Education Week is giving free access to David Polochnin’s commentary, “How my 3 year-old taught me about education,” which focuses on the role discovery and exploration can play in education.  In seeking a preschool for his child, the author realizes how much preschools promote foundations of learning and how quickly those foundations are left behind when grade school begins:

For me, the preschool-selection process … shed light on education in general, and particularly the curricula and priorities of the nation’s public schools. The experience also afforded me for the first time a view of education from the perspective of a parent.

An emphasis I noted among preschools was on discovering, exploring, creative play, and socializing. I like this approach, particularly the discovering and exploring. Aren’t these, after all, the foundations of learning? Beyond that, they are essential habits that adults need in order to live successfully—from scientists seeking to find new medical treatments to prospective inventors hoping to dream up the next technological breakthrough. Discovering and exploring happen all the time, in every vocation and role—as parents, coaches, musicians, architects, or the manager of a supermarket.

And yet, it is obvious to me that the emphasis in many of today’s public schools is not on discovering and exploring. I haven’t heard many education leaders at the K-12 level pledge to focus on discovering and exploring as yearly goals. These words aren’t part of the mission statement of any school system I’ve seen.

They ought to be. As school districts worry about accountability, adhering to state and national standards, and increased pressure to perform adequately on tests, they should be concentrating on the foundations of learning. Assessments are worthwhile, but we don’t hear many stories of their inspiring students to like school. Exploring and discovering are what inspires.

Giving students time to explore in all curricular areas, allowing them to make discoveries and draw conclusions based on their own observations and self-initiated acts, is not conventional, but shifting instruction in this direction would not be difficult.

The author’s musings reinforce my hunch that elementary school libraries can be places of discovery and exploration even as classroom teachers are more and more bound to standardized instruction and testing.  

In an informal way, we can make our school library media centers interactive beyond “student and resource.”  We can arrange comfy chairs or board games for social interaction.  Maybe we can staff our libraries so they are open during lunch for student-directed projects.   We can bring back things like puppet theatres that no longer “fit” into the rigid instructional day of classrom teachers.  Our new “writing castle” (our professional collection shelves, arranged in a cube, with the shelves draped with fabric) is a students-only zone, but I overheard “playing bank” the other day.  And after we read and re-enacted Anansi and the Moss-Covered Rock last week, a kindergarten class spontaneously rushed to pick out books so at least 20 of them could act it out again.  On their own.  Without me.

On a formal level, we know that discovery and exploration are part of a robust inquiry and research process.  Telling kids it’s OK to adapt or rethink their original research question or to pursue a newly discovered line of thought is what can keep research engaging and “worth it.”Â

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 at 5:33 pm and is filed under Inquiry, Library as Place. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.