KIDS’ CHOICES RULE SCHOOL
It skips preset curriculum, lets students be heard
By PEGGY WALSH-SARNECKI
FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITER
When the Little Lake Free School opens today in Ann Arbor, it won’t be school business as usual.
Instead of administrators deciding on a curriculum and teachers telling students what they will learn, Little Lake students will tell their teachers what they want to study. It will be the teacher’s job to help the student find ways of studying that.
For example, a child interested in frogs may read about frogs, draw frogs, study the frog’s anatomy and so on. Instead of English, students could create their own magazine, write stories, poems, editorials — whatever they are interested in — and at the end of the semester publish their writing in their own magazine.
If there is a problem, such as students not getting along, there will be a school meeting and the entire school, including students, will discuss nonviolent solutions and vote on the resolution.
The school is Michigan’s newest nontraditional school, seeking to make interests of the student the driv ing educational force, rather than a preset curriculum. Interest in these types of schools is increasing alongside interest in schools of choice and charter schools.
Little Lake is among 40 nontraditional schools that have opened across the country in the last four years.
“These schools are based on the interests of the learn er, rather than on someone’s idea of what kids should be learning,” said Jerry Mintz, director of the Alternative Education Resource Organization, which helps these unique schools open. “Kids learn more from play than almost any other activity. The way things are being prescribed in schools now, there’s just almost no opportuni ty to play in school.”
| PARENTS SAY SCHOOLS REVIVE STUDENTS’ LUST TO LEARN. 4A
“THESE SCHOOLS ARE BASED ON THE INTERESTS OF THE LEARNER.”
JERRY MINTZ , director of the Alterna tive Education Resource Organization, which helps these unique schools open
Nontraditional schools help revive kids yearning to learn
Students set pace; teachers give options
By PEGGY WALSH-SARNECKI
FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITER
If “school choice” are buzzwords in education today, schools like the Upland Hills School in Oxford offer the ultimate in choice. Upland Hills is a school where students, not teachers, drive the curric ulum and educators are passionate in their desire to avoid what many call one size- fits-all learning.
Upland Hills, like Little Lake Free School opening in Ann Arbor today, of fers teachers options in instruction. These schools have less structure and allow students more freedom in choos ing what and how they learn. They also usually shy away from grouping chil dren by age and grade, and instead, stress allowing students to learn at their own pace.
“There are many ways of learning and children need to have a number of opportunities to receive information and then integrate it,” said Phillip Moore, director of Upland Hills. “Essen tially the idea is that every child is born a genius, and the true function of educa tion is to draw out those gifts.”
Jerry Mintz, director of Alternative Education Resource Organization, calls this “learner-centered” education. The organization lists 12,000 such schools on its Web site.
Some parents who send their chil dren to nontraditional schools said they realized their children had lost some thing — namely their lust for learning — when they attended traditional schools. Beth Tanenhaus Winsten’s 13-year old son, Max, was bored at school.
“My child tests off the charts, but he does not like rote learning,” said Tanen haus Winsten of Ann Arbor. “There are wonderful public schools and wonderful public school teachers, but for a kid like Max, he just needed more.”
She enrolled Max in the Clonlara School in Ann Arbor. At Clonlara, rules are made by the students, with guidance from adults, said Martha Rhodes, Clon lara’s campus administrator. Students understand what they’re supposed to learn, but it’s up to them to decide how to learn it. For example, a student could give a speech, instead of writing a paper. “Our teachers want the students to demonstrate they have learned the con cept,” Rhodes said. “So long as they can meet the objective, we don’t necessarily tell them how to do it.”
The approach worked for Max.
“Now he’s interested in school again, he likes learning,” his mother said. “For his independent project, he built his own computer.”
Not all children learn the same way, and if the first step in learning is enthu siasm and engagement, these schools can be the right fit for students who are not engaged by traditional education, agreed Carol Swift, associate professor of education and chair of the Depart ment of Human Development and Child Study at Oakland University.
“One of the things we need to focus on is learning how to learn. Some of the alternative schools do this better than the traditional schools do,” Swift said.
Since many of these schools allow students a great deal of leeway in what and when they learn, parents enrolling their children in these schools need to monitor their child’s studies to make sure they are learning the material needed to reach their academic goals, Swift said.
Rating these schools’ academic suc cess is difficult because they tend to be private schools, and therefore do not have to give state tests such as the MEAP.
The school providers, however, say their students have no problem transi tioning to high school or to college be cause they are self-motivated.
Carla Grayson of Dexter is enrolling her 10-year-old son, Noah, in the Little Lake Free School, which costs $6,000 a year in tuition.
“We felt like he was getting less inter ested in learning at his old school,” Grayson said. “He wasn’t asking us as many question about the world around him.”
At Little Lake, “He can really pursue his own interests, get to know himself and the world, which would ultimately be more useful than learning a bunch of facts that some other person decided he should learn,” Grayson said.
Little Lake is the decades-long dream of former Detroit Public Schools teacher Melissa Palma.
“I really loved teaching the kids but otherwise felt fairly disempowered with the school system and wanted to see more involvement with the student voices and parent voices,” Palma said. “I think learning should be about listening to children. Hear what they’re passion ate about, and use those topics to help them learn.”
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