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No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

theguardian.com

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Re: No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

#61

Post by GuiA »

ionforce wrote: post #55
ada1981 wrote: post #49

Sudbury Valley Schools are the gold standard as far as I can tell from my research. (I spent a number of years as an education/students rights activist; built and ran the country's most famous education blog back in 2009; and have otherwise been doing advocacy work for a couple decades) They are fully democratic and focus on producing empowered self directed citizens who understand how to share limited resources and…

What if students (or whoever in a power sharing dynamic) are making decisions that are bad for them? How do you veto a bad decision?

I've also worked a fair amount with "alternative" educational structures, albeit in a different country (France).

In those kind of pedagogies (mostly Freinet for me), the adults ultimately do have a veto power. However, when you give kids responsibility, something funny happens - you find that they tend to become very reasonable, and you very rarely have to use veto power. More often than not, it's more renegotiation ("We can't do that today because of X, but what about tomorrow?") than true veto. And provided that you explain things clearly and don't disregard their intelligence, the kids typically agree readily.

Teenagers can be a little more argumentative, but the group is actually very good at taking care of the teenager or two who like to say dumb things just to create a reaction (one of the many reasons why a lot of Freinet implementations like to start and end each day with a group "forum").

Re: No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

#62

Post by thearn4 »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #27

Every time I come home from a mind-numbing eight-hour Scrum meeting, I feel frustrated for having accomplished absolutely nothing. Then I realise that this is what school was like, every single day. I'm sure some people prefer to be force-fed instead of learning on their own, but self-organised schools as in the OP should at least be an option for people who know what they want.

> eight-hour Scrum meeting

holy cow, is that a real thing? I feel like that's a contradiction in terms. Our sprint meetings and daily standups have slowly decreased in length based on perceived utility, to the point where they are now just a message dump in slack.

Re: No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

#63

Post by rdiddly »

savanaly wrote: post #26
k-mcgrady wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading that when you compare the development of a child that went to a regular school vs. Montessori the results are the same.

That's quite surprising, given how different the methods are. What about a control group that received no schooling?

Not that surprising when you consider that education may be more about the overall physical & social environment than the specific method. Despite the current fashion of doing a lot of hand-wringing over the fine points, kids are surprisingly indestructible and will generally turn out pretty well if the environment is basically sound or even if it's not-so. This is consistent with millions of years of evolution during which there was no institutional education at all. Basically a child learns the truth about whatever environment they're in, and adapts to it. So yeah, there are for example, truly fucked-up environments where a kid learns all the wrong lessons about life... but notice, they do learn them. To the degree that they manage to find similarly fucked-up environments to inhabit as adults (criminal gangs let's say) they will thrive. Meanwhile if a child is in an environment where there is mutual concern/care and a curiosity for learning, they will learn and adapt to that. Adults don't make that learning happen though; they only create the environment. They have some control but not nearly as much as they think. The point of Montessori seems to be to explicitly take the adults out of the picture a little bit more, which is just acknowledging reality - they're already mostly out of the picture. EXCEPT in their capacity as establishers of the overall environment, and I don't see nearly as much variation there.

Re: No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

#64

Post by s_q_b »

doc_holliday wrote: post #41
gurkendoktor wrote: post #27

Every time I come home from a mind-numbing eight-hour Scrum meeting, I feel frustrated for having accomplished absolutely nothing. Then I realise that this is what school was like, every single day. I'm sure some people prefer to be force-fed instead of learning on their own, but self-organised schools as in the OP should at least be an option for people who know what they want.

"eight-hour Scrum meeting" Why are you having an eight hour Scrum meeting? Isn't that the complete opposite of what a Scrum meeting is supposed to be? 15 minute max, standup meeting is a Scrum.

These days anyone with a few free hours and a month can become a "certified Scrum master." Scrum and Agile are mostly cargo cult imitations of the real methods these days.

Re: No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

#65

Post by whamlastxmas »

sandworm101 wrote: post #34

> Year after year, Rasfeld’s institution ends up with the best grades among Berlin’s gesamtschulen, or comprehensive schools, ... So there are still grades, or at least someone is still testing the kids. This isn't utopia yet. >> each school day starts with worship. Sorry. Game over imho. I am not so put off by the specifics of the religion, but by its presence muddying the academic waters. A school religion means a…

I am not at all religious and never will be, but I wouldn't particularly care if my child went to a school that had worship every day. The point of Montessori schools is hands on learning and teaching and providing diversity of learning. Exposure to a benign faith and the beliefs that others hold, even if you don't hold them yourself, isn't harmful. Look at the effects of Catholic schools - the vast majority of people who I knew that graduated from one were very non-religious.

Re: No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

#66

Post by emidln »

clentaminator wrote: post #54
nibs wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The assumption is that if there is something you need to know and you encounter a situation that requires it, you can learn it. And if it turns out you do not need it, you saved the time. Further, formal instruction only works for some types of people, albeit probably most. Synthesis from learning when you are interested tends to be more useful than memorization. The experienced part is the scary one, although in ter…

> and you encounter a situation that requires it, you can learn it Which is perfectly fine as long as you know what that "it" is, which assumes a base-level familiarity with subject X. The problem cases I can imagine are ones where you don't have the base familiarity, or in other words the cases where you don't know what you don't know (as opposed to knowing what you don't know and where to look for the answers). Thi…

I'd imagine that if you can describe a problem, Googling can give you a name for the problem, with which you can google for more formal introductions to the topic (articles, papers, texts, etc). Recursive Googling is a solution to an awful lot of problems in 2016.

Re: No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

#67

Post by GuiA »

bbayles wrote: post #13

My partner became involved in Montessori a few years ago, and I've been really impressed with how it works. If you don't know much about Montessori, here is my "in a nutshell" version: It's a method of schooling usually associated with preschool and elementary education. There are mixed age groups (e.g. 3 to 6) in classrooms. There is at least one adult who gives one-on-one lessons on how to work with "materials." Th…

Alternate pedagogies (Montessori, Waldorf, etc.) seem to work quite well for early childhood education, but I'm very skeptical of them for middle school, and especially high school (what Montessori defines as "3rd stage"). The reason for this is that extremely few people I've met who went to such high schools came out of them with levels in science/math that could be reasonably qualified as decent (and often borderline on catastrophic).

One of the main issues is certainly that some of those pedagogies do have pseudo-science/religion baked in, and they have a hard time ridding themselves from that past (notably Waldorf). Another problem is that the kind of teachers who are attracted to these pedagogies rarely have scientific/mathematical backgrounds, and as a result this aspect of the education suffers. It's a problem that they don't like to talk about.

The hard thing to wrestle with here is that for many scientific disciplines, hardcore reading and memorizing is vastly more efficient than inferring everything from observation and first order principles. Now you don't want to overcorrect and do ~only~ that, but there's a reason medicine students spend many years cramming.

See: "Does Waldorf Offer a Viable Form of Science Education?" http://www.csus.edu/indiv/j/jelinekd/publications/waldorfsci...

Re: No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

#68

Post by pbhjpbhj »

xanderstrike wrote: post #42
nibs wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unschooler here. I am the only unschooler from my 12 person cohort of hippie parents who did not go to University. And I am doing okay. So I think school basically has no effect. Mostly just daycare. It is good at that, though.

Sounds like your cohort was great. There was an "unschooled" girl in my college friend group who was failing remedial math and science classes in her third year. She never wanted to learn basic mathematics (we're talking long division here), so she never did, and she did not understand how to motivate herself to learn about something she wasn't already interested in. She didn't end up graduating despite the small, pr…

Hope many times do you think the subject of your comment needed to use long division "later in life"?

I found it useful as a foundation to understand rationalising algebraic fractions; but outside that I've probably only used it a few times, none of which would have been essential.

What was her degree? Demanding maths when it's not needed by practitioners in a degree subject area seems perverse to me [I love maths FWIW].

Re: No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

#69

Post by Symbiote »

doc_holliday wrote: post #41
gurkendoktor wrote: post #27

Every time I come home from a mind-numbing eight-hour Scrum meeting, I feel frustrated for having accomplished absolutely nothing. Then I realise that this is what school was like, every single day. I'm sure some people prefer to be force-fed instead of learning on their own, but self-organised schools as in the OP should at least be an option for people who know what they want.

"eight-hour Scrum meeting" Why are you having an eight hour Scrum meeting? Isn't that the complete opposite of what a Scrum meeting is supposed to be? 15 minute max, standup meeting is a Scrum.

It could be the sprint planning meeting. Eight hours is even the figure given here, for a one-month sprint: http://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#events-planning

Re: No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

#70

Post by thaumasiotes »

centizen wrote: post #33
chrisper wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to a Montessori Kindergarten as a child. I think it was good, but I do not remember much anymore. I remember all the toys and other things that taught me reading, counting, fine motor skills etc.

If you think it was good, it probably was - all I remember about traditional kindergarten was hating it.

I went to a Waldorf kindergarten. I have no negative memories of it, but my mother assures me that I hated it. I suspect that she hated it on my behalf.

That said, they apparently voiced strong disapproval of the fact that I could already read, so it's not something I could actually recommend. It probably just didn't come through to the small me.

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