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Students and Teachers Discover New Tools for Thinking
The lack of school success of First Nations students has been a challenge for many school systems. For the most part, assessment tools are not adequate to inform the proper placement of students or to influence changes in program and instructional design. In the classroom students are either passive, silent, and withdrawn or aggressive and disruptive. Students begin to disengage in the primary grades and often become resistant to teaching by intermediate grades. They often leave school altogether in grade eight.
To many First Nations students what is taught in school is not relevant to their lives and has little connection to their future. Both parents and students see a value in education and try to do what is required, but in too many cases it all ends in failure for students, parents, and teachers. Teachers, however, are valiant in their efforts to meet the individual needs of students, and have been working with a remarkable program that is producing outcomes often overlooked in research.
The Vancouver School District #39, a large urban school district in British Columbia, Canada, has been implementing the Instrumental Enrichment Curriculum since 1985. This process was created by Dr. Reuven Feuerstein, Israeli cognitive psychologist and director of the Center for the Development of Learning Potential in Jerusalem. The I.E. curriculum is based on his Theory of Structural Cognitive Modifiability and a philosophy that all children can learn and change their level of functioning. Hundreds of re search projects have been conducted on his methods worldwide with every age and ability level, and in every setting from homes and schools to factories and corporations. The results have shown that "intelligence is not a static structure but an open, dynamic system that can continue to change throughout life."
Instrumental Enrichment enhances the capacity of the learner to benefit from both informal and formal learning experiences. The purpose of I.E. is to serve as a means for stimulating and productive interactions between teacher and students. The goal of the program is the development, refinement, and crystallization of thinking processes that are needed for effective thinking, problem solving, and decision making. It focuses on transforming passive and dependent learners into more active self-motivated students.
For students who have previously experienced failure in school, I.E. creates opportunities to gain insights into their way of thinking, attitudes, and feelings. They use their own life experiences as a source of knowledge to share with others. Through the class exercises and class discussion, they can monitor the changes they make in their approach to tasks. They can then begin to appreciate that the source of their difficulties is not due to their inferiority, inability, or lack of intelligence, but is due to inefficient strategies or lack of thorough planning.
They can see that these changes are within their control, and when they think things through and examine what caused the failure, in most cases it can be corrected. Gradually they can take more risks, and then to begin to seek challenges in their learning . The environment becomes safer for them to express their ideas, ask questions, and become interested in listening to others We have seen such students move into achieving at and above grade level for the first time in their lives.
Over the past ten years, the district has been providing training to school and district staff. When teachers, like others, are engaged in learning new approaches or new ways of teaching, they must accept that they too must be modifiable and that a change will occur. During the training sessions teachers work through the exercises and a mediational teaching style is modeled. This results in teachers experiencing and reflecting on their own learning approaches, preferences, and styles. They often talk about difficulties they had in school in their youth and develop a new way of thinking about their students.
I.E. helps teachers to learn to create "teachable moments" rather than leaving it to chance that those "teachable moments" will spontaneously occur. Teachers also learn to ask thought-provoking questions that elicit thoughtful responses from students. By far this is one of the most challenging approaches for teachers, because we usually ask questions that have an answer we know. Questioning is a way of modeling for students the questions they need to ask themselves when they are solving problems.
This has not been an easy method for any of us to learn, but the results have been fruitful beyond our wildest expectations. It has been used successfully not only with our First Nations students, but with students of all cultures. We and our students all know now that there is no student who cannot learn and become more intelligent.
Lorna Williams is a member of the St'at'yemic Nation and First Nations Education Specialist with the Vancouver School Board, 1595 W. 10th Ave., Vancouver, BC V6J 1C8 Canada.
Copyright © November 1997 New Horizons for Learning, all rights reserved.
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