What If Students Could "Vote With Their Feet?"

an example of an amazing meal

Think about the most delicious meal you've had recently out at a restaurant. If you're like me, you wanted to stay and savor the experience and everything just clicked; the service, the food, the atmosphere. Typically during a great experience like this the time flies by and its over before you know it- a sure sign you were enjoying yourself!
Now think back to a time when you had a negative experience out to eat, many of the factors mentioned above were just the opposite- dreadful! In extreme cases one might ask to see the manager or leave the restaurant with out finishing their meal. This is a true signal that the experience was lousy.

Students As Diners

In thinking about various dining experiences, I arrive quickly at how eating out can be a metaphor for the experience that a student has in a classroom, with the exception that they cannot leave. Now, forgive me for jumping around here, I recently read a post by +Brad Currie about the emerging differences in edcamp style professional development which was very interesting. One sentence and idea stood out though, towards the end Brad talks about how we as educators should take the cues from our audience (students) when they are disengaged in class. On the way home today, I was thinking about how the ideal school might look when this more free flowing edcamp model was applied. Idealistic maybe, but imagine for a minute a school that was so interesting that students wanted to come on their own, they were not forced or coerced. Classes had no time constraint, and students could stay for as long or as short as they needed or wanted. Curriculum was navigated asynchronously and instructional areas could include students of different ages. If I'm getting the edcamp model correctly, (I'm going to my first one later this month) then maybe student experts might teach their own classes from time to time at this utopian learning center.

Back To Reality

After indulging in my school redesign exercise it is obvious that unfortunately most schools will never look anything remotely like that so we must do our best to meet the challenges of educating today with fresh, innovative approaches to class time with our students. The reoccurring theme here is that students are disinterested in school because (among other reasons) they feel it is boring. To paraphrase a student today who said that "teachers just drone on and on- its boring". I get a lot of students sharing these feelings because they are happy that my classroom is quite the opposite. I feel honored that they would choose to share their feeling at all, but its because I'm trying very hard to be less boring. A good example was today when we went over a recent lab activity on todays meet.
I've been using this technique successfully for a few years now and its morphing into something much more robust than I imagined at first. Each day we are having a fairly substantial chat. Besides the digital citizenship part, this technique allows for a much truer discussion to take place-one that encompasses much more (if not all) of the students in the class. This is one way that I have restructured my classroom to make the "dining" experience much more pleasant, enjoyable and effective. It takes a lot of though, and certainly some faith to experiment, but honestly our students' educations are worth it. Without changes to our instruction and interaction in the classroom we'll continue to have generations of students "voting with their feet" and leaving not just school, but learning in general.