{"id":349,"date":"2006-07-29T13:39:14","date_gmt":"2006-07-29T13:39:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/?p=349"},"modified":"2013-01-29T17:27:58","modified_gmt":"2013-01-29T09:27:58","slug":"what-the-students-decide-what-to-learn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/learning\/what-the-students-decide-what-to-learn-349","title":{"rendered":"What - the students decide what to learn?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the Shenandoah Valley in the US, a new school is being set up: Shenandoah Valley Community School.<\/p>\n<p>Based on the Sudbury model (which I wrote about earlier in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/learning\/flower-children-or-the-real-deal-118\">Flower children or the real deal?<\/a>), Shenandoah Valley Community School will be a \"free range\" school, where students decide what, when and where to learn. <\/p>\n<p>I like the concept (because institutionalized learning has serious problems) but I worry, like everyone else, whether the students will come out with \"the basics\". <\/p>\n<p>I think if I was setting up such a school, I would structure it a bit more, to avoid the situation where the artistic\/musical types don't end up avoiding mathematics altogether, and where the science lovers never hear a symphony. But such a concept can still be very open and learner-centred, I feel.<\/p>\n<p>An news article (no longer available) says of the founder of the school, Sarah Beachy:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Living on a farm, everything became an opportunity to learn. At one point, she and her siblings set up a bird-raising business. To do it, they learned math to run the sales.<\/p>\n<p>\"I learned from my family, my friends,\" Beachy said.<\/p>\n<p>She did well, scoring high enough on the SATs to get a scholarship to EMU.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>This experience was also reported at Sudbury. Students could still do well in the traditional assessment instruments - I suspect because they have learned how to learn.<\/p>\n<p>Good luck to you, Sarah - hope it goes well.<\/p>\n<p class=\"alt\">See the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/learning\/what-the-students-decide-what-to-learn-349#comments\" id=\"comms\">1 Comment<\/a> below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the Shenandoah Valley in the US, a new school is being set up: Shenandoah Valley Community School. Based on the Sudbury model (which I wrote about earlier in Flower children or the real deal?), Shenandoah Valley Community School will be a \"free range\" school, where students decide what, when and where to learn. I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}