Chapter 6: Turning Book Burners into Life-Long Learners

Abstract: This chapter was all about helping students become life long learners. Life long learners don't stop learning after they get out of high school. It is estimated that students only know %2 of what they need to know for the future when they graduate from high school. If that isn't motivation to continue learning after high school I don't know what is! One major goal of PLC's is to promote life long learning in every student and every faculty member. Life long learning, according to the author, is a number of things. It is a love of learning for the sake of learning, voluntary engagement in learning activities, the ability to ask and pursue ones own questions and the ability to sustain engagement over time. A culture of life long learning in a school starts with the principal. The principal needs to be a model of life long learning, and exhibit the traits of a life long learner all the time. This is with both the students and the teachers. Principals need to give the impression that learning is important, even for the important people! Another major thing principals need to do is to build a staff of life long learners principal needs to have high expectations and try to get everyone on board to help make this school a place where people are actively learning. Getting parents involved is another way a principal can make a big different in changing the culture of the school. The other thing schools need to do is encourage students to be life long learners. Learning can't be used as a punishment for students. Schools could make the criteria for life long learning part of their assessment criteria. Teachers can also promote real learning so it has a good name and isn't all about "listening to the teacher, doing the homework" etc, etc. Another way to promote life long learning is to have students pose and answer questions to problems they've thought of. This makes learning a lot more relevant and engages more students. The author also makes a plea to reduce didactic instruction. He thinks only 15% of class time should be spent on didactic instruction. The rest of the time, students should be "doing". Teachers can work together to help life long learning become the standard in their schools.

Reflect:
Like we talked about in class, I think the author kind of missed the boat on the book burning thing. I don't believe students burn books because they hate learning and are totally against it. I think they burn them maybe because they are just glad to be out of school and perhaps away from traditional, boring teachers. Like Josh said in class, it is more of a way to rebel against the system, not learning itself. One thing I found really interesting about this chapter was when the author said that these days kids that graduate from high school only know %2 of what they need to know for the future. That small number just surprised me. I was wondering how they even figured that start out anyway. I think it is something that is hard to measure.
I like that the author is using the teachers as models for life long learning. I think that if this starts with the teachers, than the students will learn from there example. Teachers who model the traits of life long learners are instilling life long learning ideas in their students without even telling them about it. I think he made a good point about the principal skipping out on the staff meetings and portraying the message that the important people don't need to learn, just the unimportant ones. I think having a PLC that promotes life long learning within its staff, will in turn promote life long learning in its students.
Another point this author made that I liked was that we can't use learning as punishment. That just gives it a bad name. A lot of students associate learning with notetaking, listening to lectures, and doing worksheets. These are definitely not true aspects of learning. I think in order to become life long learners, students need to truely know what learning is, and not associate it with bad things.