Welcome to EL Study Guide. We have designed questions to help you and your colleagues foster meaningful discussions around this issue of Educational Leadership.
EL Study Guide also appears every month online. At the home page (www.ascd.org), click Publications, Educational Leadership, Study Guides, and then the issue in which the articles you would like to discuss with colleagues were published.
May 2007 | Volume 64 | Number 8
Educating the Whole Child
Protecting Enrichment
Visual arts, music, foreign languages, and physical activity are the parts of the school day most likely to be placed on the chopping block in today's schools, according to Landsman and Gorski. Talk in your group about what you see happening with these subjects in your school. Have hours devoted to arts or recess been cut? What about in the higher- or lower-grade schools associated with yours?
Just as important, do your enrichment teachers integrate what they teach with the content and skills teachers focus on in traditional academic classes? Or are arts and foreign language classes isolated from the rest of your curriculum—which could make them more vulnerable to being eliminated? How might they be brought into your overall curriculum plan?
How to Measure “Whole Child” Success?
In “Balance in the Balance” (p. 8), Richard Rothstein, Tamara Wilder, and Rebecca Jacobsen ask,
What if schools were held accountable, for example, not for whether students could recite historical facts, but for whether they actually registered and voted as young adults? This would establish incentives for creating a curriculum that balanced history instruction with service learning projects, mock elections, and classroom debates of contemporary and controversial policy—just as Benjamin Franklin urged.
- Do you agree that schools should be held accountable for their students' future civic participation, or lack of it? If Rothstein and his colleagues' idea is reasonable, how might it be practically carried out?
- These authors explored what a sample of adults think are the essential goals of education; what do students think are the goals of education? Give your classes a list of the eight goal categories listed on page 9 of the article. As Rothstein did, ask each student to assign each of these categories a number from 1 to 8 representing how important that goal category should be in schooling, relative to the other seven goals. Average the results and report back. How do these students' priorities compare to those of the adult sample?
Look at Thomas Jefferson's six goals of schooling listed on p. 9.:
- To give citizens the information they need.
- To enable citizens to calculate and express their ideas, contracts, and accounts in writing.
- To improve, by reading, their morals and their mental faculties.
- To understand their duties to their neighbors and country.
- To know their rights; to choose with discretion their elected representatives and monitor their conduct with diligence, candor, and judgment.
- To observe their social relations with intelligence and faithfulness.
Discuss whether these seem like appropriate goals for education today. How do Thomas Jefferson's six goals match up with the five essential conditions of schooling identified in ASCD's recent report The Learning Compact Redefined: A Call to Action:
- Each student goes to school healthy and learns about and practices a healthy lifestyle.
- Each student learns in an intellectually challenging environment that is physically and emotionally safe for students and adults.
- Each student is actively engaged in learning and is connected to the school and broader community.
- Each student has access to personalized learning and to qualified, caring adults.
- Each graduate is prepared for success in college or further study and for employment in a global environment.
Summer Growth and Support
Educators at Thomas R. Hoerr's high school use summer as a time to gather informally (see “How I Spend My Summer Vacation,” p. 85.) Teachers share specialized knowledge with one another, bond more strongly, and nurture professional growth. Would this model for summer benefit your school?
- Have each group member bring in a book that teachers might profit from reading together and discussing. Is there interest in a summer book club among your faculty?
- Do you, or teachers you know, have a special area you've researched that you'd like to share with colleagues—anything from how to “level” books to how to create an irresistible class blog? Talk with your principal about arranging a summer in-house professional development institute, like that at Hoerr's school.
- Gather a group to meet during the summer—as you plan for the upcoming school year—to brainstorm concrete ways you could each bring a stronger “whole child” emphasis into your teaching. You might select four practices you intend to try during the coming year, pledge to the group members that you will follow through, and ask them to hold you accountable. For example, two teachers could commit to creating a joint class blog (see Eric Langhorst's article “After the Bell, Beyond the Walls,” on p. 74). Why not have your summer group keep meeting during the school year as a support for keeping your teaching practices focused on the whole child?