Redefining College Prep

by Antonio

We recently held a professional development day where a portion of the morning program was devoted to the topic of differentiated instruction. Our very talented and capable Center for Learning Director worked with her equally talented and capable staff to design an hour long presentation intended to serve as a follow up to their presentation at our pre-sessional meetings in late August. Differentiated instruction is not a new concept to those of us in education, and its underlying premise is that rather than expecting students to fit their learning to the curriculum, curriculum and instruction are flexible so that they can better meet the individual needs of individual students. Teachers who are practitioners of DI believe that their teaching is shaped by the students they have in their classes.

In the midst of our conversation together on this cold January morning, one teacher asked a very powerful and thoughtful question. “Given that we are a college prep school, how does differentiated instruction fit into the reality that students will face once they reach the university level?” It was a very good, very pragmatic question. How does it fit? Then I came across an article that appeared in the New York Times which highlighted some of the changes happening in colleges and universities around the country. The article “At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard” focuses on how members of the Physics department at M.I.T are rethinking the way they teach the subject to undergraduates. In response to increasing absenteeism rates and failure rates in these traditional lecture based courses reaching 10 to 12% the faculty at M.I.T knew they needed to do something different. Furthermore, the article states that physicists across the country were continuing to push universities to do a better job in preparing young scientists entering the field.

The result is that large lecture halls where students sit in rows with wooden desks where the professor is at the front of the large lecture hall, filling blackboards with copious amounts of information have given way to smaller classes that “that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning.” The article goes on to state that

“M.I.T. is not alone. Other universities are changing their ways, among them Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, North Carolina State University, the University of Maryland, the University of Colorado at Boulder and Harvard. In these institutions, physicists have been pioneering teaching methods drawn from research showing that most students learn fundamental concepts more successfully, and are better able to apply them, through interactive, collaborative, student-centered learning.”

The image we hold in secondary schools as college preparatory institutions is being challenged by the very colleges and universities we claim in our mission statments we are preparing students to attend. M.I.T has given this new approach its own acronym, TEAL, for Technology Enhanced Active Learning. Read that again. Technology Enhanced Active Learning. Say it out loud. Imagine for a moment what that might look like at your own school. Consider the possibility that our view of what it means to prepare our students for “college and beyond” no longer holds true. Will we be putting our 21st century students at a disadvantage by continuing to conduct business as usual? Are we willing to challenge our view that classes should be held for 47 minutes and follow each other throughout the school day only to be capped by several hours of homework every night?

Regardless of what kind of school you teach in, the first step towards embracing the full potential of teaching in the 21st century requires us to abandon our view of what it means to prepare kids for college.

Photo Credit: Night Owl City

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