Bernie Bleske, Medium -Students should have two long classes each day for six to eight weeks. They should come to school in the morning and intensely study a single subject—ancient history, a few Shakespeare plays, cell biology, a specific math concept, and so on. In the afternoon, another subject for a few more hours. When the term ends, they move on to another subject.
While this solution does not address the problem of choice, it would allow teachers to work with each student on an individual basis more frequently.
In my subject, English, the literature could be approached the way it’s meant to be—focused, with time and attention—rather than broken up into tiny fragments over months, competing with all the other demands. Students could write for two hours, in class, and then share their essay, and then revise, all in one or two days. They could spend three hours reading a few chapters of a book while I, the teacher, would have the time and energy to meet individually with each student.
The students would be undistracted by the pressure of all those other classes, all those other teachers, all those other subjects every day.
As the teacher, I could see every student’s work, monitor each student simply by moving through the room, address each student who was struggling, and see—in a way nearly impossible in a 55-minute block—who and what was succeeding or failing.
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2 comments:
Gee, this education plan looks a lot like the best types of homeschooling.
Context switching, which is what happens every time we change our focus, has a big cognitive cost. We can liken it to a computer loading a new application and all the data from a very slow storage device.
So staying with one subject for a longer period at a stretch would indeed be beneficial, particularly for subjects where learners generally have a hard time because of how abstract the material is.
Ben Bloom's proposal for "mastery learning"--ungraded, stick at it til it goes "click"--taps into the benefits of "immersion" focus. This "1 subject pet day" idea is a lower-intensity version of that.
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