Imagination

Imagine a school.  That is what I want to do.  I want to imagine a school…not simply build one.  As I read and reflect on what I want to learn about gifted education, I begin to realize how much of an overlap there is with what I feel about progressive education and educational reform - in all facets of education, not just in gifted education.  I continue to find myself in class thinking - this is about all children!  I know that there are specific differences between the needs of gifted learners and their more mainstream counterparts, but when I think about what I feel a true education should look like, I don't know that the process would be that different.  I think that gifted learners and high achievers would definitely spend less time repeating things they already understand, but I think that education in general should be less about a repetitive, mass-production model and more about how people learn and how they begin to learn to think.  That is the difference.  So much of education today is all about teaching kids specific content.  I think we need to stop looking so exclusively at content we want to impart and start thinking about the kind of people we want to produce.  I think this affects the gifted learners the most because I think they are the ones who are the most negatively affected by the current state of affairs.

 

I imagine a school where the students are encouraged to really explore their own passions.  To be given the space, time, and access to really strive to answer their own questions.  I'm not really sure how you set that up in a way that still allows for some mastery of basics to occur.  But I think that the idea of a "liberal arts" education needs to change.  I think that we as a society have decided that everyone should be "well rounded" and therefore should be exposed to all sorts of different things or we won't be whole.  What ends up happening is that most kids check out of school because there is an extreme disconnect between what they care about and what we are teaching them.  Too often, the teacher is so entrenched in their own passions and questions they fail to see that rather than truly educating their students and teaching them how to think, they are simply trying to impart their own knowledge and passions onto the students.  Why do we all need to know the same things?  That doesn't make sense to me.

 

In the realm of gifted education, I feel the same way, even in my fifth grade classroom. Without completely throwing open the door and saying "Learn whatever you want, I don't care if you learn anything at all!" I think that the gifted students in our rooms have a lot going on in their heads.  How can we help them tap that?  At this point I'm pursuing the use of Literature Circles and a wiki to help my high achieving students be able to push beyond just understanding history through non-fiction texts.  My desire is that they will use the wiki to really express their own thoughts about what is going on with the stories but also that they will begin to listen to each other and pushing each other to go deeper.  We'll see how they do, but it is a start. I just think we need to rethink so many things…but it is all still in such an infant state in my mind, I don't even really know how to crystallize my thinking at all. 

 

To top it all off, even though I know we all have to cut our own path through the jungle of life, I constantly have this nagging feeling that I am trying to uncover what others have been doing for decades.  That I'll show up one day and say - "YES! This is what I've been searching towards!" only to find hundreds of people already there looking at me and thinking, "Duh! We've known about this for decades.  Where have you been?"