Rogue Reform 3: Mentor/Small Group Based Learning
We’re healing education one brainstorm at a time.
In small-group based learning, students in high school are assigned a mentor teacher and a small group of 10-12 other students in the same grade who stay together all four years, or maybe three years if ninth grade were dropped back to junior high. Each morning, the mentor teacher and small group meet together to catch up on events in their lives outside of school, talk about current events, and make individualized plans of how each student will spend the school day. Students might be doing research, leaving for an internship, reading, writing fiction, working in the science lab, or attending workshops like cooking, personal finance, or basic auto care put on by different departments.
This setup accomplishes several things. Students are surrounded by an adult and peers who know them, know about their lives outside school, and are privy to their personal academic goals and can be encouraged to cheer each other on. The small group setting provides safety, consistency, and intimacy. Some students will thrive under a self-study program, others will need more guidance. But since teachers are only responsible for 10-12 students, they will have much more bandwidth for those students.
Current event discussion allows students to practice difficult discourse about things like politics and religion in a microcosm, with peers who know them more personally, facilitated by a mentor who has been trained to moderate.
After the morning meeting, students are armed with a plan to be productive that day. Mentor teachers are now available to work with students who are doing work and projects in their subject areas. For example, a student might have a math teacher for their mentor, but might be pursuing a project related to biology, so for part of the day, they might have an appointment to work with a science teacher. And for another part of the day, they might work with an English teacher to develop a reading list. Then they might take a cooking workshop offered by the home-ec department.
Scheduling all of this would fall more to the students than a registrar who just assigns students their schedules. Student oversight would be more personal, and students would be more engaged in their learning. Workshops and mentoring are a better way for teachers to spend their talents and time; instead of dragging lessons on for days and weeks, they can do blitz lessons in a couple of hours for students who are truly interested.
Some schools already attempt this concept within the current constraints of school schedules. It’s time to expand the concept and break out of the mold entirely, for the success and engagement of our older students. We need to truly open up the world and make it available to them, not just fabricate the world within windowless classrooms and continue to artificially extend childhood.
