CORE: Adhere to key principles
School issues and concerns over Common Core continue to be in the news. The most accurate explanation I have heard about why a system fails is this almost self-evident observation: “A system fails when instabilities occur within a system that are beyond the ability of the system to overcome.”
The instabilities within the current school learning system are there because the system has not been founded on, and does not practice, Principles of Learning. In 1932 the National School Board, in preparing a national curriculum, purposely omitted principles of learning because they said, among other things, that “… the different schools of thought could not agree on them.” This referenced source has been reprinted several times, as late as 1962, but the policy regarding the omission of principles of learning has never been revised. I, for one, would not want to cross a bridge that had been built with the omission of principles of engineering.
I conducted a 12-year program with drop-out students in a private school, grades 1-8, in which I was the only teacher. In the massive research I had to do daily in preparing curriculum for my ability-based classes, I found or discovered these “principles of learning,” concepts that I had not found in any prepared curriculum, not in any textbook, had not heard of in teacher training. Yet, there they were — principles of learning. I found that by applying just one of these principles — one concept at a time — the whole model of teaching changed. I was even able to harness the “knowledge explosion” into one simple model. When I implemented these principles (12 so far in all were discovered) grades went from D’s and F’s to high B’s and A’s within 30 days. Stress disappeared, attendance went up, management problems of every kind disappeared.
The school system will want to examine this practiced and proven principles-of-learning method. While Common Core promotes MORE, the principles-of-learning method promote LESS, while accomplishing more. It is astonishingly simple and effective.
IRENE CURRAN
Post Falls