Facilitated Education Leads to Increased Rigor
It is important to note that when we speak of facilitated education, we talk of student centered learning. It is equally important to understand that although we traditionally considered teacher led instruction to dominate learning as the content expert in the room should — this style only would reach those that intrinsically were connected to the outcome of successful mastery of said content.
Since usually that successful crowd would go on to post high school studies, they would be paying for their education, so they are to learn however it is taught.
If you really want to see something awesome in education, imagine if college professors actually taught like innovative high school teachers did?
High school is mandated education, and with that comes the ability to not have intrinsic connection to school at all, unless the beginning phases of curiosity that are fundamental for the learning process to even exist in someone, are introduced.
Think about that for a second. If you are intrinsically connected to what you are learning, you almost need to learn it. You are going to use that information for something, in one way or another that is meaningful to you, and therefore the knowledge must be retained.
How so you ask?
You can want to have all good grades because of a university acceptance that you seek drives you. You can be using a new learning tool that requires you to satisfy classroom goals daily, such as those on an individual learning plan. Or, you could love the content — or better yet just be developing a sense of curiosity for the topic.
Students in the US need to know the purpose behind what they are learning and why it is meaningful to them. If it sounds like something a free and entitled person would say, although I see your perspective it’s really quite a justified sentiment.
Since big education publication companies in America dictated culminating assessments in public education thus establishing status and credibility, this drove schools to teach to these tests, which were multiple choice and essay bound. To master these meant to memorize. To memorize people need to read and reread, and the quickest way to give the information to students so they can begin preparing is to lecture to them.
Not much creative thought goes into multiple choice other than some serious process of elimination when you’re uncertain.
Think about what non-teacher facilitated education means.
If the class period is 60 minutes in length, explicit instruction or direct instruction, which is non-facilitated, can mean 60 minutes of direct information exposed to the students. This implies that students leave and learn elsewhere. This implies that no questions were asked because no one has any, or if they were they were answered by the teacher — who we know, knows the answer already. This type of “learning” is from what culminating assessments made us think was real learning.
Also it is crucial not to forget that the ability to want to learn is really mastered during the 12 years of public education in America. At some point it is introduced, fostered, nurtured, prodded, and enhanced until enabled to be self sufficient. If you think this is an American perspective, you do not understand the genius behind this transition.
Every country in the world has poverty. Every country in the world deals with unemployment. Homelessness knows no boundaries. In America, only 33% of students actually graduate from a 4 year college. This begs the question about the remaining 67% of students — what happens to them? Are they not prepared because they didn’t graduate?
Shouldn’t we foster a path for them to explore that also leads to success and happiness? You know, get that problem at the root, before it grows into something we clearly can not control.
To comprehend that statistic more clearly, consider this impact:
DoSomething.Org published an article regarding education statistics that states 25% of all freshmen fail to graduate from public high schools. Areas in the US show corresponding relationships between these rates at their highest and rates of crime and poverty. If the system is broken, and we know how we were doing things — we need to change them so we do them better. This is not rocket science.
If all kids from age 5 to 18 are forced to attend school, this is their chance to figure out how to learn, by learning to love something they know about.
Satisfaction of further study of such paths leads to career exploration. Realizing what you are passionate about, and learning to spend time doing this, is the goal of education — this way an intrinsic connection to want to learn and do something successful is manifested.
Facilitated learning allows so many more routes for exploration and curiosity, fostering imagination, further enabling deeper content exposure due to self pacing and comfort, but also wantingness to learn more. This is now knowledge endured. Not forced and resisted.
Not mandated and given to from a one sided perspective — but rather open mindedly sought.
What is also an underlying notion, is that college or university — is the goal of high school.
This is as outdated as non-facilitated teaching. The purpose of high school is to prepare students for life post high school, whether this be college or career. Really, it’s all career — but we have to categorize to understand in this country.
The values of outstanding student loans in America because “college is for all” is really also directly linked to “financing college for all”, and consequently has doubled from 2010 to 2020.
A concluding disconnect here is that when high school teachers, and elementary and middle as well — modify instruction to best meet the learning styles and levels of those in their classrooms, thus maximizing engagement and therefore comprehension — college and university instructors do not. They still think they do not or should not have to. We all think that for some reason.
You go from “all are welcome” in public k-12 education to “one size fits all” at the colleges and universities — and you’re paying for it. Shouldn’t more facilitated learning exist in the university levels then as well?
