
School, located in Winnetka, IL. Both New Trier High School and the town of
Winnetka are closely connected to the history of progressive education. New Trier
was one of the 30 schools that took part in “The Eight-Year Study” and was one of
the first schools to adopt an Advisor Program to support the social and emotional
development of its students. Winnetka’s elementary and middle schools are known
for their own approach to progressive education, called “The Winnetka Plan,” led
by another well-known progressive educator, Carlton Washburne.
With these deep roots in placing the student at the center of learning, a group of
teachers and students were given an opportunity by the school’s board of
education to create an alternative school. The Center for Self-Directed Learning
opened its doors in the fall of 1972 to 150 students and six faculty members. Over
the course of the next decade, hundreds of students were given the opportunity to
control their own learning and help shape policy within the school and in the state.
The curriculum was derived from student interest and curiosity. The teachers were
given the task of coordinating that curriculum, often doing so “in the moment,” and
for making sure the students met state requirements for graduation. They also
served as mentors for individual students and facilitators for weekly student town
hall style meetings.
As is appropriate given this philosophy, the main focus of the book is the
students. Now mature and successful adults, these alumni look back at their
experience in The Center as seminal to their development and learning. They have
strong memories and feelings about their instructors and classmates, solid
evidence that the goals of building community and caring were accomplished by
this program. Maybe more significant are the number of graduates who speak to
their ability later in life to deal with adversity and problems using the creativity and
rigor they learned in The Center. One of the more famous alums, Illinois Senator
Mark Kirk, writes: “[The Center] provided a key set of tools and life experiences
that have enabled me at significant moments of my life and career to work hard
with a clear focus on learning difficult subjects.” For Kirk, this included military
service, foreign affairs, drafting legislation, and recovering from a stroke. These
kinds of stories are repeated over and over by students and teachers in the
program.
There have been too few books like this one about the actual practice of
progressive education. It is an important historical document from the 1970s
specifically and education generally. The decision to ask the students and teachers
to write their own autobiographic story is especially appropriate. In style and
content, this text is well grounded in its own philosophical tradition of guiding
students to find and use their own voice, of putting students at the center of
learning. For the students who experienced The Center, the experiment was
clearly a success. For readers today, their stories may remind us that pre-
packaged curriculum and high-stakes tests are not the only ways to learn.
Dr. Timothy Dohrer is Director of the Master of Science in Education
program at Northwestern University. He is a former teacher,
administrator, and principal at New Trier High School in Winnetka, IL.
His research and writing focus on literacy, teacher education, school
leadership, and curriculum studies.
“An Inspiration for Today’s Innovators”
It is a fitting time for the innovative educational practitioners of today to glean the
lessons and best practices of self-directed learning from the student and teacher
pioneers of the 1970s from New Trier High School’s Center for Self-Directed
Learning, thanks to the 50 former students (of 600 graduates in 10 years) and five
former teachers whose rich memoirs form this book, Becoming Self-Directed
Learners .
Those of us who have been involved in the movement for innovative 21st
century schools and districts have attempted to develop practices and processes
to promote and support self-directed and self-assessing learners.
But none of us who developed these schools in the 2000s knew about the
Center for Self-Directed Learning. That’s no surprise in education. Often great
innovations come along, and either the context is not there to support them, they
are ahead of their time, or they are not implemented fully. And then these
innovations are forgotten, until they come back 20, 30, 40 years later.
The Center, as former teacher and book editor Jim Bellanca writes, “fit its time
and was well ahead of its time.” The Center was not a Summerhill or a Sudbury
Valley School, free school models well known by the 1970s where students had
complete responsibility for their own education. The Center shared some principles
with these models, however its practices incorporated a well-defined seven-step
process for student work and assessment where students would have to:
Show their proficiencies to make an authentic goal of high personal
importance;
Find resources (from one course in the parent school per semester to
internships, field studies, small group investigations, a research study or
travel);
Identify a facilitator/evaluator from the Center or the external community;
Follow a self-planned weekly schedule;
Produce evidence of learning;
Assess that learning with criteria; and
Show how the specific learning contributed to college, life and/or career
goals.
It may sound contradictory, but self-direction in education, in my opinion, is best
encouraged and implemented when supported by well-defined and common
processes, systems, and structures. This was true of the Center and it is true
today of the New Tech Network and Big Picture Learning, two innovative school
models that prize self-directed learning.
Of course the second decade of the 21st century is a much different world than
the 1970s. Much has changed—state standards, accountability, and technology. In
the 1970s there were no laptops, internet, and smartphones. Today, Alan
November in Who Owns the Learning? shows how new digital tools empower and
enable students to be productive self-directed learners who author, produce,
research, publish, and globally communicate and collaborate. But November
rightly shows that this happens best when teachers, like those at the Center for
Self-Directed Learning, facilitate, design, and enable self-directed learning
experiences.
The stories and memoirs of this book reveal how the Center’s students and
teachers created and implemented a culture of self-directed learning and self-
assessment. They are a treasure trove of lessons and an inspiration for today’s
innovators.
Bob Pearlman is a strategy consultant for 21st Century school
development. He was Director of Strategic Planning for the New
Technology Foundation in Napa, CA, which supports the New
Technology 21st Century High School model in more than 50
communities across the United States; and he was President of the
Autodesk Foundation, Coordinator of Education Reform Initiatives for
the Boston Teachers’ Union, and a high school teacher for 27 years.
“A Blueprint to Find Ways to Increase Deep Learning”
Becoming Self-Directed Learners is a collection of memoirs that I, as a parent,
teacher, staff developer, mentor, and urban school educational consultant, believe
everyone in the educational world should read. Here is an incredible testimonial to
the mindful growth made in an alternative school where these students, their
teachers, and their parents all profited.
The many memoirs in this remarkable book attest to how this school embraced
all students, not only those with handicapping conditions (as we now think of
alternative schools), but the very bright, the very unique and those dissatisfied with
traditional classes who were willing to risk “my way.” This inspiring collection of
educational success offers a blueprint to help all of us find ways to increase deep
learning, and not just rote memorization, but deep thinking.
Long before the Common Core, these students were walking their own path to
the future. I wish that all of us could have such an experience. As a parent, I would
have wished it for my children; as a teacher, I would have wished it for my
students; and as a teacher leader, I would have wished the opportunity for myself
and my peers to “learn how to learn” as these students did and are still doing with
a gift that will last forever. I am thankful at least to have read these stories.
Diana Mann was a New York City teacher for over 30 years. She is now
a staff developer, an instructor of graduate courses for the New York
State United Teachers Education Learning Trust, a consultant with the
National Urban Alliance, and a certified instructor for the Feuerstein
Institute.
“The Center Helped People Take Charge of Their Own Lives”
It is heartening to read Becoming Self-Directed Learners , especially now in 2013,
when so much focus in education is on test scores and “accountability.” This
fascinating book chronicles the experience of a wide sampling of students and
faculty and what is clear from the individual memoirs is that New Trier’s Center for
Self-Directed Learning helped people take charge of their own lives and their own
education, and that for many, impressive achievement followed. As Illinois Senator
Mark Kirk, a 1977 alumnus of the Center, puts it in his reminiscence, “I did have an
intellectual life before the Center, but the Center catapulted me into the major
leagues. It was there I built lifelong habits that showed me how to solve really hard
problems.”
This collection will stimulate debate, self-examination, and new approaches
among educators of all sorts.
Julie West Johnson taught English in New Trier East’s regular high
school program and sometimes mentored self-directed studies by
Center students. She is now a writer for The New York Times magazine,
Chicago Life .
“When learning is self-directed, learners emerge as who they are.”
This volume transports me back to the days when I worked and learned in a public
alternative high school in the 1970s. The pieces by students and staff of the
Center for Self-Directed Learning capture the aspirations, the challenges, the
palpable spirit of such a place, and the lasting effect on participants. As editor and
founding director Jim Bellanca writes, apart from the innovations and powerful
learning, the legacy is to be found in the lives of the students and staff who
brought the vision to life and then took that vision with them into the world.
The Center’s story is about self-directed learning, to be sure, but it’s about
relationships, too. As Dewey pointed out long ago, when learning is self-directed,
learners emerge as who they are, which makes it possible for teachers to know
them better. Moreover, the commitment to self-directed learning calls for a
transformation in the authority relationship between teacher and student—for a
collegial pedagogy in which teachers and students are learning together and from
each other. It is no accident that longtime teachers, launching the Center, soon
realized that they would have to learn to teach all over again, and that teaching is
a team sport.
In this second decade of the current century, the great irony remains that
teachers are asked to foster 21st century skills in a 19th century work
environment. Perhaps it wasn’t so apparent back then, when this century seemed
a distant future, but the Center for Self-Directed Learning offered a 21st century
work environment for teachers. The evidence is everywhere in the testimony of
these teachers, unleashed to pursue their passions, accountable to facilitate
student learning, and joined by colleagues, students, and parents in their efforts to
discover what’s worth learning and why.
The questions that led to the Center remain with us today. Why are so many
students disengaged? Why, in a transdisciplinary, problem-centered world, do we
persist in dividing the “content” of education into “subjects”? Why insist on the
same pace and the same content for everyone? Why shut out passion and
interest? Why not foster self-directed learning in a community of learners? Some
of us have been pursuing these questions in various ways for a long time. Others
have just embarked on the journey. All of us, young and old, can draw inspiration
from the lessons of the Center as conveyed by the powerful voices in this volume.
Rob Riordan is president of High Tech High Graduate School of
Education, San Diego, CA.