by One could hardly disagree that recent generations have experienced increasingly mechanized school practices. Issues impacting school administrators such as data-driven decision-making and management theories, borrowed from industry, are obvious examples of this trend. Most educators accept ability grouping, standardized testing, A-F grading, zero tolerance and compartmentalized curricula without a second thought because they have never been exposed to an alternative.
Schooling is on cruise control even when common assumptions are not in the best interest of learners. The automation of schooling limits autonomy and allows services to be “delivered” on the cheap.
When skillful teachers get to really know their students, they can use their creativity to design activities and materials that meet each student’s needs. In such contexts, curricula, pedagogical strategies, assessments and even the physical learning environment may be changed to realize the potential of each student.
School leaders can get away with homogeneity or mechanized instructional practices until kids fall through the cracks and parents complain. This partially explains the curious epidemic of learning disabilities as well as the proliferation of IB and AP courses, and gifted and talented programs. When children are treated like interchangeable widgets, parents will demand labels designating their children as unique and deserving of services.
Enrich What?
I’ve taught incarcerated teens diagnosed with a plethora of learning disabilities and 10-year-olds engaged in cancer research, engineering and music composition. These kids have more in common than one would think. They need productive contexts for learning in which teachers build upon their individual needs, talents, expertise and desires without sorting, labeling, name calling, fear or coercion. Students need to engage in meaningful work with the support, materials and time necessary to demonstrate understanding.
In the absence of learner-centered conditions, gifted and talented and special education services are required. Ironically, these interventions are endangered by the very forces that required their existence. Today, shortages of funding, leadership or imagination cause gifted and talented programs to be sacrificed for something called enrichment.
Enrichment is derived from Latin for “children of rich parents who complain.” In many cases, enrichment becomes its own course for children fortunate enough to gain entrance. Enrichment is too often a pull-out program where a very small number of kids leave their regular classroom to engage in the sorts of enriching activities that would benefit every child, while disrupting the child’s classroom. My informal research and experience suggests that enrichment is where lucky students experience project-based learning, read books they enjoy, play games and take field trips. Sometimes any child (who can afford it) may elect to be part of enrichment.
Field Trips
I am all for field trips-lots of them! That’s where many students see their first play, hear a cello, touch a squid, see a Van Gogh, meet a scientist, climb a fire truck, consider a career, or spend their own money in a gift shop. Field trips offer the opportunity to learn many lessons related to the curriculum and life outside of the classroom. Field trips provide poor children with the sorts of opportunities more affluent students take for granted.
At a time when funding priorities have made field trips a distant memory, they are a hallmark of enrichment. Not only does this aggravate educational inequity, but the field trips for enrichment students often have little educational value. Trips to the mall, Disney films, cartoon-based Broadway shows, or even the circus are not uncommon treats made available to enrichment students whose parents can afford them. Such field trips are an entitlement that sends the message to a handful of children that you are deserving of privileges your classmates won’t enjoy.
Curriculum connections could be made to ensure that field trips are educationally meaningful, but why bother? There isn’t time during the occasional enrichment session to explore the significance of the Titanic. But what the heck, we’ll bus them to look at Titanic artifacts anyway. Besides, enrichment and its field trips aren’t about enriching the curriculum. They are about telling one group of parents that their children are better than the rest.
Originally published in the August 2008 issue of District Administration Magazine
Veteran educator Gary Stager, Ph.D. is the author of Twenty Things to Do with a Computer – Forward 50, co-author of Invent To Learn — Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, publisher at Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, and the founder of the Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute. He led professional development in the world’s first 1:1 laptop schools thirty years ago and designed one of the oldest online graduate school programs. Gary is also the curator of The Seymour Papert archives at DailyPapert.com. Learn more about Gary here.
Gary,
I teach Gifted elementary kids and you probably won’t hear this sentiment from other teachers like me but you hit the nail on the head with, “Enrichment is derived from Latin for ‘children of rich parents who complain.” I’ve had parents tell me the only reasons their kids are in the Gifted programs are because their kids will be with their friends, or they think the classes are smaller or they would be the only ones in the neighborhood not in it. I’ve not yet heard a parent say they feel their child has some special gift that can only be met by an EP and taught by a teacher certified to teach Gifted. From what I can see, it’s entitlement and sends a destructive message to the children that they are more special than other children in what we, in our school, call the “regular” classes. There is also a divide between the teachers. You’ve got the teachers who feel they are Gifted as well and know everything about these students and how unique they are. Then you’ve got the teachers of the “regular” classes who are made to feel like they are teaching poor shlubs. The parents of the students in the Gifted program in my school are not interested in true enrichment. They are ONLY interested in whether their children continue to get good grades. They keep their kids home on their birthdays and every other Friday because a relative has a time share at a local theme park. They expect that the work can be made up by sending home worksheets. When the students don’t do well on an assessment, they complain that their child wasn’t taught the material. The ONLY field trip approved this year was one to a theater to see a play on Cyberbullying (don’t get me started on this one).
Out of all of my students, I’d say I have 3 students who need some very specialized interventions to really develop their gifts. One in writing and two in science. A few others are struggling with basic low-level thought processing-types of activities. The rest are just bright kids who would do much better playing and interacting with the rest of the students in their grade; as would all of them (even those 3 mentioned above). Having homogeneous grouping is what’s best for the teachers. There needs to come a time when we start doing what’s best for the students.