Earlier this week while at one of our high schools, I watched about 40 students trudge into the building for summer school. Their morning would consist of working through an online credit recovery program. While I am supportive of the students’ fortitude or perhaps their parents’ insistence to attend summer school, it was somewhat depressing to consider the reality of what the students were experiencing. For whatever reason, the vibrancy and urgency of school during the year did not take. And because of this, the students were now making things up in an empty building with a computer.
I support online learning and know that when it is done well is an asset to what we can offer students. Learning however, must include application and when possible human interaction that provokes thought. The acquisition of skills through the computer is fine, but without extension, is limited. Wouldn’t it be great if our summer school experience required an application or product as a way for the students to demonstrate mastery of the learned concepts? Because funding prevents this from happening in the summer, let’s do all that we can to ensure the school experience during the winter includes those components of learning that help school take root. Summer school has its place, it is however, a poor substitute for winter school.
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Not always, IME. Our son and five other students were going to KMS 3 hours a day, 6 days a week for two weeks after school ended, enjoyed it, benefitted from it, and I heard no grumbles about missing summer vacation. Their writing, presentation skills, and background research on international pharmaceutical issues all improved markedly.
One difference could be that these were students so motivated and high-performing that they had placed first in State, hence they were preparing for competetion at an international level, versus whatever “online credit recovery program” is a euphemism for.
Another difference, and perhaps this was the Superintendent’s point: there was a very skilled and dedicated teacher in the room with them (volunteering her time!) , keeping it moving, on-task, and interesting.
Thanks for the response.
I should have qualified my comments by stating that they only applied to students who had failed classes and were at the summer school using the credit recovery program to try and catch up or stay on track.
The learning that you describe is exactly what we would like to see at all times. As mentioned, our funds for the summer school are limited and do not allow for the type of offering that you describe.
Thanks goes to the teacher for volunteering his/her time.
I have watched students doing some of the online credit recovery classes with the course open on one screen taking a test, and google on another looking up the answers. I have always felt that kids really miss out when they are doing these online courses. A researcher has shown the power of online learning, but he makes a really powerful statement that we must focus on. He shows how kids can learn from computers, then states that they only had positive results when working as a group, where they had to process, discuss, and synthesize the information.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html
This speech is incredibly interesting as an educator.
Thanks for the comment and the link. I agree that online learning should when possible include human interaction. The findings of Sugata that a self-organizing system will lead to high levels of learning are powerful and speak to the limitations of how we organize our schools. Understanding how childeren learn is critical; our practice of one teacher speaking to 25 students is clearly not the best way to go.
I actually gave the link to a different speech. This is the one where he talks about group learning.
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html