From School Choice to Student Voice - development of teaching programmes based on student interests

School Administrator, May, 2001 by Paul E. Heckman, Viki L. Montera

Motivation and interest provide the fuel for the effort and energy that are required to learn. The facets of interest involve children's curiosity, challenge and problem solving. Children are curious about their world. They seek challenges in their world and solutions to problems that they confront daily.

Those features of the world about which children are curious or which challenge them are rooted in their prior knowledge and experiences. Children have an abundance of prior knowledge before they enter school and before they begin any formal learning activity in school. Their prior knowledge and interests originate in their neighborhoods and families and other out-of-school experiences.

These ideas were reaffirmed in classroom practices in a project that we were involved in from 1990 until 1998 in Tucson, Ariz. Our work tried to create more powerful classroom experiences for children by focusing on what students and teachers did in classrooms based on student choice and other ideas about learning and motivation.

The schools were in the economically poorest neighborhoods of Tucson. Teacher struggles over giving up the ideas of standardization arose. Understandings about the importance of students' interests and the unique and abundant knowledge they brought with them to school had to be understood and acted upon.

During the early days of discussing these ideas in the schools, we clearly recall the disbelief the adults had about children having knowledge and interests that could be important learning opportunities. During our dialogue sessions, teachers regularly made statements about what little knowledge the children had. Teachers concluded it was the children's lack of knowing that explained the failure and underachievement that seemed to prevail in many, if not all, of the classrooms.

Amazing Discoveries

These views were encouraged by the prevailing fact that the children did not fit the standard model of what students were to know when they came to school. When the students did not appear to know these particular things and did not have interest in schoolwork, it was presumed they knew little to nothing and had few to no interest in what the teachers deemed important.

One particular dialogue focused on the inadequacies of the children and what little they seemed to know. As the discussion went on, we suggested that during the following week teachers find out if children knew anything about the topic that they would be focusing on in their classrooms before they started teaching what the textbooks and their heads told them to tell students. Most agreed to do this. We reminded them that they had a theory about the children and their knowledge--that the children knew little. The efforts of the teachers during the coming week were to provide data that confirmed or disconfirmed this theory.

When we returned to our dialogue the next week, teachers brought in long lists of what students knew. They were amazed that they had these long lists. The teachers who worked with the 1st and 2nd graders were going to start a unit on plants. The teachers asked students what they knew about plants, anticipating limited responses, especially from children who lived in the desert. Instead, students provided many details about their knowledge about plants.