What does school have to do with real life anyway?
Teachers are more sympathetic to this question than they like to let show. They know the subjects they teach can be lively and interesting. But all too often the exciting disciplines they know and love just seem to lie flat on the page, and seem to hold little interest or relevance for today's students.
Book-based education also creates an unintentional bias in the system. Students with weaker reading skills never see the excitement and are denied a chance to develop a fully rounded sense of where their education can lead them and how it connects with the fascinating world they see around them every day.
Most, if not all, teachers are on the look out for ways to bring the curriculum to life. In this section, three teachers discuss how they gained students' interest and helped them learn more effectively by bringing real-world activities into the classroom.
How can I create a dynamic framework in which to learn and apply the regular business courses of accounting, marketing, entrepreneurial studies and business management? Enviroworks, "a school within a business" created by Michael Zanibbi, helps divert more than 60 tonnes of construction and demolition waste from local landfill sites and offers homeowners and renovators an economical source of materials.
The Business of Learning
"After a year of teaching business studies, I was really bored. The kids were bored too. It wasn't that the curriculum wasn't interesting; it was that the environment was unsuitable. It didn't match what I was teaching. I was actually turning kids off business."
"As a person who wants to run my own business someday, Mr. Zanibbi and the Enviroworks program have given me realistic experience I will be able to use." Student
Michael Zanibbi
Queen Elizabeth Collegiate and Vocational Institute
Kingston, Ontario
Michael Zanibbi admits his educational background is not traditional for a teacher: he has a BA in English and history, an MA in English literature… and an MBA. When he graduated from business school, he turned down several private sector jobs to earn his BEd. This award-winning teacher says, "It is very important to have a varied and lengthy educational background. It is also important to be a lifelong learner."
In Your Community
This idea would work in almost any community, though a market analysis to assess the competition is important. Look for similar opportunities if a recycling business isn't feasible.
The business needs to be large enough to generate sufficient income to cover basic costs, such as rent, utilities and any salaries. Asking the school board to subsidize the business might make it harder to obtain backing from the many private and public sector sources of financial support for employment-creation programs such as this.*
There are a few factors critical to the success of a program such as Enviroworks.
Find an entrepreneurial leader - someone who understands business, is familiar with the curriculum and is willing to put in the hours to run the business. This is a school within a business, not the other way around. The curriculum naturally follows from the business operations.
Prepare a good market analysis and competition analysis. Some large urban centres that already have a used building material outlet may be able to support another. Many cities have none at all and are wide open for this kind of opportunity.
Apply for any government or business partnership grants you can. The business needs about $55 000 to $60 000 a year to cover the costs of rent, truck and salary. After three years, we are approaching the break-even point.
As with any business and on any job site, we take every safety precaution possible. Potential clients insist on it before hiring us. Parents do not sign release forms because most students in the program are 18 or older. The school board provides workers' compensation coverage as it does for other co-op programs.
* I am currently working on a CD-ROM to summarize all the sources of supply, money and curriculum I have found. To find out more, contact me at school - 613-531-0542.
How can I teach students about Canadian politics and the Canadian parliamentary system in an exciting and meaningful way? Richard Lonsdale's mock parliament is part of the Grade 11 social studies course. Students gain an excellent understanding of our parliamentary system by actually participating in it for a month.
Debates and Developing Skills
"I consider myself fortunate to teach history and social studies. Far from being dead subjects, I see them as living and immediate topics. Historically significant events happen every day, so my teaching differs every year as a result."
"Mr. Lonsdale has shown me a path of wisdom and questioning which will forever shine a positive light on how I choose to live in this world. For this I am eternally grateful." Former student
Richard Lonsdale
Pleasant Valley Secondary School
Armstrong, British Columbia
Richard Lonsdale is well known among British Columbia's educators for his teaching achievements. His courses develop students well qualified to excel in post-secondary education by fostering good work and study habits, refining research and reading skills, and establishing weekly goals. His students consistently achieve the highest marks in the provincial History 12 exams.
Order in the House
Here are a few tips to help you plan a mock parliament in your school:
Find a room big enough to accommodate all participants that you can reserve for an entire week (or however long your mock parliament takes).
Use desks or simply chairs for benches, if possible giving frontbenchers desks and backbenchers chairs.
Make sure to have a raised speaker's platform and chair, and a good public address system with two or three microphones for the floor and one for the speaker.
Using a slightly extended lunch hour each day for the mock parliament allows enough time for government business without completely rearranging the students' (and teachers'!) schedules.
The speaker is a key player in the proceedings and should be an adult who's familiar with parliamentary procedure, but not one of the teachers involved in organizing the event.
Each party, starting with the government, should present two bills for first reading and there should be enough time to finish the second reading of the government's first bill.
Daily procedure should include a meeting of party leaders and advisors, distribution of orders of the day set by party leaders and distribution of bills to students.
Finally, make sure to develop a detailed schedule before the mock parliament begins. And don't forget to start small and have fun!
How can I ensure that children with different learning styles and different abilities have an equal right to learning and knowledge? Ken Marland discusses how a moment of curiosity or interest offers an opportunity to teach, and how the inclusive teaching strategies of outdoor education could be brought into the classroom to both encourage and require student participation.
Equal Access to Learning
"All children may have an equal right to learning and knowledge, but different children have different learning styles and different abilities. These differences may make it difficult for students to gain access to learning from traditional classrooms and lessons."
"I attribute much of the fact that I have gone so far so fast to Mr. Marland. Instead of abandoning me…, he spent extra time with me after or before school to help me overcome my problems." Former student with Attention Deficit Disorder now completing commercial pilot's licence
Ken Marland
Buena Vista Elementary School
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
Ken Marland's teaching extends well beyond his classroom. He founded a summer camp and developed a swimming program for handicapped children. He has also been involved in several stewardship initiatives, including a public education campaign against pouring chemicals down storm sewers and a project to save the prairie crocus from home gardeners.
How Bats Became a Project
I realized that a lot of different kinds of learning would be required if we were to keep these bats alive until we could release them in the spring. The children were excited. This wasn't an abstract study unit on bats. These were real bats with real, immediate consequences.
For example, I found out that the bats shouldn't weigh less than 15 grams. If they did, it meant they were starving. So we had to weigh them every day. Since the bats didn't gain or lose weight in whole gram increments, the students had to learn about decimals (much earlier than the curriculum required). They also had to do the math necessary to figure out and plot on a graph how much weight each bat had gained or lost. This simple exercise offered a number of different learning activities for the children - reading the scale, writing down the numbers, calculating the daily differences, finding the correct coordinates on the graph and marking the new results on the graph.
The bat project inspired a lot of language arts work. For example, a group of people concerned about public health hazards wanted us to get rid of the bats. (In fact, health concerns were very carefully monitored while the bats were with us and the children never handled the bats.) So the students started a public information campaign. They published two community newspapers and many posters. We studied attitudes towards bats in other cultures; people in China have very positive attitudes towards bats compared to those of Europeans.
Most of the evaluation during the bat project was done orally. I did give written tests, but then I cross-checked the test results with an oral exam.
And everyone in the class learned. The students met all the expectations of the curriculum, even the students who weren't good readers. I remember one little boy who had never shown much interest in school or learning up to that point. One day he proudly walked into the classroom with a huge smile on his face. He had persuaded his mother to take him by bus downtown to the main library, where he found and took out two books about bats!